I'm seeing a strong parallel between late 60s racial issues in the US and the current state of affairs in Europe with their Muslim minorities. Both cases saw disadvantaged and discriminated-against youth often turning to radicalism; in that framework, ISIS is the Black Panthers. The Nation of Islam and Malcolm X's "by any means necessary" would be another analogy to play with, but the NoI tended to talk more radically than they acted, if memory serves.
One difference in these cases is that black and white Americans had a common Christian heritage to draw upon. Martin Luther King could draw upon Biblical themes that would resonate to ears of all racial groups. That commonality of religious background, even though the styles were often different, gave the Civil Rights Movement an extra tool in the kit that Muslim-Europeans don't have.
Absent that religious common ground, secular French natives and their Muslim brethren have just the Liberty, Equality and Fraternity of the French Revolution to call upon. The natives aren't feeling all that fraternal with the Muslims and, to borrow from West Side Story's America, that liberty leaves the newbies "free to wait tables and shine shoes." Integration has been a slow slog, with a less-vibrant European economy being hard for newbies to fit into to, doubly so due to a socio-religious gap.
The song is an interesting one, with the gals singing of the virtues of a free, western society, while the Sharks are singing the grim realities of being an Hispanic immigrant in post-WWII Neuva York. The final verse has the guys wanting "to go back to San Juan"; in the modern case, the guys often go back to their ancestral turf and become a jihadi.
Modern liberals and neocons are left in the role of the gals, but the Sharks aren't listen all that much. They're bitter, feeling like outcasts, and looking for a fight. When you add a religious overlay to that youthful rebellion, you have a potent brew, even more potent when you can cast the oppressors who don't share your faith as the infidel; recall that in WSS, they were divided by ethnicity and language but not faith, although religion didn't show up on radar in WSS.
Without a common culture or common faith, there isn't much common ground to be had.
This Atlantic piece that got my mind rolling on this front has the French struggling to digest this issue and whether their political system can survive the stress; the current Fifth Republic only kicked in in 1958. The change from a parliamentary to presidential system was prompted by stressors that lead to Algerian independence in 1960.
I'm not sure what a Sixth Republic would entail; France seems to be on the verge of a ideological shift rather than a change in constitutional structure, where nativism and/or a stronger focus on integrating minorities rather than seeing them radicalized. The nativist National Front would be the beneficiary of such a move unless the mainstream conservative parties can come up with a law-and-order Nixon to counter Marine Le Pen as George Wallace in drag; her dad deserves the metaphor more than she does.
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