Civic integration and the negation of collective selfhood: A normative analysis through Paul Ricoeur’s notions of identity

ABSTRACT

Requirements of immigrants to prove language skills, undertake knowledge tests, or complete courses of civic education, have become central in the process of attaining formal legal membership in the political community. However, while civic integration often is furthered as an emancipatory process and way to strengthen social cohesion, this article maintains that civic integration deviates from a notion of integration as the mutual transformation of migrant and receiving polity alike. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s discussion of ipse- and idem-identity, the article analyses the normative underpinnings of civic integration and argues that civic integration is conditioned on a community based in sameness rather than in an inclusive and reciprocal respect for diversity, meaning that civic integration will emerge as strikingly similar to the assimilationist practices it seeks to overcome. Thus, drawing on idem-identity, civic integration is seen to not only defeat its own goals of political emancipation of the migrant and the social cohesion of the community, but also to negate the very possibility of collective selfhood. By contrast, through exploring Ricoeur’s notion of identity as imbued with temporality, this article gestures towards how the normative standards of reflexivity, tolerance and mutuality ought to guide any idea of integration.

KEYWORDS:

• Civic integration
• Paul Ricoeur
• identity
• sameness
• selfhood
• naturalization
• political community

State membership conditioned on prior civic integration in the polity is increasingly becoming the modus operandi in the process of acquisition of formal inclusion in the nation-state. Presumed to make way for better social and political inclusion of migrants in their host communities, civic integration posits various combinations of language skills, knowledge tests, interviews, or courses as mandatory requirements for those seeking membership status in the polity. Doing so, civic integration is generally understood as more aligned with liberal democratic values and ideals of liberty and equality, than earlier preferred policies of assimilation.

In its most general sense, integration broadly implies social inclusion through the concurrent adaption of migrants and their host societies alike and concerns ‘the general sociological mechanisms that describe the way, in which all people, migrants as well as non-migrants, find their place in society’ (Brubaker 2001, 533–535; Kostakopoulou 2010a, 829–832; at Lucassen 2005, 18). In contrast to assimilation, which presumes the individual to renounce her particular identity and acquire a thick, comprehensive, national identity, integration often describes conformity in the public, political sphere, albeit not in the private.¹ With civic integration this implies the adoption of a core set of civic values as requirement for citizenship. While this places the responsibility to integrate on the individual migrant, it also makes legal status and political participation in public life conditioned on the prior acquisition of, for example, language skills or civic knowledge (Goodman 2014; Joppke 2010a; 2010b).

While many scholars – although not without notable exceptions – agree that the thin, political identity ideally promoted by civic integration serves to foster social cohesion as well as the autonomy of the migrant, it is in this article suggested that such a conclusion can only be drawn through an insufficient understanding of the meaning of identity. In this, identity appears either as a structure of sameness and difference, or in the form of an autonomous individual able to act independently. Paul Ricoeur’s theory on narrative identity and the relationship between ipse-identity, or identity as selfhood, and idem-identity, or identity as sameness, destabilizes this understanding. Through Ricoeur, it is instead suggested that the distinction between thin and thick identity breaks down. It is also argued that Ricoeur’s notion of selfhood renders an ambiguity to identity, which is necessary for a vibrant democratic life.

This article aims to analyse the normative underpinnings of civic integration and grasp what form of political community they condition. It is argued that civic integration deviates from a notion of integration as the mutual transformation of migrant and receiving polity alike. Through engaging Ricoeur’s discussion on narrative identity, the article suggests that civic integration is conditioned on a community based in sameness rather than in an inclusive and reciprocal respect for diversity, meaning that civic integration will emerge as strikingly similar to the assimilationist practices it seeks to overcome. By contrast, exploring Ricoeur’s notion of identity as imbued with temporality, the article seeks to elucidate how identity at each moment hold its own alterity. This allows the article to gesture towards what normative standards that ought to guide any idea of integration. It is suggested that reflexive identity and collective selfhood, as an extrapolation of Ricoeur’s notion of narrative identity, opens for the possibility to engage integration, as well as political community, as a process of mutuality and shared public life. In connection to this, Ricoeur’s discussion of tolerance, resonating with compromise, is seen to make way for a relation to otherness without taking recourse to appropriation or exclusion.

The first section of the article outlines the basic assumptions of civic integration, the purposes civic integration is presumed to serve, and some of the broader critique it has generated. It also discusses how civic integration is presumed to normatively rest on a thin, universal identity in contrast to the thick identity of national belonging. Drawing on Ricoeur’s discussion on ipse- and idem-identity, the second section of the article explores the dialectic between selfhood and sameness. It is argued that engaging civic integration through the temporal figures of character and promising makes the distinction between thin and thick identity break down. In the third part, this dialectic between selfhood and sameness is further engaged, but now from a collective rather than personal perspective. The section considers the implications of collective reflexive identity for the understanding of the community as vested in mutuality and shared commitment. In its fourth part, the article returns to the issue of civic integration. Proceeding from the notion of collective reflexive identity, the article discusses how civic integration aligns with civic nationalism to its normative foundations. The final section sums up how the temporality of civic integration stands in opposition to its acclaimed emancipatory potential, but also how the normative underpinnings of civic integration undermines democratic ideals of freedom and public participation, as well as collective selfhood. Discussing the relation between self and other in Ricoeur’s work, the section ends with opening for an account of integration based in reflexivity, tolerance, and as encompassing all facets of democratic co-existence.

The thin identity of civic integration

With the so called ‘civic turn’, the early twenty-first century saw a shifting focus from national to civic integration policies in Europe. In contrast to an earlier emphasis on national identity and inclusion, civic integration was forwarded as reflecting universal liberal-democratic values and as fostering social cohesion. It was also presumed to empower individuals to act independently as autonomous members of the political society. Civic integration is premised on the assumption that citizenship entails something more than a bundle of rights and duties but must also be understood as a form of membership. Whereas national identity defines such membership through belonging in a cultural community, civic integration sees instead membership as stemming from a commitment to shared norms and values. Commonly, civic integration also encompasses the acquisition of certain proficiencies such as language skills. To this effect, civic integration requirements in European countries might range from completing a civics’ education, passing a knowledge test, or meeting a standardized level of language proficiency, to swearing an oath of allegiance to the host state (Goodman 2012, 660–665; Joppke 2010b; Larin 2020).²

Originating in the Netherlands, the Dutch civic integration policies are still considered one of the strictest in Europe (Blankvoort et al. 2021). In 2007, the 1998 Newcomer Integration Act was replaced with integration policies that made civic integration more compulsory and targeted not only newcomers but also parts of the long-term residents. United Kingdom followed suit and added knowledge tests to language proficiency requirements. In France, permanent residency was conditioned on language proficiency, whereas Germany introduced both language and civic requirements as part of their immigration law (Ferwerda and Finseraas 2021; Kostakopoulou 2010a, 2010b). By 2010, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Luxembourg and the UK all required migrants to attend language and civic orientation courses and, in most cases, to pass integration tests in order to obtain permanent residence. While other countries, such as Sweden and Finland, are still considering making citizenship conditional on the migrant’s integration record (SOU 2021), full access to social benefits has long been attached to the active participation in integration courses for refugees and asylum-seekers (Bauer et al. 2023, 2; Kostakopoulou 2010a; 2010b).

The surge of European civic integration programs in the first decade of the new millennium spurred a first wave of critical research on civic integration. This especially revolved around what was understood as the illiberal aspects of the involuntariness of integration programs (Joppke 2007), the one-sidedness of civic integration courses as they cater towards the immigrant and not the community as a whole (Klarenbeek 2021), the consolidation of the national identity as both homogeneous and as superior to the identities of other, and the concomitant creation of the migrant as a threat (Kostakopoulou 2010b). A substantive part of the normative discussions within this research was also dedicated to the very practice of testing civic skills. While some maintained that making knowledge a prerequisite for citizenship is illiberal per se as assessing rather than assuming integration cannot form part to a liberal tradition (Carens 2010; Kostakopoulou 2010c), others held citizenship as a substitute for the education native born citizens in a state have already received (Hansen 2010), or underscored testing as a more inclusive procedure involving subjective criteria concerning the degree of assimilation of the individual migrant (Klekowski von Koppenfels 2010).³

2015 saw an expansion of mandatory integration programs as a response to the challenge of accommodating the extensive arrival of refugees to Europe predominantly from Syria. The later programs also add a focus on labour market integration to the study of language and civic and democratic values (Ferwerda and Finseraas 2021). Recent research on civic integration often centres on the actual outcome of labour market integration programs. It argues that the potential success of the programs is linked to how they manage to accommodate the heterogeneity of migrant groups (Spehar 2021), including their capacity to attend to the previous level of education of the attendants (Mozetič 2022). It is also seen how access to labour market is becoming connected to an idea of ‘the good citizen’ forged in contrast to tropes of migrant men and women (Bauer et al. 2023). Civic integration programs are here studied as ‘a core practice of othering’, by contrasting a discourse of inherently modern nationals to the image of the unmodern, threatening other (Blankvoort et al. 2021, 3523).

Normatively, civic integration is presumed to correspond to a universalist perspective on citizenship as ‘state membership’ and to the notion of a thin, universalist identity based in a commitment to liberal values, universalistic principles, and equality. This thin identity of civic integration is understood to deviate from the thick, particularist identity of national belonging and to align with the idea that in ‘a liberal society, the ties that bind can only be thin and procedural, not thick and substantive. Otherwise individuals could not be free’ (Joppke 2010a, 111–117, at 116; Larin 2020; Mouritsen et al. 2019a).

Yet, when meeting the practical implementation of civic integration policies, the normative standards of a thin, universalist identity are often contradicted with expectations on immigrants to have knowledge of or adopt a particular cultural habitus associated with the host state. While there are instances when this is made explicit in questions of knowledge tests⁴, this is also reflected in a general expression of the host society as associated with normatively desirable values contrasted to migrant identities (Bauer et al. 2023; Blankvoort et al. 2021; Kostakopoulou 2010a, 2010b). An early discussion within civic integration research, which has persisted in more recent scholarship, concerns what form of identity that is conveyed through civic integration programs. It is argued that civic integration risks imposing the thicker identity of a repressive form of liberalism that ‘transmutes into an identity, an ethical way of life that everyone is expected to be conformant with’ and which is often contrasted to Islam and Muslims (Joppke 2010b, 2). Civic integration is also criticized for reifying a moral superiority of the majority society, by promoting secularism and modernism, e.g. gender equality and gay rights (Blankvoort et al. 2021; Bauer et al. 2023; de Leeuw and van Wichelen 2012, 201). Answering the question of what qualities pertain to a thin, political identity in contrast to a thick, comprehensive, national identity is therefore crucial when determining the legitimacy of practices of civic integration. Goodman maintains that while national identity rests on a ‘logic of sameness’ is civic identity premised on a ‘logic of togetherness’ stemming from rules of ‘belonging that hold together otherwise disparate groups and interests’ (Goodman 2014, 17).⁵ Yet, there is a lacking consensus on whether a shared identity or logic of togetherness corresponds to universalist ideals, or if it also requires familiarity with particularist traditions (Goodman 2014; Joppke 2010a, 2010b). To Joppke, the latter implies the risk of passing the threshold to illiberalism as civic integration programs become concerned with the assessment of beliefs and not just knowledge. Democratic values or knowledge of the historical development of a nation into a democratic polity is therefore deemed permissible, whereas questions on specific national traditions and behaviour are perceived as illiberal, infringing on the personal identity of individuals (Joppke 2010b).

Much of the research and debate unfolds in relation to the practices of civic integration and whether these reinforce a thin or thick identity. Normatively, by contrast, the thin identity that ought to be promoted by civic integration is not only deemed unproblematic but often understood as welcome, as it is presumed that liberal, autonomous subjects constitute the independent actors of the political community, vouching for the consolidation of democratic values.

However, the latter is not only lacking in sensitivity to the current relation between liberalism and nationalism, where contemporary nationalism increasingly has attained a civic content (Mouritsen, Jensen, and Larin 2019b). More so, it is here argued that the above approach to civic integration insufficiently engages in a conceptual analysis of the meaning of identity. Identity is either understood in a structure of sameness and difference aligning with shared norms and values, or it is formulated through self-reference, as an autonomous individual able to act independently. Accordingly, practices of civic integration are understood to form the procedures through which such independence can be established. However, this is premised on an understanding of thin, civic identity as imbued with a continuity and homogeneity that also forms an externalization and othering of difference.

By contrast, this article forwards Ricoeur’s theory on narrative identity and discussion on the relation between ipse-identity – identity as selfhood, and idem-identity – identity as sameness, as a corrective to this. It is argued that analysing the normative conditions of civic integration through Ricoeur’s theory on narrative identity will reveal how the distinction between thin and thick – and consequently also civic and national – identity breaks down. In particular, Ricoeur’s theory on narrative identity describes an indeterminacy to the self while also underscoring the openness to alterity and incompletion inhabiting each attempt to determine the self as well as what is other than self. Thus, on the level of the individual, a Ricoeurian account of identity helps problematize how also the notion of thin identity promoted by civic integration restricts migrant selfhood. It also provides a better understanding of the relations the conceptualization of identity establishes between self and other. Further, drawing on the reflexivity of narrative identity also underscores how ideals and practices of civic integration have implications also for the broader collective. Instead of forming a reciprocal relation of change and exchange, of ‘dialogue, mutual learning, mutual adaptation and interdependence between majority and minority communities’, is civic integration seen to turn migrant inclusion into a preservationist project (Kostakopoulou 2010b, 946), premised on an understanding of collective identity as a unified entity relatively same in relation to itself. The following sections strive to unpack this presumption and concludes that civic integration withdraws from the reflexivity of collective selfhood, necessary for democratic coexistence.

The temporality of identity

Engaging the temporal dimension of personal identity, Ricoeur asks how identity – aside from simply signifying two entities identical to each other, such as A = A – can be understood over time. A temporal perspective implies considering the relation between identity and change. The key to engage this relation, Ricoeur maintains, is found in the notion of narrative identity. The concept of narrative identity gained traction as a response to an increased insistence on identity as an explanatory factor for relations of power and privilege between different identity groups (Somers 1994). To Dawne Moon, narrative identity might either pose the self as with a fixed core, defined through similarities with or differences to the other, or understand the self as fluid and formed in relation to the structures of power and privilege in which it is embedded (Moon 2012). Thus, representational narratives have functioned to distinguish some identity groups, such as race, sex, or gender, from others and to present an epistemological framework from where to launch struggles for equality and emancipation. However, representational narratives also risk cementing group belonging into ‘fixed ‘essentialist’ (pre-political) singular categories’ (Somers 1994, 605). As a remedy to this, Somers understands identity as interpersonally formed through social and structural interactions over time. The self is not fixed, but ‘constructed and reconstructed in the context of internal and external relations of time and place and power that are constantly in flux (Somers 1994, 621). This notion of identity reveals the incompleteness of representational identity and forwards instead categories as always saturated with multifaceted personal narratives (Somers 1994, 621).

Ricoeur’s temporal perspective on narrative identity resembles the above, as it also opens for a multifaceted understanding of personal identity and takes the issue of change into account. However, while both Somers and Moon emphasize how identity can always be subject to change, Ricoeur’s linguistic approach to identity reveals how narrative identity at each moment always holds its own alterity. For Ricoeur, the dialectic between selfhood and sameness forms the constitutive feature of identity. Ricoeur approaches this dialectic through different ways of understanding permanence in time, which, in turn, heightens the contrast between identity as sameness, or idem-identity, and identity as selfhood, or ipse-identity. On the one hand, permanence in time presumes ‘an uninterrupted continuity between the first and last stage of what we consider to be the same individual’ (Ricoeur 2008, 117). Idem-identity, or sameness, implies that such an uninterrupted continuity is attached to a particular substance, feature, or quality of a person. Time, then, becomes an element of dissemblance or divergence, for example consequent to aging.⁶

However, when time is grasped as a notion of change, difference, and augmentation, permanence in time relates instead to ipse-identity, that is, to a selfhood of the self not reducible to a particular category or substance. Time as a notion of change and difference connects the problem of permanence in time to the ‘question of ‘who?’ as much as it is irreducible to any question of ‘what?’’. While the question of ‘What am I?’ forms an identification temporally described by uninterrupted continuity, the question of ‘Who am I?’ implies two other figures of permanence in time, character and keeping one’s word, that set up two distinct dialectic relations between ipse- and idem-identity (Ricoeur 2008, 118).

To Ricoeur, character ‘designates the set of lasting dispositions by which a person is recognized’ as the same (Ricoeur 2008, 121). Character is constituted by distinctive signs, traits, or habits that persist over time. Through my habits, ‘my character is me, myself, ipse; but this ipse announces itself as idem’ (Ricoeur 2008, 121). In this near complete overlap between idem and ipse, selfhood becomes understood through the traits and distinct signs ‘by which a person is recognized, reidentified as same’ (Ricoeur 2008, 121). Acquired identifications express a similar overlapping structure, as ‘the identity of a person or a community is made up of … identifications with values, norms, ideals, models, and heroes, in which the person or the community recognizes itself’ (Ricoeur 2008, 121). This resonates with the thick, national identity, in which belonging is understood as membership in the cultural community. In the figure of character, the self recognizes itself by the facts – the preferences and evaluations – assumed as its own. It is ‘the self under the appearances of sameness’ (Ricoeur 2008, 128). Character, then, ascertains ‘qualitative identity, uninterrupted continuity across change, and, finally, permanence in time which defines sameness’ (Ricoeur 2008, 122). Presenting a notion of identity in which same and self appear to fully coincide, character sees the question of ‘Who am I?’ relapse into the question of ‘What am I?’ to the extent that the two become inseparable (Ricoeur 2008, 122).

By contrast, Ricoeur’s second figure of permanence in time, keeping one’s word, rests on a temporal structure of difference and change rather than continuity. It also describes a distinctively different relation between ipse and idem. How can we presume that one can keep a promise over time, despite the changes a person undergoes throughout her lifetime? It cannot simply be assumed that an individual is the same from young age to old since whatever she faces in life will render her person new layers and insights. Keeping one’s word suggests instead consistency of the self through time, even if one is not the same person as one once was. In contrast to character, which takes form in something general and gives priority to the dimension of ‘what?’, the self-constancy expressed in the temporal figure of keeping one’s word is instead exclusively inscribed within the dimension of ‘who?’. Promising describes a self-constancy which cannot be attributed to a general trait but can only be inscribed in oneself (Ricoeur 2008, 123–124).

It is through her ipse-identity, or selfhood, a person understands and recognizes herself as a person, capable of different accomplishments. That is, one asserts ‘oneself as an agent to whom beliefs, intentions, actions … can be attributed … and, consequently, who can be held responsible for certain acts as one’s own’ (Lindahl 2018, 312). Promising describes the self-constancy of a person that allows others to be ‘counting on me, I am accountable for my actions before another’ (Ricoeur 2008, 165). Persisting through the fluctuation of time, promising forms ‘a modality of permanence in time capable of standing as the polar opposite to the permanence of character’ (Ricoeur 2008, 124). In promising, the sameness of character becomes fully opposed to the constancy of the self. Narrative identity inhabits the interval between character and promising as it forms an oscillation, a dialectic between the one limit where idem and ipse fully overlap and another limit where ipse describes the problem of identity without recourse to idem (Ricoeur 2008, 123–124). While ipse- and idem-identity are distinct, they are also irreducibly related to each other. Thus, while the relation between the two forms of permanence in time assumes a polar structure, any understanding of oneself will necessarily be found in between the two poles as ipse and idem cannot be affirmed independently of each other. Although ipse-identity cannot be reduced to idem-identity, there is, by the same token, also no ipse without the support of an idem, as will be further demonstrated in the discussion on reflexive identity.

What is typical to selfhood is its reflexivity. To Pettit, reflexive selfhood entails ‘That an agent is a self means that he can think of himself, or she can think of herself in the first person as the bearer of certain beliefs and desires and other attitudes and as the author of the actions, and perhaps the effects, to which they give rise’ (Pettit, cited in Lindahl 2014, 82–83). As regards the self, this indicates a movement; ‘a departure from the self and a return to the self, like a ray of light reflected in the mirror’ (Agamben 1999, 118). In this movement, the reflexive self draws on both selfhood and sameness, since to reflect on oneself implies also to reflect on the experiences that belongs to me, on what is my own, what is proper to myself. Here, two types of ownership are expressed, what I have and who I am. Intrinsically linked to representative thinking, reflexive identity means that we are bound to both identity as sameness and identity as selfhood: I know that I am a woman, and that ‘womanness’ matters to me, but I can never fully explain how this category belongs to me. When seeking to articulate any experience of being woman I am bound to take recourse to characterization. Thus, a heteronomy permeates the I as ipse­-identity reveals to us how the self always slips away. Describing an agent with intentions, capable of reflecting on her actions, selfhood does exactly not characterize a fully autonomous subject in control of said actions. On the contrary, ipse-identity indicates the existential dilemma of never fully being able to grasp oneself without appropriation, since ‘what reflects never has the same form as what is reflected’ (Agamben 1999, 119).

There are especially two instances where Ricoeur’s theory helps clarifying the effects of the assumption of character in the case of civic integration. The first concerns the temporal aspects of civic integration. Empirical research reveals how many civic integration programs explicitly forwards the ideal of a national character often based in modern values, while potentially also degrading the identity of the other as unmodern or threatening. For example, in Dutch civic education, values considered as modern, such as openness to gender and queer rights, but also a strong work ethic and self-sufficiency are presented as universally applicable values associated with the Dutch nation-state (Blankvoort et al. 2021). This is however not only the case in states where permanent residency or citizenship is conditioned on civic knowledge acquisition. Also in countries where integration policies are less restrictive and focused on for example language competence, the empowerment this is presumed to lead to is embedded in similar tropes. Studying the civic orientation courses in Sweden, Simon Bauer et al argues that the migrant self becomes constructed as a tabula rasa, needing to be helped to manage the new society. In particular, migrants are treated as lacking previous experience and knowledge, and as ‘in need of internalizing new values in accordance with the desires of the state, and making such values their own’ (Bauer et al. 2023, 5). This holds particularly true for migrant women who are portrayed as in need of being saved from their homes and themselves, through turning into subjects participating in the labour market (Bauer et al. 2023, 7).

The ideals of self-sufficiency and autonomy are central in the above examples. What stands out is how these values are presumed to be held only after the completion of civic orientation programs. In relation to the discourse of the unmodern other, state programs thereby emerge as emancipating migrants – and especially migrant women. The problem here, as Bauer et al points out, is not whether civic integration programs in practice hold this emancipatory effect for some of their participants. The problem is that emancipation ‘is presented as a gift from the state’ and as something that migrants otherwise would not find in themselves (Bauer et al. 2023, 7). Posing the particular character of the included citizens, civic integration programs will presuppose selfhood as coming after inclusion. Contrary to Ricoeur, migrants do not appear as agents in their lives, accountable for their actions and choices. Instead, the above examples of civic integration rests on a temporal structure where migrants first are to prove their ableness as citizens through attaining the sameness of civic character before any account of their selfhood can be acknowledged. Crucial here is how civic integration centres on civic character as conditional for inclusion in the polity. However, with the emphasis on character, the distinction between a thick, comprehensive identity, and a thin, political identity starts to break down as both thick and thin identity are structured on the axis where sameness and selfhood overlap. This means that the self becomes fully understood through idem-identity, or sameness, as the collective requires particular qualitative features of its prospective members.

Together with Ricoeur’s detailed account of the reflexivity of selfhood, this points at a second and deeper problem concerning the contractual underpinnings of civic integration. By these, civic orientation emerges as a form of social contract where the rights and liberties of migrants are conditioned on their conformance with the norms and values of the host society (see further Adamo 2022; Blankvoort et al. 2021; Kostakopoulou 2010b).⁷ Joppke considers this permissible from a liberal standpoint as long as it does not form a control of inner beliefs (Joppke 2010a). However, Ricoeur’s theory suggests the litmus test for civic integration ought to be if integration policies depart from the figure of keeping one’s word rather than from character, that is, from the priority of ipse-identity rather than idem-identity.

Kostakopoulou forwards integration as an active participation in political, social, and economic life. Integration, she holds, forms a reciprocal relation of change and exchange, of ‘dialogue, mutual learning, mutual adaptation and interdependence between majority and minority communities’ (Kostakopoulou 2010b, 946). Pace Ricoeur, such mutual action implies putting to work the dialectical relationship between ipse and idem and being attuned to the heteronomy permeating the self. This intensifies the problem of seeing civic integration as a contractual agreement between the migrant and the host state. Normatively, this is deemed problematic due to the migrant not being able to form a free part to the contract (Kostakopoulou 2010b, 950–951). In addition, following Ricoeur, self-constancy is what grounds promising and the possibility to be accountable for one’s actions. Hence, accountability must be understood as conditioned on self-constancy, rather than on character, since promising takes selfhood as its point of departure. It is through a reflexive selfhood that acknowledges the heteronomy of identity as much as the elusiveness of the self, that a person can form a considered, reflected part to a contract and engage in a promise that persists in time. In sum, selfhood is determined by reflexivity and promising is conditioned on the heteronomy of identity. Practices of civic integration that draw on character will therefore not only contradict liberal norms of democracy through delimiting the voluntariness of migrant, they will also negate the preconditions that are necessary for a contractual agreement between subject and state to be fulfilled in the first place.

Collective reflexive identity

Hitherto, the discussion of narrative identity has circled around the issue of individual selfhood in relation to practices of civic integration. But what can be learnt about the collective from the discussion on reflexive selfhood? And what kind of political community can be envisioned from an engagement with reflexive identity?

The notion of collective selfhood entails the question of what it means to be a ‘we’ and to refer to ‘us’ as ‘ourselves’. One answer to this would be to simply state that ‘we’ consists of an aggregation of individuals. However, as Dan Zahavi points out, such a conclusion does not take into account ‘what notion of self one is operating with’ (Zahavi 2021, 11). For Ricoeur, reflexive identity is elusive and always formed in a dialectic between selfhood and sameness. To approach oneself as another discloses therefore selfhood both as heteronomous and inherently relational, since ‘the reflexive relationship between me and myself always already presupposes the social relationship between me and you’ (van Roermund 2013, 54). But can the relation between me and you be immediately translated into a we? While this is not necessarily what is at hand in daily social interactions (see Zahavi 2021, 14–16), it is nevertheless, Bert van Roermund maintains, the case that a polity that assumes self-determination – and therefore also self-awareness – as its foundation must engage the first-person plural, or a we-, perspective (van Roermund 2013, 54). To transfer the notion of reflexive identity to the first-person plural suggests something more than constituting a ‘we’ as an ‘undifferentiated fusional unity’ (Zahavi 2021, 13), or a summation of autonomous individuals (Lindahl 2014, 85–86). Yet, it means not merely that a ‘we’ must maintain the plurality and heterogeneity of its members since their ‘differences must be preserved and experienced in order to make possible a genuine being-with-one-another’ (Zahavi 2021, 13) or that a plural subject must involve ‘a kind of melding of the parties’ (Gilbert 2014, 15). Instead, engaging the first-person plural means to ask what is entailed in the reflexivity of ‘we’ referring to ‘ourselves’?

While Ricoeur is mainly concerned with personal selfhood, he does not restrict his discussion on identity to the individual. Instead, he stresses how narrative has bearing also on collective or national identity, which is often formulated in comparison with, or as oppositional to others (Ricoeur 2010, 40). Elaborating the roles various figures of the stranger play in the self-characterization of the community, Ricoeur underscores how the stranger has functioned as an explanatory factor for the meaning of ourselves so that ‘in order to explain our collective identity we need to compare ourselves with others’ (Ricoeur 2010, 40). On the one hand, this taps into the understanding that ‘the core of political action’ is always about ordering social relationships and ‘that the result of this ordering is the polity which as a whole is a first person (plural) in relation to some ‘other’’ (van Roermund 2013, 123). On the other hand, Ricoeur’s engagement with what meaning the figure of the stranger holds to ‘us’ forms a critique not only of modern state sovereignty, but also of ‘the nature of our own understanding of ourselves as members of a given national community’ (Ricoeur 2010, 39). This accentuates the immediate relationship between how we refer to ourselves and how we relate to others. To stave off appropriation, this relationship can neither be marked by differential and oppositional characterizations of the other (Ricoeur 2010, 40). Instead, the other must form an alterity that exposes the self to its own heteronomy (van Roermund 2013, 110–112).

Ricoeur is careful to point out the dangers of assuming an immutable collective character (Ricoeur 2008, 122–123). The concept of character showed the ease by which ipse overlaps with idem, lending the selfhood of a community qualitative attributes by requiring particular features of those who are making it up. When related to idem-identity, the selfhood of the political community can be conditioned on how the people making it up share the qualities of, in the case of civic integration, speaking the same language, sharing similar historical knowledge, or confessing to the same norms and values. The first-person singular question of ‘What am I?’ is then approached through the notion of character and the full congruence of sameness and selfhood. It is transformed into the first-person plural question of ‘What are We?’. When applied to groups, Ricoeur’s notion of character transposes into an issue of collective character, embedding presumed qualitative traits of the community in its self-determination, something that takes its most extreme form in nationalist thinking. Ricoeur himself underscores how, without a thorough engagement with history and geography, character easily lends itself to ‘the most harmful ideologies of ‘national identity’’ (Ricoeur 2008, 123).

What, instead, is entailed in the question of ‘Who are We?’. That is, what would be the meaning of a collective self that takes the temporal figure of keeping one’s word rather than permanence in time as its point of departure?

Ricoeur understands the political community as both formed through a horizontal bond, reflecting the will to live together, and as a vertical relation that provides an institutional structure for people to act in concert (Deweer 2022, 814). This implies an institutional structure that steers away from domination and constraining rules to instead allow for power held in common (Ricoeur 2008, 194–195). Thus, ‘institutional relations do not primarily constitute a coercive normative framework, but rather a shared ethical pursuit that is expressed in the ability to act in concert’ (Deweer 2022, 814). Drawing on Ricouer, van Roermund analyses constitutional power as an institutional relation, stemming from reflexive identity. Considering Rousseau’s social contract, he rejects the notion that the individual immerses herself and all her power in the whole through the social contract, since this would inscribe the community as prior to its constituents. By contrast, individuals should be understood as handing themselves over to each other, meaning that the whole of the community comes into existence as a principle of reciprocity and mutuality. This distinction heightens the temporality entailed in processes of integration and becomes therefore particularly significant. Civic integration aligns with the first application of the social contract and draws on a temporality where the community is prior to its constituents. That is, it describes a community to which individuals can belong once they have assumed the expected characteristics and expressions of a particular political identity. An understanding of integration as based in mutuality is instead temporally aligned with the second application of Rousseau’s theory, that is, where the community is coterminous with the continued formation of reciprocal relationships between people and rests in the mutual recognition between those part to the contract (see van Roermund 2020, 19).

This can be further explored with respect to how Rousseau states that ‘a law is a law if and only if the whole people rules over the whole people’ (van Roermund 2020, 96). Distancing himself from the commonly accepted co-referentiality thesis that holds the phrase to state that ‘law can only be law if ‘rulers’ and ‘ruled’ are co-referential terms’ (van Roermund 2020, 97), van Roermund maintains that aside from setting the ground for representative democracy (in vain of a functional direct democracy), the co-referentiality thesis corrupts the idea of popular sovereignty and its account of freedom in society as ‘the possibility for a people, P, to act in pursuit of what it determines as its own interests’ (van Roermund 2020, 98). Instead, ensuing from the co-referentiality thesis is the ‘condition that the interests of its rulers are the same as the interests of the ruled’ (van Roermund 2020, 99).

In contrast, leaning on Ricoeur’s discussion on reflexive identity, van Roermund forwards the ‘reflexivity thesis’ stating that ‘[b]oth the normativity and validity of law lie with its legislators (the rulers) ruling on themselves’ (van Roermund 2020, 99). This attributes an intentionality to the legislative act, such that legal obligations are not understood as primarily deriving from prescriptions, but rather emerge as commitments. Legislators are not above or outside of the ruling they are authoring, but ruling over themselves in a shared intentional activity, since legislation guided by intentionality suggests that law enactment is envisaged as commitment to collective action. This shared intentionality operates through reflexive ipse and means that we are doing something together with mutual responsiveness to each other’s intentions and actions rather than merely doing something similar (van Roermund 2020, 101–107).⁸

Thus, the legal framework guiding naturalization policies such as civic integration must both consists in the vertical structure that allows people to exercise power held in common, while also be able to assess the basis of any assumed commonness. A collective identity corresponding to this account of law cannot in the first instance be concerned with boundary setting. Rather, collective identity becomes saturated with commitment to the joint activity of a shared public life guided by reciprocal recognition of one another. Drawing on reflexive ipse-identity, collective selfhood describes a commitment to do something together, rather than something similar and is premised on ‘mutual responsiveness in the joint activity, mutual commitment to the joint activity and mutual support for each other’s roles in the joint activity’ (van Roermund 2020, 107–108, at 108). But what does this tell us about integration policies in terms of fostering a horizontal bond between a plurality of people sharing the will to live together?

Civic integration or civic nationalism?

Through Ricoeur’s discussion on ipse- and idem-identity we could see the distinction between a thick, comprehensive identity and a thin, political identity break down. Both thick and thin identity emerge as structured around the axis where sameness and selfhood overlap to the extent that the self becomes fully understood through idem, or sameness. Transposed to the level of the collective, idem-identity is merged with ipse-identity in the character of the collective, meaning that the selfhood of the collective resurfaces as requiring particular qualitative features of its members. Following Ricoeur, the perseverance of character as a figure of permanence in time renders a certain unity to the collective self. According to van Roermund, such unity is expressed through the co-referentiality thesis. This means that unity appears in the form of sameness, suggesting that subjects exist together and act in pursuit of their interests by virtue of being similar, both as regards themselves and their interests. While this is fitting for the notion of a thick, national identity, it also applies to the thin, civic identity expressed as the normative goal of civic integration, as, in both cases, both thick and thin identity are conceptually conditioned on the figure of character. Not only, then, does a nationalist, comprehensive identity picture a community based in sameness. So does also a thin, civic identity that projects a community founded in autonomous individuals able to act independently.

This insight makes the distinction between thick and thin identity more difficult to uphold. It also reveals the proximity between nationalist politics and civic integration. While Joppke holds liberal identity as ‘tantamount to the retreat of nationalism’ (Joppke 2010a; 2010b, 142), Larin maintains that ‘Civic integration policies are clearly an application of civic nationalist ideology to migrants’ (Larin 2020, 132). Liberal citizenship is not opposed to the concept of the nation. On the contrary, a civic conception of the nation compatible with diversity and pluralism is presupposed by the ‘liberal citizenship regime’ (Fernández 2019, 678–679). Indeed, Mouritsen et al. identify a nationhood with an increasingly civic content, which presumes civic acculturation through shared values and principles as a condition for a well-functioning democratic welfare state. The gist behind such a ‘Leitkultur’ is to create social cohesion through ‘normatively uncontroversial reflections of political liberalism (human rights, tolerance) or more perfectionist, social democratic, feminist or republican liberalism (autonomy, gender, equality, work and participation obligations)’ (Mouritsen et al. 2019a, 645). Not only is this presumed to ‘improve new citizens’ but also to enhance ‘solidarity, national identity and trust’ (Mouritsen et al. 2019a, 645). In practice, however, there is little empirical basis for such an outcome. To the contrary, Mouritsen et al. underscore the ‘background assimilatory barriers’ entailed in civic integration regimes and suggest the function of the coupling between civic integration and national Leitkultur to be to appease and ‘’integrate’ hostile majority segments’ rather than migrants (Mouritsen et al. 2019a, 648).

Also to Larin is civic nationalism founded in a valorization of the self-representation of the national majority, to which certain migrants are defined against. Thus, rather than corresponding to the social basis of integration, the ideological underpinnings of civic integration emerge as a form of migration control that contrasts the otherness of particular migrant groups to a self-acclaimed national identity of tolerance, liberalism, and diversity (Larin 2020). This can be seen in the culturalization of secular liberalization, through which civic integration reinforces a notion of moral superiority of the host society unparalleled by other cultural contexts (de Leeuw and van Wichelen 2012, 201). In political discourse, the majority is then often presented as under threat ‘by an influx of intolerant, reactionary and narrow-minded ‘others’’ (Larin 2020, 128–134, at 134). Joppke acknowledges as much when underlining how ‘the lack of integration is taken as grounds for the refusal of admission and residence’, leaving ‘the entire integration domain … potentially subordinated to the exigencies of migration control’ (Joppke 2007, 250). Indeed, to its design, civic integration policies can form a de facto migration control as practices of ‘integration abroad’ testify to. With these, not only residence and citizenship status but also entry rights become conditioned on participation in or completion of civic integration programs (Bonjour 2010).

Larin (2020) as well as Mouritsen, Jensen, and Larin (2019b) scrutinize how civic integration empirically approximates and coalesces with nationalism. Larin (2020) departs from a social relations perspective to understand the contiguity between civic integration, civic nationalism, and migration control, while Mouritsen, Jensen, and Larin (2019b) notice how the stated end goals of civic integration contradict the empirical outcome of policies. However, this article maintains that in addition to empirical observations is civic integration aligned with nationalist politics also to its normative foundations. This is due to how both civic integration and nationalism are premised on the co-referentiality principle and in idem-identity. For nationalism, the sameness of the rulers and the ruled in the form of a thick national identity constitutes the legitimizing glue that holds together and sustains nationalist politics. For civic integration, legitimacy is founded in the assumption that the character and interest of the rulers and the ruled are presumed as same and overlapping and that these are expressed in the thin political identity of civic liberalism. Hence, also civic integration founds its legitimization in idem-identity and the assumed co-referentiality of rulers and ruled. However, as Ricoeur shows, any attempts to draw identity on the axis of character and so give prevalence to idem, will be marked by exclusions, homonomy, and delimiting representations. Character presents the idea of shared belonging as stemming from ‘the traditional markers of national identity: linguistic assimilation, knowledge of the history, the civics and ways of life’ (Kostakopoulou 2010b, 950), rather than from the active participation in political, social, and economic life. While this sets forth a normative discussion on the relation between the individual and the state, it has also real, lived consequences for the individual migrant. For example, the recent Swedish government official investigation concerning the introduction of language and knowledge tests for citizenship acquisition in Sweden points at the lacking correlation between testing and a stronger inclusion in society (SOU 2021, 2). Indeed, language requirements are seen to even increase the risk of segregation of women, elderly people, and groups with lower or no education. According to appointed expert Pieter Bevelander, would, if the case of Sweden follows similar trends as in the Netherlands and Denmark, less than half of the migrants receive citizenship status and, by consequence, voting rights in the case of introducing languages tests. In sum, language tests as a condition for citizenship are seen to lead to ‘a lower, prolonged, and more selective naturalization of immigrants’, with problematic effects on employment opportunities, as well as the political and social engagement of migrants (SOU 2021, 2, 415). To this end, the observation by Mouritsen, Kriegbaum Jensen, and Larin, with reference to Gina Gustavsson, that ‘What actually constitutes the (minimal) ‘stuff’ of national identity is an open, empirical question, with normative implications’ (Mouritsen, Jensen, and Larin 2019b, 604) ought to be reversed; the question of national – as well as civic – identity is a normative question with empirical implications.

Integration revisited

Understood as temporally prior to its citizens, the community envisioned by civic integration stands in opposition to its acclaimed emancipatory potential. Founded on the co-referentiality thesis, it is only by virtue of being sufficiently similar that individuals constitute part to the community. However, as the assessment of the sameness of any newcomer is made prior to her formal inclusion in the political community, the migrant is exactly not perceived as same in relation to the rulers until successful completion of assigned integration programs. Hence, while civic integration is proposed as an emancipatory project that should provide the migrant with the skills necessary to participate in society, it simultaneously sets up an authoritative relationship between the ruler and the ruled whose legitimacy derives from the sameness of the already included, rather than from principles of co-activity and mutuality. Not only does formal membership in the political community emerge as a reward and outcome of a completed integration process, so does indeed the autonomy which should form a foundational part to liberal citizenship and civic integration policies to begin with. Subjects emerge as autonomous agents only after they have submitted to the disciplining process of becoming sufficiently similar to and attaining the character ascribed to the host community. While this suggests that civic integration unfolds on the axis of narrative identity where ipse- and idem-identity overlap, it also places the migrant in a position of inequality vis-à-vis the polity.

Aside from conditioning autonomy on the external recognition of sameness, as the independence of the migrant is presumed to flourish only after the attainment of a liberal character, civic integration also indicates a displacement of politics. This is seen in what Joppke refers to as the privatization of integration, which concerns how the migrant is assumed to bear the sole responsibility for integration, with or without the necessary educational infrastructure in place (Joppke 2007).⁹ Not only has this altered the anatomy of the integration process in the sense that assessing, rather than assuming, integration has transferred the responsibility for inclusion from the host state to the individual seeking membership in the polity (Kostakopoulou 2010b). The conditionality of civic integration also implies that a liberalism of equal opportunity that aims to enable people to become included, has been substituted with a disciplinary liberalism that requires of people to become included (Joppke 2007, 269). A displacement of politics is consequently seen on the level of the individual in how the privatization of integration deprives the migrant of any possibility to affect the procedures of inclusion to which she is subjected, thereby circumventing foundational democratic principles.¹⁰ On the level of the collective, the displacement of politics unfolds from civic integration deriving its legitimacy from the co-referentiality thesis. The privatization of integration and the valorization of thin, civic identity can only be legitimized by reference to representation, that is, by the presumption that the interests of the rulers and the ruled are sufficiently same and overlapping. This is presumed to provide adequate criteria for the legitimacy of the obligations deriving from legal prescriptions. However, on van Roermund’s reasoning, this inflicts with foundational democratic ideas on popular sovereignty and freedom, and stands in stark contrast to the principles of co-activity, reciprocity, and mutuality entailed in the reflexivity thesis. Indeed, on the level of the collective, civic integration would prove a negation of collective selfhood, which, in turn, forms a negation of an inherently political, actor-driven community, sensitive to the multifaceted nature of otherness.

This exposes civic integration as a double-edged sword that targets both the migrant and the host community. Constructing difference as a threat, civic integration is conditioned on a homogenization of the other which implies collective identity to unfold on the axis where sameness and selfhood coincide. Now, as the reflexivity of collective selfhood draws on a notion of the other based in alterity, the centrality of idem-identity entailed in civic integration will have implications not only for the individual migrants, but for the entire host society. Not only, then, will civic integration homogenize and divest the migrant of her agency and selfhood. But, by being conditioned on and striving to consolidate idem-identity, civic integration will also deprive the host community of the openness to otherness necessary for a collective selfhood that grounds political intentionality and action. This since a democratic community based on mutuality, reciprocity, and shared commitment are conditioned on the alterity and plurality entailed in collective selfhood. By contrast, practices of civic integration structure the collective identity of the community on the figure of character and legitimizes rule and democratic co-existence on the co-referentiality theses, which instead reduces the scope and possibilities for political engagement.

The displacement of politics seen with respect to migrants seeking formal legal status through completion of civic integration programs, is here seen to extend also to those who are already formal members of the political community. Rather than establishing a political community founded in the reciprocity stemming from politics as plural engagements of joint activity, civic integration suggests the community to emerge from an established notion of sameness strictly distinguished from – albeit yet conditioned on – an equally firm notion of difference. Thus, not only as an empirical consequence of how civic integration is implemented, but also to its very normative core, will civic integration undermine the goals of emancipation, public participation, and social cohesion it is supposed to achieve.

A notion of integration that assumes the reflexivity thesis as its normative foundation would, rather than give rise to ‘a uniform, unitary and harmonious society or national culture’, set forth a community based in reciprocity, diversity, and co-activity (Lucassen 2005, 18). To this end, integration would imply a process of mutual change and exchange, affecting migrants and host society alike. Thus, approaching the issue of integration through Ricoeur, suggests taking collective selfhood and reflexivity as a point of departure. Responding to the question of ‘Who are We?’ means to withdraw from sameness as a guiding principle for the constitution of the political community. Instead, it calls for a reflection on the meaning of who we are as a people, rather than determining what characteristics the people manifest. This implies the joint recognition of the mutuality of the integrative process. Rather than placing the primary responsibility to integrate on the incoming part, collective ipse helps us reveal how integration is relevant to all agents participating in society. Following van Roermund, a notion of integration conditioned on ipse-identity and based in mutuality and reciprocity would, rather than seeking to prescribe obligations and regulate social interaction, emerge as grounded by a joint commitment to mutual responsiveness amongst each and every one in the community.

Ricoeur’s engagement with the meaning of tolerance is instructive to better understand what such mutual responsiveness would amount to. Tolerance, Ricoeur says, is both an individual and collective virtue in the exercise of power. Tolerance consists in the renunciation of imposing a particular manner, belief or way of life on others. This stands in contrast to intolerance, which is founded on the disapproval of opposed or different ways of life, as well as on the power to prevent others from leading their lives (Ricoeur 1996, 189–190). However, tolerance appears in different forms or stages that move from passively enduring the ways of others, to actively accepting them. In the latter case, tolerance is constituted by the acceptance of a truth that is other than mine. This form of tolerance, Ricoeur maintains, is only ‘practicable by the individual’ and ‘a culture would only have access to it thanks to a radiance from person to person, from small communities to small communities’ (Ricoeur 1996, 195). Tolerance resonates with Ricoeur’s account of compromise as ‘dependent on a subject that is able to welcome the other without the risk of self-loss’ (Deweer 2022, 816). This implies not ‘the negation of one’s identity’, but ‘the negation of exclusivity’ that allows for a world ‘with a ‘multiple foundation’’ and ‘mutual recognition’ (Deweer 2022, 816–817). Mutual responsiveness underscores how such multiplicity also permeates the self, so that this never can be exclusively defined. Tolerance and compromise, instead, attends to how the recognition of the other must also entail a recognition of the multiple foundations of social relations. Yet, Ricoeur warns against how tolerance risks slipping into indifference. There is a danger that tolerance opens for relativism if it ‘denies the existence of the intolerable’ (Deweer 2022, 822; see also Ricoeur 1996, 196–197).

So how can we, in the name of tolerance, stave off the perils of indifference, of letting anything pass? The question is crucial for a notion of integration based in the mutual change and exchange of both migrants and the host society. The ‘refuge’ we must find, in the name of tolerance, but also against tolerance, is the intolerable. However, the intolerable is ‘the polar opposite to intolerance’ and only ‘pertinent in a culture educated by and for tolerance’ (Ricoeur 1996, 197). In order for us to announce what is intolerable, we must therefore already show tolerance. For Ricoeur, the intolerable can be recognized in the behaviours that ‘harm the exercise of tolerance’ (Ricoeur 1996, 198). Possibly, it could be enough to say that integration ought to be guided by tolerance, as a ‘reflexive virtue in wait of reciprocity’, where ‘the first intolerable is intolerance itself’ (Ricoeur 1996, 198). Yet, this does not fully indicate what is entailed in the meaning of harm. Ricoeur defines harm as a ‘wrong done to the power (puissance) of existing of the other, prevention done to his growth’ (Ricoeur 1996, 199). Such a wrong is what is potentially at stake in any relation to the other. Civic integration has here been seen to construct otherness as different from, or even oppositional to the same. Yet, the other and the same still align with one another through being based in the figure of character, establishing ‘otherness’ and difference as a threat to the collective. To avoid a behaviour that harm the exercise of tolerance, then, must involve a relation to the other that would not disregard the existence and growth of their selfhood.

Certainly, the reflexivity of collective selfhood does not do away with otherness, yet the question is what kind of otherness it invokes. Through its reflexivity, collective selfhood suggests that we understand ‘us’ as a people as something that is, which simultaneously implies the consideration of what we are as a people. While we might be able to provide answers to the latter question, these will always make the collective self slip away, as such answers reduce our selfhood to the particulars of sameness. Thus, the immediacy of the self is blocked by what mediates our understanding of our self. Selfhood emerges instead as a ‘dialectic of ownership and of dispossession, of care and carefreeness, of self-affirmation and self-effacement’, wherefore Ricoeur speaks of an existential crisis of the self (Ricoeur 2008, 168). Such crisis is not in the negative, but rather opens the self to the world as well as to itself. It ascribes to selfhood an inherent dialectic between self and other since the self will always appear as other than self. The awareness of this implies, in turn, that the acting self is bound to inconstancy as it incessantly retreats from appropriation or sameness.

For Ricoeur, the other appears as other precisely because identity is important. Otherness describes the experience of contingency inherent to the necessary mediation of any account of collective selfhood. On the one hand, this renders the self with uncertainty and fluidity. On the other hand, this also implies an openness to otherness, to the otherness of the self or the self as another, as it were (Ricoeur 2008). Such openness to otherness as fluid and uncertain is conditional for grasping the ambiguity and changeability also of the self. It helps us understand that ‘[t]here is no ‘me’, no ‘self’ as an uncomplicated given, as something interior that stands opposite to anything outside itself’, by contrast, otherness reveals to us ‘how there is some’thing’ about the mineness of my me that I cannot place at sufficient distance, cannot understand or transcend’ (Visker 2004, 294–295). Through otherness, the contingency of our identity is revealed to us, as is simultaneously its relevance. Yet, the realization that we can never fully account for what is our own, that is, the insight of the impossible immediacy of collective selfhood, suggests a simultaneous realization of the other as always mediated. Not only will the self continuously escape attempts of conceptualization, so will also the other. Thus, collective selfhood could be seen to describe a move towards an encounter without appropriation,¹¹ exactly through the insight of the impossibility of such an encounter. Through its reflexivity, collective selfhood describes the incessant task of engaging the referents of ‘us and ‘ourselves’, without taking recourse to ‘them’. In other words, while the reflexivity of collective selfhood necessitates the other, it is also formed in a relation of mutuality and openness to otherness, lest collective selfhood should not collapse into an iteration of the same.

Conclusion

Research on integration persistently underscores uncertain legal status as detrimental to recovering from the traumas often experienced by refugees, but also as disadvantageous to language acquisition, employment, and housing opportunities. In particular, civic integration requirements such as language and knowledge tests are seen to not only prolong the process of naturalization but also to delimit the number of migrants naturalized (Vink et al. 2020). The political consequences are manifold, as early naturalization is found conducive to the long-term political integration of migrants, including rendering members of marginalized migrant groups more active participants in the democratic community (Hainmueller, Hangartner, and Pietrantuono 2015). On the contrary, civic integration tests tend to discriminate against low-educated migrants and cement existing social inequalities (Vink et al. 2020).

The aim of this article was to analyse the normative underpinnings of civic integration to better understand what form of community that civic integration preconditions. It was suggested that academic literature on civic integration suffered from an insufficient elaboration of the meaning of identity, to which Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity was forwarded as a corrective. While proponents of civic integration have contrasted a thin, civic, state identity against a thick, national identity, this distinction was in this article seen to break down. Certainly, civic and national identity are presumed to involve different facets of life – as civic identity should encompass only the political aspects of a person, whereas national identity also pertains to private individual sentiments. However, both the thin, civic identity and the thick, national identity are conceptualized on the figure of character, that is, on an understanding that allows selfhood to be grasped only through sameness. This suggests that civic integration aligns with assimilation as a process in which the immigrant should assume the character of the host community. Establishing membership in the political community as conditional on sameness, or idem-identity, civic integration therefore appears strikingly similar to the practices of assimilation it seeks to overcome. The foundations of belonging are in both cases carved out through a particular understanding of identity where continuous re-enactments of who we are relapses into attempts to provide answers to the question of what we are. Further, making sameness a prerequisite for belonging was seen to inscribe the naturalization process in a temporality that defeats the acclaimed emancipatory potential of civic integration, by turning autonomy into a reward and outcome of the integration process rather than its points of departure. Taken together, this disqualifies a community stemming from mutual commitment to a shared political and social life. As mutuality and political action are premised on the heteronomy and alterity of identity, any uniform account of identity – whether national or civic – will thwart the possibilities of co-existence, plurality, and political engagement.

Instead of allowing for a dialectical relationship between self and other that rests upon the reciprocal openness to the alterity and incompletion inhabiting each attempt to determine the self and the other than self, civic integration is premised on a relationship between other and same that rejects the reflexivity of collective selfhood and thereby deprives the collective of its intentionality and agency. Thus, while social cohesion is forwarded as a central argument for civic integration, this article reveals how the normative premises of civic integration constitutes a negation of collective selfhood. This suggests that if practices of integration should not defeat their own goals of political emancipation and social cohesion, or even disqualify the ideal of collective self they strive for, they need to renounce any accounts of collective identity as sameness and instead be conditioned on a notion of collective selfhood that recognizes the ambiguity and fluidity of the self as well as of the other.

An additional aim of the article was to point at the normative standards that ought to guide integration. While civic education and testing forms the primary integration policy today, there is a small but growing body of literature studying integration as a process of reciprocal relation building. According to this, reciprocity is conducive to integration and builds relationships between migrants and the native population notwithstanding any known previously shared norms and values (Heins and Unrau 2018; Phillimore, Humphries, and Khan 2018). Here, integration becomes understood as an interpersonal, collective process engaging migrants and non-migrants alike (Barwick 2017; Klarenbeek 2021). This article suggests that reflexive identity, collective selfhood, tolerance, and compromise form points of departure for such an understanding of integration. For Ricoeur, tolerance forms a normative principle for how to engage with the other without renouncing or disregarding their selfhood. Reflexive identity and collective selfhood, in turn, brings the insight of the heteronomy of identity and of how identity always holds its own alterity.

Certainly, through its reflexivity, collective selfhood is not redeemed of sameness. On the contrary, collective selfhood compels us to realize that when confronted with the question of who we are, we are bound by appropriation and by the need to take recourse to idem-identity. Collective reflexivity reveals to us the contingency of selfhood as well as of otherness, so that we can grasp the otherness that is our own. Perhaps should this insight prompt us to ask the question of ‘us’ not in terms of what we are, but in terms of what we do. Doing so, we could see ‘us’ as adhering to policies and regulations because they are prescribed to us as legal obligations by our elected rulers, notwithstanding the way they might target groups differently and install social and political stratification. Or, we could begin to grasp a notion of ‘us’ that emerge from continuous encounters and engagements with one another, by which ‘we’ envisage law enactment and policy enforcement as a commitment to collective action shared and upheld by all parts of the political community, newcomers and long-term residents alike. The latter compels any understanding of integration to withdraw from being a one-sided process of adaptation to the host society, and rests instead on the insight of how ‘we’ are continuously forged in a relationship of mutual exchange and commitment to a shared political co-existence.

Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity suggests that any consideration of ‘us’ must also engage the meaning of ‘ourselves’. Reflexive identity adds therefore an indeterminacy to the self and renders the self with a volatile otherness. It entails a continuous reengagement with both otherness and with what is our own that invites the demos to face its own incompletion and incalculability (see further Pettersson 2018). Thereby, practices of integration premised on reflexive identity, collective selfhood, and tolerance will divert from relating to the other through appropriation or domination. Instead, they establish a relationship to otherness emerging from continuous encounters, that is, from acts of mutual engagement and from a recurring, open-ended, exchange of meaning and experience between people. To this end, integration should precisely not be a task for some to complete to become members of the democratic society. Instead, integration ought to be a challenge for all as it forms the very fibres from which the fabric of democratic life is woven.

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Notes on contributors

Jonna Pettersson

Jonna Pettersson is a political theorist and a senior lecturer in Political Theory and Global Politics. She currently holds a position as a postdoctoral researcher at the department of Global Political Studies at Malmö University, where she is also an affiliated researcher with The Rethinking Democracy research platform (REDEM). Her research engages issues of the political community, citizenship, democratic theory, inclusion, political space, spatiality, and national identity. Her most recent work revolves around civic integration and reflexivity on the one hand, and on practices of externalised migration control, territoriality, and relational space on the other. Jonna Pettersson is the author of The Question of Political Community - Sameness, Logos, Space, published with Rowman and Littlefield.

Notes

1 It should however be noted that Brubaker seeks to recover the notion of assimilation to mean what is today generally understood by integration. In addition, his historical exposé over practices of assimilation distinguishes between one general, abstract sense of assimilation and one specific and organic, where the former describes the process of becoming similar, and the latter the end state of a complete immersion in the majority identity (Brubaker 2001).

2 Despite its universalist ambitions, civic integration policies have developed within different national contexts, and differ between different states. For a discussion on and comparison between different policy strategies for civic integration in Western Europe (see Baldi and Goodman 2015; Fernández 2019; Goodman 2010; 2012; 2014; Jensen 2019; Joppke 2007; Kostakopoulou 2010a).

3 Klekowski von Koppenfels refers to a French appeal case in 2008 where a woman wearing niqab was denied naturalisation on the grounds of being perceived insufficiently assimilated, despite fluency in French (Klekowski von Koppenfels 2010).

4 Two infamous examples are seen the German civic integration test of 2010, which asks how Germans celebrate Christmas and Easter, and the multiple-choice question of how to respond if someone spills a pint over you at the pub found in the British test from the same year (Joppke 2010a; 2010b; Goodman 2014).

5 To this end, civic integration resembles the account of identity of liberal multiculturalism, which maintains that a diverse society is tied together not only by shared political values, but also by a shared identity based in common language and public institutions (Kymlicka 2001). Indeed, civic integration could be seen less as a withdrawal from multiculturalism, than as an additional layer to multiculturalist policies and their attempts to create social cohesion through an overarching shared identity (Banting and Kymlicka 2006).

6 Ricoeur gives the example of how a tree can be perceived as the same ‘from the acorn to the fully developed tree’, or how we can speak of the same creature from birth to death. See Ricoeur (2008, 117).

7 Integration policies may also include legally binding contractual agreements. In the case of Denmark, the Integration Act states that asylum seekers and family-reunited immigrants must sign a declaration giving an overview of the societal values and democratic principles of Denmark, as well as a legally binding contract by which the migrant commits to achieve goals regarding language proficiency, employment, and education. A breach of contract has immediate effects on the social benefits the migrants receive. In the longer perspective it also inflicts the possibilities of gaining permanent resident permit (Adamo 2022).

8 It should be noted in passing that while law is often understood to be concerned with securing public interest or setting boundaries to the community through self-determination, this is not what justice is about, given a thorough engagement with the meaning of reflexive selfhood. Instead, any account of self must engage with the other, as the selfhood of the other holds a value to ‘us’ precisely by not being part of our world. That is, by not being reducible to a part of our consciousness or through being formed on whatever preunderstandings we hold, the subjectivity of the other guarantees the subjectivity and self-awareness also of the self. However, the other can also emerge as a norm that judges the self and makes the self question the division, exclusions, and closure of their ordering of the world. If the self is the origin of its world, then the self is not free but captured in the world it has proclaimed. The other forms then a possibility for the self to release itself from the bonds it has established for itself and for others. Thus, there are two ways for the first-person agent to relate to the other; through ‘acknowledging her as a value for me in warranting the objectivity of my self-awareness, and acknowledging her as a law challenging the premature ordering of my own world’ (van Roermund 2013, 92–123, at 123). Justice, then, ‘is a politics that, on its own accord, makes something count against the identity it acknowledges as its ultimate basis’, whereas law is the institutionalised openness of a political order to the event of justice (van Roermund 2013, 110–112, at 110).

9 As the practice of third country civic integration tests testifies to. See further Bonjour (2010).

10 See further Abizadeh (2008).

11 See further Pettersson (2018, 128–130).