Recognizing the political consequences for Europe of Muslim immigration, and relying on a novel identification strategy, this paper investigates why Muslim assimilation into French cultural norms is incomplete, and provides experimental and survey evidence that reveals the low expected payoffs that Muslim immigrants in France receive for full assimilation. While the data show that rooted French people initially distrust Muslims (compared to a matched set of Christians)  in part due to their unwillingness to fully assimilate, the real source of Muslim reluctance to fully assimilate is their perception that in anonymous transactions (i.e., through French institutions) they will always be perceived as foreign and face discrimination.

Workshop paper is available to Stanford affiliates upon request by email to khaley@stanford.edu

David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He received his B.A. in Political Science from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include comparative politics, nation-state formation, ethnic conflict, and religion. Among his publications are Politics, Language and Thought: The Somali Experience (1977), Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (1986), Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa (1992), Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (1998), and Nations, States and Violence (2007). Prof. Laitin has been a recipient of fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Event Summary

Professor Laitin opens the seminar by providing background on the research project that motivated the paper. This examined: whether Muslim immigrants in France faced unique social and economic barriers; the source of the barriers; and whether French republicanism exacerbated or lessened the barriers. He provides a brief summary of studies examining the first and third points, but the focus of his talk was on the second point: if there are higher barriers for Muslims, who is building them?

Professor Laitin then describes the study his research team carried out on a Senegalese population in France for 15 years, drawing on equal-sized groups of Muslims and Christians from similar social and economic conditions. Through a series of games and surveys, the team observed that within Senegalese Muslims in France, certain groups assimilate more than others, and those that assimilate less are treated worse by French individuals and institutions. Many of the Muslims expected to be treated less generously by French individuals, and reported more experiences of discrimination from French institutions, which Professor Laitin's team found was more difficult to overcome than individual discrimination. This group also exhibited stronger financial ties (measured by investments and remittances sent to Senegal from France) and emotional ties (measured by desire to be buried in Senegal rather than France after death). The results of the study are used to provide a series of decision rules and reward matrixes for incoming Senegalese Muslims, including the likelihood of penalties and rewards for assimilation, such as giving children French names.

During a discussion period following the presentation, such questions were raised as: Do the results of the study have more to do with the respondents being Muslim, or simply not being French - or, do other ethnic or religious groups have the same problems assimilating into French Catholic society? Is the example of preferences for burial locations more about ties to Senegal than lack of ties to France? How much of the effect is due to being black rather than Muslim? Will the results of the study change as the Muslim population in France increases? What has been the reception in France to the prohibition of collecting ethnographic data? Why is "incomplete assimilation" framed as a "response" to the discrimination - is it a choice or is it just the way things are? Where does the fault lie in the discrimination reported in the survey?

What are the limits of literary freedom? Writers' claims for autonomy have encountered legal restrictions to their freedom of speech.  As suggested by Foucault, censorship has shaped the very notion of authorship. This talk will confront the diverging conceptions of the author’s responsibility in France and the beliefs in the power of writing that underlie them through the debates surrounding literary trials, including the cases of Béranger, Courier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, the naturalists, and the purge trials after World War II. In reaction to these conceptions, writers developed their own code of ethics, which contributed to the emergence of an autonomous literary field and to the construction of the figure of the public  intellectual, embodied by Zola and by Sartre.

Gisèle Sapiro is Research director at the CNRS and Director of Studies at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales. She is also head of the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique, Paris, and been a visiting professor at the University of Freiburg and at NYU, among other places. Her interests include the sociology of intellectuals, literature, publishing and translation. She is the author of La Guerre des écrivains, 1940-1953 (Fayard, 1999; forthcoming in English translation with Duke University Press), La Responsabilité de l’écrivain. Littérature, droit et morale en France (19e-20e siècles) (Seuil, 2011), and of numerous articles published in journals of sociology, history, political science, aesthetics and literature, cultural studies and French studies. She is also editor or co-editor of Pour une histoire des sciences sociales (Fayard, 2004), Pierre Bourdieu, sociologue (Fayard, 2004), Translatio. Le marché de la traduction en France à l’heure de la mondialisation (CNRS Editions, 2008), Les Contradictions de la globalisation éditoriale (Nouveau Monde, 2009), and L’Espace intellectuel en Europe (La Découverte, 2009).

Co-sponsored by:  The Europe Center, Department of French and Italian, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Center for the Study of the Novel, Department of Sociology, DLCL Research Unit on Literature and Ethics, Hebrew Literature Workshop, and the French Culture Workshop

Event Summary

Sapiro describes how writers during the inter-war period were targeted for social and political subversion, and even accused of being responsible for the French military defeat. The belief in the power of the written word, a legacy from the French Revolution, along with the Catholic fear of the dangers of reading, contributed to the perception of the printed word as a vehicle for inciting crime. Censorship was prevalent, with many prosecutions for writing and publishing carried out during the 19th century.

Sapiro traces how this repression led to the development of two competing ideas of professional ethics around writing: the idea of art for art's sake, and the political commitment of public intellectuals. She also describes the application of objective and subjective responsibility theories, ideas about criminality, and the absence of a professional ethics in writing, to the laws of free press during this period. Sapiro outlines several specific cases of prosecution against prominent authors in France, and the variety of arguments used in the defense - sometimes unsuccessfully.

A discussion session following the talk raised such questions as: How does the identity of the author relate to concepts of citizenship? Could the trials of authors be considered a form of censorship? Were there structural similarities between the trials and the public debate? Was there any reaction in the literary realm? Was there ever any criticism about the legal mechanism as the appropriate arena for discussing this moral debate? Why wasn't the debate held within the government?

Conference organizer: Nancy Ruttenburg

What is conscience, what was conscience, and what is its future?

The purpose of the conference is to examine the authority of conscience as it is presently invoked in various arenas of contemporary life—including law, medicine, journalism, and politics—and as its meaning is inflected by scholarly debates in the fields of history, literature, religious studies, psychology, and philosophy. From their various fields of expertise and interest, participants will address the central question the conference raises: in our post-Freudian and post-Nietzschean age, to what degree does conscience possess the kind of authority that an earlier and less secular age reserved for first things? This question entails a host of others.  Do our invocations of conscience reveal it to be the still-vital residue of a kind of certainty linked to infallible authority from which we cannot alienate ourselves even when we’d like to? If so, is the enduring vitality of conscience a sign that the process of secularization remains incomplete, even in secular rationalists, those who might consider themselves to be exempt from the religiosity that distinguishes United States culture from those of other modern Western democracies? Do we regard conscience as a type of knowledge? Or is it possible to understand conscience ontologically, as a category of self or mind that—insofar as it speaks to all humanity by means of a "small, still voice" issuing from each human heart—bridges the gap between individual and corporate being? Whether or not underwritten by a discipline or a tradition, conscience is commonly invoked to justify a range of acts and behaviors: what relation do these invocations of moral law, even when unexamined, bear to the burgeoning interest in ethics we see across the humanities disciplines and into the legal, medical, and journalistic fields? Between the extremes of authoritarianism and anarchy, where do we place conscience in American political life and how do we understand its peculiar agency?

Jacob Funk Kirkegaard has been a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics since 2002 and is also a senior associate at the Rhodium Group, a New York-based research firm. Before joining the Institute, he worked with the Danish Ministry of Defense, the United Nations in Iraq, and in the private financial sector. He is a graduate of the Danish Army's Special School of Intelligence and Linguistics with the rank of first lieutenant; the University of Aarhus in Aarhus, Denmark; and Columbia University in New York.

He is author of The Accelerating Decline in America's High-Skilled Workforce: Implications for Immigration Policy (2007) and coauthor of US Pension Reform: Lessons from Other Countries (2009) and Transforming the European Economy (2004) and assisted with Accelerating the Globalization of America: The Role for Information Technology (2006). His current research focuses on European economies and reform, pension systems and accounting rules, demographics, offshoring, high-skilled immigration, and the impact of information technology.

Jacob Kierkegaard interviews on the European financial crisis can be found in the following NPR articles:

"Why European Leaders are Suddenly Backing More Bank Bailouts"

"Ireland Went Down with its Banks.  Why Didn't that Happen in the U.S.?"

"Is This Europe's 'Lehman Moment'?  Banks Don't Think So"

With democratic revolutions spreading throughout the region, and as US, European and NATO forces enter the conflict in Libya, the transatlantic community shares concern over events in the greater Middle East. The Europe Center presents a timely seminar by Ami Ayalon, former director of the Shin Bet and commander of the Israeli Navy, about the interdependence of Israeli security and Palestinian statehood and the urgent necessity of achieving a two-state solution to ensure democratic self-determination for both peoples.

Ami Ayalon is a former Member of the Israeli Knesset, Commander of the Israeli Navy, and director of the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service. In 2003, Ayalon launched, together with former PLO representative Sari Nusseibeh, a peace initiative called “The National Census" to collect signatures of millions of Israelis and Palestinians in support of a two-state solution.

About the Speaker

Admiral Ami Ayalon was born in pre-state Israel in 1945, growing up on Kibbutz Maagan. He served in the Israeli Navy for 30 years. During his service he was decorated with the Medal of Valor, Israel's highest award and the Medal of Honor for carrying out a long list of operations without casualties as the commander of the elite Shayetet 13 Naval commando unit. From 1992-1996 he served as Chief of the Israeli Navy.

Upon retiring from the Navy, Admiral Ayalon was appointed director of the Shin Bet (Israel’s General Security Service). He is credited with rehabilitating the service, which had been hard-hit by its failure to prevent the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

In 2003, Admiral Ayalon founded the People’s Voice, a grassroots movement that, together with Palestinian professor Sari Nusseibeh, formulated a set of principles for a permanent agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. To date, over 400,000 people from both sides have signed the Ayalon-Nusseibeh Statement of Principles.

In 2005, Admiral Ayalon was elected to a senior Labor Party seat in the Knesset, and served on the several committees, including as Chair of the Knesset Subcommittee on National Emergency Readiness. In 2007, Admiral Ayalon joined Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's cabinet where he served until 2009.

Having formally retired from politics, Admiral Ayalon serves as Chairman of the Executive Committee of Haifa University, leading research on terror, ethics and international law. He is chair of AKIM, a charity for people with intellectual disabilities. He holds two degrees from Bar-Ilan University: a BA in Economics and Political Science and an MA in law, in addition to an MA in Public Administration from Harvard University. He is a graduate of the Naval War College in Newport Rhode Island.

The countries sandwiched between Russia and the European Union are not fully independent actors in regional and international politics: they cannot join the EU or NATO and do not wish to form a community dominated by Russia. Most of of these ‘in-between state’ are caught in a political impasse and security deadlock. This lecture will consider the argument that partnership between Russia and Europe will remain strained as long as the status quo for these states persists.

Marie Mendras is Professor at Sciences Po University and Research Fellow with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. She runs the Observatoire de la Russie, a study group and workshop a at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales in Paris.

In 2008-2010, Marie Mendras was Professor in the Government Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Along with her academic work, she worked as a consultant for the Policy Planning Staff of the Foreign Ministry (1983-1991) and for the Directorate for Strategic Affairs of the Ministry of Defence (1992-1998).

Her publications deal with Russian political developments and foreign policy. She is on the editorial board of the journals Esprit and Pro et Contra and is the author of Russie. L’envers du pouvoir (Odile Jacob, 2008) to be published in English in June 2011 (Hurst, London, and Columbia University Press, New York).

Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

1:30-3:00 pm:  Cold War Broadcasting-Aims, Impact Lessons

• Ross Johnson, Fellow, Hoover Institution and Woodrow Wilson Center
• R. Eugene Parta, Former Director of Audience Research, RFE/RL
• Jane Leftwich Curry, Professor of Political Science, Santa Clara University
• Amir Weiner, Associate Professor of History, Stanford University

3:15-4:45 pm: Communicating to Unfree Societies Today

• George P. Shultz, Distinguished Fellow, Hoover Institution
• Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute and Hoover Institution
• Abbas Milani, Director of Iranian Studies, Stanford University and Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
• John Fox, President, I-Media and Former Advisor, Open Society Institute Network Media Program

Sponsored by The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford University.