The Integration Nation. Adrian Favell

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Introduction

      The opening scene of Gillo Pontecorvo’s film La Bataille d’Alger (1966). The Colonel Mathieu joins his soldiers in a room where they have a captive Algerian man who has been tortured. They have dressed him as a French soldier and are going to take him to the casbah where he will reveal to them where the leader of the Algerian Liberation Front is hiding. Mathieu tells them to give him a French soldier’s hat. The soldier next to the Algerian smiles broadly and shoves the hat on his head.

      ‘Intégration!!’, the soldier laughs . . .

      [To the soldier] ‘Fais-pas l’idiot!’ [Don’t be an idiot!], says the Colonel.

      The Algerian starts crying, then suddenly desperate, runs towards the window, wailing . . .

      ‘NON!!! . . .’

      The soldiers grab him, tell him to stay calm, or they’ll start on him again. They push him towards the door.

The notion of ‘immigrant integration’ is found everywhere as a progressive concept – among students, scholars, research funders, policy makers, politicians, journalists, lawyers, social workers and many others concerned with how societies should respond to international migration and include new members on fair and equal terms. ‘Integration’ is widely accepted as the most encompassing term to refer to both the process and end state by which highly globalized societies imagine they will restore unity and cohesion after large-scale immigration and the diversity it brings. In Western Europe, where the term has been most elaborated, it has largely eclipsed discussions of multiculturalism and is seen as a more progressive goal than assimilation. It appears to have more sociological scope and weight than close synonyms such as social cohesion, inclusion, incorporation or participation. Indeed, integration has a kind of aura as a default concept in forward-looking thinking about the consequences of migration and the diversification of society. It is used at once to signal the necessary adaptation of diverse cultures to dominant western norms and as an idealized image of intercultural dialogue that will be transformative on both sides. And despite its pervasive and often confusing range of use, there are surprisingly few sustained discussions of its conceptual roots and theoretical implications, although frequent attempts are made by scholars to propose ideal-type ‘models’ or ‘indicators’ of integration.

The invocation of intégration in the shocking first scene from Pontecorvo’s La Bataille d’Alger, recounted above, should underline how integration is and always was a fundamentally colonial term. As I will argue, it is embedded in a modernist development paradigm which assumes both a trajectory towards a certain kind of individualist citizenship and the dominant relation of ‘the West to the Rest’. At heart, it is concerned with the rearguard perpetuation of ongoing nation-state building on the western model in an otherwise globalizing world: of re-fashioning a sovereign, bounded social order from conflict and diversity as a form of modern progress. This is the power of the ‘integration nation’. As shrinking metropolitan nation-states came to terms with the end of empire, and the absorption of populations inherited as their post-colonial legacy of global domination, they turned to the idea of ‘integration’ as a means of re-imagining their ongoing civilizational mission in the face of global diversity. So when progressive scholars and policy makers ingenuously propose integration as the reasonable middle way between conservative cultural conformism and radical celebrations of cultural hybridity and diaspora, they are buying into and reproducing a colonial world view that is also deeply nationalist in its implications.

      As a work in political theory, The Integration Nation sketches the core component of what may be thought of as a political demography of liberal democracy (see also Weiner and Teitelbaum 2001 and Goldstone, Kaufmann and Duffy Toft 2011 for contrasting uses of this term). That is, how modern advanced nation-states classify and enumerate populations which are inherently mobile and diverse into ‘legible’ legal and institutional distinctions: of ‘citizens’ and ‘migrants’, ‘nationals’ and ‘aliens’, ‘majorities’ and ‘minorities’. They do this in order to constitute their own pastoral and governmental powers, and thereby sustain a global order of territorialized and bordered national populations founded on massive inequalities between nations and their members (Milanovic 2005; Shachar 2009) – inequalities that still substantially reflect the racialized cultural hierarchies of colonialism and empire (Boatcă 2015). At the heart of this construction lies what can be thought of as the linear conception of population movement, in which a select few designated but heavily symbolic ‘immigrants’ from poorer countries pass along a process of migration, border entry, settlement, integration and (hence) the attainment of full moral and political citizenship in an affluent modern western society, as proof of the cohesive and developmental powers of a socially ‘diverse’, ‘inclusive’ and ‘sovereign’ modern nation-state ‘society’. Along the way, the differentiation at work here ensures others are excluded or marginalized by the selective trajectory imagined in the image of the successful ‘immigrant’. Meanwhile, as we will see, the heavy imposition of ‘integration’ as the unique symbolic burden of disadvantaged ‘ethnic minorities’ and ‘immigrants’ also enables the elites of these same societies to increasingly float free of the same obligations as global free movers.

This unquestioned, progressive doxa of ‘immigration’ and ‘integration nations’ in the modern world – largely reflective of a certain skewed vision of the United States as a prototype – is the foundation of a particular legitimated liberal democratic global order associated with the nation-state, with its locus in the North Atlantic West. It is the supposedly progressive nationalism we live and breathe as our everyday normal state, repeated endlessly by politicians, dominant media, popular culture – and academics writing about ‘immigration’. Mainstream proponents of ‘immigrant integration’, who fail to see how their propagation of concepts is embedded in the doxa of immigration, integration and citizenship, reproduce this state power blindly. This applies as much to the normative typology building in institutional studies of the policy and politics of immigrant integration as to the more positivist-minded social science of integration of ‘ethnic’ and ‘migrant’ groups as it gets operationalized in comparative and quantitative studies.

      It has become a cliché that key concepts in the social sciences and humanities are ‘essentially contested’. This may be true sometimes, but such contests may also reflect intellectual confusion or dissimulation. In fact, digging into the historical origins, logic, contextualization and contemporary application of the concept ‘integration’ reveals a rather coherent and clear genealogy. Viewed this way, it is clear the use of the term commits scholars – including those who see their work as strictly positivist – to both political (i.e., normative) and methodological nationalism, as well as effectively СКАЧАТЬ