Paris Match
Blood on the streets of Paris again tonight, as rioting spirals out of control and protestors open fire on police.
What's going on in the French capital, paralleled by events in Britain a few days ago, is a result of alienation between people of different races, religions and cultures forced into conflict.
Something that's particularly telling is the title of a French government minister asked to comment on the violence.
The minister of social cohesion, Jean-Louis Borloo, said the government had to react "firmly" but added that France must also acknowledge its failure to deal with anger simmering in poor suburbs for decades.
"We cannot hide the truth: that for 30 years we have not done enough," he told France-2 television.
Countries in a harmonious state of existence don't need 'ministers of social cohesion'. They have social cohesion.
It's not just France and Britain; Germany too has problems with ethnic groups such as the Turks, and the Netherlands are experiencing an anti-Muslim backlash due to a couple of very high profile incidents.
One could stretch the analogy even further to include conflicts such as Bosnia, a place where previously buried tensions between different sections of the population, one section viewed as 'natives' and another as 'outsiders', get out of control. Or perhaps those tensions are stoked.
The basic problem here is urban alienation. When young men, perhaps undereducated and unemployed, begin to feel alienated against the society in which they live, the results are generally explosive.
But let's add to this. Alienation has always occured in deprived areas; this is something slightly different. These days, with the aftereffects of colonialism leading to mass immigration, many major cities in Western Europe have large minority populations. There are often few contacts between the different cultural entities within one area, and misunderstandings lead to resentments and ultimately hatreds.
In particular there can also be little doubt, whatever Tony Blair may say, that 'Western' actions in the Middle East are angering the Islamic populations of Europe in even further. This may well be a submerged factor in Paris, that despite France's objections to the Iraq War, its young Muslims see the West as one and the same regardless of differeing political viewpoints.
At best their bad feeling is expressed in a withdrawal from the host society into ghetto-like enclaves. At worst it is manifested in extreme acts such as 7/7 or even 9/11. The only answer is for both the 'insiders' and the 'outsiders' to seek ways to engage with each other again before we find ourselves with conflicting states within states.
