Race Politics in Britain and France

Book excerpt: 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.