The 1965 British Race Relations Act was a whimper of a law that arrived with a bang. By contemporary standards it was a narrow and weakly enforced attempt to ban racism. Passage of this act, however, was neither a banal event nor a foregone conclusion. Regulating behavior based on personal preferences or aversions was long and strongly opposed by many of the political elite. Britain's first Race Relations Act was therefore a significant philosophical departure from reigning British public policy. Moreover, action perceived to favor minorities – who at the time were caught in a maelstrom of anti-immigrant electoral sentiment – was not politically popular. Establishing antiracist provisions was thus a risky step for a Labour government with a thin two-seat majority.

The 1965 act had long-term implications for the future of British race institutions, laying the foundations for many present-day British race policies. As the following chapters suggest, the decision taken in 1965 to establish an administrative model (backed by the civil law) to punish access racism was critical to British institutional development and marked a significant departure from the criminal law model later selected in France. Britain's administrative and civil law approach has resulted in significantly higher numbers of complaints, settlements, and verdicts in cases of discrimination than France's criminal law structures. Yet, the content of British institutions was by no means predetermined.

Writing on race is no easy task because the term has no clear meaning. What are, for example, the boundaries that distinguish one “race” from another? Given that there are no biological bases for deciding whether there is such a thing as the “Irish race,” the “Jewish race,” or the “black race,” perhaps it is better to avoid such a loaded term altogether. And if the word is so ambiguous, controversial, or counterproductive, what purpose is served by devoting a book to the subject of “race politics” and “race policies”?

The topic of race arrived brusquely on my agenda when I was wrongfully arrested in December 1995 in Brixton, South London, during what was characterized by some as a race riot. My one phone call after a long night in jail was to a friend who, instead of recommending a lawyer, put me in touch with a journalist. Very early in our discussion, the reporter said that she hated to ask this, but was I by any chance black? One year later, while conducting interviews in Paris, a learned scholar stopped me short upon entering her office: What ethnicity was I, that I was writing a book on race?

Race is certainly an ambiguous word. It is a problematic concept that must be investigated rather than simply accepted. Yet, it remains incredibly meaningful.

Unlocking a compelling account of race policies in Britain and France requires investigation of policy development over time. To enrich the historical narrative and to uncover the root causes of race policy outcomes, it is essential to analyze the history in light of theories of comparative public policymaking. This chapter therefore begins by outlining three prominent policymaking perspectives. A policymaking perspective refers to a school of thought that accounts for the basic nature and central elements of policymaking, be they specific actors, a theory of motivation, or a conceptualization of constraints on action. The power-interest framework, for example, views politics as a function of actors struggling to advance their interests, with outcomes determined largely by relative power resources. Problem-solving perspectives interpret politics as a search for policy solutions to concrete problems. Institutional approaches typically stress the constraining nature of existing webs of institutions on any new policy under consideration. Each of these perspectives offers useful insights into policymaking and each must be canvassed in order to understand the contours of race policymaking in Britain and France.

Close examination of these perspectives reveals that as informative as each is, none can satisfactorily account for race policy outcomes in these cases. These theoretical frameworks do not successfully illuminate actors' goals or their desired policies.

The Labour government intended to remove race from the political agenda in 1965. For many, it had done just that. The electorate, the cabinet, the opposition Conservatives, and the unions each seemed content with the status quo. The state's new law served as a public proclamation against racism, and institutions acceptable to both ends of the political spectrum had been established to cope with concrete cases of racism. There was pervasive indifference or hostility to further race policies in the public and the political elite in the late 1960s as reflected in opinion polls and in public statements of most politicians. Three short years after Parliament brokered its legislative compromise, however, Britain's domestic race institutions were – against all odds – significantly expanded and strengthened.

The 1968 Race Relations Act struck out in two directions. It widened protection against access racism to the fields of employment, housing, and provision of a broader range of goods and services. Even after passage of the 1965 act, it had remained permissible in Britain to refuse a job, an apartment, or insurance to an individual because of the color of his or her skin. The 1968 law provided safeguards against this kind of discrimination. The 1968 legislation also shored up enforcement, providing (a few) additional teeth to the race relations bureaucracies. Under the new law, the Race Relations Board could investigate instances of racism even when no complaint had been filed, and it could bypass the Attorney General and take cases before courts on its own initiative.

Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, Parliament revisited antiracism provisions several times to refine and extend them. It was not until 1990, however, that the next major antiracism law arrived in France. The Gayssot law (as it is commonly known) comprised three substantial and new elements. First and most symbolically, it punished those who deny the historical existence of the Holocaust. Although France is not unique in enacting provisions against revisionist history, prominent observers have argued that creating an “official” history is a dubious practice in an open society. Second, it created a new tool for punishing racists. Subject to the discretion of the judges, individuals found guilty of racist crimes can be stripped of certain civil rights – most provocatively the right to run for public office. Third, and least controversially, the law of 1990 mandated an annual report on the struggle against racism and xenophobia. This provision created institutionalized publicity for race policies and opened a yearly window of opportunity for antiracist activists to exploit.

The Gayssot law was passed in a significantly different era from that of the original French legislation. If the proposals for the 1972 law were initially formulated in the postwar years, those for the 1990 law were developed in the context of a rising far right party and of heightened concerns over immigration. By the mid-1980s, most of the French political elite and the public understood that immigrants were not merely temporary workers, but were a permanent part of French society.

British and French race policies have evolved from their fragmentary postwar form into relatively well-developed institutions today. They have not, however, proceeded smoothly, nor have they followed identical paths. Multiple subplots and unexpected twists and turns have marked the history of race policies in these two countries, from Labour's about-face on immigration policies in the 1960s to France's shifting rules that let Parliament place antiracism on the official agenda in 1990. Moreover, in spite of similarities in numbers and percentages of ethnic minorities, each country struck out in a substantially different race policy direction. Closely examining the historical record has unveiled details about how and why leaders in each country chose their race relations and antiracism structures.

Tracking the evolution of race policies in Britain and France also makes it possible to examine and to assess theoretical approaches to the study of comparative public policymaking. Chapter 1 outlined the power-interest, problem-solving, and institutional perspectives on policymaking, and suggested that each served to illuminate the policymaking process. It also focused on frames, arguing that mainstream views of policymaking downplayed the role of such ideational variables in accounts of policy choices. Chapters 2 through 6 drew on these theoretical schools of thought to help analyze the construction of race institutions in Britain and France. This chapter, in turn, uses the empirical material to evaluate the theoretical perspectives themselves, with special emphasis placed on the role of frames in policy analysis.