a reader's words: France Riots and Globalization

Jean Baudrillard examines the France riots last November and indicates how they represent a broader challenge of globalization- a question of how the haves and have- nots can "integrate"- in this case the culture of the poorer immigrant with the (implicitly) superior Western culture.

In the backdrop of many European nations themselves refusing to integrate with the European Union, the expectation for non- Europeans to integrate with the "mainstream" is itself a contradiction.

The article was apparently written before the cartoon controversy, but has relevance to the controversy as well.

The French exception is no more, the ‘French model’ collapsing before our eyes. But the French can reassure themselves that it is not just theirs but the whole Western model which is disintegrating; and not just under external assault—acts of terrorism, Africans storming the barbed wire at Melilla—but also from within. The first conclusion to be drawn from the autumn riots annuls all pious official homilies. A society which is itself disintegrating has no chance of integrating its immigrants, who are at once the products and savage analysts of its decay.

...

Yet French or European discrimination is only the micro-model of a worldwide divide which, under the ironical sign of globalization, is bringing two irreconcilable universes face to face. The same analysis can be reprised at global level. International terrorism is but a symptom of the split personality of a world power at odds with itself. As to finding a solution, the same delusion applies at every level, from the banlieues to the House of Islam: the fantasy that raising the rest of the world to Western living standards will settle matters. The fracture is far deeper than that. Even if the assembled Western powers really wanted to close it—which there is every reason to doubt—they could not. The very mechanisms of their own survival and superiority would prevent them; mechanisms which, through all the pious talk of universal values, serve only to reinforce Western power and so to foment the threat of a coalition of forces that dream of destroying it.