"France has never been and never will be a multicultural country

(Super)-diversity in Macron's France

Abstrakti

Emmanuel Macron has openly claimed that he does not believe in ‘multiculturalism’ but is a fervent supporter of ‘diversity’, that he defines through the narrow and contradictory scope of neoliberal economy and meritocracy. In the French context, the concepts of ‘diversity’ and its derivatives such as ‘superdiversity’ are not strictly related to ethnic discrimination but also to ‘parité’ and cultural pluralism. Due to its “semantic plasticity” (Doytcheva, 2018), ‘diversity’ and ‘superdiversity’ have become trendy terms used in different contexts – school, business and politics – without much theoretical rigor. While being blamed by the French ‘reinfosphere’ as the promoter of the dreaded ‘diversity’ threatening the national unity, Macron’s discourse against ‘communitarianism’ actually refers more to the anti-immigration discourse of the Right and even the Far-Right. His surprising decision to include immigration quotas in the Great National Debate in the midst of the Yellow Vests crisis brings further confusion to his vision of what ‘diversity’ is in the French society – leading to the increased risk of the praise of diversity becoming “the praise of the good diversity”.