So the way the author of Europe’s Angry Muslims explains the 2005 riots in the French banlieues is the following. The banlieuesards rioted, he says, because, as the representatives of the nascent global underclass that was being left behind by the withdrawal of the nation-state, they wanted to provoke the nation-state into manifesting itself. They needed evidence that the nation-state still exists.
And the nation-state state they were trying to conjure was France.
The riots stopped when the nation-state finally did show up in the slums and even promised that there’d be a new labor law that would somewhat relax the harsh legislation in France that keeps a few lucky workers in amazing lifetime jobs while destroying the very notion of a career for everybody else.
That new legislation, however, never came into existence because every French person who was delusional enough to believe that those cushy lifetime jobs would go to him or her personally came out in a massive wave of protests. And that’s many very delusional folks.
Since the citizens so openly and massively walked out of their commitment to the nation-state, the nation-state responded in kind. So now there are no jobs for anyone.
What does this have to do with Muslims, you’ll ask? Only that , as immigrants, they were by nature more sensitive to not finding a nation-state and freaked out, trying to get it back. But there is no Islam in this story because it failed to show up.
Is anybody still wondering why I dig this book?
Clarissa's Blog 
“Since the citizens so openly and massively walked out of their commitment to the nation-state”
How did the French do this?
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All they needed to do was compromise just a little bit on the lifetime jobs. Letting go of this – truly bizarre and unsustainable – model would allow the nation-state to become more adaptable to the new times. But the French didn’t want this compromise. They took the position where the nation-state owes them everything and they owe back nothing. And that is always the moment when the nation-state dies.
The tragedy of the current situation is that people want the state to behave like the most protective, caring, paternalistic nation-state in existence while they will refuse to do absolutely anything to keep that state in existence. OK, I understand that nobody wants to go die for the nation-state, and that’s fine. But when people don’t even want to get off their fat asses and look for a bloody job because the state owes them everything for some unspecified reason, then what reason does the nation-state have to stick around?
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