Civic integration in Western Europe: three debates

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, civic integration has become the dominant immigrant integration policy in Western Europe. This article reviews three debates surrounding the new policy: first, whether there is policy convergence or persistent variation along national models of integration; secondly, whether civic integration marks a retreat from multiculturalism, or is merely layered on resilient multiculturalist policies; and, thirdly, whether the new policy is liberal or illiberal, and whether it entails a return of cultural assimilation. It is argued that civic integration converges cross-nationally with respect to policy goals and instruments, while extant variation is often incoherent or touching more on the form than the substance of policy; that civic integration is national-level policy that tends to coexist with ongoing de facto multiculturalism, especially at local level; and that civic integration mostly remains in a liberal register, as it is still integration and not assimilation, which would connote forced identity change.

Keywords:

• Comparative politics
• immigrant integration policies
• liberalism
• multiculturalism

Notes

1. A separate question is whether the state control of integration should be through a stand-alone ‘integration policy’ or through the ‘mainstreaming’ of the integration function across policy fields. In the latter, each department of the state has to factor in specific immigrant concerns into its decision-making directed at the general population. Chronic budget shortages and apparent inefficiencies and the perverse effects of immigrant-specific policies have increasingly moved some European states toward ‘mainstreaming’ (see Collett and Petrovic 2014).

2. But see FitzGerald (2015), who intriguingly argues that the pre-entry component of European civic integration (more on which below) has precursors in nineteenth century American ‘assimilability’ admission requirements, like literacy tests. The communality between both policies is a concern about culturally distant migration, and thus an ethnocultural if not racial motivation; the difference is that the selection mode has shifted from group to individual level and that ethnic selectivity today can only be indirect, to meet liberal antidiscrimination norms.

3. Ministry of Integration and Gender Equality, Swedish Integration Policy. Stockholm: Government Offices of Sweden, December 2009 (http://www.government.se), p. 1.

4. However, since 2010 a coercive element seems to have slipped into Swedish integration policy – a ‘de facto mandatory element’, as participation in introductory programmes has become compulsory for newcomers who cannot support themselves financially (Borevi 2013a: 9).

5. French Interior Minister Hortefeux, quoted in Bonjour (2011: 56). The racially motivated onslaught on family rights for citizens seems to be a common Western European trend (see Bonjour and Block 2016).

6. The contrat d’acceuil has recently been rhetorically upgraded into contrat d’intégration républicaine (see http://www.service-public.fr).

7. Allochtoon is the official label for people who are born abroad or at least one of whose parents is an immigrant born abroad.

8. This is not to deny that not all cities are alike in this respect, some being more attuned to multiculturalism, others less (for inter-city variations, see Jørgensen 2012 or Scholten 2015). One study even identifies precursors to civic integration programmes at the city level (Caponia et al. 2016).

9. Its latest blossom is ‘burkinis’ and headscarves, denounced by the French Prime Minister as ‘enslavement of women’, being removed by armed policemen from the country’s southern beaches. ‘France’s burkini ban row divides government as court mulls legality’, The Guardian, 25 August 2016 (http://www.theguardian.com). However, in a decision of 26 August 2016, the Conseil d’Etat declared these provincial measures unconstitutional, and they are not likely to be repeated.

10. For a more critical view of the Dutch ‘“big state” trying to manage social norms beyond legal principles’, see Michalowski (2011: 764).

11. One might object that the opinion of the Blok Commission was not consensual. Indeed, the report came under heavy fire for its optimistic view that with respect to employment and education immigrant integration has been a ‘total or partial success’. But the commission’s proposal to step up civic integration has been adopted (see Schneider and Scholten 2015).

12. See also Van Houdt et al. (2011), who identified a convergent trend toward ‘neoliberal communitarian citizenship’ in the UK, France, and the Netherlands.

13. One reviewer argued that discussing refugee acceptance in the context of civic integration is ‘misplaced’, and that ‘none of the civic integration literature discusses refugee integration’. This omission may well be. But considering the preponderance of refugees in recent migration flows to Europe, which is likely to grow further in the future, and most of whom are not expected to return home anytime soon, the current policy challenge is to subject them to the general integration regime. As I show for the German case, this is in fact occurring.

14. Bundesministerium für Arbeit und Soziales, Das neue Integrationsgesetz (Berlin, May 2016, http://www.bmas.de).