Europe's underclass.

• Author: Murphy, Cait

The theories of Le Corbusier have much to answer for. The once fashionable French architect believed in vertical cities that echoed the dehumanized life of the modern world: "We must create", he wrote, "the mass production spirit." In the city of his dreams, people would live in huge slabs of high-rise housing. To see how this has worked out in practice, take a twenty minute train ride from central Paris to the most complete embodiment of his ideas: La Courneuve, a vertical city par excellence. Some thirty years after its much ballyhooed construction as the best exemplar of modern urban life, the place is a mess. The high-rises are shabby, the limited park space ill-maintained. Most of the shops are boarded up, graffiti the only decoration. The train station is a fair walk away, and the bus service limited.

It is, in short, an excellent example of the problems of what France knows as la peripherie. While America's blight tends to be concentrated in the core of its central cities, in Paris and other French cities the problem is generally in the inner ring of suburbs, most of them built, with the highest of hopes, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. If ever one wants to see how good intentions can pave the road toward a kind of living purgatory, La Courneuve and its many architectural clones are prime exhibits.

That said, they are not as awful as, say, the urban hells of Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, or vast swathes of Detroit, New York, St. Louis, Baltimore, Washington, and Los Angeles. For one thing, crack cocaine - the moral equivalent of a bomb on already fragile neighborhood infrastructures - has not hit Europe as hard as it has American cities. For another, guns and random violence are less common. In the 1995 French movie, La Haine (Hate), which had tout Paris shivering in horror, the central drama depicts how one young white Frenchman acquires a gun. In some of America's urban public schools, by contrast, metal detectors are as much standard equipment as desks. As well, all the people in La Courneuve have access to health care. And finally, although the rise of explicitly racist political parties like the National Front is troubling, and while non-white Europeans have worse social and economic profiles, race is less poisonous an issue in the discussion of urban blight. It is to some extent possible for white America to avoid inner cities and to consider them a black problem - "isolate, isolate", as Tom Wolfe put it in The Bonfire of the Vanities. The fact that most residents of the wilder French banlieues and their European equivalents are white, however, makes it difficult for the larger society to ignore them as "the other." Indeed, the white gun-toter's two best friends in La Haine are a North African and a black.

Which leads us to the question: Does Europe have something akin to the American underclass? The term itself is controversial. Many Americans object to it on the ground that it is stigmatizing and defines a group of citizens as a species apart. Nevertheless, the term has the virtue of recognition; we know what we mean when we use it. It means a small minority of people, perhaps 2 percent of the population, cut off from the economic and social mainstream with seemingly little chance of ever joining it - or seeing their children join it. Europeans refuse to adopt the "u" word. The consensus is that there is no underclass in Europe, just "social exclusion", "new poverty", "advanced urban marginalization", or a "fourth world." The European Union issues worthy papers and multi-point programs discussing the problem.

But semantics aside, the question remains. And the answer is that if European cities have been spared thus far from the most hideous effects of American-style blight, they are heading in that direction - and on a huge scale. There are two ways in which adults connect themselves to the larger society: through work and through family life. When both those links weaken, the result is isolation, alienation, and hopelessness; and when it comes to both jobs and family structures, Europe has cause for worry.

Unemployment

As to jobs, Europe has proved grossly unable to get its unemployed - and, increasingly, its never-employed - into work. The statistics are stark. Almost one in nine adults in Europe (defined as the fifteen members of the EU) is unemployed; many more are in training courses, have taken early retirement, or receive "disability" pay - all often thin disguises for unemployment. Only 60 percent of European adults of working age are actually employed, three percentage points lower than in 1991 and significantly less than the American rate of 72 percent. While many of the non-working adults are students and housewives, some portion of the twelve point difference is unemployment by another name. Overall, 4.5 million fewer Europeans were working at the end of 1996 than in 1991, even though the size of the labor force stayed roughly the...