Secular-stand nation: terror in France

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fre perspective on the events shaping your world. Alexei Navalny, Russia's opposition leader, is still in Berlin after a near death experience. Our correspondent sits down with him for a long chat about the attempt on his life, his place in history and President Vladimir Putin's fading regime. And the speedy global spread of mobile Internet has made it possible to do some fascinating social science. We look into a before and after study that shows where and how much Internet access has eroded citizens faith in their governments. But first, Today, France's President Emmanuel Macron will lead a national tribute to commemorate the life of Samuel Paty, a teacher who was beheaded last week.

Earlier this month, Pattish showed his pupils.

Cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in a class on freedom of expression, angering a number of Muslim parents.

The attack happened on Friday in a leafy suburb northwest of central Paris, near the school where Mr. Paty taught. The 18 year old perpetrator, a refugee of Chechen origin, was shot dead by police soon after. Fifteen people have been detained in connection with the murder, including four students. Speaking yesterday. Mr. Macron vowed to crack down on jihadism. He said, French citizens must be protected against the evil that is radical Islam. Since Mr. Patty's death, tens of thousands of people have rallied across France in solidarity and in defense of the values the country holds dear.

I think the French are in a state of absolute shock. It's an unspeakable murder in any circumstances.

Sophie Petter is our Paris bureau chief.

But in particular, because it really feels to the French that it goes to the heart of what their country stands for in terms of freedom of expression and the role of religion and the place of secularism in modern France.

And what were the events that led to Mr. Paty's killing?

What happened is that in the course of a class that is part of the curriculum on freedom of expression, he showed to his pupils caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Now, he had, on his own account, told the pupils, any of them that might feel offended by these cartoons should feel free not to take a look at them. A parent then filed a complaint. It then became a sort of threat to the teacher on social media. And the end of the series of events was the assassination of Samuel Petit on the streets of a suburb of Paris on Friday.

And so for you, what does this crime and the reaction to it tell you about the place of religion and indeed of free speech in France?

So the French have a very particular conception of the role of religion in public life, and it dates back to a law that was passed in 1905, in fact, after. After a very bloody struggle with the Catholic Church, and that led the French to try to protect, with a private expression of religion, so the freedom of belief, but also of not believing, but also to keep religion out of the public sphere. And this is what the French called laicite. And it's buttressed by another law which protects blasphemy in France. So although some people outside France think that the French are unusually tolerant of offensive depictions of Islam, for the French, this is part of freedom of expression. And under French law, it's not illegal to mock religion, although it is illegal to incite hatred of any member of a religion.

Depending on which side of the argument you may be on, that's a big gray area.

It's extremely difficult. And it is something that some French Muslims argue is a way of legitimizing Islamophobia. And it's a difficult line to tread for the French in it is really about protecting free speech and the right to blasphemy in a country that, after all, is the sort of cradle of Enlightenment values. And it's very much part of that French identity. And I think defenders of the law would point out that Charlie Hebdo, for example, of the satirical magazine has put as many caricatures of the Pope of Jesus, which would be considered sacrilegious and possibly illegal in other countries. But in France, that is part of the culture of allowing and protecting blasphemy of all religions.

But yet this latest murder isn't an isolated event. I mean, these very same cartoons led to Islamist terror attacks a few years ago.

I think you have to be very careful about the way in which you look at this. The way that analysts in France who have studied jihadism talk about it is it's not one provoking the other. It's about a political ideology that is waging a war not only in terms of attacks on French soil, but also in ideological war for the hearts and minds of the French people, and that this is an ideology that seeks an excuse or a pretext to mobilize attacks on anything that represents the French way of treating religion in public life.

And what does President Macron say about this nuanced debate?

Well, he gave a big speech on what he called Islamist separatism at the beginning of October, And this speech was really warning about the dangers of a rising political ideology on France and the need to clamp down on it. Now, at the time, he was accused in some quarters of just a cynical chasing of the far right vote in France and others of stigmatizing Muslims. But I think since the murder of Mr. Paty, this analysis has been regarded as having been actually quite prescient.

And what's your take on the threat as described by Mr. Macron?

If you look at what he calls the soft signs of Islamism? So let's say a bus driver who refuses to take a female passenger on board because he considers that she's dressed unsuitably, or even demands for religious menus in state school canteens. The he will see these not as the right for a religion to express itself, but as the masking of a more sinister political product, which in the end, can actually help supply recruits to violence. A lot of French citizens did go to Syria and Iraq to fight alongside Islamic State. And actually, in the last three years since Macron was elected, the counterterrorist police have thwarted at least 32 attempted terrorist attacks in France.

And each one of them would bring these issues to the fore again. I mean, what has the government done in reaction to the killing of Mr. Paty?

Well, you've seen an almost immediate tightening up, an acceleration of the steps that Macron wanted to put into place anyway, with a new bill which is designed to, for example, ban home schooling, to counter the radical Quranic schools, to forbid foreign imams from training clerics in France, also to tighten up on cultural associations and prayer halls, which are seen as being sort of centers of the spreading of this ideology. You're seeing already this week talk of expelling from France those who are suspected of radicalization and who hold a double nationality. And I think particularly complicated is the subject of how to deal with this online, because you can close all the prayer halls you want that you suspect of radicalization, but ultimately it's much more difficult to control what goes on on social media. And in the days leading up to Mr. Paty's assassination, there was a huge amount of activity on social media.

And what do you think the net effect of these kinds of incidents is on French attitudes to secularism?

There always is a debate between those who want to apply secularism in a much more sort of rigid way and those who think that it needs to find some way of accommodating religion in public life in a little bit more flexible way. But I think ultimately this attack is going to strengthen the hands of those who urge a clampdown in defense of the French belief in freedom of expression and secularism and blasphemy. So I think there's no doubt that you will see a hardening of the tone from Macron and from government. And I think he really summed up the way he sees it. On the evening of the attack on Mr. Patty and his assassination, Macron said the struggle for him is nothing less than existential.

Thanks very much for your time, Sophie.

Thank you. Jason.

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It's been two months since Alexei Navalny, Russia's opposition leader, was poisoned while traveling in Siberia. He was eventually transferred to a hospital in Berlin, where the toxin was identified. A new version of Novichok, a military grade nerve agent. He spent three weeks in a coma. President Vladimir Putin, widely believed to have been complicit in the poisoning, claimed, among other things, that Mr. Navalny had poisoned himself. The European Union has just approved sanctions, including a travel ban and asset freezes against six Russians it believes are connected to the assassination attempt. Among them are the head of the intelligence service and two close aides to the president. Mr. Navalny has continued his recovery in Berlin, but despite clear threats to his life, he seems determined to return home.

We agreed to meet with Alexei Navalny in Berlin. It was quite sort of thriller like moment.

Arkady Ostrovsky is our Russia editor.

We agreed to meet in the evening. I was met on the corner of two streets by Navalny's press secretary, who was with him on the fateful trip. I noticed, it was hard not to notice, very heavy police presence, a lot of security outside the apartment block. I walked in, there was more security. There was a check. And the lift as we went up, so we went into the apartment. It's the first time, obviously, I saw him since his poisoning. He looked very gaunt. He's lost a lot of weight. And we sat down at a dinner table in the apartment to talk, had some food in the middle of it. I mean, the conversation itself actually lasted two and a half hours.

And you've known Mr. Navalny for some time. I mean, how would you describe his demeanor?

I've known Navalny for probably about 15 years, and what he said, you know, I expected him to. To be extremely angry, you know, furious at the fact that a chemical weapon was used against him. I expected him to talk about how he wants to take revenge on those who tried to kill him. I mean, he doesn't underestimate the threat and what he's been through. And he's very clear that this attack was, as he says was ordered or sanctioned at the very least by Vladimir Putin. What surprised me is when he said that actually this whole experience made him, in a way, more humane. It made him kinder and possibly even more sentimental. What he said was that actually this brush with death was good for a politician because it makes you re evaluate some things and reevaluate what human life is. So that was very striking to me.

And there's no doubt in Mr. Navalny's mind who actually made this attempt on his life.

His message was, he has no doubts, and he says this very loud and clear, that this attack was ordered or sanctioned by Vladimir Putin, Russia's President. Navalny's charge against Putin is based on the use of this particular weapon. The fact that he was attacked with a chemical, military grade nerve agent, Novichok, the fact that this was a new variety of novichok, showed that Russia has, that Putin has an active program, that this is not something that was left over from the 1970s. And it was also clear that the purpose of using this particular weapon, rather than hitting him on the head with a brick or shooting him in a dark alleyway, was to strike terror, to strike terror in his followers, in him. And this was also a message to the west that there are no limits, there are no more red lines. And Russian politics have become about survival and Putin's survival. And he takes that very seriously.

And so what does Mr. Navalny make of Mr. Putin's denials and the fact that the attempt failed?

I think to Navalny, and not just to Navalny, but also to the world leaders and to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor who came to see Navalny when he was in hospital, this was an indication that something has changed, that Putin's regime has undergone a very serious transformation. You know, we always knew Putin's regime was quite repressive and it could be expansionist and it could be aggressive abroad and repressive at home. But this goes beyond anything we've seen in the past. And what I thought was really interesting in this interview and in Navalny's analysis is that for all the powers that the Kremlin has, for all the control over security services, over political machinery, over electoral commissions, etcetera, The Kremlin, he feels, and Vladimir Putin know that there is a broad historic process or historic current that is now moving against them.

What does he mean by that, by a broad historic process?

And what he means by that is that Russia today is the remnant of the Soviet empire. It's the nucleus of the empire. And Putin's based his legitimacy very much on the idea of imperial resurgence. And he feels there is a broad historic current of pushing against the empire. In a way, it's the second phase of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, of the Soviet empire. And there is a movement for nation state, there is a movement for civic nationalism, for sovereignty of the people whose opportunities in life and whose living standards have been constrained by this imperial idea. And he, Navalny, just like opposition leaders in Belarus represent and ride this wave of resentment and push against the former Soviet empire.

So where does that leave Mr. Navalny then? I mean, he's out of the country, and a credible opposition movement is leaderless.

First of all, Navalny has created a very formidable regional network. Effectively, he has a strong party, even though it's not registered. And he believes that even if he is not there, his network, his party, will carry on. The Kremlin tactic at the moment is to stop him from coming back, precisely for the reason that Putin knows he cannot coexist in the same space as Navalny. And the Kremlin would rather marginalize him, turn him into a politician, a revolutionary in exile, which doesn't hold much sway with the Russian people. This is why Navalny is absolutely determined to come back. But there is also no doubt that he will face very grave danger that he could get arrested, perhaps on charges of treason or trying to overthrow constitutional order. So given where Putin sits and given the powers in his hands, I think the risk for Navalny to go into jail and possibly never to come out, that he might mysteriously die in a prison cell, is a very real one.

Arkady, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondence, subscribe to the Economist. To find the best introductory offer wherever you are, just go to economist.com intelligenceoffer that link is in the show notes social scientists love what's called a natural experiment, some societal transformation that proceeds of its own accord, but provides them with data before and after. Over the past decade, much of the world has provided one. Most of the 4 billion people who are now online only got connected in the past decade. That's a rich data set for pinning down just how Internet access affects societies.

A new study finds that citizens confidence in government declines when mobile Internet arrives.

Sondra Solsted is a data journalist at the Economist.

By linking surveys of people's trust in government to the expansion of 3G or better mobile Internet, researchers managed to identify a strong negative effect on the faith that people had in their governments.

It's an article of faith that the Internet has good implications for democracy all over the world. But this seems to dig a little deeper.

Studying the effect the Internet has had on democracy is very difficult. So it's very hard to know if fake news led to various elections in recent years or if the expansion of social media was behind the Arab Spring. So what you have to do is you have to be creative, which these researchers were. Now, what they tried to do was to look at an expansion of the Internet that happened gradually and in discrete geographical units. That way they could compare people in one area of a country that got Internet to people in another area that did not. What they found was that in general, people's confidence in their leaders declined once mobile Internet arrived in an area. So once they got online, and this was especially the case in countries where traditional media was heavily censored, suggesting that perhaps this is citizens just finding out what their government is up to and not being too happy about it.

So how did this study actually go about finding this out?

Three economists, Sergei Guriev, Nikita Melnikov and Ekaterina Shrevskaya, have come together to produce this study, which is still under peer review, where they combine essentially two data sets. So for the years 2007 to 2018, they looked at 2,232 regions, such as states or provinces, spread across 116 countries, and looked at when people could access at least 3G level mobile Internet. They then took these geographical regions, such as cities and provinces, and looked at how people had responded to surveys where they were asked, do you have faith in your government? Do you trust the judicial system in your country?

But given some of the correlations, some of the indications in the study that you talk about, isn't there some chance that nefarious governments could put it to nefarious uses?

One concerning implication of the study is that the effect is weaker in places where Internet censorship is strong. So perhaps what these authoritarian governments should do, if they want to censor their traditional offline media, they really should censor their online media as well. If you restrict the Internet, but you let the Internet spread and people get connected, if suddenly this control slips, rather than having this sort of new view of the government spreading gradually over time, as you say, 3G towers are put up across the country. You have opinions changing all at once, which could be more of a revolutionary thing rather than a reformed thing. Moreover, censoring the Internet requires technical expertise that many governments lack. So, for instance, in Belarus, where the government has tried to control both traditional media and the Internet, an opposition news channel on Telegram, an encrypted mobile app, has 2 million subscribers, 1/5 of the country's population. I think overall, what this shows is that by connecting people, the Internet enables information to be spread. And blindly trusting that you will be able to contain that once people communicate at great speed might not work in the long run.

Sondra, thank you very much for your time.

Always a pleasure to be here, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the intelligence. If you'd like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and see you back here tomorrow.