Sebastian Roché, Director of Research at the Pacte laboratory and lecturer at Sciences Po Grenoble, @sebastianjroche

What does it mean to belong to a nation? In a book entitled La Nation inachevée (The Unfinished Nation), I tried to analyze the concrete processes of its ongoing fabrication, and to look again at the concepts of nation, state and state people, which need to be distinguished in order to see clearly how the nation is thought of during election campaigns.

Political leaders, let alone presidential candidates presidential candidates, believe they have the legitimacy to say what the nation and define its boundaries. For example, Mme Pécresse declares: "Yes, being French means having a Christmas tree, eating foie gras foie gras, it's electing Miss France, and it's the Tour de France, because that's France". Éric Zemmour, for his part, considers foreign names of foreign origin are "an insult to France", and that "remigration "remigration", a kind of ethnic cleansing, will restore the purity the purity of a fantasized nation. Mr. Macron's position is along similar lines less clear-cut, oscillating between more inclusive statements and a choice of ministers who rally to such a vision. The ethnic of the nation among French politicians is nothing new. new. At the UMP summer campus in Seignosse, Landes, in 2009 Landes, Jean-François Copé joked with a young man, Amine, just before a woman a woman explains: "He's Catholic, eats pork and drinks beer. beer." And Brice Hortefeux, Minister of the Interior, replies: "Ah, but it doesn't fit at all, then, he doesn't fit the prototype at all. It's not like that at all. - He's our little Arab," explains the lady. - Well, that's says M. Hortefeux. You always need one. When there's one, it's fine. It's when there are a lot of them that there are problems." In November 2020, on a television interview, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said he was "always shocked to enter a hypermarket, to see that there were such community kitchens on the shelves", making insinuations about the insinuations that shopkeepers operate "by pandering to some baser instincts" (sic). instincts" (sic) - understand that they have a section of halal or kosher products. The reason given? "That's how it starts, communitarianism."

Against all odds, and even as political political leaders drape themselves in the universalist character of the values values they defend, these values themselves are not used to define the nation, and are are not used to define the nation, and are abandoned in favor of a non-political, and more precisely ethnic, definition of the nation. Instead of placing France ethnic groups, they anchor it in one of them. This is a negation of the very idea of nation as it has historically emerged historically emerged, not without conflict and violence, as a powerful integrator of integrating diverse "peoples" or "ethnic groups", in almost all countries. The very function of national identity was the integration, by various means, of linguistic, cultural, socio-economic and religious diversity, cultural, socio-economic and religious diversity, in Switzerland Singapore as in Germany. Nation-building is, by definition, always incomplete, always unfinished. It is a process of inclusion.

Whatever its definition, a politician political leader claiming or exercising political functions wants to do so in the name of the nation. It's the famous "Nous sommes la Nation in Emmanuel Macron's New Year's address on December 31, 2017. The President presents himself as the voice of the Nation. He follows in the in the footsteps of General de Gaulle, who saw the President of the President of the Republic as the "man of the Nation" in the Bayeux speech Bayeux speech (1946). This thinking is reflected in the text of the Constitution of 1958 Constitution, which is entirely organized around the President's place in the institutions. his place in the institutions, making France, as the expression has it a republican monarchy.

Leaders choose to ignore the fact that the nation and civic culture are based on subjective attachment, that the nation is a belief, a voluntary adherence. This is Max Weber's definition: "The concept of nation therefore belongs to the sphere of values"; the nation creates "subjective bonds". To put it in today's terms, the nation is a social identity. And we are a democratic nation if we feel part of a collective with a political project, in the dual sense of adherence to a national framework and civic norms. I would add an element pointed out by Max Weber: "The concept of nation (...) cannot be defined empirically at the level of the elements shared by the members of the nation." The nation exists when men and women believe they have something in common, when they have a sense of community, of forming a society, despite what they do not share.

The confusion between State and Nation is misleading, and is perpetuated by political leaders. The relationship between those in charge of the State and the Nation, and that of the Nation itself, needs to be clarified. Let's take them for what they are: two disjointed concepts with profound connections. The State is an administrative machine, an apparatus of power, whose "god" is the nation: the head of state reigns in the name of the nation, and must therefore worship it, and evangelize in its name. This is why he organizes his cult, which is also his own, through secular liturgy, the demand for respect for his symbols, and in particular the flag, with the creation of the "offence of contempt for the tricolor flag or the national anthem", piety towards images depicting the President, the cult of his dead, which affirms his eternal character, and the secular prayer that is the minute's silence in school. To put it succinctly, the State's project is the nation. This doesn't prevent us from despising the individuals who make it up, the "toothless" (Hollande), the "poor bastards" who need to "get the hell out" (Sarkozy), or who can be "pissed off" if they haven't done a health document (Macron). But why? Because they are not the sacred abstraction that can only be revered.

The Nation is a social identity, a collective identity. It is alive. "In democracies, each generation is a new people" wrote Alexis de Tocqueville. Much is at stake before adulthood, before the moment when disaffiliation with political parties and a drop in voter turnout are recorded. For teenagers, the aspirations that are currently gaining strength define their vision of who they are as a collective. They are not the people of the state, and distance themselves from its current definition. The nation has a life of its own. Unlike government leaders and most candidates, they feel French, but not exclusively: the cosmopolitan nature of their national attachment is clear, contrary to what surveys showed in the sixties. They insist on the importance of individual freedoms, including the right to practice one's religion or eat as one wishes. Their civic culture is liberal, much more so than that of their elders, demonstrating the continuation of the "rights revolution" to use Christian Welzel's expression. Their relationship with government is distant: the President of the Republic is the emblematic figure of the State. Their political culture is shaped first and foremost by their relationship with the concrete forms of the State, with administrative agents and with what we might call the concrete experience of rights and status. It's the foundation on which they become part of a political society.

There are tools that enable the state to create "its" people, the "people of the state", i.e. to draw the line between inside and outside at any given moment in history. But it's important to understand that the people of the state is the nation as seen by the state, not the nation itself. The legal and administrative definition imposed by the State does not necessarily correspond to the subjective identification with a political collectivity of the citizens themselves. Hence the political battles over its definition. To define it, the State has two main tools: on the one hand, the law, which decides who is French and who is not, and, on the other, the way its administrations operate, which, through the behavior of its agents, demonstrates inclusion in the political community. Thus, the law determines, according to the needs of the State, whether or not sub-humans can exist in the Republic (thus slavery was abolished in 1794, re-established by Napoleon, then abolished; Jews were considered French during the Revolution, then deportable under Vichy), how and where they can become so, how foreigners are naturalized (easily in times of war, difficult nowadays), and following various school tests. The other, lesser-known aspect is the day-to-day workings of the authorities. Based on the work of sociologist Michael Lipsky in his famous book Street Level Bureaucracyin France, I was able to show how the treatment of children by schools - both the fact of educating them in a "ghetto school" setting, and the failure to give children from disadvantaged backgrounds equal opportunities for success - reduced their identification with the political community and their belief in the usefulness of the vote, the linchpin of democracy. And similarly, the poor police, who are brutal with teenagers, multiply controls and discriminate against minorities, undermine beliefs in the idea of equality and living together. The effects of maladministration on citizenship are far more powerful than those of exposure to the French flag and the Marseillaise. You can have the national anthem sung in front of the flag in a ghetto school, but it won't make any difference to political integration. The ideal of an ethnic republic and an exclusive national identity, on the one hand, and the systemic injustice of the school and the police, on the other, lead to a weakening of the nation, not its strengthening.

This post was originally published on AOC on February 22, 2022.