Book'em, Jacques

The French must really like urban riots--because they are responding to the violence in their suburbs with new policies that will almost certainly invite more and worse violence in the future.

Almost everybody agrees that the riots can be traced to two fundamental causes:

1. the failure of the French economy to generate jobs and opportunities for less-skilled workers; and

2. the failure of French society to assimilate the children and grandchildren of the immigrants who arrived from North Africa and the Middle East after the Second World War.

Some of us would add to the list a couple of additional causes.

The first is the collapse of law enforcement in France.

Perhaps you still think of the United States as the world's most lawless society? Think again. Since 1973, total American crime rates have dropped by 40%; homicide rates by more than 50%; crimes against property by almost 60%.

While American crime rates have been dropping, European crime rates have been soaring. According to the international police agency Interpol, the United States suffered 4,161 crimes per 100,000 people in 2001; France suffered 6,941.

In the face of rising criminal disorder, France has retreated. United Nations data finds that France ranked 30th in the world in the number of criminal prosecutions per capita. (The U.S. ranked first.) And even after a French criminal is prosecuted and convicted, he is unlikely to spend long in prison. On average, a person convicted of armed robbery will serve 54 months in prison in the United States; 18 months in France.

Riots occur when rioters think they can get away with them--and in today's France, a criminal can get away with a lot.

The second additional cause is the spread of a highly politicized form of Islam within France's immigrant population.

The alienation and isolation reported in the French suburbs are not wholly due to the failures of French society. They can also be traced to the spread through Europe of forms of Islam that inculcate a pervasive sense of victimhood, and which preach that Muslims must dominate any society in which they live.

Zaki Badawi, perhaps the most eminent Islamic scholar in Britain, has observed that "Muslim theology offers, up to the present, no systematic formulation of the status of being in a minority." It could be said that while the black American rioters of the 1960s were trying to force their way into majority culture; many of the Muslim French rioters of 2005 are trying to force their ways onto the majority culture.

To all this, the French authorities remain bizarrely blind. French president Jacques Chirac appeared on national television last night to promise new anti-discrimination laws and to offer a "volunteer corps" to help mentor and train 50,000 unemployed youth. How nice!

But Chirac said nothing about reforming the French economy to create work. He spoke of a "malaise" in France, but he said nothing about the concrete impediments the French government puts in the way of job creation--the high payroll taxes, the laws that make it almost impossible to fire workers (and that thus deter employers from hiring anyone who might not work out), the overvalued Euro, and so on.

Job creation would go far to do the work of assimilation and integration. Look at the American experience. Racial preferences and affirmative action programs were introduced in the 1970s without significantly narrowing the income gap between the races or softening the angry racial attitudes of the post-civil-rights era. Then came the 1990s boom. The unemployment rate dropped to 3%. Welfare was abolished. Young black men and women were pulled into the work force--and average black incomes rose faster than average white incomes. It is telling, I think, that there has not been a race riot in the United States since 1992.

Nor do Chirac and his government show any understanding that their weak policing invited urban violence. France does not need more youth mentors. France needs more police, more magistrates, more prisons, to protect the law-abiding and deter the violent.

Jobs and cops alone however will not finish the job of integration. Integration is a moral obligation not only for the majority, but also for the minority. African Americans have staked their claim on American society by centuries of participation and sacrifice, culminating in the extraordinary role they have played in the U.S. military. Social integration is not a one-way obligation binding only on the majority. Migrants have obligations too, and adapting to the customs and values of the society to which they have chosen to move heads the list.

In his speech last night, Chirac promised to remain "faithful to the values of France." Brave words. But a nation that hopes to endure must do more than cling to its values." It must enforce them.