Policies of Migrants’ Integration in Europe: Backlash, Not Backslide

This chapter argues that past political options regarding the integration of immigrants in Europe have been disconnected from a postnational understanding of citizenship, that is, from helping to build a sense of belonging for individuals based on their humanity and where the right to access fundamental rights (social, economic, and political rights included) would not be limited by their national status. Political options revealed instead that the acceptance of immigrants’ presence was limited to their economic utility and often to the idea that such economic utility would soon be over. The idea of a temporary need for immigrants would hinder not only the already problematic universalistic models of integration (e.g., the French model) and the ethnic models (e.g., the German model), but also the multiculturalist models. While not denying that the multiculturalist approaches had flaws to be addressed, this chapter argues that the main flaw does not derive from multiculturalism itself, as the new anti-immigration rhetoric prefers to underline, but from the way it was used in the context of European societies still struggling with colonialist images about themselves in the world and about Otherness. Ironically, though, instead of recognising the original sin underneath the conception of past models of integration of immigrants, most European political decision makers prefer to blame multiculturalist models for today’s social unrest. I argue that European societies must stop debating how to replace multiculturalism with new versions of universalist or ethnic models. Instead, they must confront themselves with their historic inability to engage with Otherness, particularly when the Other is perceived as culturally distant, socially disruptive, and economically disposable.