Subsidiarity and a "Color-Blind" Society

The ongoing riots in France seem to carry lessons for our understanding of cultural pluralism and subsidiarity.  An article in today's London Times notes that:

Under the ethnically colour-blind “French model”, the immigrant workers who came in the 1950s and 1960s from the former colonies in North and black Africa were to be regarded as equal citizens. They and their descendants would take advantage of the education system and generous welfare state to assimilate with “white” France. To promote the idea of assimilation, neither the State nor any other body publishes statistics on ethnic or national origin. . . . Laws supposed to promote integration and oppose multiculturalism, such as the ban on Muslim headwear in schools, have often heightened resentment and the feeling of exclusion. This has in turn fed the rise of Muslim radicalism, which has now become the dominant creed of the young in the French ghettos.

France has always deemed its model superior to the Anglo-Saxon approach of diversity, which has enabled ethnic minorities to retain strong bonds in cultural and religious communities. France calls this “comunitarism” and says that it promotes ghettos, exclusion, poverty, race riots and religious extremism that can ultimately lead to actions such as the London bombings.

It seems that subsidiarity would call for a middle ground to be explored in which a subcommunity's economic integration with society is achieved without purporting to negate the cultural or social characteristics that define the subcommunity.  Perhaps the Anglo-Saxon approach has too often tended toward economic isolation, and the French approach toward cultural negation.  And France's color-blind approach may be doubly problematic, as it ultimately brings economic isolation as well given the futility of the cultural task -- i.e., Muslim communities will remain different from the surrounding culture in important ways, and unless economic policy takes account of those differences, the cultural enclave can become an economic island.  Obviously, easy answers are hard to come by, but it seems that subsidiarity should be one component of the question.

Rob