The need for a new and more composite approach to immigrant integration

Keywords: Cosmopolitanism, integration, Interculturalism, Multiculturalism, populism, public space, Transnationalism

John Erik Fossum (University of Oslo)
Riva Kastoryano (Sciences Po Paris)
Tariq Modood (University of Bristol)
Ricard Zapata-Barrero (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

According to Cas Mudde (2004), we are witnessing a populist Zeitgeist in Europe, as populist movements, parties, and policies not only gain political traction and influence but also increasingly set political agendas and play a key role in governments. The French presidential election showed how strong this movement has become in one of the European Union’s founding members. Much of Europe’s right-wing populism is closely associated with a discourse on the failure of integration that is particularly oriented against Islam and Muslims.

Ideologically speaking one of populism’s main targets is multiculturalism, which claims fosters ghettoization, unwillingness to integrate. Presented as ideal integration interculturalism is  – in their discourse far from being achieved in such ghettos. By focusing on the question of security, it rejects diaspora politics of home countries perceived as interference in national politics of integration and suspects multiple loyalties expressed by post-migrants. So is cosmopolitanism which is attributed to Europe and more specifically to the European Union and is presented as the root of all evil that affects national identity to be protected. 

There is clearly a need to debunk the populist myths surrounding these different perspectives. Within this European public space, multiculturalism has emerged as a state-focused remaking of citizenship and national identity; interculturalism has its centre of gravity at the city-level, as an effort to carve out a distinct space for achieving community cohesion and solidarity; transnationalism recognises the multiple links and affiliations to home and host country that mark the immigration experience and solidarities beyond borders within the European space; and cosmopolitanism is an effort to extend rights-based entitlements beyond nation-state membership. Further, multiculturalism and interculturalism are integration theories proper, in the sense that they focus on socialization and acculturation, whereas transnationalism and cosmopolitanism focus more on communal openness to the external world, precisely to prevent the forms of communal closure that lends themselves to assimilation and repression. We can thus say that the four perspectives are situated within a two-dimensional grid, with one dimension speaking to the inner and outer stages of immigrant integration and the other speaking to the level of governing from interculturalism’s focus on the city, to multiculturalism’s focus on the national level, to cosmopolitanism’s hankering towards the global level and to transnationalism’s focus on home-state – host-state networks. It is when this grid is properly developed that we have the best, most viable antidote to the populist assimilationist attacks. 

In Europe, if one pitches the battle as one between assimilation and multiculturalism one at the same time ignores the important fact that Europe is a multilevel governing configuration that encompasses a variety of approaches to migrant integration all of which are sensitive to difference and diversity but where these exhibit different sensitivities to the question of scale of governing. The challenge is therefore to develop a viable composite of a range of diversity-friendly doctrines. The doctrines that we seek to combine are multiculturalism, interculturalism, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism.

In order to work out a viable approach to combining the four perspectives we need to develop an understanding of the European public space. The European public space is a geographical space; a composite of legally and institutionally constituted entities; covering nations, regions, and nationals mainly within but also beyond the EU; and a site of interaction, and public expression of contestation and cooperation. This space is constituted by norms, regulations, and institutions, on the one hand, and by public expressions of territorial and non-territorial identities and senses of belonging (local, regional, national, European, transnational, global) that interact and communicate. Public space is thus composed of ideas and structures and their interaction, in the ways in which ideas and concepts are linked together in ‘social imaginaries’ (Taylor 2004). The European public space is multilevel, given that it encompasses such governing units as the municipality (city); the region; the state; and the European Union (EU), and beyond. A hallmark of this multilevel European public space is that there are significant tensions between its three constitutive elements, the spatial-territorial dimension, the legal-institutional dimension and the discursive dimension.