“To be accepted, to be recognized, you have to do the impossible. You have to be Zidane.” This sentiment is commonly felt by Algerian immigrants living in France, that the only way to become accepted as part of the French nation is to succeed at the highest level like their greatest icon Zinedine Zidane did at the FIFA World Cup. After leading the French to a World Cup Championship in 1998, the son of Algerian immigrants was declared “President Zizou” by crowds of adoring Frenchmen. However, for the millions of Algerian immigrants that could not lead the French to glory on the pitch, acceptance is far more challenging, due to over a century of cultural tension between France and Algeria that defies the French demand for cultural assimilation. The evolution of the cultural exchange and relationship between France and Algeria demonstrates the importance of tension in driving cultural exchange, while revealing both the frontiers and limitations of global citizenship and offering a model for how nations can foster cooperation through difference.
In 1848, Algeria was officially declared as French territory, beginning 114 years of rule defined by a policy of cultural assimilation. One of the major pillars of this assimilation policy was the suppression of Islamic institutions, demonstrated through the Senatus-consulte of July 14, 1865 that offered citizenship on the condition of rejecting Islamic law. This was done in an attempt to “civilize” the Algerian people, consistent with broader European colonial practices.
By the 1930s, the Arabic cultural revival began, through the Association of Algerian Muslim Ulema, arising in direct response to French cultural policy. This growing tension led to the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), a conflict with profound cultural and political ramifications. Algeria’s independence did not end its cultural relationship with France but rather allowed for Algeria to redefine how that relationship existed for the first time. The new Algerian government’s first attempts at reorienting this relationship were through the policy of Arabization, which involved suppressing and reducing the impact of the French culture and language that remained in Algeria. However, these efforts proved as unsuccessful as France was in assimilating the Algerian people. As a result, the Algerian-French cultural relationship came to be characterized by a syncretic culture and identity formed around both French and Algerian practices.
Following Algerian independence in 1962, waves of Algerian migrants settled in France, primarily in urban banlieues (communities on the urban periphery), in search of economic opportunity. Their children, known as the beur generation, were raised with Algerian cultural traditions but surrounded by French society, leaving them caught between two distinctly different identities. Nevertheless, the beur generation quickly became a powerful cultural force in France, challenging France’s model of cultural assimilation. This was exemplified through the rise of Verlan, a form of French slang. Though Verlan predates Algerian immigration, it gained cultural momentum when Algerian immigrants blended Arabic influences with French terms in an effort to resist assimilation into mainstream French society. However, even as Verlan was originally intended to resist the traditional French language, many Verlan terms began to become accepted as part of the French language. Words such as keuf (cop), tepo (buddy), and relou (annoying) have seen a rise in usage outside of Verlan’s traditional informal immigrant contexts. Consequently, words like meuf, derived from femme, have become so absorbed into mainstream French that younger speakers re-inverted it as feumeu, showing how the tension between cultures continues driving linguistic evolution.
This cultural dynamism extended beyond language, as the post-independence migration waves to France brought their music with them, with the most culturally significant being raï.
This musical form began in Algeria in the early 20th century, combining both Arab and European influences, and when raï reached France, it crossed social barriers, transcending its immigrant origins to reshape French popular music and propel Algerian artists like Cheb Khaled and Cheb Mami to fame in France and worldwide. A central figure in raï’s evolution was Rachid Taha, a fellow Algerian-born artist who became known for fusing rock and punk music with traditional raï. One of his best-known songs was Rock El Casbah, an Arabic cover of the Clash’s song Rock the Casbah, which contributed to the growth of raï music as an international genre consumed worldwide, illustrating the global reach of the French-Algerian cultural exchange. Taha, who requested to be buried in Algeria instead of France, captured the duality of his identity in his autobiography, writing “Algérien pour toujours, et Français tous les jours” – French every day, but Algerian forever. His identity, neither fully French nor Algerian, embodied the same tension that defined both raï and the beur generation as a whole. For its impact in bridging cultural boundaries, raï was recognized by UNESCO as part of their Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2022. Together, Verlan and raï represent the creative output of a people who were caught between two distinct worlds, contributing to a cultural identity that cannot be defined by a single state.
The beur generation and their descendants occupy a unique cultural space, one where they are too French for Algeria and too Algerian for France, yet their identity is shaped by both countries. Their experiences embody a real-world approximation of global citizenship, which is the idea that a person’s identity can transcend the traditional cultural constraints of geography and political borders. Importantly, this concept does not require the rejection of national identity, but rather placing national identity secondary to a broader sense of shared humanity. The beur generation and their descendants partially reflect this: they are neither fully French nor fully
Algerian, but rather a hybrid culture that transcends the borders of both nations. However, contrary to the idealized version of global citizenship, beur and French-Algerian identity does not fully transcend nationality altogether; instead, the nations of both France and Algeria matter deeply. This space was not created by intentional design, but rather through centuries of continued cultural tension between France and Algeria, demonstrated through the rise of Verlan and raï. Ultimately, true global citizenship, as defined in theory, is likely unattainable in the near future, but France and Algeria’s cultural relationship shows what the benefits of a limited application of the concept can be.
The most valuable lesson from the cultural exchange between France and Algeria is the importance of tension. The development and expression of beur culture, seen through Verlan and raï, was only able to occur due to the tension between the French cultural expectation of assimilation and Algerians resisting that expectation. Both France and Algeria originally failed in creating productive space for tension, with the French colonial forced assimilation policies and the post-independence Algerian Arabization efforts. By forcing culture upon their people, both governments left no space for productive cultural exchange to emerge. Instead, countries need to create conditions where this dynamic can exist. This can be done through sustained cultural contact, based on voluntary exchange rather than the coercion of previous assimilation policies. Rather than repressing other cultures, countries need to create spaces where their cultures can be challenged, reframed, and adapted. The unresolved tension between France and Algeria offers a lesson for other post-colonial states in how to navigate their own colonial friction, suggesting that productive exchange does not require complete historical reconciliation, but instead space for that tension to generate new identities. This has major implications for cultural diplomacy, which currently relies on using the exchange of cultural ideas and practices to build bonds
between countries. However, through tension, these bonds could be made stronger if each culture was able to challenge the assumptions of the other, creating the space for a new, shared identity to emerge that can link countries closer than ever before.
28 years after his father led the French to World Cup glory, Luca Zidane heads to North America for the World Cup, not as a Frenchman, but as an Algerian. The 28-year-old goalkeeper made the decision to represent Algeria over his birth country of France at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, saying “We’ve lived in an Algerian culture since we were small. It’s an honor to play for Algeria.” Luca Zidane’s choice embraced his unique identity as someone who is neither fully French nor Algerian. While his father represented the unrealistic standards that many Algerian immigrants faced in their efforts to assimilate, the younger Zidane represents a transnational identity that does not have to assimilate to either culture.
France and Algeria reveal that cultural exchange and the potential for global citizenship can emerge from tension expressing itself in unexpected ways, which leads to the type of transnational identity that allows for the son of a French hero to play for the country his grandparents emigrated from.
References:
Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Algerian embassy in France | Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made
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