[LINK] Integration works

[rfmcdonald]

Via Harry's Place, Daniel Williams' Washington Post article "Long Integrated, Marseille Is Spared" examines why the largest city in Provence has remained quiet this past month.

"It's the special quality of Marseille," said Dia Ghazi, a Palestinian-born proprietor of the Royal Bazaar, a hodgepodge of made-in-France textiles and Middle East-manufactured coffee makers and pine nuts. "Here, we all have contact with each other. That's the way it's always been here. We are not separate from each other."

[. . .]

That's not to say that all is well. A trip to the outlying northern neighborhood of Oliviers revealed the same depressed social and economic conditions found in the suburbs of Paris, Toulouse, Lyon and other tense cities. Residents complain of police harassment based on skin color, of joblessness and substandard schooling. But the prevailing sentiment is that people feel at home here and that's why Marseille didn't burn.

"We have our troubles, but I can go to the center of the city without thinking I am entering enemy territory," said Abida Hecini, a mother of six. "We belong to Marseille and Marseille belongs to us."

History is one source of this stability. While other cities in France fret about the arrival of immigrants over the past 50 years, Marseille has been a magnet for outsiders for well over 100: Italians fleeing poverty, Greeks and Armenians escaping wars, Moroccan sailors jumping ship, Spanish smugglers looking for a haven, Europeans returning from France's former Algerian colony and impoverished Algerians themselves seeking work.

A substantial Jewish community exited Algeria and settled here. On any downtown Marseille street corner, distinct fashions float by: a white Arab-style caftan here, the black overcoat of a Lithuanian Jew there, an African dyed garment, and a French short-brimmed cap over there. There's a budding Chinatown up in Panier, the cluttered neighborhood of sand-colored buildings on a hill above the Old Port.

"Marseille was made by immigration," said Pierre Echinard, a local historian. Of a population of 800,000, a quarter is of North African descent. Residents say they miss the ethnic variety when they leave the close quarters of their city, which is squeezed against the Mediterranean Sea by hills.

In other words, multiculturalism--here not nearly so much a set of government policies as a set of popular prejudices in favour of diversity--works.