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Nabila Ramdani

lines on the record: 30
first: 2024-01-05
most recent: 2024-01-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“We haven't even touched on so many issues that I want to talk about. The word la ICTA hasn't come up so much in this conversation. But I'm afraid for everyone who is interested in all the things that we didn't get to touch on, I would recommend that you pick up Nabila's fantastic book. I think it's one of the most important interventions in recent years about understanding a country which is so important for Brits, but also for the European Union. And anyone who really wants to think about how modern multicultural post-colonial societies are navigating very difficult economic, social and political terrains. Nabina, thank you so much for joining me and thank you Intelligence Squared for hosting us on this podcast. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. If you want to keep up with everything going on at Intelligent Squared, sign up to the newsletter. Head over to Intelligentsquared.com to get the heads up on all our live events coming up. And members can also peruse over 20 years of our back catalogue, featuring some of the world's great minds. That's all over.”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“European Union and placing France again in that sort of role as being a constructive ally to countries in the Middle East. It seems to be more paradoxical than it's ever been given the domestic position. So how would you judge where Macron and France right now thinks about itself as a global power?”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And maybe by concluding, we could also think about how France has tried to navigate the crisis in Gaza. And it seems that they've been stuck between two responses at home domestically. Macron, the French government, were one of the first to say that they didn't want to have pro-Palestinian marches on French streets. It went as far to say that they would be banned, even though people have then gone out subsequently and protested. But Macron has also, as he often wants to do, put himself in a position of a global mediator, calling for a ceasefire before many of his”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Towards its own citizens. This has foreign policy implications. France in 2003 was fettered as the European country which stood up most to the US and the UK in opposing the Iraq war. Dominique de Ville, who's then Prime Minister, sort of went viral even back in the day with a speech at the United Nations. It seems that 2003 was probably a high watermark for France, in particular its relations with Middle Eastern countries. And we've seen to be on a decline ever since. Can you speak about what do you think is the international reputation France holds beyond”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Perhaps France needs right now. Just before we end, I also want to touch on the foreign policy implications of everything that's in your book. You rightly point out that France is still the most visited country in the world. France still has a huge amount of cultural cachet in so many parts of the world because of its natural beauty and its rich history. It strikes me as somebody who lives in London and who has friends from across the world, but many of my friends come from what's called the Global South countries in the Middle East and Africa. France actually had the terrible reputation among younger people who actually are far more aware about some of the more poisonous social and cultural elements that happen in France. And this is always a disconnect when I speak to my French friends who really don't seem to understand that people informally boycott France, people in my social circles say that they will never visit France as a form of protest against what they see as the country's, you know, deep-seated race.”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, it seems to be a way to stop France from having conversations about police brutality. So when Black Lives Matter became a global movement, often the response that you saw, and I saw this from French diplomats in the European Union who didn't want to open this conversation at a European level because these are American problems, these are not French problems. We don't have police brutality. We don't have systematic discrimination against people of color. There's also equivalence, I think, with the Me Too movement, which again took hold in America and then spread across the world. And you saw figures, quite prominent figures from French movies and French culture, women of a certain generation who were also trying to push back and saying, well, we can't stop Ben from flirting with women. And actually, this is just about policing sexual behaviors. And this is not the kind of stuff that we do in France. So it feels like it's become quite a powerful argument to stop so much of the soul searching.”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And actually, with the whole wokeism debate, which seems to be cross partisan, so you hear this on the far left, on the right and the liberals all use these terms like wokeism as something that is threatening France and it's coming from America and the UK, is this also just another level of fragility that we see in the modern French Republic? Or is it actually something quite special about this relationship with the Anglosphere that modern France has always had but now seems to be in, I guess, much more poisonous in so many ways?”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything is wrong, and that's exactly where France doesn't want to go down. It strikes me that in the current culture war phase of political life in the West, France has sort of two others. One is the longstanding other of the migrant, the Muslim, the North African second or third generation French citizen, which represents a threat to French society, French values, everything France as a post-Enlightenment nation thinks of itself. And then, on the other hand, you have the Anglosphere. And this is also a bad alternative because they have ultra-liberalized labor markets. They're obsessed with wokism, transgender rights, multiculturalism. And these are also seen as to be equally evil and sort of antithetical to the French identity. Why do you think the Anglosphere still looms so large in the French psyche and is still part of this story of French declism or the French identity crisis?”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting that you mentioned the Anglo Saxon nation, so I'm sitting here speaking to you from London. Often when I have briefly intervened in French political debates, I'm usually met with the criticism that the Anglo-Saxons”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will come in the summer just upon us in 2024, where Le Pen's party will be standing for the European Parliament's elections, and these are often seen as not always accurate, but they're definitely proxies for what's been happening in a country domestically. Is there any debate about the resurgence of the Rossemblement National as soon as December of 2024 is this something that is on the agenda among the French political establishment, or are they too busy fighting sort of more short-term fires right now?”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's also a qualitative difference between thinking about the 27 election and perhaps the 2017 election or even 2022 when. The idea seemed to be that if France selects a far right leader, then France will isolate itself internationally in the European Union. I think now it's the case that if you could have a Le Pen president in 27, she could look around Europe and even the US and find bedfellows and allies. We already have Giorgio Maloney, who comes from a neo-fascist party in Italy as a prime minister of Italy. The Netherlands shows overwhelmingly backed a anti-Islam far-right candidate who sort of mimics Le Pen in so many ways. And then, of course, there is the prospect of a Donald Trump re-election. Add to that people like Victor Orban or Robert Ficherman, Slovakia. And I think the story is less of France being isolated, but even worse prospect of a far-right France finding bedfellows to change the agenda to create a more far-right Europe and a more far-right international Western foreign policy. And perhaps one of the first tests of that...”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Second rounds because they just don't see any difference between the two. Does Le Pen represent really a qualitative difference in what a French president looks like and the ideals that she represents, could they actually wreak as much destruction on France and Europe as a lot of people fear?”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2017. I think maybe we should also speak, and we've mentioned in passing a lot Marine Le Pen. It seems now more than ever that this 2027 forthcoming election won't just be like all the other ones where the far right is also managed to make it into the second round of the presidential vote and for memory Le Pen has been in the second round where she has steadily increased her vote share, but she's never made it past the threshold. And perhaps the system is designed to ensure that that never happens. What are the prospects of a 2027 Marin Le Pen victory? And what would the implications be for France in a country which has already turned right on so many issues? And I also hear in different circles that, you know, what's the most, what's the damage that Le Pen can really do when Macron has done so much? And this is something that you hear a lot from the progressive parts of the French left who maybe call for abstention in voting.”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does feel like the progressive dream of a Macron in 2017 has very much faded and seems difficult to remember a time when he did act in this role. And every time I see the French media, I notice that only a few days ago, one of the paradigmatics student figures in the 1968 revolutions Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who put himself behind Macron has now also”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Diagnostic position that the system of the French Republic will always push any president towards extremes because that's the only way that they can sufficiently govern by having effectively every couple of every four or five years a plebiscite between themselves and an extremist and then to try and position themselves as close as possible to the extremists while telling voters that this they are not really the real deal Or is this actually just a series of choices that Macron has made, policy choices about security, about migration, about Islam, about the economy that could have been avoided if he was a different type of character”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm interested in your views on why Macron got to where he is and you write in the book about meeting him and speaking to him before his 2017 election, as you mentioned, he was the great hope for those who feared the far right. He was the great hope from my perspective at that time for the European Union as somebody who had ideas to reform the state of the EU, to deepen its integration, to increase its powers. He was a liberal, to some degree a liberal strongman, and that really attracted a lot of international attention and praise. Was it always inevitable that Macron would end up where he is right now, which is stuck between his own party, which doesn't really have an identity and a far right, which seems to be dictating its agenda? Is your sort of”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“French people, the French media, even the political class think about the Assembl ⁇ e Nationale as a body. Is this provoking any soul searching about making”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a very important question and about the powers of the French Parliament. And we're actually speaking in a week where I don't think the Assembl ⁇ e Nationale has ever had more international attention paid to it, or at least in my years of watching French politics, the parliament has never been so front and center of political drama. And that's because we are speaking in a week where the French government, the sitting French government, tried to put through a very controversial migration bill and it faced a revolt, so Macron faced a revolt from within his own ranks because that migration bill was going to be passed with the support of Marine Le Pen's far right party, and they wanted to avoid that situation. And in the end, we come up with a fudge where the bill is passed. There is a majority, even without the far right, and Macron stumbles on. I'm curious, just because this is quite a live event, has the attention that's been put on the parliament changed anything about the way”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it is a deliberate democratic deficit. I mean, these were the explicit conditions in which De Gaulle felt that the country needed to bring back stability. There is talk. It used to be in the far left circles with the party of Jean-Luc M ⁇ lenchon for a sixth republic, France probably more than any other modern European country is known for this almost constant constitutional revolution. What do you feel about the prospects of a sixth republic and if you were in charge and I know the book puts out some recommendations on how France should move to a more parliamentary style of democracy, what could that Sixth Republic look like? And I guess a more sensitive question is that how much political and social upheaval would it cause or would you need to trigger such a huge national debate about the need for renewal and change in France today, given how polarized the...”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spend a lot of time in the book speaking about the perils that have been wrought because of the Fifth Republic. And a lot of that, it seems that there is a sort of original sin that is attached to the Fifth Republic. So you concentrate a lot on the conditions in which that republic was born, the Algerian war, how French brutality was marked this entire episode at the beginning of this constitution and perhaps it's something that's never really been reconciled with by the French political establishment, the country's national psyche is the real origin myth of modern France, what is the original sin and how are we seeing the continuation of this, the trappings of the colonial state in the 21st century in France? And how much can we trace back to that moment when this republic was born?”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Executive and the power that is put into hands of the president. What are some of the other sort of delusions or mythologies that you isolate in this book as being problematic and something that is holding modern France back?”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be a sort of Olympic Games in existentialism around what France is, its identity, a certain degree of French declinism, which you see from public intellectuals across the country. But it seems that there are only some types of people that are allowed to be legitimate critics of France. And it always struck me as somebody coming from the UK that those second, third generation immigrants, people in the media or intellectuals were never allowed to occupy a space where they could think radically about how to change France. This was always something that which is now increasingly reserved to the far right of the political spectrum and you see that with people like Eric Samour who go from being public intellectuals to political figures and even cult icons for the right. And that's why I think the book is so significant. And you've already touched upon one of the delusions about modern France and one of the mythologies that you think is quite poisonous, which is the”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the past, when I have published hard-hitting articles about France and what's wrong with it, I have been met with criticism from civil servants accusing me of being anti-patriotic. And I think that's a very unfair criticism, as I said, you know, my book is very much a positive constructive criticism that hopefully will allow France to look at itself and adapt to a racketly changing world. Yeah, I think we've probably both had experiences as journalists writing about some of the more painful sore spots around France. And from my perspective, I'm not French, but being based in Brussels and writing about European affairs, a constant critique is that you don't really understand the country and Anglo-Saxons can't really get under the skin of France. And what really struck me about the book is that you're completely right.”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“French establishment. What I can tell you already is that each time I brought up the book discussions with civil servants, they just didn't want to talk about it. They invoked what they call the Droit de Reserve, i.e. the right to abstain for talking about politics precisely because they are members of the government and on the government's payroll effectively.”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It follows in the great French tradition of dissenting progress effectively. Can I ask about what initial reactions your book has met in France? And was it a deliberate choice to write this book in English? And are you planning of a French translation anytime soon? Yes, I think, you know, France is a very interesting country. It remains a riddle in many ways for a lot of international observers. And that's why I wanted to write about it in English to reach out to a global audience. I have to say it hasn't been translated into French yet. I do hope it reaches the French market so effectively to allow the country to do some soul searching, which I think is absolutely needed. So I haven't had masses of feedback yet from the French public or indeed the”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fault lines about France and why it's relevant now, in particular. And I would say that one of the major fault lines I described in my book is the absurd amount of power invested in one president and indeed the very real danger that this one president might soon be a full-blown extremist committed to state racism, to put it blank. And that's why I was determined to write this book now. France is a country that is not adapting to the modern world. And I would argue it's going through an identity crisis. And I certainly wanted to highlight these failures and indeed provide solutions. And that's why I would say that my book is very much a disruptive book, but in a positive way.”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are certainly not meant to write this kind of State of the Nation books, if you like. And I wanted to change that. But there I say, more crucially, I wanted to cut through the myths about France. France is a wonderful country in principle. The constitution of the current Fifth Republic is meant to achieve liberty, equality and fraternity for all. But in practice, it has often achieved the opposite. In fact, it has alienated millions of people from a system that looks after its elite. And you were talking about, you know, the”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Word feature often felt insubstantial. So, you know, I had a lot more to say about France and the logical ambition was to write an entire book about it. And, you know, they say you write about what you know. And I certainly know masses about modern France and all of its problems. And I was also, dare I say, very Conscious that the book market is dominated by a very privileged class of people who went to the white schools, who went to the white universities, and who come from very rich and indeed comfortable backgrounds. And so people like me who come from a far more modest background, an immigrant background, a council estate background.”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The state of France today, and also, I think, a book which is incredibly prescient because by the time you've already hit publish, it seems that so many of the warnings that are in these pages are playing out in the French Senate, in the French Assembly and across the streets of France as we speak. And maybe just on that note, this is a book which has, I think, a relatively provocative title, perhaps, especially because you're writing it in English for an international audience, I imagine, to try and understand some of the pathologies of modern France. Why Nabila did you think now was the time to write this book? Well, frankly, I think that the direct answer to this is that I think France is an extremely interesting place at the moment and that there weren't many books around really explaining why. And I really wanted to fill that gap. You know, I've been writing journalistic articles about France throughout my career. But even the 2000...”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm producer Fei Adavita, coming up, Nabila Remdani, the writer and broadcaster, discusses her book, Fixing France, a critique of the current French political landscape, asking whether there's still space for liberty, equality, and fraternity in today's republic. Joining Abela in conversation is Maureen Khan, economics editor for the Times newspaper. Let's join Maureen now with more. Nabila Romdani is a French-Algerian writer from Paris who works as an academic, a journalist and a broadcaster mainly covering France, the Arab and the Muslim world. She has written for publications ranging from the Guardian to the Daily Mail and The Washington Post and broadcast for outlets like Sky News, Al Jazeera and CNN. Her new book is called Fixing France How to Repair a Broken Republic. We're going to spend the next 30 or 40 minutes talking about Nabila's motivations for writing the book, some of her prognosticians about”
2024-01-05 · Intelligence Squared · Fixing France: Nabila Ramdani on How to Repair a Broken Republic · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT