There’s an interesting post over on Gavin Hewitt’s blog at the BBC. It is about the ongoing debate in France around what it means to be French, a debate centralised on the politician Éric Besson.

Gavin’s post talks specifically about the inhabitants of France’s banlieues. The translation given for this is ’suburb’, but that doesn’t do it justice. The connotations of the word in French are very, very different. Forget picket fences, large gardens, close communities. A banlieue is likely to be littered with high rise blocks, with poor access to public transport, high unemployment etc.

As Gavin puts it:

The debate of what it means to be French, and what can be done to maintain a French society, is very different in this environment. These are people who are marginalised by mainstream French society in many ways.

Gavin goes on to say that at the moment there are no concrete proposals from Besson and states that more generally, on an international level, societies are asking themselves the same questions.

Do we expect people coming to our country to change their culture to fit in with us, or do we permit enclaves filled with different beliefs away from the mainstream? The former is very Borg-like, and the latter reminds me of several episodes in recent history where difference was actively fought against.

My view on this is probably quite clear already, but I’ll point out the obvious anyway.

When we as a society learn to understand and accept difference, and not just pay it the lip service that ‘tolerance’ demands, we will be in a far better position to understand what it means to be British, or French, or American, or whatever. We are not all the same, and there will never be one single way to define a modern nation.

What I believe is that blindly forcing jingoism onto people, whether national or immigrant, leads to only one thing. It leads to people recognising within themselves that they do not meet the norm you are expecting of them and quietly becoming more and more marginalised.