Britain and France have developed substantially different policies to manage racial tensions since the 1960s, in spite of having similar numbers of post-war ethnic minority immigrants. This book provides the first detailed historical exploration of race policy development in these two countries. In this path-breaking work, Bleich argues against common wisdom that attributes policy outcomes to the role of powerful interest groups or to the constraints of existing institutions, instead emphasizing the importance of frames as widely-held ideas that propelled policymaking in different directions. British policymakers' framing of race and racism principally in North American terms of color discrimination encouraged them to import many policies from across the Atlantic. For decades after WWII, by contrast, French policy leaders framed racism in terms influenced largely by their Vichy past, which encouraged policies designed primarily to counter hate speech while avoiding the recognition of race found across the English Channel.

Britain and France have developed substantially different policies to manage racial tensions since the 1960s, in spite of having similar numbers of post-war ethnic minority immigrants. Providing the first detailed historical exploration of racial policy development in the two countries, this study traces the sources of Britain's race relations structures and France's anti-racism approach. Erik Bleich argues against the accepted beliefs that attribute policy outcomes to the role of powerful interest groups or to the constraints of existing institutions.

Racist Violence and the State is the first serious study to apply a comparative research-based approach to the study of racist violence in Britain, France and The Netherlands since 1945. Setting racist violence within a historical background of the post-imperialist legacy, the author presents an accessible, fascinating and highly original analysis of the development of public and state attitudes to racist violence over the past 50 years.

This book looks at transformations in citizenship politics in the EU Member States. It argues that the anti-discrimination agenda in the Treaty of Amsterdam has affected traditional patterns of national integration of ethnic minorities and migrants in Europe. Comparing France and Britain, it also looks at religious factors and Islam in Europe.

After almost seven decades, Britain and France, nations with divergent political cultures and heirs to contrasting philosophies of 'integration', have proclaimed the failure to integrate their post-war ethnic minorities: at this present time, the ‘Muslim’. The ‘argument’ of this book, therefore, is a question: despite the legal, political and social commitments that emerged from the events of the Holocaust, why do both nations continue to govern minorities on the sites of the law and race? Through comparative readings of British Asian and Franco-Maghrebian literatures, the author examines the contours and patterns of British and French post-war governance and racism over four decades. Departing from prevailing theories in postcolonial studies that situate post-war racism within the narrative of colonialism or the politics of the nation-state, The Politics of Integration shows how we must re-appraise the inter-war histories of minorities if we are to ask more meaningful questions about the present. We are invited to take stock of how well theorization of post-war ethnic populations and their politics have served us in terms of asking: what does history tell us, and how and where do we - Europe and its minorities - go from here? As such, the book will appeal to scholars in multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences such as history, philosophy, literature, cultural and postcolonial studies.

Published in 1998, this volume consists of 16 edited papers presented at an Anglo-French conference on inequality in France in March 1997. The purpose of this book is to bring together ideas and perceptions of inequality in the two countries across several areas including multi-ethnicity, education, social work, housing and health, presented by experts in these fields and in cultural studies. The purpose is not comparative in the traditional sense, but rather to analyze the different meanings amd conceptions that apply to inequality in France and Britain and to demostrate how these differences affect policies as well as what is considered to be legitimate grounds for policy intervention. This approach to social policy in Europe pays attention to the cultural meanings of concepts like inequality and demonstrates that comparative social policy can only be properly productive when it acknowledges that key words like poverty, inequality, citizenship, social rights and insertion/exclusion carry with them quite different ideological, moral and social meanings in two countries such as Britain and France.