Le Melting-Pot: Made in America, Produced in France

Nancy L. Green

Israel Zangwill is fast becoming one of the hottest references on the French academic scene. For those interested in melting pots and multiculturalism, the English Jewish writer who settled in the United States and whose 1908 play, The Melting Pot, opened to rave reviews from Teddy Roosevelt himself has become the name to know in order to comprehend and critique assimilation.1 An "American model" (variously defined) has become the inevitable reference in French discussions of immigration and settlement. How can we interpret this migration of a concept, and what can it say to American historiography, which remains superbly indifferent to most comparative perspectives?	1
The nation-state is being battered from within (Yugoslavia and the ex-Soviet Union) and from without (the making of Europe), but it is not going down without a fight. In most of the oldest of the nation-state specimens, although internal diversity and borderland theories are rewriting much of the old national histories, national historiographies are very much alive and well. Given this persistence of nations as concept, reality, and historiographic practice, such historiographic traditions need at least to be confronted.	2
Ironically, the national traditions are nowhere more evident than in writing about migration, a transnational topic if there ever was one. In Europe, as the old nation-states grapple with further integration into the European Union, many countries are also coming to terms with defining themselves much as the United States has long done: as countries of immigrants. Nowhere is such a definition more fraught with questions of history, memory, and identity than in France. Of all the European countries, France has the longest history of mass immigration, dating back to the nineteenth century. Since 1789, it has also been a country (like the United States) born in revolution, based on republican, individualistic, and universal values, and committed to the proposition that all men are created equal. I have examined elsewhere the many historical, economic, political, and even ideational similarities that exist in French and American histories of immigration. Nonetheless, the cultural conclusions about immigration and national identity drawn in France have often been very different from those drawn in the United States.2	3
A comparative study of the historiography of immigration can show rather strikingly how historians and other social scientists conceptualize their own nations while imagining others. The historiographic comparison is not symmetrical, however. Variations on the American example loom large in a long tradition of French debates, from the works of Alexis de Tocqueville on, that use the American experience to understand France. Yet rare are American comparative reflections on other countries of immigration. In spite of John Higham's call of thirty years ago, the American history of immigration rarely contemplates the different Australian, Canadian, or French experiences. I would suggest that the internationalization of American history is already a fact . . . everywhere but in the United States. A look at how another country with a similar history conceptualizes a part of its past and does so with continual references to an American model can be a useful reminder that internationalization often starts abroad.3	4
As a comparative historian (and as an American living overseas) who has studied immigrant groups and national historiographies in comparative perspective, I have been interested in the comparative gaze. I have argued for the importance of comparative history while exploring the multiple contours of its practice. (The questions asked, the objects compared, and the level of analysis chosen all have an impact on the outcomes "discovered.") Both the comparisons constructed by scholars to study and those interactive comparisons—"reciprocal visions"—made by participants merit attention.4 It is the latter that interest me here to the extent that globally similar histories of immigration have often led participants to very different views of their meaning.	. . .