In the aftermath of the May 2007 presidential election, the creation of the Ministry of National Identity launched words onto the public stage that designate the foreigner separated from a national "us". At the same time, they were the words of a mysterious sector of government whose function was not clearly seen, overwhelmed by so many symbols: "identity" as a national cause, "integration" as another word for exclusion, "immigration" as an identity problem... An aggressive government initiative, but just political, it was said (to please the far right to "neutralize" the FN?). The words of the social sciences were turned around, instrumentalized, researchers and associative and political activists felt concerned to debate it, clarify their ideas. But the ministry and President Sarkozy did not frankly pursue the debate! Meanwhile, the Ministry of Immigration and National Identity has constituted not its "object" but its "objectives", displayed, quantified: 27,000 expulsions of foreigners per year. And suddenly, against all odds, a "debate" is announced. Not to discuss the very existence of this ministry but to decide "without taboo" what national identity should be...

In these days when Claude Lévi-Strauss is celebrated by all as one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century, the thinker of diversity and the unity of the human, it is not useless to recall that the anthropologist of the Collège de France organized in the 1970s a seminar whose theme was precisely "identity", a notion he designated as a "sort of virtual focus to which it is indispensable for us to refer to explain a certain number of things, but without it ever having any real existence" (L'Identité, PUF, 1977). For several decades, researchers in the human and social sciences have been questioning individual and collective quests for identity, and the reasons why we so often speak of identity. Their research leads them to the limits, the borders, the contacts, far from the belief in a "true", essential, fixed identity. And collective identities, whatever they may be (cultural, religious, national), refer to nothing other than the "myth of insularity" to use the terms, again, of Lévi-Strauss. For the social sciences (sociology, anthropology) as for the human sciences (psychology, linguistics), it is a question of understanding and accompanying this long work of each one to accept that identity is elusive and indefinable...

It will then be admitted that the governmental injunction to define identity norms is what is most unacceptable for the knowledge of anthropologists. What arrogance, what will to dominate or what strategy can lead a government to want to govern, also, identity? To "define" it (thus making believe that it is definable) is to produce identity norms, a double violence. Violence for those it challenges to include themselves and remain "under identity control" at the cost of cultural and memorial humiliations (thus making violence, for example, to the African, Caribbean or Maghrebian part of France's history). In this sense, there is indeed a totalitarianism of any "ministry" of identity insofar as the question of identity, its quest or its construction constantly move from the most social and collective sphere to the most private and intimate. The total grip of control over people is the foundation of the totalitarianism of police states, as the history of the 20th century teaches. Under the guise of a "debate" on what defines national identity, we would thus be led to "subjectivize" the injunction of a supreme power, to endorse a paradox of totalitarian democracy of which each one would become co-responsible, making us the co-authors of identity control! The inquisitive gaze of an identity power would then hover, with our assent, over the life and gestures of each one. The definition of a national identity will provoke another kind of violence, towards those it excludes. For this normative identity - which everyone knows will be (it already is) ethno-national - has as all norms its essential function to produce a-normals and to exclude them, to "return them to the border" of identity. To make the "foreigner" exist in our minds and in xenophobic policies will be the first empirical verification of a national identity thus fabricated. Enclosed and impoverished on the cultural level, it will logically lead with it procedures of identification and verification, that is to say more police, walls, confinement.

What anthropologists offer as a perspective from the observation of the infinite diversity of cultures and societies is quite the opposite of this identity policy. It is a universalism. While being the one who, in the 1950s, advocated the always legitimate recognition of cultural differences (see Race and History, Race and Culture, Albin Michel/Unesco, 2001), Claude Lévi-Strauss, in the 1970s defended the "mutual intelligibility" between all humans and all cultures. However, the identity enterprises that have developed in the world - and to which the ideological enterprise of the "debate on national identity" echoes perfectly coherently - have all borrowed racial, ethnic, religious ways and languages, languages of "roots" and "autochthony", which take on a more radical character and, everywhere, "hardened" when they become political... then ethno-national, and then antonyms of citizenship. Today, it is this identity angle that induces and dominates every initiative and every word of the Ministry of National Identity and Immigration. Has it really been measured - in the very spheres of government, more concerned with electoral strategies than with proposing a vision of the world - all the danger that the existence of a "Ministry of National Identity" already poses in our country? The search for adherence to its objectives of controlling migrants and expelling undesirable foreigners through a "debate" on its object is one more step in its dangerousness. This ministry must disappear, quickly, its existence has already deeply darkened the image of France in the world, in the countries of the South as well as the North. And for good reason: it signifies confinement and the refusal to take part in the movement of the world.

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