The Challenge of the Multiracial Society

by Guillaume Faye

Guillaume Faye confronts the emergence of multiracial societies in Europe, tracing the ideological roots and societal implications of this shift from a once homogenous continent to one grappling with identity, cultural preservation, and the consequences of colonialism and immigration.

This is the second part of Guillaume Faye’s essay ‘The New Ideological Challenges’, published in 1988. Also read part one.

In recent years, most European countries have suddenly awoken in the midst of an entirely new form of society — one they could have foreseen twenty years earlier but did not — a form previously thought to be exclusive to the USA: the multiracial society resulting from decolonisation, the immigration of labour, and the differing population growths between North and South. For the first time in its history — at least in the last millennium — Western Europe became a host to Afro-Asian minorities, whose proportion is steadily increasing. The shock is substantial, and it is most pronounced in France. The question of identity is raised with unprecedented brutality and urgency. But this challenge enables Europeans — finally — to become aware of the nature of their own specificity, or at least to contemplate it. Identity, the strength of the sense of belonging, and the meaning of the term ‘citizenship’ obviously rest on a relative ethno-cultural homogeneity of Europeans, and therefore, we must ask about the ‘desirability’ of a multiracial or multicultural society. A new sign, however, is that the public debate openly discusses the (previously tabooed) question of a possible and desirable return of minorities to their homelands. Movements of opinion even question the possibility of obtaining citizenship of a European state if one does not have a European ethno-cultural origin. The multiracial society has two significant disadvantages: on the one hand, it is a ‘multi-racist’ society in which ghettos, racial hatred, and various social struggles ‘blossom’, as documented by the USA, Brazil, and South Africa, among others. On the other hand, this societal model equates to a New York-isation of Europe, following the logic of planetary Occidentalism, where uprooting, narcissistic individualism, the mechanisation and commercialisation of the social body, and the loss of cultural identity are the norm and abolish the concept of citizenship — for both the foreign-born and the natives.