Should assimilation be a requirement for citizenship?

By S.P. | PARIS

In April, when France’s highest administrative court upheld a decision to deny citizenship to an Algerian woman because she refused to shake the hand of the presiding official, the ruling barely caused a stir in France. Abroad, though, it raised eyebrows, and the charge from some quarters that the country was infringing on civil and religious liberties. The incident serves as an example of the sort of policy decision taken in a liberal democracy that to some observers amounts to intolerance but to others to a form of vigilance against intolerant values.

The woman, named in the ruling only as Madame B.A., had married a French citizen in the Algerian town of Nédrona in 2010. Five years later she applied for French citizenship through marriage, as she is legally entitled to do. During the naturalisation ceremony, in the town of Grenoble in the foothills of the Alps, she refused to shake the hands of the two officials present, and later explained that this was for religious reasons. The French government ruled that her refusal amounted to a “failure to assimilate”, which it is entitled to do under a provision in French law, and therefore denied her French citizenship. When the applicant appealed, on the grounds of her right to religious freedom, the Conseil d’Etat upheld the government’s decision.

To outsiders, such a decision may appear absurd, if not deeply illiberal. No mention in the ruling was made of Islam, but this was widely assumed to be the religion she was referring to. Surely a woman’s decision to follow her faith in declining to shake a man’s hand is her right? The French may argue that religion should be kept out of public life. But when mayors of some French beach resorts in 2016 tried to ban the “burkini”, a head-and-body-covering swimsuit, they were overruled in the courts.

In this instance, though, France was applying its secular laws in the context not of beachwear but the right to citizenship. In its ruling, the Conseil d’Etat explicitly referred to a 1905 law which was designed to keep religion out of public affairs after a long anti-clerical battle with the Catholic church. It was on this basis that the French banned the Islamic headscarf and other “conspicuous” religious symbols in state schools in 2004, and the face-covering niqab in all public places in 2010. Such a creed, known as laïcité, enjoys cross-party political consensus.

Exactly how to interpret such rules is a matter of ongoing debate in France. President Emmanuel Macron has argued for the need to be less rigid, and likes to remind the French that the 1905 law was passed also to enshrine the right to religious practice. He has said that he is “not personally happy” about French women who wear the veil. But nor does he want to restrict the wearing of it any further, as some politicians would like.

In general, the French regard laïcité as a bulwark against the dissemination of hardline religious practices, in particular those that impose conservative social codes on women, which the French consider a greater threat to tolerance and openness than their secular rules.

There may be no simple solution to the contradiction this presents for those who uphold liberal values. France’s quest to find a better balance between defending religious freedom on one hand, and individual rights when they are threatened by the consequence of those freedoms on the other, puts a central part of its very identity to the test.