14 February 2003. Dominique de Villepin, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs delivers a speech at the United Nations Security Council against American plans to intervene in Iraq. Several major demonstrations take place in European cities and North America. The tensions are high between the United States and some countries of the “Old Continent” and French fries are rebranded Freedom Fries. Why is France opposing what is conceived by the Bush Administration as a legitimate enterprise after the attacks of September 11, 2001? Francis Fukuyama puts forward a hypothesis in the Wall Street Journal of 31 January 2004: “The French government's stance against the Iraq war and US foreign policy more generally seeks in part to appease Muslim opinion”. France would then shape its foreign policy based on the potential reactions of its Muslim minorities, expecting a reactive conflict spillover. After all, aren't Muslims supposed to feel solidarity with the community of the believers, the ummah? Wouldn't the endorsement of the American intervention cause internal troubles, possibly riots in the “banlieues”?

Attributing French foreign policy decisions to a domestic variable, especially related to minority politics seems puzzling to anyone familiar with the hostility of the French political structure to minority politics. It is this puzzle that constituted the starting point of this research into the foreign policy opinions and attitudes of Muslims in France and Great-Britain, two countries home to significant post-colonial Muslim minorities.

There is a wide recognition that multiculturalism represents a challenge for Europe (Gurr 1993; Alesina & La Ferrara 2005) but in spite of all the debates surrounding this issue, few perspectives introducing the foreign policy variable have emerged with regards to immigrants or ethnic minorities, especially Muslims. A broad range of literature in the United States is dedicated to ethnic lobbying. In Europe, though the range of literature dedicated to Muslims is broad, it has never been looked at from this angle. The neglect of this topic is quite interesting if we consider that a range of events after 9/11, the Arab Spring and the proclamation of the caliphate by the so-called Islamic State have involved Muslims in foreign policy debates in one way or another.