The Integration Nation. Adrian Favell

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СКАЧАТЬ governance of populations – whether ostensibly local, national or global in its scale of operation. Wherever it is used, at whatever scale, integration implies an organized, functional and consensual view of society: one whose configuration of institutions is able to categorize and differentiate its own members by at once individualizing, internally unifying and externally bounding them. This entails a default model: one in which the integration of newcomers is into one single, indivisible ‘state’ (the process), thereby constituting one single integrated ‘society’ (the end state). Without all these elements present it is not really ‘integration’; the power of the liberal democratic state depends on it. The theory of society invoked by the term is therefore prototypically the modern advanced (western) nation-state. A critical view is needed to expose these assumptions, as well as to make sense of their implications in relation to other confusing uses of the term: for example, regional ‘European integration’, or even the possibility of an ‘integrated’ global society (a question posed in the sociology of Richard Münch, e.g., 1996). Moreover, it is a performative action to invoke as a benchmark the ‘successful’ integration ‘process’ towards building better ‘communities’ along different dimensions. This points towards the inescapably normative implication of integration scholarship in its relation to formulations of integration policy.

Towards a new political demography

Ordinarily, questions of ‘integration’ are identified in order to specify a range of ‘post-immigration’ interventions or processes that are distinct from, and follow after, ‘immigration’ policy as such – selection, border control, rights of entry and abode, who is in an ‘immigrant’ category and who is an unwanted ‘alien’ or ‘illegal’, or merely a ‘tourist’ or ‘visitor’, and so on. This is important because there is often an implied prioritization imposed on the two kinds of policy: successful integration presupposes a well-functioning border regime that must be cleared first and which has effectively fulfilled all the other definitional operations noted above. As suggested by Roger Waldinger, the typical view of ‘immigrant integration’ is emphatically one of the nation-state with its back turned to the border (Waldinger 2015): immigration has occurred, the border has operated and been affirmed in its (legal) crossing, and the duly designated ‘immigrant’ is now observed as subject to various pressures and opportunities that will ‘integrate’ them as ‘equals’ into their new ‘home’ society. Aspects of a migrant’s existing life that may already be ‘integrated’ outside the border are not relevant to this question – except perhaps as hindrances or resources in the new, encompassing (national) societal integration that is meant to take its place. There is already here an implied deficiency: as a result of crossing that border, the immigrant needs to change, to be or to do something in relation to whatever it is they must integrate into to achieve the desired parity.

Yet it is the fact that they are subject to integration – the possibility for the ‘immigrant’ of a successful implantation, settlement and development towards full membership – which defines who is deemed to ‘immigrate’ in the first place. The purposive nation-state building or bordering properties of integration thinking become clear here. The underlying assumption of national societal integration in this sense precedes the operation of the immigration policy at the border (see also Joppke 2011, citing Niklas Luhmann, on this point). Other kinds of people who have crossed the international border at the same time – such as tourists, business-visitors, truck drivers bringing goods, or ‘illegal’ migrants – must be excluded from the functional vision of national ‘society’. They do not, by definition, need integration. Although all these other activities imply presence, social interaction and ‘integration’ in other senses – for example, as part of an integrated regional or global economy across borders, or a transnational family structure – they are not part of the exclusive, power generating, nation-state building that centres on the ‘immigrant’ who can and should be ‘integrated’. It is those who are identified and observed as subject to integration – the immigrants – who thereby confirm the unit in question as a distinctly national society: it is a ‘nation’ because it is defined, differentiated (as a national ‘society’) and legitimated (as having national ‘sovereign’ jurisdiction) through this particular way of seeing an abstract population as a unit – as made up exhaustively of insider nationals, outside foreigners, and those who have crossed the line between these categories (see also Schinkel 2017). In other words, among foreigners only ‘immigrants’ can integrate and become members like the supposed ‘natives’, and they must do so in order that the successful society as a ‘nation’ continues to be made up of ‘full’ and recognized citizens: that is, full membership of a club to which all nationals, by definition, belong.

      This circular reasoning underlines the normative affirmation via notions of immigration and integration of the necessary nationalization of a population which belongs here in this territory, to this society, and the distinctions it must draw between itself and all those considered as ‘foreigners’ and ‘aliens’, who do not; it is, in effect, a question raised anew as an anomaly in the modern world system every time a foreigner crosses a border, and potentially changes jurisdiction, as an ‘immigrant’ (Joppke 1998b). An additional anomaly occurs in colonial settler states as they become reconceived as immigrant ‘integration nations’: where immigrants over time effectively become the ‘natives’ and indigenous populations become ‘national minorities’, also needing ‘integrating’ (Mamdani 2020; Sharma 2020).

In spatial terms, these normative definitions and delineations of immigration and integration continue to play a key role in sustaining the conventional ‘container state’ view of national society – the so-called ‘Westphalian’ view of the state that has been a cornerstone of international relations for centuries (Shachar 2020). That this view of sovereignty has been variably effective and imperfect as a source of state power in history (Krasner 1995) does not vitiate its role as a normative foundation of the ongoing nationhood of liberal democracies. It is the view of society literally as a box, with hard bordered lines corresponding to territory differentiating it from the world, inside which there is an individualized, named population of citizens, distinct from the rest of the world. How successfully this society is contained and maintains this distinction defines its legitimated power as a nation-state. The people as nationals constitute this container: they are distinct from all other populations in the world, and they are the totality of this society. If it is a liberal democracy, the state is also thought to be made up of and by these people: the collective power held by the state is the expression of their sovereign voice, precisely as a ‘people’. This is the famous book cover image of Leviathan from Thomas Hobbes. The ideal type of sovereignty here may of course fail empirically to eliminate all the anomalies and noise in the actual population as it is defined; but, as an ideal type, it works in the same way as the unquestioned notion of ‘democracy’ as a source of legitimated political power, whatever the imperfections in the participative process.

      Classically, in demography, the principal way this contained, bordered population can change is through births and deaths. These, of course, the state counts and tracks, marking births and deaths with (named) registration. The national society is made up of the output, as it were, of this population. Population typically grows with modernization, although this has been changing with declining fertility in some of the most advanced societies. Outside of this, the only other way a population can change is through migration. People can leave and emigrate (although it is rare to move away and lose your citizenship). Or people can join: what is called ‘immigration’. In many countries in the world, immigration is now a more significant factor of population change than births and (minus) deaths. With the question of migration, demography becomes political. If the world might be said to contain multitudes, whose mobility and diversity are potentially infinite, how the advanced nation-state-society captures, contains, de-complexifies and processes what it allows in – as immigration – becomes key to its ongoing power and self-reproduction.

The view I present here contrasts with much of critically oriented migration studies which understandably focuses its fire on the more СКАЧАТЬ