Shaping Race Policy by Robert Lieberman

Author:Robert Lieberman [Lieberman, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691130460
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2007-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

France

Unlike the Civil Rights Act, the French law against racism of 1 July 1972 was not the product of an intense compromise necessary to construct a winning legislative coalition from among fragmented and diverse interests and ideological factions. The postwar era was a period of institutional transition and instability for the French republic, and these changes had important implications for minority politics. Under the Fourth Republic, parliament was dominant, but a fragmented system of political parties rooted in local constituencies and narrow social interests produced a series of short-lived and often indecisive governments—more than twenty-five in twelve years.56 Among the most divisive issues during the Fourth Republic, and the one that eventually brought it down, was the civil war in Algeria, which led to Algerian independence in 1962. In addition to military and foreign policy, the treatment of Algerians in France was a highly contested issue, particularly the creation of internment camps for those suspected of terrorism on behalf of the National Liberation Front. This issue divided the Socialist Party, whose parliamentary deputies split badly on the bill creating the camps.57 The Socialists had shown some interest in courting North African voters during the 1950s, but the structure of parliamentary government in the Fourth Republic placed a premium on elite bargaining and centralized party discipline at the expense of mass mobilization and local electoral imperatives. This tension contributed to the limited development of mass party organizations in French politics, limiting opportunities for the forging of electoral linkages between the Socialists and new immigrants and displacing issues of integration onto other organizations, such as labor unions.58

In the Fifth Republic, policy-making power shifted away from the legislature and toward the executive—the president and ministers—particularly by giving the government strong legislative powers. Thus policy-making under the Fifth Republic was increasingly centralized in the hands of the executive, providing relatively few points of access for influence on national policy, especially when superimposed on the persistent administrative centralization that has long characterized the French state.59 Executive dominance, in turn, made for less fluid coalition-building; what mattered above all in policy-making was the executive’s position, and the sort of inter- and intra-party bargaining that both African Americans and their opponents were able to exploit to build majorities in the United States was largely closed as a path to policy-making. Combined with legal restraints on immigrant and ethnic political organizations, this feature of French policy-making institutions both limited the options for ethnic minorities to influence national policy and focused those options on a small number of political actors. Moreover, the weakness of the Socialists in national politics during the 1960s and 1970s and the dominance of French national politics by the Gaullist Right during those decades further restricted the potential for minority influence on policy.

It is important not to overstate the centralization of French politics in the Fifth Republic, even before the decentralizing reforms of the 1980s; centralization did not preclude the effective capture of the state by powerful private interests. As in earlier regimes, many national

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