In The News

Tragedy and Paradox of French-Arab Relations

Matein Khalid November 11, 2005
France has a long relationship with the Arab and Muslim worlds—a relationship that has often been marked by hostility and bloodshed. It would be a mistake, however, to see the current French rioting as an outgrowth of conflict between France and Islam. Matein Khalid writes that France's French-Arab minorities care about their own economic opportunity and social equality, rather than any...

This Is Not Only a French Crisis - All of Europe Must Heed the Flames

Timothy Garton Ash November 10, 2005
With urban insurrection raging from Normandy in the north to Marseille in the south, it is now impossible for the French to dismiss the country’s enormous demographic faultlines with appeals to republican greatness and unity. The riots revealed that France, the European country with the largest proportion of men and women of immigrant descent, faces a tremendous social and cultural crisis. In a...

In Vino Vilitas

Barbara Supp November 9, 2005
Once the rarefied realm of connoisseurs, the wine industry now must bend to the forces of the market and not the tastes of the palate. Europe, the birthplace of wine, can no longer rely on its continental sophistication and experience to control the wine market. Experts estimate that 2005 will be the first year in which wine imports into Europe will outnumber wine exports. Fearing the loss of...

You Shouldn't Have to Burn Cars to Get a Better Life—Ask My Bolivian Cleaning Lady

Niall Ferguson November 7, 2005
Both Britain and France have endured violence at the hands of their Muslim minorities in recent months: Britain in the July 7 London Underground attacks; France in the wave of nationwide rioting that has now gone on for more than a week. They need not endure such violence in the future. Their problem is not so much an excess of immigration as it is a lack of assimilation: the Muslim youths...

A Year of Living Dangerously

Francis Fukuyama November 3, 2005
One year after the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, well-known scholar Francis Fukuyama writes about the phenomenon of so-called "homegrown" European Islamic radicalism. He argues that radical Islam among immigrants to Europe is the result of their traditional faith being uprooted from its social and cultural underpinnings, and the crisis of identity that seems to particularly...

Suburban Riots a Recurring Feature of French Life

Tom Heneghan (Reuters) November 2, 2005
The Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, wracked by days of clashes between Muslim immigrants and police, is far from unique. One of many such suburbs created by an influx of Arab and African immigrants in the 1960s and 1970s, the town suffers from the same social tensions simmering beneath the surface across France. France's Muslim immigrants live in low-income, high-crime slums from which...

Sarkozy Pledges Police Crackdown after Riots in Paris

Jon Henley November 1, 2005
Following four nights of violent rioting in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy vowed to aggressively police many of the nation’s poorer, largely immigrant ghettoes. The unrest – the likes of which France has not seen in years – began on Thursday when two boys of North African origin, named only as Ziad, 17, and Banou, 15, died of electrocution after...