Perry Anderson’s lazy endorsement of US self-mythologising

A few weeks ago the historian Perry Anderson published an essay “Regime Change in the West?” in the London Review of Books. Like many of Anderson’s essays this is a wide-ranging splurge full of bon mots and *apercus” delivered from some quasi-Olympian height. My attention was caught, though, by the following couple of sentences which both expressed a widely-held belief, even a cliché, but one which I knew to be false despite the lazy “of course” which Anderson interjects:

Historically too, of course, the US is an immigrant society, as no European country has ever been [emphasis added]. That means there is a tradition of selective welcome and solidarity for newcomers that doesn’t exist at anything like the same emotional pitch in Europe.

The reason I knew this to be false is that, unlike Anderson, I had taken the trouble in my own (non-historical) work on immigration to read the work of France’s foremost historian of the phenomenon, Gérard Noiriel in his now-classic work, Le creuset francais: histoire de l’immigration (XIXe-XXe siècle) (Seuil, 1988). In his opening chapter “The dismissal of memory”, Noiriel addresses both the facts and the myth, pointing out that while in the US immigration is understood as an “internal” part of the constitutive history of the nation, in France it has been treated as something episodic and external. But when you look at the facts, immigration has played as much of a role, and perhaps more, in French society as American.

Here’s Noiriel

… American mythology has always tended to inflate the importance of immigration in the history of the country. [But] even during those periods when the influx was at its greatest, “the population of recent immigrants never exceeded 15% of the population”. … However, the key point is that in the United States immigration underwent a big slowdown at the beginning of the 1920s after very restrictive laws were passed, whilst in France this is the period when it begins to take on its full extent. In 1930, France is the country which experiences the largest rate of growth of a foreign population in the world (515 per 100,000 inhabitants compared to 492 for the United States). At the end of the 1960s France is once more in the forefront of industrialised countries for the relative size of its immigrant population. We can therefore affirm that contrary to widely held assumptions, for at least half a century, the question of immigration has had an importance, as much economic as social or political, that is greater for France than the United States. If we look at things from a genealogical perspective, over three generations, the lived memory of the “immigrant experience” it today more widely spread in the French population than in the American one. … If we start from the “foreign born” category used by the US Administration and compare it with an equivalent group for France, we find that in 1970, Americans of recent foreign origin constitute less than 5% of the total population as against 12 to 13% for France in the 1975 census. This gap shows above all how much more significant a role immigrants of the “first generation” play in French society compared to the US. However, other figures show that in 1970 already, the place of the “second generation” was proportionately as important in each of the two countries. At that date, indeed, 11.8% of Americans born in the US had at least one parent of foreign origin. This was the case for close to 10% of French citizens, according to the survey carried out by Alain Girard, a survey that was only concerned with adults (including children would have raised the proportion considerably)…. [W]e can therefore consider as plausible the idea that today, over three generations, the impact of immigration is at least as great in France as is in the United States. (Le creuset francais (2006 edition), pp. 20-21, my translation)

One of the misconceptions about France that Noiriel is concerned to expose is of an autonomous and auchtochtonous society dating back centuries and refounded with the revolution but where “the story” is always about internal development engagement with outsiders is a matter of war or conquest. It was never like that. There have always been foreigners and in largish numbers (although the idea of who counts as “foreign” is a mutable one). Anderson and Noiriel would agree that immigration is much more central to the self-conception of the United States than of France but the job of the historian is surely to expose the vain self-conceptions of nations and their elites rather than flattering them with an lazy “of course”. But then Anderson’s main purpose isn’t so much to flatter Americans as to suggest that European anti-migrant hostility is understandable because Europeans have never had to experience high levels of immigration before. But they have.