The immediate and spontaneous reference is to the group of equals, capable of imitation/analogy to connect itself to other groups in a strategic operational way. The classic suburban movements enjoyed the benefits of organizations and elementary instruments of communication such as:- megaphones, leaflets, documents, brochures, wall writings and banners to lead the demonstration processions. The fundamental means of communication in the Parisian revolt were, according to investigations, cell phones, sms and e-mails (9) .
The French November of 2005 has some antecedents, but not so very far back in time. It concerns new spontaneous urban movements which appeared in France, in England, in the United States at the beginning of the 90’s. In 1990, at Vaux en Velin, near Lion, three days of clashes between youngsters and police anti-riot forces take place, (damage to cars, shop burning, attacks on people) following the death of a young person, run over by a police car. In Bristol, in 1992, violent demonstrations follow a serious accident: a patrol car runs over two young people who have stolen a police motorbike. In the same year, Los Angeles is engulfed by a mass riot (house, shop, car burnings, attacks on citizens and police) which follows the acquittal of 4 policemen who had violently attacked an Afro-American, (there is video-tape evidence) (10) .
Context: The French autumn indicates unrest and the presence of social problems, which are not similar to those which generated the movements of the underprivileged in the U.S. in the 60’s, or which nourished and nourishes the spontaneous/organized street protest in Latin America. The Civil rights movements and the movements of the underprivileged which disturbed the American urban areas in the 60’s are typical of development and of a particular type of social economic development.
The question of civil rights is written under the heading of modernization: a great society can only take form when barriers among citizens do not exist: only where there can be a competition among equals. The message of Abraham Lincoln, after all, is not unlike the message of Kennedy: equality means the elimination of social backwardness (together with discrimination and the servile relations of subordination) are essential factors for economic growth and for the launching of an industrial economy.
Urban protests and the movements of the poor are strictly tied to a further phase of the industrial development: that of public intervention and the State support role in identifying the remedies to wrongs which growing industrialization provokes in the social body. The movements of the underprivileged ask for a fair distribution of the profits produced by the industry and easier access to jobs and social promotion.
Spontaneous movements which periodically explode is certain Latin America areas, have sometimes be taken as an example of a new protagonism of the multitudes and connected, objectively, to the explosions of violence which spread through much more developed urban areas. The comparison stands only by virtue of a complex work of social-economic elaboration because between these two worlds of protest, there is no real common objective. The popular anger which animates the street violence in Latin America is a protest against the lack of economic development (or bad development).
On the one hand, those movements try to oppose the traditional production with an unreachable industrialization, as well as, protecting a way of life and culture threatened by homologation and an insupportable competition. On the other hand, (the movements of Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela) concerns initiatives which try to reach a competitiveness blocked by authoritarian political regimes, by redistribution policies administered by the law, by unsustainable free trade acceleration, or by the dominance of pre-capitalistic and profoundly non-equalitarian economic relations (large landed estates, public and private monopolies, natural resource benefits to support public structures, etc.)
The movements which explode is certain urban centres of the West, and that which exploded in the French autumn 2005, unlike the previous ones, are not connected to a phase of growth nor to the lack of economic growth, but rather, they are tied to the decline of a model of development, and to the process of transition from the decline of material production, to a new phase which generates insecurity.
From some aspects, it seems to be a phenomenon connected to globalization, in particular, to migration and to the growing world gap between opulence and deprivation. In other words, it would seem to be the reactions to a culture (latent or evident) of intolerance and to a form of discrimination (latent or evident). In reality, both the discrimination and the difficult social amalgamation are multiplied by a specific factor which weighs upon all developed societies and affects the entire social structure.
The protest becomes indiscriminate and indeterminate in urban movements because it appears, to the same protagonists, like a reaction to a situation from which there is no way. In the social analyses made in France immediately after the demonstrations, the metaphor of the blocked social elevator had wide success. By now, the experimented mechanisms of social integration and of social/professional promotion appear completely jammed, irremediably deteriorated, non- existent. The industrial system to accelerate social integration was based on a) a vigorous offer of work and on large production structures capable of guaranteeing employment security, b) on the existence of a network of social supports which provided a correct integration in the labour environment and protection for the uncertainties of the professional itinerary, c) a training system capable of giving an effective work preparation to the new generations. In the society where production ends and work is terminated, a social structure which sees the traditional forms of industrial production disappear (11) , the prospect of a stable participation in the labour market fades, but also certain measures, designed over a period of 150 years, of protection and training of the industrial proletariat, cease to have meaning. The safety network of the modern social security system, with the ‘end of work’, becomes a structure without universalism.
The guarantees for the uncertainties of the professional life finish by being concerned with only stable employment, defended by classic legislation and protected by traditional forms of contract. The social security system, nourished by an efficient public structure, is replaced by a system of progressive insecurity.


Status and social destiny

The production crisis in the West on the Ford model, (we can hardly speak of ‘end of work’, in the presence of 150 million industrial proletarian in China!) has radically transformed the labour market. From a labour demand supported by the creation of an ever increasing number of consumer goods (produced by large manufacturing complexes), we pass to a contraction of the labour market where the demand concerns the service activities, network supplies, recreational games, entertainment, the quality of life. In the society of networks, the concept of the labour market is in question; there is no longer a strong demand for labour, but rather the opening of social spaces which favour the execution of work (productive, semi-productive, unproductive or of the third sector), often quite new and unexpected. The interface of this system consists in the multiplication of insecure professions, that is, unstable and changeable. R. Florida, in a successful work, states that the future will not belong to the white collar class, nor to the blue collar, but to a ‘no collar’ class, (the people of polo-necks and parkas); the figure of the worker led to informality, not destined to work in a crowded environment, free from social control and from company rules of ethics and aesthetics, but producers of income and motors of economic development (12) .
The precariousness of the new work relations does not inhibit the formation of wealth, nor is it an obstacle to the possibilities of individual social progress. The U.S model (and British, in some respects) (13) of the labour market, precarious and disciplined by fragmentary and non-homogeneous regulations, does not block social ascent. However, certain aspects in the area of ‘equal distribution of opportunity’ intervene. i.e. aspects of equality must be correct.
When a model of fragmented work is spread through a society which, traditionally, has cultivated other types of work and has theorized a unitary public discipline and homogeneity of work relations, serious contradictions arise. In that type of society a vertical split occurs: on the one side are those who still work under the protection of a system of guarantees, on the other is a universe of new workers destined to a completely different professional itinerary. Furthermore, the path of unusual work provokes different effects in relation to the personal qualities, to the basic cultural formation, to specialization, and to the social capital a person possesses. In subjects who are favoured with a patrimony of social resources (education, family connections, family income, educated to lead), entrance into a labour market which is different from the traditional one, can propagate work quality, can generate incentive for better accomplishment, favour creativity and produce higher income. In a person with weak resources and of insufficient cultural background, the anomaly could, vice versa, favour social regression, ceaseless professional downgrading to lower quality and less qualifying jobs, to work which is not connected with the current economic situation or, from apathy, the deviant choice.
In the ‘end of work’ society, there are fewer social shock absorbers, which in the classic design of the social State were able to mitigate the effects of the economic cycle on employment. Certain absorbers of the conflict/crisis remain. However, they are not distributed with universal criteria. In a world of labour protected by indeterminate time contracts and by a protection network which safeguards work continuity, measures to mitigate the effects of economic crisis are foreseen. For the new precarious labour world, vice versa, benefits able to alleviate conditions of temporary need do not exist. Even less protection exists for the lack of work, for a long lapse of time between training and employment, for the technological expulsion from work.
In the social State, there have recently appeared unexpected forms of social absorbers. The benefits given in favour of stable workers are often redistributed in favour of the offspring, of the second and third generation. Belonging to a family with guarantees (work continuity, income stability, social protection, adequate housing) offers some benefits to those who are destined to the new precariousness. However, it concerns benefits which are not equally distributed and which strongly influence the formation process of the individual, reducing the autonomy, impeding the creativity and the competitiveness of the person. Henry Sumner Maine, a scholar from the Victorian Age, was famous for his sociological studies for the definition of a scheme capable of summarizing the characteristics of the modern industrial society. According to Maine, progress accompanied the passage of the status to the contract. The modern industrial world asserted itself the moment in which the individual could compete socially without being conditioned by the origins of family. Maine’s scheme contained apologetic elements (mercantile and entrepreneur competition against the privileges of birth, the activity of the bourgeois versus the laziness of the continental aristocracy) but, on the whole, he described well an industrial society, which was different from the feudal one, in that it was free from the claims or bonds of birth and origin. The French revolution abolished titles of nobility; the industry in England, France, Germany and Italy was the fruit of the inventiveness of men able to compete and emerge by virtue of merit and not by virtue of ancestors!
Today, Maine’s scheme is completely reversed in the developed European countries; here, from the contract, we return to the status, from the equal terms competition, we pass to a social introduction guided and determined by family origins. A society in which the opportunities for a stable employment are reduced, in which the precariousness and instability become inveterate elements of the work performance, is a society in which the starting positions weigh more and more, consenting a point of departure from a more advanced position, permitting resistance to the uncertainties of the professional career, permitting a wider gamma of choice and, it is also a society in which the occasions of discrimination and exclusion are multiplied.
For those who do not have the advantage of stable starting positions, the competition becomes always more difficult and if, to the deprivation of origin, we add extraneousness to the cultural environment, the obstacles become insuperable.


Integration and values

In many analyses of the November revolts, the French system of integration of the immigrant population has been put under accusation. It is a system heavy with strong ideological connotations, which has its roots in the 1789 culture: equality and acceptance into the Great Nation of civil rights.

The French system subordinates ‘acceptance’ to a positive cultural adaptation. The immigrant is requested to make an effort to adhere to a culture, but also, and, above all, to the great values of freedom, equality and civilization (14) . In an interview released during the days of the Parisian riots, Trevor Phillips, the Anglo-Antillean, assigned by the Blair government to head the British Commission for Racial Equality, commented ironically on the French model, speaking of a “republican tradition (….) which obliges every immigrant to become assimilated, to forget his past, to leave his cultural baggage at the frontier and urges him to learn and speak a ‘good’ French, like that of Giscard” (15) . The French model, as described by the Haut Conseil à l’Integration, “does not recognize rights, except to the individual (who is) free of his community ties”.
The immigrant “maintains his particularity, but is not taken into consideration for the exercise of his rights or for the fulfilment of his duties” (16) . The rule which prohibits the veil, in places of public instruction, is an extreme example of a concept filled with political and civil values of integration (17) .
The French integration model is regularly compared to the British one: a system of the inclusion of differences. The problem of the student’s veil does not exist in a country where the public employees of Sik religion, wind around their head, a turban of seven meters of cloth, every day. In the parade of the Empire’s armed forces, in occasion of the jubilee of Queen Victoria, one can see corslets, helmets, sun helmets, turbans and even the fez of the Cyprus police corps! Today, the British Highway Code allows the motor-cyclists’ obligation to wear a crash helmet to be waived, in the case of those whose religion obliges them to wear a bulky head turban!
Yet, at the roots of the rebellion, was there the refusal of a citizenship model? Was there the wish to recuperate an identity and a culture? The French November nights were not animated by the Moslem girls who had paraded in Paris to claim the right to wear the veil in the school rooms.
The protest was not because of the diffused policies of citizenship, but rather to the impoverishment of the citizenship, and to the inadequacy of the formal citizenship, when it means finding answers to social and material problems. The rebellion was not carried out in the name of identity, but in a confused manner, against the consequence of identity.
A large part of the youth which had animated the November nights belonged and belong to Islam, not only as an identity, but also as a negative stigma: as a mark which produces discriminatory effects, as an identity which reduces professional growth. In the post-industrial metropolis, unemployment and, in particular, the juvenile unemployment, is constantly on the increase; it is a phenomenon which is common to the whole of continental Europe. Also in France the number of unemployed weighs heavily, but the percentage doubles when it concerns Islamic immigrants and their children (18) . As far back as 1955, an investigation by the National Institute of Demographic Studies in France, found that “notwithstanding equal academic credentials, unemployment was double the average for the young Moslem immigrant” (19) . A report from the Social and Economic Council, (2002), shows that the discriminatory practices, at the moment of hiring a person, “are persistent, and discrimination and exclusion are increasing” (20) . The interlacing between ethnic origin and social stigmatization produces that particular type of religious devoutness which has been the object of many studies of the Western Moslems. Among these, a ritualistic (21) conception is diffused, or rather privatized by Islam (a call to the cultural roots without strong outward or superficial appearances), but united, in some cases, to an emotional conception (22) , of belonging, which is manifested as identification with those Moslems who, feeling oppressed, set out from the most varied geographical areas, upon the path of rebellion.
If the French model has shown signs of cracking, also other models have shown structure failure. The model of tolerance and of the acceptance of other identities, typical of England (and of Holland) (23) , has favoured the formation of socially and culturally homogeneous districts. The muslimtown, the quarter or small city satellite in which the clothes, the paraded religiousness, the exterior show of orthodoxy (head covers, beards, feminine veils, times of prayer), consumer goods and public services, shops, domestic and urban furnishings recalling the Moslem culture (24) , in the short-term, reduce conflict and permit forms of indirect control of possible deviations. Yet, in the medium and long-term, the formation of areas inhabited by homogeneous ethnic groups can favour the growth of serious and almost irremediable conflict.


Social measures?

In France, but also in the rest of Europe, measures necessary to prevent the kind of malaise which exploded in the November nights, are discussed. In general, the catalogues of traditional Welfare are dusted off, but are the experimented measures which guaranteed social calm during the course of the 20th century, still adequate to the new needs? Is it possible, using classic measures, to cope with an entanglement of ethnic and generational problems, such as those which emerged in the French autumn, and which threaten a large part of Europe?
Today, the traditional measures defending dependent work appear to be insufficient to guarantee a world of young workers which presses on a changeable labour market, which consists of parcelled out fragments of indefinite duration.
Provisions to protect dependent labour concern those who already have work (in a company or in a medium or large institution), but these provisions are not able to satisfy the needs of those who have to commence work in the phase of the parcelling out of the work, and of the inter-connection of autonomous work. In France, the law which led to the 35 hour working week, benefited only the dependent worker, above all, the already employed!
Today, the housing policy has lost the role it had after the Second World War, during reconstruction, and during the phase of the great migrations of people due to industrial growth. A new impetus of the housing policies could contribute to humanizing the districts where the poorer sections of the population live. But the classic housing policy of today, in France, and elsewhere, does not appear to be sufficient to ease the situation.
State housing investments are generally destined to favour stable nuclear families with many children. However, the November nights showed a complex protest: motivated by social conditions which were considered unjust, motivated by a too-long permanence in a family model in crisis (25) which was unable to help the children (or able only to hinder them) along the path of social growth.
The school can play a role in the diffusion of equality. In France, there has been no lack of initiative to render instruction an instrument for the radical social recuperation of any type of discrimination and exclusion. Robert Castel, scholar on matters of urban conflict and critic of the modern system of social “insecurity”, recognizes that in the field of education, France, since the 80’s, has made significant innovations.
“It cannot be said that nothing has been done after 1981, and after the first spectacular violence. A series of measures has been adopted, without which the situation would be worse (….). For thirty years, there has been a dialectic in course, between prevention and repression and many efforts have been made in favour of prevention. In the schools, for example, the creation of the Zeps –zones of priority education – was a good idea for positive discrimination” (26) .
However, the investment in training and education has not been sufficient to eliminate those suffocating structures which, today, inhibit the access to employment of those young people without social capital. Training is not sufficient in a non-impartial work organization and in which, protection is reserved for those who have already benefited and is not extended to those who want to enter the working world – even those with high qualifications. “It should not be forgotten”, says Castel, “that on the labour market, discrimination still exists and continues when hiring new people” (27) . To this it must be added that in France, as well as in Italy, the training system does not guarantee satisfactory results in terms of entering the work market. A European Commission report on juvenile unemployment states that in France, 22% of young school-leavers are unemployed (28) .
Perhaps, to meet the ethnic unease, multiplied by a crisis which effects all the new generations of the old continent, there is a need for innovative measures to which only a few hints for the revival of a social State are being made. It means to re-establish the beneficiaries, the targets and the instruments of the Welfare.
Welfare has been outlined for adults: it mostly benefits maturity and old age; leaving to the young people, only the resources that supply the school system (transmission of competence, but also work force remuneration and control of the pressure on the labour market).
In the labour world, the guarantees of the social State start conflicts, even between the young and the old (29) . After the Second World War, the guarantees of the dependent work had a universal function because they were relative to an economy in which there was an ever increasing request for work, and where always new legions of dependent workers fed the fiscal and social security system. From the moment in which the economy is transformed, that type of guarantee ceases to be universal and assumes the characteristic of a privilege for only part of the society. Restoring universality and impartiality to public intervention means to inaugurate specific policies to guarantee to the young, entrance to the labour world and an autonomy in the society, even if, (and necessarily) the benefits for the other age classes must be rearranged.
The Welfare policies, above all, in the phase of shrinkage of government expenditure, tend to guarantee an essential minimal base of facilities. This is in order to impede that impoverishment or inequalities lead to devastating effects, but it is not able to guarantee a route towards excellence for the young people who come from a deprived environment. Supplying a minimum amount of benefits means to reduce, to a certain extent, the starting handicap, but does not mean, at all, that it can restart the social elevator. For a non-discriminatory cultural and social growth, positive promotion policies are needed, which are capable of supporting the disadvantaged merit at all levels of formation.
There is a third limit in the classic Welfare State policies, which needs to be pointed out. It concerns the instruments of social growth which it concedes. The measures are generally oriented to groups (social or family), to territories or communities. But, perhaps, it would be opportune to propose the individual as beneficiary of the social policies and as an instrument of collective growth (30) . Perhaps, the fact must be accepted that thegroup can be also a carrier of pathologies.
A policy that raises the individual and leads him to become autonomous, could be a useful (or indispensable) instrument to break that new primacy of the status that immobilizes Europe.


An exportable product?

Some questions: Is the French November exportable? Could repetitions of the Parisian autumn be seen also in countries of new immigration; in that Mediterranean Europe overrun by migratory streams, above all, in the last twenty years? It seems, for now, that the type of protest conceived in France is not reproducible, at least, in the countries of new immigration.

Certain problems which effect France and countries of post-colonial and industrial immigration (England, Holland, Belgium, France, Germany), are not identical to those of countries like Spain or Italy, where immigration is more recent and has found widespread forms of settlement and diversified outlets for work. For the time being, homogenous ethnic neighbourhoods are not reproducible, and discrimination in employment, which cruelly hits an ethnic and religious identity, is not reproducible.
The problem which pinches a large part of the old continent still remains, i.e. to adjust the social policies to fit the transformations of the economy. In almost all of the old continent, Welfare is, certainly, not adequate to the problems of the labour transformation, to the new jobs, to the diversity and inequality which oppose an adult and a young world. A movement with such strong ethnic connotations as the Parisian one is not repeatable in Southern Europe, but in that area, the malaise of a young and often highly qualified section of the population remains, due to the slowness of social integration and the difficulty in surmounting the enormous obstacles to obtaining employment.
Also, for the present, something else does not seem exportable to the rest of Europe. However, this does not allow for satisfaction, relief or for feelings of superiority. It concerns the modalities with which the government, the parliament, the political forces in France, have handled a situation of serious crisis.
In the face of extreme measures like the immediate decision for a state of emergency, the extension of same for a further three months, there was substantial unanimity of the parties. The majority approved; the socialist opposition did not dissent (31) .
The rightist National Front did not dramatize the issue with a campaign for law and order. Dissention towards the choice of the executive was minimal and hardly recorded in the daily press.
The attitude of the French political forces has shown another face of that republican spirit which leads it to impose upon the immigrant, the acceptance of the values of the host community: the capacity of the party system to divide itself when it means animating the alternation of those in power, but to become so compact when it is necessary to preserve the constitutional principles of the democratic life.