Michel Wieviorka

Is multiculturalism the solution

As far as multiculturalism is at stake, three kinds of question arise at the more or less confusing meeting point of sociology, political science and political philosophy: What are the sources and meanings of cultural difference in our societies? In what way do institutions and policy-makers in some countries deal with multiculturalism? Why should we favour or not favour multiculturalism? This article tackles these questions in turn and seeks to answer them. Cultural differences are not only reproduced, they are in the constant process of being produced which means that fragmentation and recomposition are a permanent probability. In such a situation, the problem is how to broaden democracy in order to avoid at one and the same time the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of the minorities.

After New Social Movements

This article combines an historical and a sociological approach. Historically, it distinguishes three main moments in the history of social movements since the 1960s. After working-class movements, which corresponded to industrial societies, came the so-called new social movements, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and these were followed by a third generation of actors deserving a new denomination as alter-globalization activists. Sociologically, this articles analyses the differences between these three figures from the point of view of the identity of the actors, of their relationship to culture, to their adversary, to their subjectivity, or to their framework for action (national or otherwise). The article introduces the concept of anti-movement, which is illustrated with the contemporary cases of ‘global’ anti-movements such as global terrorism or global anti-Semitism.

The Making of Differences

Cultural differences are produced, and are not just the fruit of a process of reproduction. They are more or less connected to social inequalities or exclusion. They are not the contrary of modern individualism for several reasons: individuals may have a personal interest in choosing a collective identity. This interest may be instrumental or expressive and subjective.

Contextualizing French multiculturalism and racism

During the last forty years, France has undergone a profound transformation, social, political, cultural and intellectual. This article locates Pierre Bourdieus position on the French intellectual scene during these years. Analysing the relationship between general changes and Bourdieus positions enables us to understand how the discussion of ideas can be perverted into a kind of sociological terrorism.

Violence and the Subject

Violence confronts us increasingly, everywhere: how are we to make sense of it? Its ubiquity begs the question of analytical differentiation. This article seeks to open the field by suggesting a fivefold typology: violence as loss of meaning; violence as non-sense; violence as cruelty; fundamental violence; and founding violence. The idea of analytically differentiating between types of violence cannot avoid the fact that sometimes victims are also perpetrators in other ways, and that even violent activity is not conducted only by essentially violent subjects. Violence needs to be connected to modernity and to problems of identity formation and not only to personal or collective risk.

Racism and Diasporas

This paper argues that contemporary diasporic identities provide a strong basis from which to oppose contemporary expressions of racism. Immigrant and mobile populations have been able to construct images of identity that are based neither on an assimilationist model, nor defensive strategies against assimilationism. Rather, the older, internal relation between racism and diasporization has been broken by the ability of groups to claim a diasporic status on the basis of a public and not private articulation of self-identity.

ETA and Basque Political Violence

The history of violence in Spain is a complex one. It has its ideological as well as its ethnic sources. Competing strands, Catholic, conciliar, monarchist, anarchist, communist, Trotskyist, socialist and that strange amalgam of corporatism, monarchism, and Catholicism represented by Franco, have all left their residue in a country in which localism and an extraordinary imperial history remain retrievable memories. Monarchy, republic, civil war, dictatorship, autocracy, democracy — these have succeeded each other at the state level with Spain perhaps today one of the more stable and increasingly prosperous countries in the European community. Such progress has eroded Basque nationalism. So have crackdowns on terrorists who have taken refuge on the French side of the border by the French government. But acts of terrorism continue and Basque nationalism and separatism remain a festering sore in the Spanish polity.

The Construction of What

In the space of 40 years, since the mid-1960s, one question which has come to the fore in many societies (and it is a genuinely ‘global’ question since it involves issues which are at once general, worldwide and local), is that of cultural differences, for example ethnic or religious differences. In some cases, as we see in particular with Islam, these are in a position to challenge world order, and the functioning of many countries, possibly even of many regional or local political systems.

Pour comprender la violence: l'hypothèse du sujet

The article aims to develop a theory of violence that is centered on the notion of the subject. The proposed theory does not wish to discard or oppose other possible perspectives, such as those that focus on the rationality of the actor of his frustrations. The point is rather to situate those perspectives withim a more encompassing perspective that runs parallel to them or even subordinates them to the nation of the subject. Privileging the point of view of the subject means fundamentally to explore two ways that frequently cross each other, but that have to be dissociated for the sake of analysis: the first foregrounds the actors of violence, the second its victims. As violence is often a mark of a impeded, forbidden, impossible or unhappy subject, the starting point is a definition of the notion of the subject, of a subject that has also been a victim of violence.

France faced with terrorism

Abstract France is an interesting laboratory for studying terrorism, or antiterrorism, not because extreme violence has been committed on a large scale as in Lebanon, but because, faced with diverse terrorist actions over a short period, France has worked out and considerably modified a policy for dealing with terrorism. The subject herein is not terrorism but the official response to it, namely counterterrorist policy and actions.