ON FIFTH COLUMNS AND CAUSALITY

Eugene Volokh contends that the following paragraph means that Le Monde's London correspondent believes that fear of "domestic conflagration and terrorism" is a motivating factor in Chirac's opposition to a war with Iraq. He also argues that the apparent fear of this large immigrant population indicates a mistake in France's immigration policies. Here is the paragraph in question (from this article):

Let's be clear: Mr Chirac does not endorse Baghdad, and he finds Saddam's regime as despicable as do Bush and Blair. But he fears the American hawks will ignite Muslim fundamentalism worldwide. The fear of domestic conflagration and terrorism are also ever-present: there are 6 million French Muslims to take into account.

The paragraph can be given another meaning that is less ominous and more reasonable. First, given that the French position is that war in Iraq is not justified under the present circumstances, it's not surprising that the correspondent would focus on an immigrant population that might have especially strong views regarding a war that is already seen as the product of American intemperance and desire for domination (or Protestant "intolerance" as the correspondent puts it), and that these views might lead to violent reaction. If you already believe that the American position is wrong, it's not surprising that you would look to folks who might have an especially intense preference in the matter. [Relatedly] It seems to me that the American press systematically underestimates the force of the common "one million dead Iraqi babies" argument that places blame for massive harm in Iraq at the feet of American policies.

If France wanted to colonize Algeria again, for example, presumably violence would ensue from many quarters. Some of that violence would no doubt be "domestic conflagration and terrorism." But the French don't want to colonize Algeria, because they think, I assume, that it is wrong to do so. And French reluctance to support another country's colonizing efforts would suffer from the same problem. The French have embraced both the policy of non-colonialism and the immigrant populations that would have an especially strong view on the matter.

But another point is worth making. In Lockean liberalism, at least, there is a deep relationship between ideas of tolerance and the expectation that people will rebel if they feel oppressed. Whatever moral arguments one might also marshal in favor of it, religious tolerance, for Locke, is simply prudent policy because intolerance leads to violence and instability. It strikes me as an entirely reasonable claim to say that domestic populations with intense preferences (in this case, preferences that arise out of a feeling of commonality) should be taken into account in policymaking, and that at the end of the imagined chain of causality one needs to be concerned about whether or not those populations will engage in violence. And, again, if you already believe that those groups have the moral high ground, it's not extortion. The question, I guess, is whether you believe that the policy in question was chosen before the revelation of the intense preferences of the immigrant group. The article seems to show that the author believes that Chirac's "visceral" opposition to the "clash of civilizations" is pretty fundamental to his outlook here.

I guess that Eugene's real target is the claim that France has the "moral high ground," which he believes France couldn't have if Chirac felt that he was making his foreign policy decisions under the shadow of violence. This is true only if you think that "the moral high ground" necessarily means a position that is free of individual interest. By that logic, a judgment that religious toleration is the moral high ground is faulty because one of the arguments advanced for toleration is a prudential one (see above).