Monday, December 12, 2011

This house would extend the right to vote in French municipal elections to non-EU residents - rebuttal speeches

Second proposing speech
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this debate! First of all, I want to respond to the first opposing speaker. He started his speech talking about the current economic, politic and social crisis in order to prove that it is not the right time to pass the law we are dealing with. Thank you a lot for that! I would like to address the current social crisis in France and link it to our issue. One of the key causes of this crisis is the indisputable lack of integration of foreigners in France. Please look at the link (1): it is a striking example (people booing the hymn of the country where they live…) of our inefficient integration system. Contrary to the opposing team, we are pretty convinced that allowing non-EU residents to vote in municipal elections would favour the integration of foreigners. As AJ explained us: right to vote is a huge factor of integration by involving ALL the people of the French territory in local policies. This bill may be a first solution to the integration issue.  [...]

by BL

Second opposing speech
Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for following this complex debate. I would like to begin with an answer to a few arguments which were developed by the first proposer. This will lead me to develop my own point: creating new statuses and second-class citizens is not a good thing, helping foreigners to become full French citizens is. […]

by GL

Second proposing speech
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this debate! First of all, I want to respond to the first opposing speaker. He started his speech talking about the current economic, politic and social crisis in order to prove that it is not the right time to pass the law we are dealing with. Thank you a lot for that! I would like to address the current social crisis in France and link it to our issue. One of the key causes of this crisis is the indisputable lack of integration of foreigners in France. Please look at the link (1): it is a striking example (people booing the hymn of the country where they live…) of our inefficient integration system. Contrary to the opposing team, we are pretty convinced that allowing non-EU residents to vote in municipal elections would favour the integration of foreigners. As AJ explained us: right to vote is a huge factor of integration by involving ALL the people of the French territory in local policies. This bill may be a first solution to the integration issue.

This leads me to address another point: unity. Which unity was the opposing team talking about? Was it the unity on the French territory? I just cannot understand how making categories of voters (French people and EU residents) and non-voters would unify people living in our country. The opposing team insisted on the fact people need to feel member of a group: I totally agree and that is why I strongly support the motion! How our Japanese resident of a charming village in the French Alps could feel in a group, I am talking about people living on the French territory, if he cannot influence the policy of the city he has been living in for decades?

         
Let me now address a new aspect of the motion and point out the relevance and modernity of the bill. It would allow foreigners to express them. Indeed, I do not agree with the opposing team regarding the strength of the influence of local elections. Voting in such elections only provides with an indirect influence on national policies, as foreigners cannot be elected: they would only participate in the elections of the people in charge of expressing their opinion in the Senate or the National Assembly. However, we will realize providing foreigners with a right to vote in local elections is completely coherent and rational.

It is quite a modern bill when we consider more precisely the current political organisation of France (please look at the link (2)) and above all the links between cities and the state. Cities are very disconnected from the state: I mean they are more and more independent regarding their local policy and make most of the decisions alone. This decentralization process started in the 80s with the Deferre laws (1982), which reduced state supervision on local authorities and keeps on going nowadays. Please read the article (3) to learn more about that progressive decentralization process. For instance, the power transferred in 1982 concerns town planning and urban development. As a matter of fact, that bill is a first essential step in the involvement of foreigners in the evolution of their city and is strongly coherent with current changes in France. It makes them participate in the evolution of their environment by letting them express themselves on cities issue. As AJ said, it is almost a moral obligation: how could we justify foreigners paying taxes cannot decide how their money is used? It is completely irrational!


Some may argue the right to vote only in local elections is not strong enough to be a relevant and justified bill but I think it is essential to make the changes step by step. Giving directly to non-EU residents the right to vote in all elections would be a huge mistake: French people may not understand properly and accept the reasons of such an essential law.


BL





Second opposing speech

Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for following this complex debate. I would like to begin with an answer to a few arguments which were developed by the first proposer. This will lead me to develop my own point: creating new statuses and second-class citizens is not a good thing, helping foreigners to become full French citizens is.

AJ, you are quite right when you underline the fact that being a member of a community implies a certain number of rights and duties. But we have to clarify what we call a community here. On a local scale, the community can be defined as a number of people who regularly interact with each other and share common interests. What are those common interests? Public services like education and healthcare for instance, public transportation, security, local markets and stores… everything that is equally accessible to any member of the community and provides the group with a certain cohesion.


I would like to focus on one of those examples: education. In France, municipalities are in charge of the management of primary schools. But when it comes to grammar schools, the conseil général takes responsibility, then the region for secondary schools (the situation is a bit complex for universities). Thus if someone lives in a town and is given the right to vote for municipal elections only, he would have his say in the management of this town’s primary schools, but would not be able to influence the way other institutions are developed, even if they are located in his town. The situation is the same with security: municipalities have the control of the city police, but not of the national police.


What we want to show here is that giving suffrage only for municipal elections is not coherent with the idea of rights and duties that you develop. What you would actually do is give limited rights to people who have quite similar duties as French citizens. Therefore, why stop there? Or maybe this is just a step before giving foreigners living in France suffrage for all elections, following the example of Chile. But then we should be clear on this point, and this is quite a different debate… In a centralized country such as France, local, regional and national levels are so tightly linked that the real power of municipalities is quite reduced. What should we do then?


Citizenship is not something you can split. You cannot give a tiny bit of it to some people and stop there. If foreigners really want to get involved in French politics, they have the possibility to ask for naturalization: French laws offer easy conditions to obtain French nationality[1] (the unspoken annual quota depends on immigration policies, here politicians are to blame and not the law). The solution is to modify the conditions of naturalization, not to create new intermediate statuses. Moreover, France accepts dual nationality from any other country[2], therefore naturalization does not imply the loss of one’s original nationality (the impossibilities result from the legislation of other countries: Norway for instance refuses dual nationality whereas France would accept French-Norwegian citizens).

Encouraging people to take the French nationality and to become French citizens would be an advance towards better integration of foreigners settled in France. Indeed, integration can only be effective when people are truly equals. This is what Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité is about, and this is what the first proposer defined as our “moral obligation”. What is expected with this law is to see full fraternity (through deeper integration) derive from limited equality, and this is not something we can promote. The proposed law does not even allow foreigners to be elected as mayors: they would be allowed to choose, but not to be chosen. How fair and equal does that sound? Let them be full citizens and they will be able to do both, and on every election!


Thank you for reading us, and vote for us!

GL

10 comments:

  1. @BL

    "they would only participate in the elections of the people in charge of expressing their opinion in the Senate or the National Assembly"

    Mayors don't go to the Assemblée Nationale or the Senate, could you be more precise? If you are refering to the elections of the "Grands électeurs", foreigners would not be allowed to vote according to the law voted by the Senate last week.

    Besides, if such a link existed, this would definitely give local elections a strong influence on national policies...

    GL

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  2. @ GL,

    As I have already said, they would only indirectly participate in the elections of the “Grands Electeurs” as they cannot be mayors (they choose the people in charge of electing the "Grand Electeurs"). I just do not get your point.
    That is why I think the link between local elections and national policy, even if it obviously exits, is not completely significant.

    Hopefully, I did understand and respond properly to your misunderstanding about my speech.

    BL

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  3. @ GL

    I think your example concerning education is flawed. Curriculum is defined in Paris, whether you are in secondary or grammar school. The teacher status depend on a competitive exam decided by Paris. Basically, the municipality is deciding only for the buildings... That is not such a great power...

    GM

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  4. @GL

    Participating in local decisions and being French are two different things. Consider the case of an American who lives in Paris : he will feel concerned by the policy of the mayor since it has a direct impact on his life, as it would have if he was French. But national politics are a matter of identity, therefore he will be mainly interested in US politics.

    Besides, one can lose his nationality when he acquires the French one.

    To sum things up, there's a wide gap between being French and participating in French municipal elections.

    RM

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  5. @BL

    All right, I got mixed up because you mentioned the National Assembly, which is not linked with the Grands Electeurs or any local representative.

    @GM

    I am not talking about curriculums. I am talking about everything that goes around education itself: building and renovating schools, school transportation, school meals system... If you consider it as a small responsibility, just think about the school transportation on which many parents depend, or to which many would like to have access - and this is just one example.

    @RM

    Losing one's nationality acquiring the French one is something that should be worked on, this is one of the things I meant by "changing the conditions of naturalization".

    We think that if someone has been living in a country for more than five years and plans to stay longer, then his attachment to this country can give him access to the same rights French people have. Naturalization is just a way to show this attachment and his integration. This may imply a shift in the way we understand the concept of "national identity", but in the globalized world in which we live, this is changing anyway.

    GL

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  6. @GL

    If you check out this paper (1) from 2008, you can see that there are in fact many countries that do not tolerate dual citizenship. For instance, the Algerians, which constitute the biggest immigrant group in France, have to renounce their Algerian citizenship in order to obtain a French one. This means that a lot of people are unwilling to obtain a French citizenship since that would suggest losing a part of their identity. However, they can still be interested in influencing how their tax money is spent.

    Also, I have not seen any good arguments from the opposing side why one should deny foreigners from non-EU countries the right to vote when EU citizens have this right. You argued earlier that this is natural since in France people feel that they have some sort of European identity? How many do you honestly think see themselves as having a European identity? Should not people have the same rights regardless of where they come from?

    RJ

    (1) http://www.migrationpolicy.org/transatlantic/docs/Faist-FINAL.pdf

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  7. @RJ

    I think that the fact that Algeria does not accept dual citizenship is an inheritance from their difficult independance. Diplomacy can solve this problem, and we think efforts must be made in this direction, not to create second-class citizens.

    The EU aspect you mentioned was an attempt at creating stronger European unity and at encouraging people to move within Europe. It came with the legal concept of European citizenship [1] and after the Schengen agreement. Therefore it cannot be compared to what we are debating, as it was part of a much bigger and long-term set of agreements aimed at creating and reiforcing a European identity. And this process is not finished yet: it is still going on today.

    Moreover, if we follow your idea that all people should have the same rights regardless of where they come from, why not let everybody vote for presidential elections? Or be elected as an MP?

    GL

    [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_of_the_European_Union

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  8. @GL

    When saying that people should have the same rights regardless of where they come from, I obviously meant within the framework of this debate. I.e., why should some foreigners have the right to vote in municipal elections when some are denied this right? This has nothing to do voting in presidential elections.

    RJ

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  9. *This has nothing to do with voting in presidential elections.

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  10. @GL

    You make a good point about the potentially self-defeating effects of limiting the extension of suffrage to municipal elections only. But I'm not sure you prove that "citizenship cannot be split". I'd have thought that even only partial citizenship was better than no citizenship at all, and I'm not sure why such a notion would be conceptually incoherent.

    Nationality, on the other hand, seems to me much more difficult to "split". Unlike citizenship, which could plausibly be seen as flowing from a free and rationally entered into agreement, nationality seems more emotional, intuitive, based on feelings of kinship, history and identity that are less easy to share. By asking a foreigner to share (or even shift) such feelings between nations, one may be asking too much for some people. But such people will continue to reside permanently on French soil, and be integrated in every way in the life of the nation, except of course in terms of their non-right to vote. Is this an admissible situation?

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