[update below]
I am quite mad about this. Pissed off in fact. The French National Assembly has just passed a bill that criminalizes denial of the Armenian genocide. If the law enters into force, anyone violating it risks one year in prison and a fine of €45,000. Turkey is enraged, not surprisingly, has recalled its ambassador in Paris, and is threatening all sorts of retaliatory action (voilà the headline in Le Monde dated today: “La Turquie menace la France de sa colère”). Now these are two countries I know and love but I have no sympathy for either in this affair. Or, I should say, I have no sympathy for the Turks but even less than no sympathy for France. When it comes to this particular issue, I have total antipathy for the French (N.B. as a French citizen I have a right to say anything I please on this otherwise lovely country). The Turks may be a pain, with their hypersensitivity to what Europeans say about them, hysterical nationalism, and extreme difficulty in confronting the many dark episodes of their past. But all that is the Turks’ affair. The problem here is with France.
There are five specific problems with the bill. The first is the very idea that speech should be criminalized. The current bill is an extension of two “memorial laws”: the 1990 Loi Gayssot, that outlaws denial of crimes against humanity, and the 2001 law recognizing, in the name of the French state, the Armenian genocide. The Gayssot law, which has been mainly used to criminalize Holocaust negationism, is uncontroversial in France and supported across the board by the left and right (minus the Front National). As a First Amendment purist, I find both laws unacceptable and liberticide (i.e. liberty-killing). No further explanation is necessary, not for an American at least. I can accept that France, for reasons having to do with its recent history, would ban public displays of the swastika. But for a mature democracy to proscribe speech of a political nature is inadmissible. Period. In addition to being liberticide such laws engender the inevitable perverse consequences, which, in the case of the Gayssot law, was seen most starkly in the 1996 brouhaha over Roger Garaudy’s negationist pamphlet Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne. If it hadn’t been for the lawsuit against him for violating the Gayssot law, the pamphlet would have gone unnoticed by all. But thanks to the Gayssot law and the consequent lawsuit, Garaudy gained major publicity and became a hero in the Arabo-Muslim world—where his pamphlet was translated into numerous languages and sold like hot cakes—, as well as a martyr for the cause of free speech. Great! Moreover, once politicians start interdicting speech, where does it end? E.g. why not a law—if not in France, say in Belgium or Spain, with their laws of universal jurisdiction—criminalizing denial that France committed crimes against humanity in the numerous massacres it carried out in its colonial empire over the years and centuries (and with the inevitable demands for reparation by the successive generations of the victims)? Massacres of which, it may be added, the average French citizen is entirely ignorant. What goes around can come around. E.g. in America, when the idiots of the Communist Party USA enthusiastically supported the enactment of the Smith Act in 1940—that criminalized advocating the overthrow of the US government by force—, as it was immediately used to prosecute fascists, Nazis, and Trotskyists, but then boomeranged against the Communists with the onset of the Cold War (before being gutted of its substance by the Supreme Court). Clearly the French have not taken to heart the line that Voltaire never said, about disagreeing with what one says but defending to the death one’s right to say it.
The second problem with the bill is that legislators simply have no business legislating on such matters to begin with. This is the most common reproach in France, that interpretations of history should be left up to historians, not politicians, who lack the professional credentials or competence to weigh in on what happened in Asia Minor a century ago—or even in France a half century ago—, let alone pass laws on it. In this vein, two former members of the French Constitutional Council—Georges Vedel and Robert Badinter—affirmed that the 2001 law recognizing the Armenian genocide would have been ruled unconstitutional had it been referred to the said council, as the National Assembly was manifestly exceeding its constitutional mandate in legislating on the question (e.g. see here and here). This would seem second nature but for French politicians it manifestly is not.
The third problem is that the bill implicitly equates the Holocaust with the Armenian genocide. Or maybe I should say the Armenian “genocide.” On the Holocaust—on what the Nazis did to the Jews during WWII—there is no dispute whatever. Historians disagree over interpretations, not over the fact that it happened and that it was a genocide. There is not a single trained historian anywhere, now or in the past, who denies that the Holocaust happened or that the Nazis set out to exterminate the Jews—every last one of them—from 1942 onward. Not a single Holocaust negationist is a historian. Robert Faurisson is an emeritus professor of French literature. Arthur Butz teaches electrical engineering. David Irving was a physics major before dropping out of college. The negationist Journal of Historical Review has never published an article by anyone with a doctorate in history. Professional negationists are professional anti-Semites, not professional historians. All this is uncontroversial, having been fully explicated in the work of Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Deborah Lipstadt, among others.
What happened to the Armenians is another matter. I have personally read enough on the subject to be convinced that a genocide—such as defined by the UN’s 1948 Genocide Convention—did indeed occur in 1915 in the Ottoman Empire, but there is, in point of fact, a legitimate debate on this. The Turkish state has not helped its case by imposing an official history on the question—not to mention criminalizing denial of its version—or having imposed a blanket taboo on free discussion of the subject until only the past decade. But there are bona fide historians—who are specialists of Turkey and know Turkish, both modern and Ottoman—who do reject the term genocide for what happened to the Armenians in 1915, arguing that there were massacres committed in the context of war but that there was no plan hatched in Istanbul to exterminate the Armenian population, even in part, let alone in full. These historians include Justin McCarthy, who has published much on the question (notably this; also see this); Guenter Lewy, who published this, among his many works of history; and Bernard Lewis, who has not written on the matter but has publicly stated his view—most famously in a 1993 interview in Le Monde—that the Armenians were victims of massacres but not genocide, and for which he was hit by a lawsuit in France. McCarthy and Lewy are in a minority among scholars of the Armenian genocide and their work is hotly contested, but their scholarly credentials and competence are not in doubt. Vigorous debates on their work have unfolded in academic journals—e.g. the Journal of Genocide Research and Middle East Quarterly—and where, it should be said, one of their principal detractors in recent years has been the Turkish historian Taner Akçam, who has famously broken the Turkish taboo in asserting that the Ottomans did indeed commit genocide against the Armenians (e.g. here and here). That McCarthy and Lewy could be legally prosecuted in France for their scholarship is both outrageous and unthinkable. Their work on the Armenians has not been translated into French and published here but now it should be, just to put the inevitable perverse consequences of the new law, should it come into force, to the test.
The fourth problem with the bill is the base electoralist considerations that are driving it. As numerous commentators and pundits have pointed out, a presidential election is taking place in four months time and there are several hundred thousand Armenian-origin voters out there (and who, politicians seem to presume, will put this issue above all others in deciding for whom to cast their ballots). As it happens, ten days prior to Sarkozy’s visit to Armenia in October—where he declared that Turkey “must face up to its history” (doit regarder son histoire en face) and threatened to have enacted a law criminalizing Armenian genocide denial—François Hollande gave a speech in Alfortville, a Paris banlieue with a sizable Armenian-origin community, announcing that if elected president he would push for such a law. Sarko just couldn’t let Hollande outflank him on this; and knowing Sarko he most likely consulted briefly with just one or two aides in his PR staff before making the decision.
Another issue. The existence of an Armenian lobby and of a supposed Armenian electorate has been evoked in a matter-of-fact way for years by commentators in France. This in a polity that has ideologically rejected the notion of ethnicity and that blocs of voters could be defined by sub-national identities (and courted by politicians based on these). One of the most pejorative terms in the French political lexicon is communautarisme, a neologism devoid of social scientific value and for which there is no precise English translation—”communalism” comes the closest but doesn’t really do it—, signifying groups based on ascriptive criteria—mainly ethnic or confessional—that publicly invoke sub-national identities that differentiate them, even symbolically, from the larger French nation and then go on to use these as a resource to advance specific political or social revindications. Communautarisme is regarded as a scourge by French politicians, intellectuals, and media talking heads, and which is seen as afflicting immigrant communities from former colonies on the African continent. When French citizens of Maghrebi or African origin seek to organize on the basis of what Americans call ethnicity or race, they are invariably accused by the political mainstream of engaging in the despised communautarisme. But when Armenians do likewise, it occurs to no one to trot out the communautariste bogeyman. Curieuses mœurs politiques dans ce pays…
The fifth problem with the bill is that it highlights the most unattractive donneur de leçons side of France’s face to the world—a.k.a. French arrogance—, not to mention being so inimical to France’s higher national interests. Given the execrable state of Franco-Turkish relations over the past few years, but which have been improving of late, it is mystifying that Sarkozy would risk poisoning them even more by giving the National Assembly the green light to pass the bill, particularly in view of Turkey’s increasingly important diplomatic role in the region (notably with Syria) and the fact that it is France’s third leading economic partner outside the EU (after the US and China). It makes no sense. Alain Juppé, the foreign policy establishment, and business community have been arguing against the law but to no apparent effect. In backing the bill, Sarkozy has demonstrated yet again that he is not an homme d’Etat. François Hollande, Sarko’s probable successor, has not been acting much like an homme d’Etat either. Triste France.
UPDATE: Claire Berlinski links to my post and adds an important statement by the historian Norman Stone, who will risk legal prosecution in France if the law passed by the National Assembly enters into force.
Well said, Arun.
Thanks a lot for this very enlightening piece.
The Armenian diaspora is very old and one of the better organized ones. Gabriel Sheffer wrote a very good book that I recommend to you called Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad. Worth reading for a global view of how diasporas behave and their sometimes very ambivalent relationships with host and home countries. On some subjects, yes, diasporas will take action in support of the home country and can be courted by host country politicians. As a member of a very disorganized and pretty powerless diaspora I can only admire (and envy to a certain extent) their ability to translate presence into concrete action.
On the other hand as a firm believer in Free Speech I’m not very amused by this law. I find such things self-defeating – let people say what they will and let the debate begin. It makes it so much easier to know who your friends (or your enemies) are. 🙂
Victoria, thanks for the tip on the Gabriel Scheffer book. The problem with designating Armenian-origin French citizens with the term ‘diaspora’ is that the overwhelming majority were born in France (and even to parents born in France). Aren’t they simply French citizens like all others? (perhaps with an ‘ethnic’ identity but just like many of immigrant origin). And one rarely sees reference to an Algerian or Moroccan diaspora in France…
This is a subject, Arun, that never ceases to fascinate me. The answer is that wherever people happen to be born they can still sit at the intersection of complex relationships between states. Even if they wanted to be simply French citizens it is not necessarily up to them. Some of it has to do with citizenship laws – in particular strict jus sanguinis that says that wherever a child is born he or she is “ours” in some sense if one of the parents was a national of that state. Even France does this – consider the case of child born in Canada and who has lived in other countries and who has never actually lived in France but who is still considered a full French citizen because she has a French parent. Another important element is to what extent the country of origin takes an interest in its nationals abroad and provides them with recognition and assistance and asks for their loyalty in exchange. The relationship doesn’t have to be public for it to be powerful. I’ve read (and I think it is true) that the best organized diaspora in France is the Portuguese one. Apparently they have a truly extraordinary network of language classes, cultural events, sponsored trips for families back to the home country and so on. The French government doesn’t seem to have a problem with this. In some ways an organized diaspora can be a benefit to the host country – it can be preferable to talk to diaspora representatives if there is some issue to be resolved (family reunification, discrimination, union representation and so on) or if the government wishes to use them as intermediaries with the country of origin.
I could go on about this at great length but I’ll stop there since I don’t want to abuse your kindness by bending your ear too much about this. I spend a fair amount of time on citizenship issues and diasporas because they are incredibly complex and sometimes have very strange outcomes. If you’re interested I did write these blog posts on diasporas:
Defining Diaspora
http://thefranco-americanflophouse.blogspot.com/2011/09/defining-diaspora.html
An American Diaspora?
http://thefranco-americanflophouse.blogspot.com/2011/09/american-diaspora.html
I also wrote up a short series on plural nationality and citizenship that you can find by looking under “Pledging Allegiance: Thoughts on Citizenship” on the left hand sidebar. Hope you find the information as amusing as I did. 🙂
Victoria, thanks for the commentary plus the links to your blog. They’re useful. I have a longstanding interest in nationality/citizenship law as well, which I teach in a couple of my courses.
Sorry that should read the “sidebar on the right”. I need more coffee 🙂
Victoria
Very good points, congratulations. To say that French politicians just can’t refuse this law, for electoral reason, is relevant, but see: François Bayrou (my political leader, btw) approved the first 2001 bill (the French State recognizes the 1915 genocide) but disapproved the new one (criminalizing the expression of adverse opinions). During the 2006-2007 presidential campaign, this led to a clash with the political leader of the Armenian community (as president of the CCAF), Alexis Govciyan, who was a militant of our party, and left. I just saw Mr Govciyan on TV, supporting the bill.
I would just add that the broad majority obtained by the bill is not surprising. France is a land of freedom and human rights… but precisely holds the respect of human rights as a basic principle, I would say, of some “national religious” nature (taking the place of ordinary religions, in our “laïque” Republic). “Les négationnistes” are considered as some new kind of heretics.
I stand again criminalizing heresia, anyway 😉
Thanks for the info on Bayrou and his stand, which seems principled to me (even if I disagree with the 2001 law as well as the latest one). I have to repeat that Sarkozy, in cynically backing this law, has definitely shown himself not to be statesman. A Président de la République who willingly risks undermining France’s national interest for base, short-term domestic electoral considerations should be tossed out of office at the first electoral opportunity.
Well, I agree with your conclusions, for sure 😉 but I wonder whether Mr Sarkozy and the UMP really took into account the existence of Turkey. As shown in “L’exercice de l’État”, politics happen in a closed circle, insiders consider and anticipate each other’s move, and easily forget that the outer world exists. To go on with that movie, the car accident at the end represents just that: the cruel revenge reality sometimes takes. Turkey’s fast and dry reply is that kind of revenge.
Let’s hope, after all, that the end will be fine. That the bill will not be adopted, that Turkey will recognize the genocide, that the French will understand and admit that “colonisation” did not mean “pacification” (as even I’ve been taught!) but most cruel violence,… that history, the science, will be given the first rank as far as History is referred to.