Integration policy and integration research in
a review and critique
Adrian
Favell
Sociology, UCLA
Report prepared
for the Carnegie Endowment
‘Comparative
Citizenship Project’ (June/Nov 1999)
Published
in:
Citizenship
Today: Global Perspectives and Practices
edited by T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Doug
Klusmeyer
Washington, DC: Brookings Institute/Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, 2001, pp.349-399.
Integration policy and
integration research in
a review and critique
Adrian Favell
Introduction
Despite the quantity of research on
post-war immigration in
To break with these restrictions, we need
to conceive of doing research which reduces the nation-state and/or
nation-society to one among several potential structuring variables explaining
the actions of immigrants and minorities and their interaction with existing
European populations. After looking at the deep theoretical features of
thinking on integration, and the way in which a cross-national and
transatlantic research agenda has developed on the subject, I show how the
(sometimes hidden) framing of the integration ‘paradigm’ can be seen equally in
commissioned research on immigration politics and policy in Europe, as in
current national survey and census based studies on the behaviour, identities
and social mobility of immigrant populations. Throughout, the general argument
of the text is supported by a detailed literature review and discussion in the
footnotes. The study also attempts to put into practice a thoroughly reflexive
approach to sociological work in this area, which pays close attention to the political
and social contextual factors and the material conditions of production which
have caused certain types of research and policy intervention to be made.[2]
Integration
in theory and practice
There is no shortage of comparative and
national research on integration policies in western Europe and the most
straightforward kind of overview to write would be one which tried to
synthesise the various findings, in order to perhaps produce a checklist of
policies in different countries and an evaluation of their relative
effectiveness. However, any such attempt will quickly encounter the fact that
the issues of immigration and integration are formulated in very distinct, and
context-specific ways across
What we have as the unreflective starting
point, then, is the image of several distinct, bounded nation states in Europe,
each individually facing more or less similar questions about the ‘integration’
of different ethnic minorities and immigrants, who mostly arrived as a result
of post-war immigration. At different stages of this long migration-settlement
process, what each is then faced with implementing is a series of provisions,
policies and social interventions which together might be seen to add up to an
‘integration policy’. These may include (the list is by no means exhaustive,
but indicative):
basic legal and social protection
formal naturalisation and citizenship (or
residence-based) rights
anti-discrimination laws
equal opportunities positive action
corporatist and associational structures
for immigrant or ethnic organisations
redistribution of targeted socio-economic
funds for minorities in deprived areas
policy on public housing
policy on law and order
agreements with foreign countries about
military service
multicultural education policy
special sections within political parties
policies and laws on tolerating cultural
practices
cultural funding for ethnic associations
or religious organisations
language and cultural courses in host
society’s culture
etc., etc.[3]
What should be asked first is how and why
this disparate range of state policies, laws, local initiatives and societal
dispositions - which could in theory be implemented by all kinds of agencies
and at all kinds of levels - comes to be thought of and described as a single
nation- state’s overall strategy or policy of ‘integration’. But who or what is
integrating whom and with what? This is by no means such an obvious question to
answer: unless we simply take, as far too many social scientists still do, the state and a society as the unproblematic, unchallenged backdrops to these
debates and processes. For sure, when political actors and policy intellectuals
talk about ‘integration’, they are inevitably thinking about integration into
one, single, indivisible (national) ‘state’, and one, simple, unitary
(national) ‘society’. But it is precisely the assumptions behind this term that
we should be examining. Political language is performative: people are always
trying to create the phenomenon of
which they are speaking.
So what assumptions does the concept
‘integration’ contain? One or two points are immediately clear. To talk of
integration is to envisage a policy that is distinct from immigration policy -
border control, rights of entry and abode, etc. - per se. It accepts some idea of permanent settlement, and is
dealing with, and trying to distinguish, a later stage in a coherent societal
process: the consequences of immigration. It is also a term which partly builds
its success on swallowing up other similar, but more precise, partial or
politically unfashionable terms for the same kind of process: terms such as
assimilation, absorption, acculturation, accommodation, incorporation,
inclusion, participation, cohesion, enfranchisement, toleration, etc. And, as I
will argue throughout, integration policies and provisions are interventions,
with a few exceptions, taken to be almost exclusively the province of
nation-state, or more local agencies of the state. The institutions of the EU
for example - which has got involved in so many other substantive areas of
policy in Europe, and which of course builds its own dynamics around a
different use of the same term - is almost wholly excluded in the current
treaties from any of the kinds of integration intervention listed above .
In
most West European countries by the end of the 1980s, a dominant discourse on
‘integration’ had emerged as the overarching framework for the various types of
policies and practices towards immigrants and minorities being experimented
with by actors and agencies in all sectors of society.[4]
This emergence as the widest possible conceptual consensus invariably followed
a period in which ‘older’ assimilationist ideas vied with the post-60s
inheritance of ideas about cultural difference and the anti-racist struggle,
and in which integration became a comfortable, ‘sensible’ position for the
centre trying to distinguish itself from xenophobic nationalism on the one
hand, and radical anti-system discourses on the other. On one level, the
success of a term like this can be said to be superficial: it is just jargon
that gets picked up as a kind of default language, when other types of argument
become unfashionable or distorted by political usage. However, integration has
thus far appeared quite impervious to these same problems: even among academics
it is rarely problematised or examined, when it is used as a conceptual
shorthand. Its effectiveness seems to lie in the fact it best fits the
undefined ‘conceptual space’ gestured to when academics talk about the
(counter-factual) goal of successful inter-ethnic relations or a less
dysfunctional multi-cultural or multi-racial society. For sure, this must have
much to do with its built-in vagueness, and its abstract-yet-positive sounding
quality. It suggests a comfortingly technical view of the engineering of modern
society, heading in a teleological direction towards a self-evidently
progressive outcome. In this respect, its polar opposite is so obviously bad,
as to almost force us to accept ‘integration’ as a necessity. ‘Disintegration’
is one of the most chilling descriptive terms to use about society - as it is
for persons - evoking a disaster striking at an almost molecular level (an
imperative that is not felt with quite the same force for ‘incohesion’, ‘disenfranchisement’
or ‘intolerance’, for example). Crucially, too, in relation to terms like
‘assimilation’, ‘integration’ sounds like a complex, two way or multiple
process, to evoke change that is mutual and organic in some way.
‘Integration’ also works well as a
popular public concept, I think, because of its allusion to more longstanding
theories and ideas about the nature of modern society. One area where the
sociological thinking of the 20th century has had a very deep effect on the
self-consciousness of how western society thinks about itself as a collectivity
(with collective agency), is in the
almost essential link that ‘society’ and ‘societal integration’ are taken to
have. The discipline of sociology as a mode a mode of reflection about the
world, is indeed constituted from the construction of society - as a unified,
functioning whole - as its overall object
of enquiry. This link, and hence the raison
d’être of the discipline, is driven by a fear of the ‘logical’ alternative:
the Hobbesian sub-consciousness of a societal breakdown, and the war of all
against all.[5]
The inheritance of Durkheimianism can here be pointed out, filtered in the
It is perhaps not surprising that state
actors have to speak positively about the possibility and goal of societal
integration, but it is interesting to note how academics in the 1980s and 90s
have also adopted the same kind of discourse and underlying logic, with a
similar ‘state-centric’ (re-) constructive attitude towards fundamental social
thought, re-imagining ‘social unity’ or ‘cohesion’ out of diversity and
conflict. Reading some of the multicultural theorists of the present day, we
need constant reminding that these philosophers and social theorists are not
speaking from the same social location as the politicians, judges and
bureaucrats who actually make decisions and implement policies. Given their
officially autonomous status in liberal democracy as free thinking
intellectuals, there is no reason on the face of it why they should have to
worry about getting involved in heteronomous, pseudo-policy prescriptions about
the building of a better society, instead, say, of engaging in a critique of
the fundamental blindspots and self-delusions of those who actually do have
this power. Once upon a time, when Marxists roamed the Earth, the academic’s
vocation was taken to be critical; to refuse hegemony, and denounce power. In
the field of ethnic, racial and migration studies, they tried to show how the
world system was built on colonialism and racial exploitation; how the
political economy of
The institutionalisation of this academic
field has produced a genuinely constructive turn towards the object of social
thought - a multi-racial or multi-cultural society - and the practical problems
it can been seen to have. Academics have reconceived their role as offering a
counterfactual meta-discourse on policy making for the good society, that
mirrors the more inclusive and supportive attitude of the state towards
including ideas from these origins in the policy process. Intellectuals
themselves have thus increasingly engaged with imagining a progressive (future)
reality, rather than unmasking the corruption and lies of the present, with a
performative discourse about integration which seeks to theorise social
possibility rather than offering a denunciatory counter-discourse (about power,
domination, exploitation, etc.). Such a role is also a self-styled interpretative
role, reconstructing history as a movement towards something better, in which a
progressive intellectual position in aligned with progressive political
currents in the society.[9]
My point here is not to glorify the good
old days of structural Marxism. Rather it is to emphasise the shifting role of
the intellectual in relation to social power of intellectual work in the
nation-state context, and suggest how that has both disciplined and constrained
their output, as a necessary condition, perhaps, for producing more engaged and
socially meaningful work for others. As a system of thought, the progressive
integration ‘paradigm’ - as I will call it - of trying to imagine how western
societies are going to deal with their ethnic dilemmas, resolving the achievement
of social cohesion under conditions of cultural diversity and conflict, has
forced a pragmatic discipline on thinking, which has to also follow the logic
of the mainstream integration discourse.[10]
This has added up to a normatively-engaged mode of thinking about the problem
of multicultural society which has become the ubiquitous, apparently
unavoidable, medium of progressive, constructive social thinking everywhere in
the 1980s and 90s: the idea of citizenship.[11]
The key part of this line of thought - in practical terms that make in
meaningfully as a policy contribution - is to try to reconcile this rectifying
impulse, with a recognition that there are always going to be de facto inequalities in society. The
academic thus must engage in conceiving of a just ‘equality of opportunity’,
which allows perhaps for special provisions and protection for the
disadvantaged, but does not challenge the underlying need for common principles
and rules that apply to all.[12]
When linked to questions about integration or multiculturalism, the idea of
citizenship gestures towards tolerance and recognition of difference, openness
to diversity, perhaps even positive action or cultural rights for minorities.
The apparent inevitability of the idiom of citizenship is perhaps not
surprising once social thought goes beyond Marxist critique and repositions
itself as offering practical interventions towards the construction of a
multicultural society. But what is sometimes less honestly recognised in all
this is that you cannot have citizenship without the historical social and
state structures that make its various component elements realistic and
meaningful: the nation-state.[13]
Many thinkers in the field are concerned with thinking of political and social
entities ‘beyond’ the nation state, but invariably this involves projecting the
features of the nation-state onto some supra-national construction. On this
point, the recent outbreak of reflection about citizenship projected to a
European level, or re-conceived as post-national citizenship, seems a misguided
and mistaken reading of the European project.[14]
Yet, at the same time, it is far from clear that in the 1990s the nation-state
still exists in anything like the ideal type form that Ernest Renan or
T.H.Marshall imagined in the past, except perhaps in the conceptions of those
powerful social actors most embedded in the political forms which gave it its
shape and power in the past. The reproduction of ideas of ‘integration’ and
‘citizenship’ in academic discourse - for all their progressive veneer - thus
may be just reproducing a certain vision of a unitary modern
nation-state/nation-society, that corresponds very closely to what those who
speak from a powerful position within society most want to hear, but not how
the society or societies out there really function.[15]
Emergence
of a cross-national comparative field
Talking about ‘society’ as a collectivity
will naturally leads observers on to talking about the specific particularities
of their own society: of projecting its distinctive nature, its mode of
evolution, its future development. But, as any thinkers in the phenomenological
tradition would readily point out, all talk about who ‘we’ are will depend in
part on the simultaneous definition of the ‘other’, those whose differences
enable us to see who we really are. We need to perceive and judge other
societies in order to define our own. The urge to comparativism is, therefore,
almost an epistemological necessity in all practical social thought; but it too
is shot through with the distorting influence of partiality and unequal
relations of power.
This, I would suggest, is a second
important consideration in understanding current thinking on integration. For,
in looking at how constructive thinking on integration and citizenship has
emerged in the 1980s and 90s, the other key dimension has been the return of a
North American perspective on the European situation. This dimension has always
been more or less present in European thinking about itself. In an era of
post-war reconstruction and the cold war, Europeans bought into Americanisation
in a big way, eyeing up its version of market-based universalism, personal
freedom and the paradigmatic immigrant nation/melting pot idea, as possible
solutions to its own social future. These ideas have also always been distorted
by the asymmetrical power relations across the Atlantic, and Europeans’ desire
to define a different version of liberal democracy and the liberal market for
itself: the EU emerged from this impulse as much as any other. European nations
have always worked themselves up into paroxyms of love-hate in relation to the
outside American cultural influence; none more so than the French. From the
other side, Europe has always been seen as both the motherland origin of
authentic cultures, and the hotbed of archaic nationalisms and histories;
behind this, Americans has taken the same developmentalist attitude to Europe
they took to every other part of the globe.
In thinking about race, ethnicity,
multiculturalism or citizenship, the stock of American vocabulary has almost
always been swallowed whole by Europeans trying to understand themselves in
American (and lately Canadian) terms. As I will argue throughout, this has not
always been the most appropriate choice of social scientific language for study
of European cases: Europeans, in fact, should be measuring their distance from these countries built on
immigration - and their very different social systems - not their similarities.
The British, in particular, are particularly self-deluding in this sense: often
seeing their society as closer to North America than ‘Europe’, that place just
across the sea. This in turn is reinforced by the use of the completely
meaningless adjective ‘anglo-saxon’ on the continent to lump English language
societies together as one ‘type’ of society.
In other ways, the dominant intellectual
influence of North America is abundantly clear. The very emergence of a
policy-oriented sociological discipline, driven by the practical idea that the
sociologists’ primary role is to study, chart and offer remedies to social
inequality, owes so much to the pioneering work of the Chicago school and its
modelling of the social integration process in urban contexts.[16]
American has thus provided Europe with the whole model of immigrant
integration, ethnic studies and race relations; and latterly the nightmare
vision of ethnic and social breakdown on a scale unimagined in European cities.[17]
Again, these approximations have not always been so appropriate. The term
‘integration’ in the US was, up to the 1960s, used not to talk about immigrants
in American society, but the classic ‘American dilemma’ about the US’s native
black minority population. Integration was promoted as the opposite of the
official black and white segregation practised prior to the civil rights
movement in many parts of the US. It was used in sociological studies
supporting the desegregation of restaurants, swimming pools, theatres and
(especially) public schools. This usage went out of favour as anti-racist discourses
in the US changed. Integration, however, has now made a comeback in the context
of the new immigration of the 1980s and 90s, as new questions of cultural
accommodation and assimilation (concerning Asian or Hispanic groups, for
example) have emerged centre stage. The confusion in referencing these American
inspired terms and studies in Europe, lies in the fact that immigrants in
Europe are usually also disadvantaged
racial minorities: both American literatures, therefore, have inspired European
work.[18]
More generally, Europe has, in the cold war period, been taught to view itself
along scales of comparative civic culture and democracy defined by the US, that
specify the ideal components of rights and democracy.[19]
Yet, what has been interesting in more recent years, is how North Americans
have starting reversing this trend and have looked instead at
What Europeanist Americans find,
typically, is the one thing the US has been rolling back in recent years:
resilient state-institutional structures, and ‘thick’ democratic cultures of
civic participation and belonging. Bringing the state back in and rediscovering
institutions, has of course been one of the great intellectual fads of the last
decade or so. Behind this, among its leading proponents has been a constructive
ambition: more than just understanding what it is that makes democracy work,
but also what it is that makes multicultural citizenship work. Again, the
institutional focus signals that the crucial thing is the rooted, bounded and
shared context of ‘good’ pluralist politics: the nation-state finding coherent
democratic solutions to its integration dilemmas, with immigrants and
minorities in Europe the key focusing question. The evolving debate has thus
asked how nation-states have dealt with citizenship and integration questions
for immigrants and ethnic minorities, seeking to distinguish between
generically different national approaches and states of development across
Europe, and then offer more prescriptive suggestions about the potential
treatment of immigrants vis-à-vis
what might be conceived as the full complement of citizenship rights in a
revamped Marshallian scheme. Although there are European exceptions - which in
the early 80s took their cue from the growing realisation about how western
states had miscalculated that earlier immigrant workers would ultimately return
home[21]
- the true source of this comparative perspective has been through the work of
North American based scholars able to stand outside nationally-bounded European
self-perceptions and interests. These innovations aside, the European scene at
a national level has often remained dominated by narrowly national
perspectives, that take their cue from the predominant local political debates:
these perspectives persist in spite of the growing outside and cross-national
influences.
The first and most obvious step was the
formulation of cross-national European comparisons in terms of ‘models’:
institutionalised state practices, rooted in nationally distinct historical
‘cultures’ or ‘idioms’.[22]
This in itself takes its cue from the older civic culture type literature,
which was concerned with identifying the national cultural bases of democratic
political behaviour. The opening up of this perspective has been crucial in
forcing nationally located perspectives to encounter outside studies grounded
in an autonomous academic discourse whose theorisation reflected wider
disciplinary concerns from history, political science, geography and sociology.
In other words, it has given the field both inter-disciplinary width and
historical depth. For once, comparative method, coupled with some sensitivity
towards the problems of interpretative comparativism, could be seen to ground
cross-national understandings of national differences: quite a change from the
perspectival influences of national policy contexts and self-comparisons. The
result has, arguably, been the creation of a genuine cross-national comparative
‘research programme’, with scientifically productive internal theoretical
debates, and an evolving common framework of reference of which all scholars
working with in it - both North American and European - have been aware. Within
it, the central paradigmatic idea of nation-states and changing citizenship has
been fought over and challenged, but the basic paradigm and terms of reference
have remained in place.[23]
As such, the work we have seen flowering in this area has been richly
strengthened by cross-Atlantic exchanges, conferences, and affiliations: many
of the scholars are Europeans who have been educated in North America, or who
have been strongly influenced by North American education at some point; or
they are American Europhiles, highly active in associations such as the Council
for European Studies, and the many exchange programmes connected with leading
Europeanist centres in the US and Canada.
Some of the initial value judgements of
the ‘models’ approach might be considered a little superficial.[24]
But the important thing has been to inspire an evolving set of intellectual
responses to an initially limited starting point. Thus the intellectual
starting point of generic
historical/cultural models has been challenged by more contemporary, political
science grounded explanations of party politics and policy making;[25]
local-level focused studies have been able to point out discrepancies between
national rhetoric and local practice;[26]
the institutionalist-slant has led to more complex studies of mobilisation,
participation and contestation of these state frameworks;[27]
and the idea of models was extended by classifying national differences in
terms of typologies of incorporation regimes.[28]
In more recent years, a cross-over has been made with other contemporaneous
studies welfare state regimes, with complex indices of rights and incorporation
along a variety of scales;[29]
and finally Europeans have responded with the development of more thoroughly
self-reflexive studies about how policy knowledge and constructions have been
produced, tracing the accumulation of the institutional effects of these
constructions which often overlap and flow into the construction of public
perceptions of the subject.[30]
Throughout, the interaction with the ever stronger political philosophical
reflection on citizenship and multiculturalism has developed, often leading to
a strong overt or covert normative flavour to otherwise comparative social
scientific projects. Again, the North American - particularly Canadian -
influence has been paramount.[31]
And, as might be expected, these transatlantic concerns have very
self-confidently translated themselves out of what has been a very successful
emerging academic sub-field, into direct policy and public intellectual type
work for many of the scholars involved.
Commissioned
studies on integration policy
While it may ultimately be a matter for
the history of ideas to chart the underlying intellectual reasons why a growing
number of scholars have been asking these constructive ‘integration’ and
‘citizenship’ questions in the 1980s and 90s, the material and contextual
reasons why such interests have been generated in cross-national comparative
research are fairly clear. Although clearly less central to party politics and
government agendas than issues of macro-economic policy, the future of the
welfare state, or regional development and devolution (for example), ethnic
minority and immigrant integration - and the multicultural questions
surrounding it - have risen significantly on the political agenda everywhere in
the last twenty five years. In parallel to the evolving philosophical and
sociological debates about citizenship, the question has come to be seen as an
essential element of ongoing policy thinking about the future of liberal
democracy and the distinctive possibilities of freedom and equality it may
offer beyond mono-national conceptions of the nation. The treatment and
accommodation of minorities and strangers is seen to be something that liberal
democracy, of all systems of political organisation, does best; it is indeed
widely assumed to be a defining trait of liberal democracy.[32]
National governments themselves have thus
generated a public research agenda around these questions: as well as direct
policy and political debates, this has led to media activity and the involvement
of other actors in the policy process. And, of course, it has sponsored the
involvement and co-option of prominent academic scholars, willing to cross the
line and take on the role of public intellectual in one of the various channels
of policy thinking. In a parallel learning curve to that achieved by academics
who have broadened their intellectual resources by looking comparatively across
nations, European states have themselves developed an urge to cross-national
self-comparison within Europe. In and
of itself this does not necessarily produce fair minded, non-perspectival
thinking among public figures. At the early stages of developing public
knowledge on the subject, this urge to comparison is often a kind of
self-justificatory reflex, driven by an instinct for defending the culturally
distinct national ways of doing things, that seeks to improve itself by
pointing to negative contrasts in foreign countries as part of the study. Many
examples of this kind of argumentation can be found in the leading countries
with most developed immigration and integration policy, often with a goal to
affirm the link between these policies and particular national idea of
citizenship or idea of democracy along the way.[33]
However, the widening scope of policy
thinking that encourages such cross-national initiatives, does also lead to new
kinds of contact with foreign counterparts, that expands the national legal,
political and bureaucratic policy community. As one can readily tell from the
rapid international involvements of the Blair government, one of the big
benefits of election to power is the opportunity to engage in all kinds of
cross-national networking and synergy building, that would simply not be
possible when in opposition. And, if it is possible to a little less cynical on
this point for a moment, then it can be suggested that that the parties might
overall come national blinkers, and engage in some kind of cross-national policy learning while they are
fraternising. The famous example in this field is, of course, the ‘liberal
hour’ of sixties’ race relations thinking in Britain and the Wilson
administration courting of the American civil rights movement, in order to
import ideas and moral justifications into Britain’s proposed race relations
legislation.[34] Of
course, to engage in such an import of ‘foreign’ ideas can prove not only
practical but a clear justificatory strategy, which diverts responsibility for
the justification of ideas away from the smaller country’s own national
political traditions and discourses when internal justification is not
possible. The weak position of exchange between European nations and the
An arguably more equitable venue for
cross-national exchange of ideas across European policy thinking has emerged
under the sponsorship of the European Union. The bi-lateral relations between
states within the EU is so heavily institutionalised as competition among
equals, that it precludes states projecting themselves into the weaker
‘learning’ role, unless this giving up of ‘sovereignty’ (as the learning/policy
justification process is constructed in public discussion) is seen to be part
of wider pan-European co-operative effort. It is clear that the common history
and similarity of European societies should dictate that they probably have a
lot more to learn from each other than from a rather different society such as
the
The nature of this kind of work is
clearly co-optive and self-reproducing. However self-critical one is of one’s
relationship with the EU, working within their (EU) integration agenda will
inevitably draw scholars into a pro-European integration stance that seeks to
diminish exclusive national level control over these questions (although the
logic of every network being made up of ‘national’ representatives mitigates
this tendency somewhat). The benefits of this new kind of cross-national
thinking in not automatically reproducing national policy perspectives should
be clear. An additional dimension linked to this is the involvement of
professional NGOs in this kind of quasi-academic commissioned work.[38]
Its necessarily schematic packaging and content means that this kind of work
does not contribute much to critical knowledge about integration policies, but
it can be an excellent source of descriptive facts and policy practice across
national cases. What we invariably find out from this kind of work is that
there are indeed clearly distinct national models of justifying and
implementing integration strategies, and that these frameworks render the idea
of policy transferability to other national cases problematic. One thing this
kind of research has sustained, however, is the perception that European nation
states are converging on similar kinds of policies and problems.[39]
This observation can then in turn be used to sustain claims for improving
rights for minorities and non-nationals across
A slightly different inspiration and
sponsor of cross-national research has been the Council of Europe in
One interesting consequence of the new
European co-operative efforts has been the intellectual struggle over the
progressive agenda at the European level: whether it should follow more the
British anti-discrimination focus or the French approach to citizenship and
equality. The British initially were very suspicious of the EU’s efforts to
engage with anti-discrimination issues at the supra-national level, arguing
that the EU was likely to dilute British standards, which were in any case the
best in
The creation of the Monitoring Centre
points towards the hooking up of knowledge production on discrimination, racism
and minority rights with the existing machine for producing ‘Euro-knowledge’
such as the Eurobarometer surveys.[44]
Reminiscent of the huge scale post-war American civic culture/democracy indices
that were concerned with managing transitions to democracy, such work attempts
to evaluate the relative level of development as regards integration policy and
legislation according to a common European scale, that brusquely rides over the
kind of arguments based on national distinctiveness/traditions so prevalent
among national policy makers when they compare themselves to others in Europe.
While clearly extending the range and repertoire of knowledge about what each
country is doing and how each is officially dealing with the problems involved,
the kinds of results produced by these surveys - that country x is less racist
or more tolerant than country y because country x has better official legal
provisions against discrimination and more rights than country y - can be
highly dubious as indicators of integration as such. Predictably, highly
state-centred countries, with a high level of co-opted academic policy
production - such as the
The second problem with these kinds of
studies and the knowledge they produce is equating integration and inter-ethnic
relations with official state structures such as rights, policies, legislation
and so on. Such indicators only really measure the extent to which the state
succeeds in defining, controlling and managing the phenomenon: it says little
about whether this control is benevolent, or in fact highly dominating in its
effects. Intellectuals here, again, are involved in legitimising a view of
society to which they should in fact be offering a critique. Knowledge that is
reproducing the kinds of categories and institutional schema that the state
seeks to impose on ethnic relations in society, is itself part of the
institutional process of enforcing hierarchical state power and jurisdiction on
the subject. Intellectual work thus becomes part of the process whereby
institutions enforce a coercive and constraining cognitive framing of societal
phenomena, that might not necessarily be things than can or should come into
the state’s domain. It turns complex societal relations and interactions into a
categorised object of ‘policy’, creating bureaucratic norms that can be imposed
on social actors on the way to becoming law. The Dutch way of managing policy
problems by funding nearly all academic production in this area - and hence
turning academic research into a branch of state-sponsored knowledge creation
on the subject - is one extreme on a scale which could also envisage totally
disconnection between state policy thinking and the work of autonomous
intellectuals. Dutch society puts such a central premium on the idea of
rationally-produced, informed and structured ‘beleid’ (policy), that nearly all
leading social scientists are co-opted into the system of producing
policy-relevant research for social engineering purposes, by a host different
ministries and independent research agencies.[45]
The result of this academic influence - the wonderfully well-organised schema
of rights and provisions for minorities in the country - is both a measure of
how seriously the state and government take policy on integration questions;
and, taken inversely, a measure of the scale of pathological effects that such
top down hierarchical structures can have on the social situation itself, if
the enormous growth of informal activities among immigrants in the Netherlands
is any indication.[46]
The deeper point here is that any
discussion of integration which tries to measure it by evaluating the degree of
state-institutionalised organisation in the country assumes a degree of
coercive, state-powered pressure on immigrants to conform to this framework.
Given the overwhelmingly one way direction of social integration pressures that
living in western social system imposes on anybody, positive, fully
institutionalised indicators of integration are thus also indicators of the
state-organised assimilation pressures put on migrant and minority groups to
conform to western norms - the very opposite of where multiculturalism is
supposed to lead.
Survey
and census based work on integration
Thus far, my overview of integration
research has concentrated on works which approach the question from the point
of view of ‘policy’: that is, of already institutionalised legal and political
structures in various national contexts in
Turning, then, to the state-of-the-art in
behavioural attitude surveys, social mobility and social psychological
approaches to immigrant integration, what do we find? A range of far more
ambitious integration surveys are now beginning to emerge out of the empirical
expansion of this field, due in large part to the investment of public funding
to address a subject seen to be of rising political and social concern, and
thus due in effect to the recent technical possibility of doing this kind of
work. The great advantage of survey-based work is the fact it explicitly seeks
to reduce questions about policy frameworks, laws and legislation, and so on,
to background variables. Being highly ‘positivist’ in nature, these studies
also generally refrain in their methodologies from taking overtly ideological
positions in advance about what states should be doing from a top-down
perspective to achieve their policy goals. This is usually left to an
explicitly secondary stage of interpretation, public framing and publicity,
which may lead to normative conclusions or engage in post-publication
interventions in the media and public debates. It is correct, then, to take the
self-styled ‘scientific’ credentials of survey-based work seriously: it is why
such work may offer more insights about actual integration processes than
policy and politics focused work, which often in the final analysis has very
little to say about immigrants themselves, if rather a lot about how elites
debate and understand the question. However, as I will argue, this is not to
say that the methodological choices and conceptual assumptions that
survey-based studies make, reflect any less the material and contextual influences
that shape other types of work on the subject.
One significant limitation with
survey-based work is that there is virtually no existing examples of genuine
cross-national comparative work in the field, and certainly no elaborated
source of comparable data. There is nothing like the effort of the annual
OECD-SOPEMI reports to compile date on migrant flows and stocks in various
countries, a report which gathers data from national correspondents in each of
the OECD countries.[47]
The OECD report does now have a section on ‘integration’, but this is by far
its weakest part, simply reproducing some of the usual debates about national
models or comparative rights-frameworks. Moreover, all data on immigrant (or
minority) numbers follows the vastly different conventions in each country
about collecting population data. On this basis, ‘integration’ - if it is so
named - can only be quantified in the normatively specific and
nationally-rooted terms that are set up by the individual national research
technologies themselves. This is the basic constraint which limits the
construction of survey-based knowledge in the field: the difficulties of
collecting meaningful cross-national data will be at the root of the many
problems with which scholars will have to engage at some point in the future.[48]
As soon as anyone looks at the question from this level, it becomes apparent
just how much even the basic elements of comparison - how we categorise the
populations themselves - are incommensurable in terms of the ways different
nation-states gather data on migrants and minorities. Some use censuses, some
do not; and censuses use very different classification schemes, ranging from
ethnic self-identification through parental country of origin and rates of
naturalisation to only registering those classified as non-nationals in the
country. Who, then, or what are we talking about? ‘Ethnic minorities’;
‘immigrants’; ‘aliens’; ‘foreigners’; ‘non-nationals’; ‘third country
nationals’? Do these groups self-select their identity or are these identities
objectively imposed by some family link, or by phenotypic category? What of
mixed, ambiguous identities, or dual-nationalities and citizenships?[49]
Even an independently constructed survey - if it has to work with official data
of any kind - will find itself limited to a given external ‘sampling frame’,
which embodies the nation-state structuring influences embedded in the way any
state counts, classifies and controls its population. Nothing whatsoever is
agreed on by researchers or state agencies pursuing these questions in the vast
numbers of studies on the question across Europe; and these basic difficulties
only multiply as the questions move to asking the opinions, feelings or
affiliations of particular populations, or how their behaviour, actions and
choices relate to the so-called ‘norms’ of the majority population.
Of course, survey works of this kind are
also invariably contextually-aware interventions into an ongoing domestic
policy debate, which seek to affirm or transform certain assumptions about the
correct currency of the debate. Because they are high-brow, scientific works,
they often carry enormous prestige and weight; in this sense, they are much
more significant than the academic fields of comparative politics and public policy
which are often precariously journalistic in their approaches. Crucially, also
the work reflects the actual mechanical and material apparatus for conducting
this kind of work, something which in some places has recently become possible
through the adaptation of national census production, for example, to allow for
sensitivity to ethnic minority monitoring and analysis.[50]
Again, it cannot be stressed enough how important these material conditions of
production are in determining the shape of the final work, which also
critically reflect the current social coalition between different
policy-interested actors who might be interested in the ‘objective’ and
‘scientific’ findings of a large scale survey project. Although survey work is
invariably inspired or forced as a ‘progressive’ reaction to some current
perceived social crisis or danger, it is highly significant that they are
almost always conducted under these hot and pressing conditions: recent high
profile studies on Islam and fundamentalism indicate what a dangerous fertile
ground this is for sensationalist work.[51]
Quality newspapers, in particular, love this kind of work when it produces
shocking or anxiety inducing ‘facts’ from a research project of the kind which,
by definition, everyday journalism is unable to mount.[52]
Yet as with policy and public funding elsewhere, scholars often enter into a
Faustian pact when they sign up to do this kind of research work with
heteronomous production and publication conditions attached.
The inevitable transatlantic influence
felt on research on integration policy has also been felt on the shaping of
survey-based research in
The somewhat old-fashioned sound of the
idea of assimilation is not at all reflected in the technology of research to
be found in
This was the background to the
controversies surrounding the report by Michèle Tribalat and associates, a
major empirical survey of the assimilation of immigrants in
The Tribalat report and its methods has
had a significant influence on work in other countries: French style work is in
this sense a lot closer to the basic methods of survey work being done across
Europe than British methods. A good example is the enormous scale survey
project being conducted by Ron Lesthaege (1997) at the VUB, focusing on the
socialisation to ‘western’ norms of the Moroccan and Turkish population in
Belgium (in particular women), again with the significant blessing, funding and
technical support of the various Belgian states.[62]
What is noticeable here is not the weaker assumptions about integration or
socialisation, but the much weaker nation-state policy context for interpreting
the findings of this work, which have focused on gender differences and the
still significant integration gap between these ethnic populations and the
Belgian population.[63]
This offers potentially a very different type of policy context to France,
given that no intellectual production in Belgium can comfortably fit within any
one single policy framework or definition of integration, let alone a single
unitary idea about the nation-state into which immigrants might be imagined to
integrate. Integration rather has always been a field of conflictual positions
in Belgium, which habitually imports its more grandiose conceptual vocabulary
from the French, but which then faces significant differences in
interpretations in the Walloon and Flemish communities (who themselves often
look to the Dutch), and more local differentiations at regional, city, even
commune level. The absence of the nation-state context means that the norms of
socialisation being identified as the gold standard of immigrant behaviour are
simply generic ‘western norms’.
In the Belgian context, the really
critical question is the language use of immigrants in relation to integration:
crucially, of course, in the bi-lingual capital itself, Brussels, where it is
thought that immigrants opting to learn French or Flemish might tip the
political balance in the city one way of the other. Work on this question is
highly controversial in
Across the water in Britain, it comes as
no surprise to find integration research significantly out of step with the
rest of mainland Europe. Britain identified its ‘race relations’ problematic at
an early stage with that of the native black population in the US, and the
evolution of what might be called ‘multicultural race relations’ has been
shaped ever since by this self-assimilation to a part (but not all) of the US
example. Immigration control, on the other hand, is a different matter
entirely, and many of Britain’s biggest problems today derive from the fact its
thinking on this question has very little in it to deal with the challenges of
new migration and the global refugee crisis in the 1980s and 90s.[67]
Race relations, on the other hand, is widely perceived to be one of the great
liberal success stories of the post-war period, and - relative to the
perception of ethnic dilemmas in ‘Europe’ - something on which ministers,
activists and ethnic minority members alike can agree to affirm as something
the British do best. Not surprisingly, then, there is a strong degree of
proselytism whenever academics or policy specialists cross the channel to give
advice to their mainland European counterparts.
The message is that Britain does it
differently, and hence it has its own state-of-the-art survey on integration,
which offers a deep contrast in methodology and rhetoric to that of the
Tribalat report: The Ethnic Minorities in
Britain survey, published in 1997. Reports such as this have been made by
the influential Policy Studies Institute on a decade by decade basis, and offer
a distinct picture from the kinds of official census and survey material
produced by the state, QUANGOs (Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental
Organisations) such as the CRE (the Commission for Racial Equality, which
‘regulates’ the implementation and progress of race relations laws), or
clientalist pressure groups such as the Runnymede Trust. This slightly
subversive role is underlined by the fact that this latest report was headed by
Tariq Modood, who has played quite a significant role in what can be looked at
in hindsight as the break-up of ethnic and racial studies in Britain, partly
under the challenge new ethnic questions have brought to the dominant race
relations establishment.[68]
The PSI is also notable as one of a battery of new-left think tank groups that
have risen to prominence in the 1990s, and which now have a strong presence in
the policy circles of the current government. The report therefore offers a
distinct perspective on the key successes and deficiencies of British
‘multicultural race relations’ that stands at a certain distance from current
orthodoxies. It is thus a highly self-aware work: knowing its place in a long
canon of similar national studies, and its take on the often temperamental
debates about multiculturalism and anti-racism in
What this reflects is a reluctance to
move outside of a framework in which
What is perhaps remarkable is that other
smaller European states seem to be following the neo-nationalist response of
The
Dutch, however, do have something in common with the French and the British on
this point. They too are fiercely convinced of the superiority of their
national political model and the kinds of characteristic policy methods that follow
from this. This may be characteristic of the post-colonial condition, or indeed
of countries that have not had to see themselves on the losing, ‘bad guys’ side
of the century’s wars in
Crucially, within this nation-state
sponsored picture, the status and power of immigrants gets measured entirely in
terms of a social mobility relative to norms of integration into the nation-society,
or average national social mobility paths; yet, it is increasingly normal to
think of elites in these countries as becoming more and more transnational in
their roles, influence and trajectories.
Directions
for future research
Comparative research on integration
processes and integration policy in
First of all, it needs be pointed out
that a precondition for any new research is that some solutions to the dilemmas
outlined at the preliminary stage - i.e., in this paper - must now be found.
These questions require detailed expert debate by all concerned. We need to
determine a common set of categories for identifying migrants or minorities
across
Stage one of the research proper must be
the gathering of existing research on the question. Obviously, this paper is a
step in this direction, which indicates the degree to which most existing
studies have to be processed through an interpretative key of this kind, in
order to understand how and why they have been written. This key is essential
if we are to unlock and re-use the best existing national studies. These can be
found, but they always need ‘translating’. However, in all the countries in
question data exists on the numbers and concentration of migrants and minority
groups, their social and political organisation, their political behaviour and
access to existing political channels and so on.
Stage two must be the determining of what
it is we want to compare and explain: our dependent variable. Much normatively
directed work pitches this in a vague, indeterminate way: it seeks to compare
levels of ‘citizenship’, ‘democracy’ or ‘civil society’, as if were in fact
possible to measure these notions in an open-minded enough way, that did not
already expert certain conditions to be fulfilled before the normative category
can be said to be achieved. These concepts are also too often bound up with
normative ideas about nation-building and the progress of national societies;
they are too ideologically loaded. Narrower studies, however, such as those
which seek to measure the degree of formal rights or the amount of formal
legislation protecting migrants or minorities, are too literal, reproducing a
certain kind of highly organised, top-down state perspective in their analysis.
The key measure for political integration should be something in between,
something linked to participation and the mobilisation of groups. The important
thing will be to stress that it is not just the quantity of participation that
needs measuring, but its quality: the degree to which migrant groups actually
manage to influence political outcomes (whether it is influence on policy
outcome, influence over agenda-setting or issue-definition, or indeed faces in
parties or public positions). In other words, we must look for a measure of
their relative social power in specific contexts.
Stage three is the measuring of the
dependent variable in different national situations, in order to set up a cross-national
research question and identify the key possible independent variables
(explanatory factors) that might be causing variance in outcomes in different
contexts. Almost any stance on measurement here will contain a bias towards
either disorganised libertarian states (measurements indicating degrees of
freedom from state control for groups), or highly organised state-centred
approaches towards integration (measurements indicating degrees of formal
protection and policy for groups). It is here, then, that I suggest a rather
idiosyncratic trick to make comparison in the European context possible. This
is to instead assume that all the states in Europe we are interested in are
roughly equivalent in the degree of integration they enable, and that what is more
important is to not to classify them as better or worse, but to compare the
different ways in which they frame the question and seek to achieve it in
practice. This move is in effect like creating a ‘G7’ of ‘integration nations’
who, as in the real G7, have different GDPs and degrees of economic
performance, but who within this set of nations are nevertheless considered
equals, with an equal status in the select group of developed, industrially
advanced states. If, then, we take our ‘integration nations’ as essentially
equal members of a select group - within which it is absurd to impose a
hierarchy of advancedness - what we are left measuring is not absolute variance
but rather qualitative variance across cases. Although this means we will not
be able find out whether France is ‘better’ than Italy or Britain ‘better’ than
Germany in their treatment of immigrants, the exercise may - via a series of
paired bi-lateral comparisons - enable us to identify what is good and bad in a
particular country’s policies of integration relative to another.[73]
If we then take on board the assumption that there is a kind of policy
convergence going on across all these states, it may be possible to synthesise
from across the various comparisons a set of ‘best practices’ that take the
best of each.
Stages four would move on from this
logical design to practical questions of what the unit of comparison will be
across nations (i.e., at what level it should take place). Too many studies in
the past have compared immigration politics or policies of integration using
the general ‘institutional’ features of national political systems. Although
initially productive, this is now leading to repetitive and moribund research,
that reproduces national stereotypes and assumptions about the nation-state. It
is also often normatively biased in favour of state-centred policy approaches.
My suggestion would be that the city is far better unit of comparison, a level
for studying political integration which enables both contextual specificity
and structural comparisons that allow for the fact that immigrant integration
might be influenced simultaneously by local, national and transnational
factors. From this we can move to the selection itself of cities and immigrant
groups for study. Here, a good deal of existing descriptive work exists that
has already generated information and data about indicators of the independent
variables that explain differences across cities and there would seem no reason
why research cannot build on these studies, and develop a more extensive range
of studies of migrant political integration in European cities.[74]
It is suggested, then, that a simple work
through a step-by-step research design process such as this, may in fact help
clarify how more effective cross-national comparative research on integration
might be possible. It may indeed also be possible to envisage this kind
research drawing conclusions about which are the more effective means of
political integration of migrants and minorities found across Europe, as well
as a sense of the specific problems that nation state policies have generated
in their progressive attempts to build distinctive national ‘philosophies of
integration’. With this kind of procedure, it may even be possible to envisage the derivation of normative statements
or guidelines of the kind that I have sought to eliminate from the research
process throughout this study. It is in this way, I argue, that social
scientific research on integration may be able to redefine an autonomous role
for itself in the policy making and politics of integration currently troubling
so many European states.
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[1] This chapter is a shortened version of a
60 page report presented to the Carnegie Comparative Citizenship Project in
1999. The longer version will be available as a working paper. My argument owes
a great deal to the many informal conversations I have had with friends and colleagues
on the subject, and their own views of the academic research field in which we
work. In particular, I would like to acknowledge discussions with Karen Phalet
(Utrecht), Virginie Guiraudon (CNRS, Lille), Cristiano Codagnone (Bocconi,
Milano), Patrick Simon (INED, Paris), Michael Bommes (Osnabrück), Dirk Jacobs
and Hassan Bousetta (KUBrussel), Marco Martiniello (Liège), and Ruba Salih,
Bruno Riccio and others at the Sussex Centre for Migration Research, that have
helped me piece together different parts of the argument presented here. The
revised version benefited greatly from discussions with colleagues at the
original Carnegie meeting in Lisbon in June 1999; a meeting of ‘hard-core’
survey-based social mobility researchers at the European Science Foundation/European
Consortium for Sociological Research conference in Sept 1999 at Obernai on
‘Migration and ethnic relations in Europe’, organised by Hartmut Esser; and, in
the same week, a much more qualitative, anthropological conference of the ESRC Transnational
Communities programme, organised at Sussex. I am also grateful for an
invitation to discuss the work in progress at the Ethnobarometer conference at
Castel Gandolfo, Rome, in June 1999, and to Michèle Lamont, Will Kymlicka,
Rainer Bauböck, Pnina Werbner, Thomas Faist, Stephen Castles, Yngve Lithman,
Tariq Modood and the editors for their suggestions, and/or early sight of new
or unpublished research.
[2] Although much needs to be said about the
selective way I use their work, my approach is influenced by the idea of
reflexive sociology developed by Pierre Bourdieu, and expounded by Loïc
Wacquant. See their discussion of methodology in Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992,
and 1999, their entertaining polemic on anglo-american approaches to race and
multiculturalism.
[3]
Various authors offer useful checklists of these kinds of policies, rights or
incorporation regimes: see Kymlicka, 1995, pp. 37-38; Soysal, 1994, pp. 79-82;
Guiraudon, 1997, p. 25; Vertovec, 1997,
pp. 61-62.
[4]
Britain has essentially worked within an ‘integration’ framework since Roy
Jenkins’ famous speech of 1966 (quoted and discussed in Favell, 1998a, pp.
104ff). For reasons of political distinction, many anti-racist commentators
rejected the term from the seventies onwards, and the term is still seen by
some as having a vaguely ‘incorrect’ air about it. It remains, however, widely
used in political discussions, and is enjoying an academic comeback. French
policy intellectuals constructed a conceptual consensus on ‘intégration’ in the
mid to late 1990s, charting it as a consensus term, although it is still
sometimes used interchangeably with ‘assimilation’ or ‘insertion’. The Dutch
have similarly converged on it in the 1990s, as a reaction against excessive
cultural differentialism in their original ‘pillars-based’ approach. Belgians,
meanwhile, on both sides of the country, refer to the term as the natural goal
of social policies, although they may differ in the details of its application,
according to which of the French or ‘Anglo’ influences is uppermost. Elsewhere,
in Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Italy or Spain, the word is
currently widely used in the same self-evident way.
[5]
It is, of course, significant that the nightmare scenario of the sociological
‘sub-conscious’ should be the anarchic, individualistic one (this reflects the
dominantly Americanised nature of our thinking about society without
integration), rather than other states of nature, whether dystopian (the
Freudian primordialism behind civilisation), or utopian (the Lockean
spontaneous community; or the Rousseauian and Marxist sense of man in nature
before alienation, for example).
[6]
It may not be as fashionable as it once was in the sixties, but older
sociological discussions on integration theories versus conflict/power theories
of society are still the essential intellectual backdrop for these discussions.
A good selection of debates about Parsons and the Hobbesian dilemma, including
contributions by Lockwood, Rex and Giddens, can be found in Worsley, 1970; see
also Haferkamp and Smelser, 1992, and Alexander’s, 1987, discussion of Rex.
Only German sociology on migration continues to reflect these absolutely
fundamental questions; without it, a lot of discussions of ‘integration’ are
hopelessly superficial in nature. My own understanding of the question owes
most to the teaching of Pizzorno: see, e.g., 1991.
[7]
Of which the most influential public theory is that of Rawls 1971, 1993, and
followers: see Mulhall and Swift, 1992,
and Kymlicka, 1989, for the essentials of how this way of thinking is
applied to questions of integration/citizenship. What is most significant is
that the great German inheritor of the social theoretical tradition, Habermas,
has now himself converged with the Rawlsian normative paradigm: see Habermas
1995, 1996; Rawls, 1995. His constitutional patriotism is the epitome of the
kind of left-liberal collapsing of social theory and sociology into normative
political philosophy, which is characteristic of so much current reflection on
the subject. Symptoms of the normative urge for usefulness that drives most
studies are the fact that many of the most significant commentators actually
come from a philosophical background (i.e., Kymlicka, Bauböck, Modood), and
that in the current climate, many of the best empirical commentators, such as
Stephen Castles, invariably frame their work in normative terms and concerns
about citizenship or democracy (i.e., Castles and Davidson, 1999). See my
discussion of the transatlantic field of multicultural citizenship in Favell,
1999.
[8]
The development of British ethnic and racial studies is here a case in point.
Earlier studies were inspired by one of two things. The first came out of an
activist anti-racist tradition, mediated through a critical Marxist or
Marxist-Weberian sociological perspective. It began as a critical current,
which over time increasingly became co-opted into official policy circles and
semi-autonomous research institutes, keen to use academic work in the
development of British race relations, creating in the process a ‘canon’ of
policy-relevant sociological research. The influence of John Rex (i.e., 1967,
1970) was paramount, and the evolution of the field can indeed be traced
through the numerous people who followed his work (or, indeed, worked with him),
only to then build their own distinctive positions through criticism and
rejection of it (Robert Miles, Robert Moore, Sally Tomlinson, John Stone,
Malcolm Cross, John Solomos, John Wrench, Harry Goulbourne, Tariq Modood, Steve
Vertovec). Other influential early constructions of the empirical subject were
the work of Michael Banton, director of the first officially funded research
centre at Bristol, which afterwards moved to Aston, then Warwick (Banton 1955,
1967), the Institute of Race Relations’ seminal report Colour and Citizenship (Rose, 1969), and the anthropological
collection of studies on different ethnic groups in Britain, Between Two Cultures (Watson, 1977).
Reading some of these studies as historical milestones, it is striking how the
construction of data and concepts about migration and settlement of post-war
immigrants to Britain in the early period resembles much of the work being done
now elsewhere in Europe. Solomos/Back, 1996, is a useful guide to the evolution
of British work on race and racism from this point on, offering an intelligent
defence of why British work evolved in this way, as well as a internal guide to
a field symptomatically limited to British-centric notions and debates. A
second current of work, which almost had a separate but much more international
life to it, was that based on Marxist political economy, epitomised by
Castles/Kosack’s, 1972, unsurpassed early comparative study of migrant workers
in Europe. Although a major breakthrough in the formulation of international
questions, the work had probably more impact outside of Britain and outside the
sub-field of race relations, and was an approach left behind to some extent by
its authors at a later stage. The cultural turn of the early 1980s, revealed
‘new racism’, and gave rise to a new generation of critical works using
cultural studies approaches which attacked the canon above, but did not break
out of its British-centric limitations. Central to this were the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1992, Paul Gilroy, 1987, and, above all, Stuart
Hall (see: Hall, 1995). The rise of cultural studies - alongside the new and
highly politicised gender and identity based studies of race and ethnicity -
has fragmented and all-but-destroyed the original sociological foundations of
the field in Britain (although Rex continues to be a key figure in countries
with strong sociological traditions such as German). The story of the rise and
fall of the Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations (CRER) at Warwick - which
split along exactly these lines - crystallises this intellectual genesis. The
centre was initially headed by Rex and nurtured many of the leading figures
mentioned above. However, caught between its growing policy-oriented role and
the increasing radicalisation of cultural studies approaches, the centre fell
apart in the mid 1990s. The centre has tried to find a new research identity
through Europeanising itself on the new comparative (and EU funded) wave - as
so many other research centres have done - but is a now a shadow of its former
importance. Cultural studies approaches, meanwhile, thrive everywhere in
Britain, with little or no connection to other current European or North
American work in the field. These approaches are, of course, useless for policy
purposes, but they have become an extremely strong form of academic production
because of their fashionable ability to cross-over outside of academia into the
urban lifestyle markets. English language publishing houses such as Routledge
have thus had a dramatic effect in the redefining and hollowing out of
sociology as a discipline, as it dilutes further into cultural, media,
communication, gender, identity, etc studies. This process is exacerbated by
the increasingly market-oriented dynamics of university teaching, which force
syllabi to compete for students with fashionable subjects that focus on
students’ own identity concerns and lifestyle preferences. Self-styled marginal
and radical approaches have thus ironically, in the current British
professorial generation, become the complacent mainstream. As academics are
increasingly forced to compete for policy research money as part of
international research networks, it is likely that the cultural studies
approached will fade again, in proportion to the growing demand for credible
comparative work - in a more ‘conventional’ social scientific style - on the
subject. In this sense, work will have to return to re-considering some of the
discarded ways of the past, and may in fact prove to be case of ‘back to the
future’. This is quite the reverse of what British academics on the subject
like to think - that it is the rest of Europe which is ‘behind’ in its
understanding of race/ethnic relations.
[9]
The return of T.H.Marshall, 1950, to everyone’s theoretical agenda after the post-1989
collapse of the Marxist paradigm (which left the left looking around for a new
one...), is emblematic of this ‘progressive, but constructive’ turn amongst
scholars. No matter how false his theory can be shown to be, or how limited it
is to British history (see Mann, 1988), it nevertheless still offers a richly
performative theoretical framework, which continues to inspire positive minded
academics trying to reconcile the normative and the historical/explanatory, and
work with a rights and citizenship idiom (see Bulmer and Rees, 1996). The
intellectual trajectory of a certain Anthony Giddens is indicative on this
point: from post-Marxist critical social theorist, to court intellectual and
Marshallian apologist of the ‘third way’.
[10]
The cue again comes from earlier developments in the US. See, for example, the
work of Glazer, 1983, as an indication of how research and policy concerns
about integration have come to shadow each other so closely, in this case, in
the work of one of the US’s leading experts on race and immigration.
[11]
Some of the key defining contributions include Turner, 1993; Kymlicka and
Norman, 1994; Habermas, 1992; see articles collected in van Steenburgen, 1994,
and Beiner, 1998. What is more sinister, perhaps, is how closely these academic
concerns shadow the fashion for talking about citizenship in public policy
debates in the 1980s and 90s, in Britain, France, the Netherlands and
elsewhere. This co-opted use of the idiom surely collapses a great deal of the
critical distance needed to question why ‘citizenship’, and why ‘now’?
[12]
This is the continuation of the basic liberal conundrum of the post war period,
whether we think of Marshall or Dahrendorf or Rawls: of how to reconcile de facto inequality and the persistence
of dramatic social distinctions - and the threat of destructive social conflict
over this - with the idea of a classless, just, welfare-state based society.
The Rawlsian form of ‘solution’ has been the triumphant default theoretical
position of the current period: full citizenship with equal rights plus
equality of opportunity, but individual freedom and any unequal distribution
that remains compatible with these conditions (Rawls, 1971). As a legitimising
philosophy it continues to hold firm in post-war western societies - thanks
usually to a strong dose of nationalism and ‘solidarity’, and continued
economic growth. In his later work, 1993, Rawls has then gone on to apply the
same method to the reconciliation of cultural pluralism with liberal principles
of freedom and equality. Lukes, 1985, offers an sympathetic but acute analysis
of the seismic paradigm shift - and new moral engagement - that intellectuals
have taken in leaving behind Marx for contemporary liberal political theory.
[13]
On this point, the historical work of Mann, 1988, 1993, seems most pertinent:
in showing how the recent modern nation state has emerged to prominence, and
its necessary presence in any meaningful thinking about citizenship.
[14]
Normative European Union studies are often characterised by this projection of
the EU as in a state of becoming, in which citizenship and other nation-state
functions can be redefined at a supra-national level: see Meehan, 1993; Weiler,
1998; Wiener, 1997, for some of the most influential formulations.
[15]
A similar discussion of the misleading consequences of the ‘common sense’ in
migration research - which is archetypally founded on an unexamined conception
of integration and an idea of sociology as dedicated to rectifying inequality,
is to be found in Bommes, 1998, a brilliant sketch of the intellectual
parameters of current research, which mainly discusses the most important work
going on in Germany.
[16]
A story told in Bulmer’s, 1984, work on the Chicago School. See also
Ballis-Lal, 1990.
[17]
Classic texts by Burgess or Park are still the founding stones of urban
ethnography and urban cultural studies. It was the Chicago school
characterisation of migrant newcomers in Northern cities, assimilating via a
step-by-step process of contact-conflict-accommodation-change, that provided
scholars everywhere with the problematic of ethnic conflict leading to
integration (or disintegration), and its ideal-type teleology. The connection
with Parsonian forms of thinking about society and norms is made clear in
Glazer, 1976, to which Parsons contributes, alongside Gordon, whose work (i.e.,
1964) offered the definitive sociological model of societal assimilation in the
American context. This awareness of the underlying assimilatory motion of
American society is currently being revived in new work by Alba and associates,
1997.
[18]
Glazer, 1999, makes the case for regarding the US as an exceptional case;
Joppke, 1999, meanwhile, does a good job of relating the US to Europe, as part
of a skilful asymmetrical comparison of the US, Germany and Britain. One of the
key theoretical references used on both sides of the Atlantic, Kymlicka, 1995,
also explores in detail the conceptual differences between native or national
minorities and ethnically diverse immigrant populations, drawing important
normative conclusions for citizenship from the distinction.
[19]
For example in the classic ‘civic culture’ literature of the 1950s and 60s, in
which the
[20]
I discuss the underlying origins of concerns expressed by, for example, Bellah
et al, 1985, Schlesinger, 1992, Putnam, 1993, in Favell, 1998b, linking them to
the re-emergent transatlantic citizenship research agenda. A slightly different
aspect of the new Europhilia among American Europeanists is the wave of
interest in European Union studies. This is also an institutionalist movement
in significant respects, but it draws strength from the obvious attraction of
American academics for the EU as a kind of cosmopolitan, post-national project
- something doubtful in the actual workings and dynamics of the EU.
[21]
The two pioneering European works in this respect were Hammar’s early work,
1985, and Castles et al, 1984.
[22]
On this, see the pioneering work of Brubaker, 1992, and the original collection
of scholars he put together, 1989. The involvement of Hammar, 1990, was also
crucial.
[23]
The best overview of the ‘research programme’ is offered in the collection by
Joppke, 1998.
[24]
For example, the now tediously well-trodden distinction between ‘civic’
[25]
See, for example, Freeman, 1995, Guiraudon, 1997, 1998, Feldblum, 1999, Favell,
1997. Joppke, 1999, is another example. This latest study, which sits at the
end of a decade of such work, illustrates an emerging problem in this public
policy-focused scholarship: that it can be done entirely through the discussion
of secondary political debates and attendant scholarship, that talks about
immigration, citizenship and integration issues with little or no focus on the
immigrant groups themselves, actual migration patterns or theories of
migration. By way of contrast, see the comparative policy framework set up from
a bottom-up perspective (using migration patterns, post-industrial
transformation and urban theory as the starting point) by migration scholars,
Carmon, 1996, Marcuse, 1996, and Weiner, 1996, in Carmon, 1996.
[26]
Good examples are the arguments put forward by Lapeyronnie, 1992; and Schain,
1999.
[27]
Ireland’s, 1994 comparison of different cities in France and Switzerland was a
major breakthrough; see also Bousetta, 1997, 1999; and work under the MOST
project, headed amongst others by Vertovec, 1999; and Kastoryano, 1997.
[28]
In its most well-known formulation by Soysal, 1994.
[29]
Janoski and Glennie (1995) looked at the extension of naturalisation rights in
this light, followed by Janoski’s monumental synthesis of citizenship rights
and incorporation indices (1998), which build on Esping-Anderson (1990).
[30]
See for example the work of Alund/Schierup, 1993, Martiniello, 1992, Rath,
1991, Favell, 1998a, Blommaert and Verschueren, 1998, Castles, 2000. The
‘paradoxes of multiculturalism’ these authors identify is linked to the fact
that in each case the society incorrectly assumes it can seize itself from
above as a collectivity and change itself through new hierarchical structures
(policy, law, etc) alone. This ‘minorisation’ where it occurs, as Rath calls
it, also typically has significant perverse effects. For example,
institutionalising policies also enables the policy sector to be seized by
other policy actors for their own social power struggles: hence, the pervasive
and distorting presence of go-between advocates and co-opted ethnic mnority
leaders in the ‘representation’ of minority or migrant interests.
[31]
The massive readership of Kymlicka’s work, 1995, is of course the most dramatic
instance of this. Also, the work of Taylor, 1992, has been read widely outside
of philosophical circles. See the collection of articles in Beiner, 1998, for
the state-of-the-art, with a Canadian slant. Kymlicka is exceptional among the
leading philosophical voices in translating his work into genuinely
policy-directed applications, going on to do reports on integration for the
Canadian government, 1998, and also reflecting on the applications to minority
rights questions elsewhere, such as Eastern European.
[32]
By no means certain that this is true: the most genuinely ‘multicultural’ societies
(in terms of cultural exchange and conflict not structured uniquely by a
dominant nation-state) historically have been within non-democratic ‘empires’:
see discussion in Brubaker, 1995, and Grillo, 1998. This, at least, becomes a
possibility as a result of the power-based conceptualisation of multicultural
relations of exchange that I work with, once it is detached from the
nation-state-society integration framework. Another consequence is that this
realisation also pushes most conventional liberal-democrats back to a
straightforward defence of the (in fact) assimiliatory nation-state as the
grounding for liberal philosophies of justice, equality or ‘cultural
pluralism’: a sample of such ‘honest’ forms of liberalism are Kymlicka, 1995;
Miller, 1995; Goulbourne, 1991; Crowley 1998; Hansen 1998; Weil 1996.
[33]
Countless examples of negative comments about other countries’ approaches
and/or flattering self-comparisons could be found in official British, French,
Dutch or Scandinavian policy statements and formulations. This is much less the
case in countries which, for a variety of reasons, are more self-questioning or
angst-ridden about their own national ‘philosophies of integration’: such as
Germany, Belgium or Italy. Intellectuals in these countries are also often
spectacularly critical and damning about their own country’s policy
shortcomings on immigration and integration. In Italy and Belgium, indeed,
intellectual ‘despair’ is almost the national sport.
[34]
See work by Bleich, 1998; and Hansen, 1997. The theoretical paradigm for
thinking about the role of ideas in policy making was developed by Peter Hall,
1993, who has been involved as supervisor in a number of the more recent
contributions to the comparative immigration politics field.
[35]
I discuss the pathologies associated with Britain’s self-assimilation of its
race relations paradigm with America’s in Favell, 1998a, pp. 121-4.
[36]
The Carnegie Endowment, the Ford Foundation, the Marshall Fund and others, have
all got involved in funding large cross-Atlantic research projects on
immigration/citizenship/ethnic relations in recent years, and there has never
been such a level of transatlantic policy consultation on the subject. The
collection Cornelius et al (1994) was a typical example of the products of these
initiatives. A good example of the asymmetry involved is the Metropolis
project, funded copiously by the Canadian government on one side, but with
scant resources on the European side. What is troubling are the slightly warped
reasons why academics get involved in these kinds of activities, which are
financially rewarding, but do not entail real influence on the policy process,
and can only be a diversion from pure academic research. On the other side, it
is very unclear how and where their involvement can get translated, say, into
Canadian city urban policy, even allowing for the fact that something might be
learned from, say, looking descriptively at Dutch social policies or British
race relations jurisprudence (which is not clear). In recent times the Canadian
civil servants have been trying to control the output of Metropolis more
strictly: but this then decreases the side benefits for other research that
academics themselves may get from involvement in such projects. Another
excellent example of a reverse, but equally distorted, transatlantic learning
process is the fascination many left-wing American social scientists have for
Swedish and Dutch social and welfare policies, such as the regulation of
sex-work. This might be called the ‘Amsterdam’ phenomenon: being attracted by
something very ‘liberal’ - that is in fact unrepresentative of the way these
highly controlled, conservative societies function as social systems - and
using it as a ‘social policy other’ in order to derive normative conclusions for
one’s own society. The phenomenon also often works in reverse: Europeans using
America as a negative dystopian ‘other’. A good example has been the follow-up
research to the Modood report (discussed below), the best recent research
project on immigrant social mobility in Britain. Instead of pursuing the much
needed but difficult path of cross-national European comparison, the authors
have instead opted to make a comparison of the findings with the US. It is very
hard to see how this work will avoid the usual asymmetric distortions that
render this kind of comparison hugely problematic. And, as might be expected,
the first media reports of this ambitious new project (The Guardian, Aug 4th 1999) immediately saw the Brits claiming how
successful some ethnic minorities in Britain are when compared to the black
American population, despite the blatant inappropriateness of the analogy.
[37] The TSER project ended up funding an
impressive array of projects (either as full cross-national projects or funded
international networks) that emerged from an intense bidding war among rival
European academic networks. These included subjects such as police cooperation
and immigration control (headed by Didier Bigo), immigrants and the informal
economy (Kloosterman/Rath), migrants in cities (Cross), models of European
citizenship (Bellamy), and comparative integration policies (Heckmann). This
latter, a large project located at the University of Bamberg
(http://www.uni-bamberg.de/efms) is symptomatic of some of the limitations of this
predominantly descriptive and documentary, network-based research. Its findings
are still very much located in the mainstream ‘comparative models’ approach,
something determined by the fact each network has to have a well-known national
representative (in this case, for example, Dominique Schnapper for France, Han
Entzinger for Netherlands) who are likely to have the most conventional
national viewpoints (because the best known figures are policy academics), and
the fact selection of projects also is made by similarly established
nation-by-nation figures. The brief spurt of EU funding for these subjects may,
however, be drying up. The new Framework V has dramatically pulled back from
funding further work on immigration/integration/exclusion questions - perhaps
reflecting the specific aim of national governments to stop or gain control
over discretionary spending by the Commission on research and funding NGOs, in
policy sectors where there are no clear competencies at the EU level.
[38]
The prolific output of the Migration Policy Group, a tiny but very influential
NGO in Brussels is a case in point. For two major examples of the projects they
have mounted on citizenship and integration questions, see MPG, 1996; and the
Vermeulen report, 1997, in collaboration with the Institute for Migration and
Ethnic Studies, Amsterdam. The first was a massive synthesis of roundtable
discussions conducted with policy makers in five west European countries, and
further handful of east European countries; the second, a five nation survey of
the different integration strategies and policies being used for integration
policies, language, schooling and cultural organisation (in France, Britain,
Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands).
[39]
The MPG report, 1996, offers evidence of and normative arguments for
convergence (as does the Heckmann project discussed above); what is less clear
is whether this convergence comes about through policy learning, or
isomorphism, or simple a ‘garbage can’ choice of policy. Randall Hansen and
Patrick Weil, 2000, have been putting together a massive comparison of apparent
convergence in naturalisation/citizenship practices across western states,
under the benevolent funding of the German Marshall Fund - but what explains
this convergence? We should be suspicious of arguments which suggest it is
pulled by some rational ‘good’; as well of the functionalist consequences of
allowing comparative research to be pulled by the teleological idea of
harmonisation, that has always been a driving rationale for the reproduction of
European integration processes. See also Lapeyronnie’s, 1993, arguments about de facto policy convergence in
[40]
The best of its kind is the Bauböck report, 1994a, for the Council of Europe,
which is able to offer a much more panoramic and detached view that work
sponsored by EU institutions. This is an entirely conceptual work, which
succeeds in opening up migration and integration questions in
[41]
See the caustic account of these developments in Burgess, 1999, and
[42]
The background to this has been a series of large scale reports on
anti-discrimination provisions, and the attempt to rate existing provisions in
different countries. The early comparative report by Forbes and Mead, 1992,
explicitly sets up
[43]
Among the output has been perhaps the most ambitious comparative integration
project of all: the Çinar et al, 1995, project on ‘legal obstacles to
integration’, which puts together an index of legal and policy integration
provisions and barriers in seven countries and the EU (see Waldrauch and
Hofinger, 1997). This new concentration of legalistic knowledge offers a check
list of types of rights rated on a 0-1 scale, rating each country in term on
separate issues of naturalisation laws, family reunification, civil, political
and social rights, etc, giving each an overall final score between zero and
one. It remains to be seen what comes out of this work, although it is clear
that locally it could some impact on shaming the Austrian government vis-à-vis some of its European
partners, at a time when anti-immigration is high on the Austrian political
agenda. The final report is due in 2000. The search for overarching schemes of
comparing good practices on a common scale, often only confirms ‘national’
stereotypes, and ends up slanted towards more transparently ‘organised’,
rights-based, state-dominated societies (Austria does very badly; Britain does
less well than usual; the Dutch, French do better than the Germans and the
Swiss; and the Belgians rate surprisingly well - on paper...). Methodologically,
the weaknesses of this type of survey are linked to the weaknesses of
Eurobarometer type surveys discussed below.
[44]
The existing Eurobarometer surveys already contain questions on attitudes to
immigration and race, and questions related to citizenship and identity.
Indeed, one of the surveys (Eurobarometer 47.1, 1997) was devoted to these
question, sparking a whole new round of debate about the data and its dubious
methods of collection (particularly in Belgium which apparently had very high
levels of self-confessed racism!), but also launching a thousand research
projects base on explaining it. For example, around a dozen quantitative PhD
research projects are being coordinated on this and related projects by social
psychologist Peer Scheepers at
[45]
On questions of immigration and integration, a handful of leading academics -
with distinct power-bases in different universities - have vied for central
influence on policy making: among the leading figures are Han Entzinger (
[46]
See the quite superb work by various Dutch scholars on this subject, such as
Engbersen, 1996, and Burgers, 1998; Kloosterman, van der Leun and Rath, 1998;
and Rath and Kloosterman, 1998.
[47]
The OECD-SOPEMI reports, detailing the latest trends in international migration
(the latest was published in 1998), is the best we have got: these are based on
country-by-country reports, that are not always strictly compatible. Getting
actual comparative data on migration-related phenomena is immensely difficult,
and almost never convertible from one national context to another, given the
intensely political nature of the way data and knowledge is structured and
produced.
[48]
For my still incomplete understanding of these problems, I owe an enormous debt
of gratitude to social psychologist Karen Phalet. In collaboration with
quantitative political scientist, Swyngedouw, 1998, 1999a, 1999b, she is
developing a genuinely cross-national approach to survey work on integration
which may be able to side-step many of the nationally-bounded problems I
explore here on these questions.
[49]
I explore many of these issues about the construction of data and categories in
[50]
I discuss details of French, British, Dutch and Belgian data collection below.
As well as identifying and counting migrants or ethnic minorities, some census
collections incorporate specific samples of sub-populations for other
questions. One example is the longitudinal study in
[51]
The well-known example from Germany is the controversial study by Heitmeyer et
al, 1997, which asked young Turkish adolescents provocative questions about
their attitudes towards Islam, as ‘proof’ that their difficult social
circumstances were leading them towards dangerously militant forms of
fundamentalism.
[52]
Work such as this has indeed been frequently sponsored by newspapers such as Volkskrant in the
[53]
The historical work of Noiriel, 1988 - with its strong
[54]
For example, the unavoidable reference to Gordon, 1964. Gordon’s work and its
legacy is now being revived in the US by Alba and associates, 1997, and it is
to this work that the efforts of Tribalat and others in France should be
compared.
[55]
The first report of the series, Pour un
modèle français de l’intégration, written under the auspices of Jacqueline
Costa-Lascoux (see Haut Conseil à l’Intégration, 1993), constructed a survey
that was sent out to the town halls of some seventy three communes across
France, enquiring about general data on immigrants’ integration into norms of
national-belonging (appartenance),
family behaviour, social advancement, social involvement (sociabilité) (Favell, 1998a, pp. 72-4). This crude, politically
oriented survey provided the impetus for the much more scientific efforts of
INED and Tribalat’s research group.
[56]
See for example the ongoing work of Louis-André Vallet on immigrants in education
and Roxane Silberman on immigrants on the labour market, careful empirical work
which steers clear of the usual republican polemics, and has been developed
with an eye on comparative European social mobility research.
[57]
It should be stressed that this has not yet happened for the national census in
[58]
Tribalat, 1995; Tribalat et al, 1996.
[59]
For example, Champsaur, 1994.
[60]
The report was greeted with intense polemics in the press about its
methodology. It is difficult to reconcile the modesty of the methodological step
towards ‘ethnicity’ taken, with the spectacular intensity of its symbolic
significance. Across a variety of questions which cover attitudes and behaviour
on inter-ethnic marriage (a large part of the report), cultural orientation to
the homeland, language and the maintenance of traditional cultural practices,
housing concentration, intergenerational social mobility and labour market
access, and political participation and associational activity, the report
charts the socialization of France’s immigrants to national norms of the population de souche derived from a
control group of non-immigrant origin French. Its explicit aim, and its
empirical result, is to present positive findings about the ongoing success of
these processes in the light of a thus confirmed public theory and framework of
integration, understood as a sui generis
French national achievement. Such a picture offers no way of gauging how
migrant social trajectories might take creative or successful paths that are
not convergent with French norms and its bounded social context. Perhaps most
indicative of this is the key ‘exception’ to the findings of the report: that
there is one clear ethnic outlier to the generally positive assimilatory
progress of ethnic groups in
[61]
Despite its controversy, then, the report was received by many commentators as
proof that good old fashioned French republican assimilation was still working:
arch-republican Emmanuel Todd, for example, made much of its findings about
inter-marriage in
[62]
Lesthaege, 1997. Tribalat was, herself, an external advisor to this study.
[63]
A wealth of interesting work on
[64]
Another recent study by the Swyngedouw group (by Bousetta and Swyngedouw) found
that the granting of votes to non-national immigrants and resident Europeans in
Brussels (who are both assumed to be likely to vote Francophone rather than
Flemish) would not in all probability affect political results in the city. One
of the Flemish sponsors was not happy with these results and withdrew support,
which then jeopardised the continued funding of various other projects the
group had planned.
[65]
See Favell and Martiniello, 1999, on this.
[66]
This is one report which may lead on to something comparative - at least last
with the
[67]
The key thing about Britain is that (restrictive, culturally closed)
immigration control and (liberal, culturally open) race
relations/multiculturalism/integration are policy constructions conceived as
two separate questions with a different goal and logic (whereas they are one
and the same question everywhere else in Western Europe). They are, however,
inter-related: success with the latter (a more multi-cultural or multi-racial
[68]
See his earlier attacks on the ‘establishment’ in Modood, 1992, and, 1994,
based partly on experiences working within the ‘race relations industry’, in
which he upset many established dogmas by putting Asians, and then Pakistani
and Bangladeshi Muslims, on what had been up until then a black and white race
relations map. In her socio-psychological work on
[69]
The British construction of data on ethnic minorities here dictates a sampling
frame - and hence a construction of the integration problematic - which follows
the British convention of relativising more or less distinct ‘ethnic groups’
with one another (and, most importantly, an amorphous majority ‘white’ ethnic
group). In the British census and other official data gathering devices, each
individual questioned self-identifies with a given ethnic category, from which
wider patterns about groups are generated. In the Modood report, the
identification of the sample and the ‘ethnic’ self-categorisation questions,
follow generally the kinds of the categories created for the latest 1991
census, but also allow cross-checking with declared family origin, some
recognition of the problem of mixed-origin, and distinctions within groups
crudely clumped together in the official census. It limits itself only to
these,
[70]
An example is the impressive integration survey work by Justus Veenman and team
in
[71]
The new literature on transnationalism or post-national citizenship suggests
many ways in which thinking might go ‘beyond the nation-state’ but the often
celebratory style of much of this work rarely engages with the necessarily
structural questions about socialisation and the reproduction of social norms
that theories of integration raise. On transnationalism, see Basch et al, 1994,
Smith and Guarnizo, 1998, Portes, 1996 ; and on post-national citizenship, see
Soysal, 1994, or Bauböck, 1994b. However, Portes, the leading figure in the
study of transnationalism in the US, does indeed continue to ask the vital
‘integration’ questions about residential segregation, education, labour market
conditions and social mobility in the midst of work which emphasis the
transnational political, economic and cultural organisation of migrants (for
example, 1995, 1997). It is this line of work that needs exploring in the
European context: see Cross and Waldinger, 1999.
[72] One new hope for integration research in
Europe, is the new interest being shown in the subject by the European
Consortium for Sociological Research, led by John Goldthorpe and Robert
Erikson, whose work on Europe and North America remains the central reference
in comparative social mobility research (Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1992). Members
of this group, such as Hartmut Esser, Walter Müller and Anthony Heath, are now
showing an interest in similar comparative work in
[73]
This was in fact the research strategy I used in my study of
[74]
For example, the UNESCO-MOST project or the various reports produced by the
Metropolis project on migrants in cities (see Hjarnø, 1999). The former
project, which involves many of the best European researchers, produced a set
of city reports on the participation and representation of migrants in cities
that each followed a common template specifying indicators (for population
numbers, types of political organisation, channels of representation, etc). Two
excellent academic studies which follow the kind of strategy suggested here are
those by