Christian Joppke

Civic Integration Policies Reviewedion in Western Europe:

National Models v. Policy Convergence

Since the late 1990s,This article reviews“civic integration”has become the dominant immigrant integration policypolicies for immigrants in Western Europe.Even Switzerland, with its policy ofFördernund Fordern, has partaken in theis trend. There has been a debate among scholars whether the new policy is convergent across states or whether it merely prolongs, under different name, established “national models” of integration. I offer two arguments in favor of policy convergence. First, extant policy variation, which of course exists, runsoften runs counter to traditional “national model” expectations. Secondly, the few national-model type variations that you may stillmayfindbe foundareismore with respect to the form notthan the substance of policy.

Since the late 1990s, “civic integration” policies for immigrants have been adopted by most Western European statesThis article reviews civic integration policies for immigrants in Western Europe. The novelty of the policy seems to be at least twofold. First, integration is no longer left to the free play of society`s institutions, such as labor market or education, but is attempted to be brought under conscious, concerted state control. In thisat respect, civic integration is tantamount to the rise of state-led integration as such, replacing a previous rein of laissez-faire, (complemented by mainlyostly local interventions). Secondly, civic integration combines measures that further the integration of immigrants with their selection and control, so thatl—in a nutshell, integration and immigration policy are no longer separate domains.

There have been several lines of debate surrounding the new policy. One has been normative, asking whether the policy is “liberal” or “illiberal”, and whether, despite its name, civic integration marks a return from “integration” to “assimilation” (see Orgad, forthcoming; in part also Goodman 2014; an overview of the various positions is the collection of comments by xxx [anonymized], discussing citizenship tests as one instance of civic integration). A second debate has been over the question whether civic integration is a departure from previous multiculturalism policies, whose “retreat” has thus been processed in a civic integration idiom;, or whether civic integration and multiculturalism policies may coexist, the former merely having been “layered over” persistent multiculturalism policies (see Banting 2011; Banting and Kymlicka 2013; Kymlicka 2012). AFinally, a third debate has been over the question of continuity or discontinuity of policy, if not the very usefulness of the notion of distinct national styles or “models” of integration, and how civic integration fits into this. For one line of authors, civic integration flags the “end of national models” (if there ever were any) and rise ofin favor of policy convergence (xxx:anonymized). A number of critics have objected that national models of integration continue to exist, even under the new cover of civic integration (especially Goodman 2012, 2014). It is this third debate that this paper taps into, tackling the question of national models v. policy convergence, and seeking to render plausible the “policy convergence” position.

In the first part (I), I provide a brief overview of civic integration, why it emerged at this point in time, and locating it within European immigration history. In the second part (II), I offer two arguments in favor of policy convergence: first, extant policy variations, which of course cannot be denied,, which of course cannot be denied,tend tooften run counter to national-model expectations; second, the few national-model type variations that still can be found are more with respect to the form than the substance of policy.

(I)What is Civic Integration?

Since the late 1990s, civic integration has become the dominant approach to immigrant integration across Europe. The term itself is an approximate English translation of the Dutch noun inburgering, whose literal translation would be “naturalization”, “habituation”, or “acclimatization”. Inburgering became a legal term in the first of all European civic integration laws, the Dutch 1998 Newcomer Integration Law (Wet InburgeringNieuwkomers, in short WIN). WIN obliged new immigrants to the Netherlands to take an integration course, which consists of Dutch language and civics lessons. On English-language Dutch and Flemish-Belgian government websites, inburgeringhas hence been referred to as “civic integration”. Other European states that quickly adopted the “Dutch model” (Michalowski 2004) have other words for the same policy—such as Integrationskurse in Germany, Integrationsvereinbarung in Austria,Contratd`acceuil et d`intégration (CAI) in France;, but also the Swiss integration policy under the motto Fördern und Fordernismust be understood as a variant of civic integration (see Eule 2015), so that the following analysis is relevant also to a Swiss audience. Their different names still cover a similar idea and content: the state-enforced formal obligation for immigrants to acquire the language of the host-society and to familiarize themselves with its political institutions, history, and culture (“civics”). Not meeting this obligation may forfeit one`s legal residence status or even first entry in the first, (as in the case of “integration from abroad” (, more on which below).

The invention and meteoric proliferation of civic integration at this point in time reflects an important moment of change in Europe`s immigration history. Up to then immigration had been considered a finite episode of European post-WWIIwar history, channeled in terms of “guestworker” or “postcolonial” immigration, or both (see xxx: anonymized). As different as they were in terms of origins and institutional processing, these immigrations were not to be repeated but to be brought to a close, humanely yet firmly (“firm but fair” was appositely the motto of British immigration policy). Of course, after the closing-down of “new-seed” guestworker and postcolonial immigration in the late 1960s to early 1970s, there had immediately been other, unforeseen types of inflow, most importantly asylum-seeking and family migration, and also, though much more limited than in the United States, illegal immigration. But still in the early 1990s the dominant mindset among European political elites was that the goal of state policy should be to bring all immigration to a halt, immigration zéro in the hopeful words of a hard-lining French interior minister at the time, Charles Pasqua.

Integration in the context of notional zero immigration was a combination of non-policy and reflex-like continuation of old ways of dealing with cultural difference, within a mindset of dealing in a humane and service-oriented way with frictions and adjustment problems of migrant streams that were considered historically unique and non-continuous. At the same time, there was a tight legal and ideational separation between the policy domains of immigration and integration, to the limited degree that the latter was a state-level concern at all (at local level, where immigrants settled,, of course integration it always was a concern). Overall, one cannot earnestly talk of an explicit integration policy in most European states before the arrival of civic integration. These were settled nation states, if not ideologically post-nation states, that had unlearned the great integration exercise, when “peasants” were turned into “Frenchmen” in the late 19th century, to use Eugene Weber`s evocative metaphor (1976). By the same token, when integration reappeared on the state radar at late 20th century`s end century later, it had to take on radically different, namely: (i.e., less nationalistic and and more liberal) features than those known from classic nation-building.

Theis reappearance of integration occurred in the course of the 1990s, when European states` attitudes to immigration changed completely. Representative for many, the German government abandoned the long-held mantra that Germany was “not a country of immigration”. Also in France, the call for zero immigration could no longer be heard. If one looks for a game-changing event, it is clearly the breakdown of Communism and the rise of globalization. The world was no longer two but one, with unprecedented people mobility as potential (and often actualized) consequence. Most of this mobility was still unwanted by states, which responded forcefully to live up to their residual function of caging people—the martial notion of “Fortress Europe” dates from this very moment. But, importantly, it dawned on policymakers that global markets and technologies could not be run and developed without globally mobile personnel. In the late 1990s, in Germany, a cosmopolitan, reform-minded SPD and -Green Party coalition government introduced the so-called “Green Card” scheme to recruit high-skilled migrants for the IT sector. Quickly there was no European state left without a policy to recruit high-skilled immigrants, which at EU level later materialized in the so-called “Blue Card” scheme. In addition, in 2000, the Population Division of the United Nations Organization published its famous report outlining the dramatic degree and consequences of demographic shrinkage in Europe (for an overview, see xxx). In the context of chronic right-wing populist mobilization across Europe the demographic rationale for immigration has still to enter politicians` vocabulary. But it was the last nail in the coffin of zero immigration as mainstream political project.

The new reality of recurrent, (rather than one-shot) immigration, which is a historical novelty in Europe, catapulted integration from a low- (or local)- level concern to a central state concern. Across Europe, integration became tantamount to “civic integration”. Confirmed by many case and comparative studies (e.g., Permoser 2014; Goodman and Wright, forthcoming), there is an indelible symbolic dimension to civic integration, which is as much,(if not primarily,) directed at immigration-averse mass publics as at the immigrants themselves. The often harsh and disciplinary rhetoric of civic integration wishes to assure natives that “their” government is in charge and that local habitats and traditional milieus are not going to be washed awaychanged overnight by ongoing, no longer stoppableclosable immigration, often from faraway places and cultures. Recent empirical work on the evolution of migration policies in a large swathe of (mostly rich) countries further supports the view (first expounded at theoretical level by Freeman 1995) that, contrary to the ongoing strength of anti-immigration rhetoric, policies have actually become less restrictive over time (de Haas, Natter and Vezzoli 2014).

There is a second subtext to the rise of civic integration, which is that multiculturalism has failed to bring about the integration of immigrants, instead shoving the latter into anomic and deprived “parallel societies”. The “civic” in civic integration signals integration into society`s mainstream institutions, especially the labor market. The Dutch case epitomizes this thrust. Civic integration substituted the previous “ethnic minorities policy”, which had been adopted in the early 1980s to provide “equality of opportunity” for disadvantaged immigrant minorities, but weirdly by supporting a separate infrastructure and identities for the latter. State-supported separatism was no invention of the age of multiculturalism but fed uponinherited the Dutch tradition of “pillarization” to mend the deep religious and ideological friction that had hampered Dutch nation-building through the agesall along. But it was now held responsible for the “multicultural tragedy” (as the Dutch sociologistwriter and Labour Party activist Paul Scheffer called it) of high unemployment, school failure, and residential segregation among immigrant ethnics, particularly Turks and Moroccans.

But even in countries that had never known multiculturalism policies, there has been a rhetorical retreat from a demonized multiculturalism and turn to civic integration instead (see xxx: anonymized). AThe juxtaposition of multiculturalism and civic integration helps calibrate the latter. In countries that never had it as official state policy, most typicallylike Germany or France, “multiculturalism” is another word for laissez-faire and drift, that is, for the state keeping out of the process of integration. This abstinence is now found wanting. I, the diction being that if there is state intervention, it should be centrist and not reinforcing separateness—hence “civic integration”. Moreover, “multiculturalism” is associated with the burden of adjustment being more on the receiving society than on the immigrants. This is reversed in civic integration, where the burden of adjustment is imposed almost exclusively on the immigrants. The Dutch case, again, shows this shift more clearly than other cases. Immigrants are not just expected to become economically self-sufficient (and thus no burden on the welfare state), but they are quite literally required to pay in full for the cost of civic integration courses and tests-- (the fees for which are accordingly much subsequently higher in the Netherlands than in any other country). “Privatized integration”, one might even argue, in a way signals a “total retreat” of the state from supporting integration at all (Michalowski 2009: 275). This is also, also shown in the fact that, apart from a short film and small booklet, the Dutch state provides no infrastructure in terms of integration courses or course materials.

States now often use the notion of a “contract” with the immigrant, as the French contratd`acceuil or the Austrian Integrationsvereinbarung. In this contract, admission to the host state and society is exchanged against concrete and objectively verifiable integration efforts (and, as in the Dutch case, results) on part of the immigrant, short of which a residence permit is denied. In this “contract”, there is no parallel obligation, not to mention adjustment effort, exacted on the host state. Civic integration, at least in its extreme version practiced in the Netherlands, thus disproves the official definition of “integration”, given out in the European Council`s influential “Common Basic Principles of Immigrant Integration in the E.U.” (2004), and reiterated in so many official state declarations. According to it, “integration” is a “two-way” process of “mutual accommodation”, in which not only immigrants but also the receiving society has to change (see xxx: anonymized). In reality, civic integration is “one-way” only, the immigrant but not society being expected to change.

Thirdly, the obligatory, even punitive nature of civic integration in Europe is intrinsically connected to the demographic profile of immigration in Europe: the latterit is overwhelmingly low-skilled family migration, with a high proportion originating from Muslim countries. This linkage is especially visible in the most drastic variant of civic integration, which is “integration from abroad”. Invented, again, in the Netherlands, in 2006, it asks forrequires elementary host society language and civic knowledge as precondition for being granted a first temporary visa for first entry. The linkage between obligatory integration and low-skilled immigration from culturally distant regions of the world is also confirmed by certain national-origin exemptions granted in some countries, especially Germany and the Netherlands. The Netherlands, for instance,latter exempts not only citizens of other EU and European Economic Area countries (which is required by European Union law), but also citizens of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and other rich OECD countries. TIn the Dutch case, these exemptions are justified as favoring countries “comparable to European countries in cultural, socioeconomic and societal respect”, and whose nationals “in general possess a certain insight into the societal relations we have in the Netherlands and into Dutch norms and values” (quoted in Bonjour 2011: 53).

Fourthly, the demographic nature of the immigration to be processed by civic integration points to the policy`she latter`s perhaps most distinct feature, which is to link immigrant integration with immigration control and immigrant selection. Low-skilled immigration, after all, is structurally marked by the supply greatly exceeding the demand for it (see Bhagwati 2004: ch.14). The control feature is again most clearly expressed in the policy`s “integration from abroad” variant, where the failure to pass the exam is (mostly) tantamount to denied entry. By contrastConversely, the control element is more virtual than real in the denial of permanent residence for failing the post-entry civic integration hurdle (which is the classic variant of civic integration), because this. This is the main and original variant of civic integration, which hardly ever leads to deportation but simply the maintenance of temporary, (though naturally more precarious residence) status. Finally, the control and selection element is more fictitious still in the case of denied citizenship acquisition. This, which is the third step in the civic integration continuum, which (that ranges from pre-entry to post-entry (“civic integration” proper) and citizenship. The citizenship-acquisition stage of civic integration is the one with the least teeth, because); denied citizenship applicants simply continue to be legal permanent residents.

With respect to integration from abroad, the Dutch government nonchalantly called it “selection mechanism”, and it allegedly rewardeding not education and socioeconomic background (as is often charged, also within the Netherlands) but individual “motivation and severance” (quoted in Bonjour 2011: 57). While denying that a reduction of family immigration is the purpose, the Dutch government still counts this reduction as welcome “side effect”, originally expecting it to be in the 25 percent range (ibid. 58).