There are moments in history when the men and handful of women who occupy positions of leadership take a stance that will turn out to be historical. It is possible that one of these moments has arrived in the campaign for the French presidential election this spring.
French interior minister Claude Guéant, one of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s right-hand men, lit the touch paper when he spoke of “superior civilisations” in a speech on February 4, using terms blatantly chosen to imply a racist insult, which got him the outcry he sought. His self-satisfied smile when challenged in Parliament by Serge Letchimy, a deputy for the West Indian island of Martinique, reinforced the impression that this battleground was consciously chosen in the heart of the French presidency.
Guéant, who was Sarkozy’s chief of staff and was appointed to his present job by the French president, is a career bureaucrat who has never stood for election until now. But in June’s Parliamentary elections, at age 67, he is the candidate for Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party in one of its safest seats, Boulogne Billancourt, a leafy Paris suburb.
Given that he was educated at France’s most elite universities, Guéant undoubtedly knows the difference between a civilisation and a political regime, as political commentators from almost every part of the spectrum have said. Yet he counterposed the “superiority” of the French Republic’s rallying cry, “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”, to tyranny, the subjugation of women and social and ethnic hatred, concluding that “not all civilisations are equal”.
Whom was he talking about? As interior minister he is not usually concerned with the various tyrannies abroad where women do not enjoy equal status to say the least, but he nevertheless managed to conjure up the image of an Islamist regime. To French ears, though, his comments were directed closer to home, a sidelong swipe at France’s Muslims who are often blamed for not integrating enough into French society and accused of the very thing they suffer from – ethnic hatred.
The problem with Guéant’s comments is not just the implied racism, it is above all the association of those racist assumptions with an ideology whereby some are superior and others, inevitably, are inferior. History shows that such ideologies have been responsible for some of the worst atrocities the world has ever seen.
He implied that European values are superior, but this is hard to defend if you take a tour through history, as Letchimy rightly said in Parliament, only to face a walk-out from Sarkozy’s UMP party. Human rights were not bestowed from above but were extracted over centuries by the force of popular movements, in the face of the violence of those in power to whom such concessions were unthinkable.
Surely Guéant has not forgotten that French women only got the vote in 1945, the year of his birth? French commentators have also focused on how France used the concept of its superior civilisation as a cover for brutal colonisations, but of course it was hardly the only European country to do this.
But for all the reactions, there are two things that have not been clearly stated and explored. Firstly, there is the historical link between ideologies of superiority and perpetrations of extreme brutality and violence against those deemed inferior. Secondly, such ideologies tend to emerge in particular economic contexts; they are expressions of economic imperatives.
Letchimy linked Guéant’s comments to slavery, colonisation and the Holocaust and was decried and faces disciplinary sanctions. Yet these are exactly the examples that illustrate how ideologies of superiority oil the wheels of an indefensible violence, and how they are rooted in economic circumstances.
Slavery as operated by European powers was a key component of a fundamental change in economic organisation. Newly-discovered territories in the Americas were to be exploited and a new form of production was to be introduced, with plantations mass-producing a single crop. Slavery supplied free labour.
Colonialism was also an economic endeavour. Colonial powers appropriated mineral-rich lands and extracted their riches for use back home. Plantations provided commodities from the plant kingdom. Merchants became rich while the local societies became unbalanced and poor.
The glue that held these systems of daylight robbery in place was the ideology of superiority and inferiority. It allowed Europeans to deny the existence of African civilisations and see themselves as civilising savages when they were in fact subjugating entire peoples. It also allowed Europeans to treat Africans sold into slavery like animals, industrialising their transport to the New World.
This same ideology reared its head again during the 20th century and was used in similar ways. The Nazi ideology of “Untermenschen”, or sub-humans, led to Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and Communists being transported in cattle trucks across Europe and being put to death industrially and barbarically, because they were deemed inferior.The economic disasters of the 1930s could be blamed on Europe’s perennial outsider, the Jew.
After the Second World War, apartheid South Africa (1948-1993) deprived the majority black population of the right to vote and designated them as inferior, institutionalising their economic exploitation and opposing any political rebellion with harsh repression.
So it is worrying that ideas of superiority are being touted at a time when the economic situation has some parallels with the 1930s. The sub-prime crisis and global financial crisis in 2008 have been followed by the economic crisis and euro debt crisis of 2011/12. In Europe the entire post-war construction threatens to fall apart, and the solution imposed by financial markets and politicians is increasing austerity in already weakened economies.
Some economists are crying in the wilderness that despite the efforts to avoid a melt-down in 2008, there was not enough stimulus to avoid a repeat of the Great Depression and austerity packages are the last thing we need right now. In other words, despite the lessons of history, we are heading closer to the edge of an economic precipice.
Enter (again) the ideology of superiority. When you are asking people to tighten their belts so drastically, it is far more comfortable to point the finger at outsiders and accuse them of bringing about this unjust situation than to challenge the economic imperatives that created it.
That is why this could turn out to be a historical moment in the French context. In France’s presidential election, all parties are hunting for votes on the ground where there is the greatest disillusionment – among low-income families for whom unemployment and real poverty are no longer remote prospects. But not everyone is playing the card of racism and xenophobia, much less claiming to be superior in the process.
Sadly, the track record of Sarkozy’s presidency with its crackdowns on illegal immigrants and repatriation of Romanian Roma, crowned by the insinuations in Guéant’s speech earlier in February, suggests the ruling party has chosen its stance.
But they, and others, should look again at the lessons of history. Choosing to go down that road is a weighty responsibility, and one that history may not judge lightly.