The civic integration turn

Abstract

The definition of state belonging has undergone major transformation. At the dawn of the twentyfirst century, several Western European states began to craft policies requiring immigrants to demonstrate host society knowledge, language proficiency and a commitment to national qua liberaldemocratic values. Categorized as ‘civic integration’, these policies promoted active and productive participation by immigrants in society and the labour market through acquiring a set of ‘citizenlike’ skills. These include speaking the host country language, having knowledge about the country’s history, culture and rules, and understanding and ascribing to the values that underscore their new home. Civic integration policies advance these characteristics with new assessment tools such as integration tests, courses and contracts. Also new is the interjection of the state into the process of immigrant integration, exerting a heavy hand by making status acquisition conditional on completing tests, courses, etc. Finally, in addition to the newness of content, instruments and conditionality, civic requirements uniquely apply not only to naturalization but increasingly to nontraditional membership statuses, including longterm/permanent residence and entry. Given these new hurdles, civic integration is significant from the perspective of the immigrant because it can be a decisive barrier to obtaining status and inclusion. Civic integration is also significant from the perspective of the state as it formally facilitates and mandates integration. By highlighting shared rules of society and concepts of belonging, states are articulating (some for the very first time) concrete and, in principle, accessible definitions of what it means to ‘be British’ or ‘Dutch’ or ‘German’. Here, civic integration represents the latest iteration of the ongoing project of nationbuilding (or, what StokesDuPass (2015) refers to as ‘manufacturing’). On the one hand, this change across mostdifferent systems signifies convergence, where divergent tropes of belonging – from German ethnodifferentialism to French civic republicanism to the multinational understanding of belonging in the UK – face reexamination. This shared change is unidirectional in the sense of states going from zero or informal requirements of membership to robust integration schemes at multiple stages of status. On the other hand, we can question whether states are changing into the same thing and for the same reason. In fact, the question of whether civic integration policies signify an ‘end to national models’ (Joppke, 2007a) in subsuming national differences to produce a ‘lite’ form of citizenship (Joppke, 2010) or not