Meltdown in France; No more credibility

International Herald Tribune

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2005

Contrary to your reports and editorials ("Riots in Paris," Nov. 04), the social unrest in France fails to taint the French model of integration.

Despite inequalities and severe unemployment traceable to the free-trade "reforms" force-fed to France by America (and often defended by your newspaper), France still succeeds in assimilating immigrants and in secularizing Islam.

North Africans are now entering the French middle class. Many are intermarrying. Very few Muslim adolescent girls defied the law against conspicuous religious attire in French public schools. France makes immigrants French.

By contrast, America fails to assimilate Arabs and many Hispanics, and the American melting pot seldom melts blacks. Racial intermarriage is rare. Affirmative action barely dents the misery of American ghettos, which remain more desperate, doped-up, crime-ridden and permanent than any in France.

Daniel Birnbaum, Paris

As real time news and video now spreads around the world in a fraction of a second, the illusion of the French model that successive French governments since the end of World War II have tried to project slowly begins to disappear.

The problems of France's suburbs have been ignored for over 30 years as have been a plethora of other issues and reforms.

Richard Schatz, Paris

It's no surprise that France is being torn to shreds by its immigrant population. France's corridors of power make up the world's largest all-white boys club.

Johnna Bunn, Philadelphia

The riots in the suburbs of Paris may have been triggered by a single event, but the magnitude shows that there are deep roots. Those parts of Paris - and numerous other parts of other cities and towns in Western Europe - could be described as barrels of dynamite ready to explode.

An increasing number of people have been excluded from society. The vast unemployment has struck immigrants especially hard. In many poor suburbs, the majority lives off low contributions from the state.

France is one of the strongest defenders of the so-called European social model. The main feature of the model is a big state - with high taxes, a regulated labor market, public welfare monopolies and large social security systems. But after the events in Paris, isn't it about time that France realizes this is a model that it should leave behind?

A regulated labor market creates unemployment. Those without jobs feel a great insecurity, but so do those with jobs; they know that should they lose work they wouldn't find more. The young people in Western Europe can't find jobs and lose hope for the future.

High taxes reduce opportunities and put a brake on growth. Economic activity is low and living standards across the population stagnate, and in several places, deteriorate.

The antisocial effects of the social model strike even harder for immigrants. Regulated housing markets produce ghetto-like suburbs. Since hiring always involves a risk for the employer, a regulated and unionized labor market excludes immigrants. They are deprived of their opportunities to compete.

With low taxes, a free labor market and fewer regulations for companies, the situation could change. France could have new jobs and increased prosperity. And the country could give immigrants the chance to get into society and work.

If we don't focus on change in order to disarm this bomb, which is ticking all over Western Europe, we will see the Paris of today repeated elsewhere.

Johnny Munkhammar, Stockholm



No more credibility

The headline of Roger Cohen's column "Iran's behavior offers test for world's mettle," (Globalist, Nov. 5) could just as well have referred to President George W. Bush.

The Bush administration has forgiven Pakistan for its export of nuclear technology to North Korea and Iran; ignored India's snubbing of the nonproliferation treaty, dispensed with the antiballistic missile treaty and is going soft on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

To really test the world's mettle, earlier this year the United States insisted on eliminating language from a UN statement that would have appealed to nuclear states to make moves toward disarmament. With his own nuclear nonproliferation credentials in tatters, Bush will find it hard to preach nuclear restraint to others - a strategic failure of potentially grave consequence.



James Stuart, Le Paradou, France