There is not, on the one side, a responsible governing group and, on the other, irresponsible commentators. Statesmen versus choirboys, the ‘hands on’ against the ‘hands off’. The six French Members of Parliament who on November 19th voted against the prolongation of the state of emergency, a group made up of three from the Socialist Party and three from the EELV Green party, are no less concerned about the welfare and safety of their fellow citizens than the promoters of this headlong rush into a state of exception and, as a result, to the suspension of democracy.
Democracy is not only about voting, which is just one of its instruments. It is a concrete culture, a lively practice, a complex ecosystem which implies the participation of citizens, the balance of powers and counter-powers, the independence of the just system, freedoms of expression and information, of the right to meet and demonstrate. A mobilised society, whereby the governed control those who govern.
The fact that for some it is almost intolerable that one can express alarm over this abrupt security lockdown, introduced in an emotional context and without deep debate or thought, is itself already the proof of a brutal regression of democracy, illustrating a state of panic rather than calm.
That those in favour of it are in a clear political majority, and even carry a majority of public opinion, is not the final word on the matter. History has plenty of examples where those who, at a point in time, represented a small minority of opinion did in fact at that moment preserve the promise and a lucidity of the future.
There was just one vote, that of Democrat Senator Russ Feingold, that was cast against the Patriot Act when it was presented one month after the September 11th 2001 terror attacks in the United States. But one year later, in the House of Representatives in October 2002, there were 133 votes against military intervention in Iraq (against a majority of 296). They refused policies made frantic by ideology and which would have more enduring, catastrophic consequences than the attack to which they were supposed to reply. The invasion of Iraq, a sovereign country, that had previously been an armed ally in face of Iran, which had no ideological or logistical link to al-Qaeda and which, no longer possessing weapons of mass destruction, represented no threat to the world.
American democracy and indeed the rest of the world have since been able to measure the vast damage done by what was decided in exceptional legislation, and the blindness that accompanied it, from a delirious state to media lies. The damage it caused is precisely what we are paying for in France today. The catastrophic result is unquestionable: the inability to halt a totalitarian terrorism which unceasingly expands its field of action to the point of claiming a state-like territory fuelled by considerable financial means; the incapacity to counter the ideology that cements this Wahhabi sectarian Islam for which the principal base is Saudi Arabia, ruled by an obscurantist monarchy which is nevertheless always supported and given special treatment.
On the other hand, there is no incapacity to produce and widen the damage on which the Islamic State group feeds, through the total destruction of the Iraqi state, the extreme brutalisation of its society, the at least half a million deaths during the 2003-2011 American occupation, and the plunging of the country into a war of religions at the heart of Islam, the Sunnis and Shia.
The future is made fragile when lessons of history are not learnt. These include the heavy final cost of offensives launched for ideological or tactical reasons, taking advantage of fears for internal political gain; of violating democracy while pretending to defend it from hateful opponents - and adopting their same vocabulary centred on annihilation, eradication, and destruction; of making our society used to dropping its guard over attacks on fundamental freedoms. All of these do not demonstrate our force, but rather they prove our weakness. It is to fall into the trap laid out by the terrorists, to adopt their temporality – that of a monster of the present, a present without a past or future. A present that is dead, inert, without hope or promise.
By crying out that “France is at war”, in the manner of an axiom that needs no reasoned or informed explanation, French President François Hollande made precisely this same choice when he addressed both houses of parliament at a special congress in Versailles on November 16th. His speech, which centred upon security issues alone, lacked any reference to past causes of, or future solutions to, the problems at hand. The only horizon he presented was the immediacy of war, not only afar but here at home also. It is a dead-end perspective because it lacks the reference of the past. Indifferent to the contexts, the genealogies and heritage that have shaped the threat, this presidential response was short-sighted and short of breath. It was both disconnected from the international origins of the events but also, and graver still, unconscious of the national consequences of his obstinacy.
There is thus the strong risk that this will have no other outcome than the perpetuation, if not the extension, of the catastrophe – as has already been forecast by numerous specialists, diplomats and intelligence veterans who argue that France has been hit in a boomerang-like effect. This unleashing of violence - which horrifies us all - against an open and mixed society, is borne by decades of strategic mistakes made from a past standpoint of a power that refused to be placed into question by the new stakes of a multi-polar world. One that is more unpredictable and more difficult to apprehend, formed from progressive emancipations from colonial or imperial rule, zones of influence and allied blocks.
François Hollande, federating a conservative Left, persists in this tragic wrong direction. By doing so, he dangerously exposes France’s democracy which is already so fragile by its lack of intensity, poorly armed against the temptation of authoritarianism. For thirty years, French democracy has above all been gangrened by an anti-republican imaginary whereby racial identity replaces equality, security replaces liberty and the fear of others replaces human fraternity. While the American mistake above all affected the world due to the power of the United States, the French mistake above all threatens to damage our country, to batter its democracy, or even lend a hand to those digging its grave.
'The bloody marriage of repression and terrorism'
The prolongation of the state of emergency is the first movement in a disaster for democracy – not one that is foreseen, but rather one which is already underway. During the National Assembly debate on the prolongation of the state of emergency, Prime Minister Manuel Valls called on Members of Parliament - who are supposed to establish the law - not to waste time with “legalism” (“No legalism, let’s advance,” he told them). Similarly, when the debate moved to the upper house, the Senate, he exhorted its members not to take the risk of calling on the Constitutional Council to advise on the issue, even though it is the guarantor of the respect of our fundamental rights. These were like snapshots of a brutal regression. In the minds of those who govern us, the state of emergency signifies the dismissal of a state of law, as illustrated by the deafening silence demonstrated throughout by the justice minister, Christiane Taubira.
Rather than a momentary shortcut to face up to security imperatives, the state of emergency is a long-term, enduring shortcut which accompanies a retreat of democratic principles, reflexes and bearings. The argument that attempts to justify its imposition stands on a factual lie, doubled with political irresponsibility. The lie is the statement that without the introduction of the state of emergency the security forces would not have the means with which to hunt down terrorists, nor the legal means for surveillance, house searches, common law arrests demanded by such an urgent situation.
As if France did not already have specific anti-terrorist legislation, a dense and severe repressive framework which has been revised more than 12 times in ten years, topped up by another new law barely one year ago and this summer by a new law giving wide added surveillance powers to intelligence services. As if the judicial arsenal had not been unceasingly reinforced and hardened since the first wave of terrorist attacks in 1982, followed by those of 1986, and those of 1995.
On top of this disinformation which is aimed at making the country accept and become used to a shrinking of freedoms, the powers that be have made the staggering proposition of adding the state of emergency into the French constitution, even though it will be in place and will weigh heavily on public life, alongside the exceptional powers already granted to the head of the French state by Article 16 of the constitution, and the state of siege allowed for by Article 36 for times of war. In face of an issue of public order, however dramatic, no state which is sure of itself, certain of its institutional stability and its constitutional solidity, would dare take such a wayward step of modifying, opportunistically, fundamental law. Does it need reminding that, however liberticidal it is, the Patriot Act in the US is a provisional law? It is revisable, it can be prolonged at regular intervals but is submitted to control, with bipartisan evaluation of its collateral damage.
But worst of all is that this coup de force in France is characterized by a profound irresponsibility, namely the satisfaction offered to the authoritarian Right, even the far-right, by a left-wing majority. This includes the extension of the powers to strip citizenship, which will now apply to those dual-nationals who were born French; the withdrawal of certain freedoms on the basis of suspicion caused by an individual’s “behaviour” as opposed to his or her activities, as was required up until now; the generalisation of surveillance intrusions, house arrest orders, made without judicial control but by the simple decision of the police administration; the granting of exceptional powers to prefects and their administrations who alone will decide on the opportune moment for their application and the manner of their application, which can be based simply on a suspicion (and which is not invulnerable to prejudice); the strengthening of state controls, and therefore the censorship of the internet. Meanwhile, the temptation of taking over direct control of the media, reducing their pluralism, resurged in a socialist parliamentary amendment.
While the state thus frees itself from law, preferring exception to the rule, society has placed itself on leave – or rather, in quarantine. How can it be seriously imagined that voters can be called to the urns for next month’s regional elections at the very same moment that democracy is elsewhere invited to remain silent, with the prohibiting of public demonstrations, marches and meetings. The security argument is used to close down society on itself, and to empty the public space of its substance. While civilization is at stake with the challenge of climate deregulation, the authorities hold up the terrorist attacks as the reason for locking down France’s borders to the citizens of the world who are mobilised for this universal cause. The international marches during the United Nations climate conference in Paris, which opens on November 30th, are as of now banned, as most probably also will be every dissident street demonstration.
The government is in effect saying ‘be fearful, and we’ll look after the rest’, mounting the distrust of a pluralist, vigilant and mobilised society for the principle of survival and endurance. The terrorists could not have dreamed of a more symbolic victory which is this invitation to desert democracy and to blindly delegate our powers – and all the more to enduringly lose them. It is this spiral that we refuse because, far from protecting us, it makes us more fragile and exposes us. And this position, rather than being irresponsible, is one that preserves the future, by refusing the perpetuation of what French writer and journalist Albert Camus called “the bloody marriage of repression and terrorism”.
Camus wrote those words in 1955, the very same year when, on April 3rd, France introduced the state of emergency into law, now imposed for a period of three months for the first time since the 1954-1962 Algerian war of independence from French colonial rule, and which may now be included into the constitution. From his 1949 play The Just Assassins, to his 1951 essay The Rebel, Camus never showed any complacency towards terrorism. Whatever the accumulation of misery, despair and humiliation that might be at its origins, Camus found no excuse for terrorist action, and condemned a form of action that invariably “ceases to be an instrument controlled by a policy, to become the crazy weapon of elementary hate”. His principled alarm call has all the more importance given that it was made at the time of the inaugural scene of the debate that concerns us today, amid a climate of dramatic emergency.
Like all sincere democrats, meaning all true republicans, Camus was alarmed at a rush towards the cliff face, where “everyone uses the crime of the other as authorisation to go yet further”. In the context of the Franco-Algerian civil war and moral crisis, the memorial legacy of which is not unlinked to the challenge facing us today, Camus had the presentiment of how much the immediate blindness to causes and solutions would enduringly prove to be for the worst in both camps. What was to follow proved him right, from the fall of the French republic caused by the battering blows of colonial extremists, to the splitting of the Algerian nation through the militarization of the independence movement, not to mention the contagious de-demonization of torture.
But in 1955 Camus believed it was still possible to upset the infernal process, which is why he returned to work as a journalist for French weekly news magazine L’Express. After the failure of his appeal for a “civil truce”, launched in January 1956 in Algiers, Camus slipped back into silence, to the incomprehension of his own friends. L’Express served as a tribune for the French politician who was undoubtedly the most lucid of his time, Pierre Mendès France. On May 14th 1955 he made an appeal that politics should not be left to the professional political class. In those times which were as troubled as ours today, he called for a “mobilisation of popular will” in face of the danger of the confiscation of political policies “reserved for the initiated, the preserve of technicians”.
“Politics belong to the citizen,” concluded Mendès France, “if the citizen wants to take them.” That is what we are doing by refusing the state of emergency, the warlike ideology of which dispossesses us of our common requirement: democracy.
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- This op-ed is available in French here.
English version by Graham Tearse