Is it really about values? Civic nationalism and migrant integration

ABSTRACT

Migrant integration is a pressing policy concern, and the perception that newcomers are not integrating has led to a growing backlash against migration. One outcome is ‘civic integration’ policies, according to which the most important mechanisms of integration are language training, employment counselling, and especially the inculcation of liberal-democratic values. Few authors, however, have addressed the fact that these policies are essentially civic nationalist ideology applied to migrants, and represent the most recent chapter in a long-standing debate over the relationship between majorities and minorities that focused on intra-state nationalist conflict during the 1990s. Civic integration policies reflect the self-representation of majorities, and are both politically and ontologically problematic. First, in many cases they seem best understood as a kind of symbolic politics that is more about who gets in than how they are integrated. Second, civic nationalism is based on a theory of nations and nationalism that treats these as solely ideological phenomena, and ignores the social bases of integration. ‘Shared values’ are a product of that process, not a mechanism for its achievement.

KEYWORDS:

• Integration
• migrants
• shared values
• civic nationalism
• relational social science
• conceptualisation

Acknowledgements

In addition to the anonymous reviewers, the author thanks the participants of the European Consortium for Political Research’s Joint Sessions workshop ‘The Civic Turn in European Immigrant Integration Policies’, the participants of The Institute for Research into Superdiversity’s conference ‘Rethinking Integration: New Perspectives On Adaptation and Settlement in The Era of Superdiversity’, and his colleagues in the Institute for Minority Rights at Eurac Research. Per Mouritsen, Gina Gustavsson, Sergiu Constantin, Johanna Mitterhofer, and Rasmus Sommer Hansen provided especially helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 ‘Beginner’ under the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/cadre1_en.asp.

2 The term ‘multiculturalism’ refers to several different things, the most prominent of which are: (1) the fact of social diversity; (2) the way that various institutions accommodate that diversity; (3) the normative justification for such institutional measures; (4) and an aspect of national symbolism that incorporates some combination of the previous three meanings. Joppke refers to the first as ‘de facto multiculturalism’, which he says is inevitable and unproblematic in principle, and varyingly lumps the other three meanings together when he criticises ‘multiculturalism’. Other critics of multiculturalism, especially in public discourse, often seem to be as concerned about the fact of diversity as anything else.

3 This puzzled many people, not least because the United Kingdom is the only country among the three that could be said to have ever had a multiculturalism policy.

4 It is difficult to understand why Joppke thinks that the ‘shared values’ critique is consistent with his own position. My best guess is that he sees a difference between shared liberal values and a shared ‘procedural liberal’ identity, which is not persuasive.

5 See Larin (2019) for a full explanation of the differences between civic nationalism and liberal nationalism. Also, it is possible for someone to take a position that is both civic nationalist and liberal nationalist: preferring a constitutively civic nation as the context for liberal practice, for example. This is rarely the case, however, and all of the major liberal nationalists (Tamir 1993; Kymlicka 1995; Miller 1995; Moore 2001) reject civic nationalism—as a starting premise, in the case of Kymlicka. This is in part because liberal nationalism is a kind of ‘third way’ between Rawlsian (1999) and communitarian (Taylor 1985) social ontologies.

6 Fozdar and Low (2015) describe a similar practice in Australia.

7 Many authors mention that Brubaker’s analysis is ‘relational’, especially when referencing his ‘triadic nexus’ of national minorities, nationalising states, and external national homelands (1996). Most, however, seem to think that this just means that these three categories can only be understood in relation to one another, and unaware that it is a more radical argument that is explicitly derived from relational sociology.