Christophe Bertossi on the Challenges of Citizenship and Multiculturalism in Europe
The Division of Global Affairs was pleased to invite Dr. Christophe Bertossi of the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri) to present some of his research findings at the final session of the Spring 2010 Colloquium Series. Dr. Bertossi’s presentation entitled “Mistaken Models? The Crisis of Migrants’ Integration in France, Britain, and the Netherlands Revisited” provided a useful framework for thinking about the panoply of social, economic, cultural, religious, and ultimately political issues that surround how new entrants are incorporated into—or shunned from—‘host’ societies. Employing a comparative perspective, he illustrated how certain models of integration have been shaped over time in these three countries, since their substantive emergence in the 1980s. And by extension, he posed the critical question of whether any of these approaches still hold value in the rapidly-evolving landscape of contemporary European affairs.
Scholarship in this area suggests three quite distinct periods of the conceptualization of integration in Europe. The mid-1980s saw the emergence of various models as typologies of national institutional/ cultural settings. By the mid-1990s, the discourse had shifted to a focus on the post-national challenges to the very notion of national identity, and since the beginning of the 2000s, the bulk of the emphasis has been placed on making sense of what is widely thought of as a ‘crisis’ of integration – the apparent failures of which have been manifested in recent events such as the murder of Theo van Gogh, the London bombings, the civil unrest/ rioting in France in 2005, etc. Nonetheless, these relatively brief scholarly epochs overlap with more nuanced characterizations that evolved in specific national contexts regarding the process of integrating migrants. With a strong tradition of Republicanism and with much attention paid to socio-cultural mechanisms of integration, France for example, has evolved from a model of non-discrimination, to laïcité (secularism/ religious neutrality), and eventually to the present assimilationist aim of civilizing migrants vis-à-vis national identity. Great Britain, which has tended to place greater reliance on socio-economic mechanisms, has progressed from addressing integration from the point of view of race relations to a discussion of ethnicity, and furthermore to today, where Britain has increasingly viewed the crisis of integration in a distinctly religious context (i.e., the perceived ‘threat’ of Islam). Finally, the Netherlands has moved away from prior attempts at integration and instead turned toward a model of assimilation, in which political dimensions such as minority representation have been central components.
In qualifying the real-world utility of these rather loose-knit models of integration however, Dr. Bertossi stressed some key points in his closing remarks. He discussed how they have failed their essential mission of fostering greater societal tranquility, and have even been partly responsible for exacerbating certain trends of disintegration and inter-group tensions. This has largely been due to the fact that the models have contradictory elements, they are path-dependant, they are generally defined only after the fact, they vary over time and are polysemic, and they—in and of themselves—remain fundamentally unable to keep pace with the shifting demands of integration in Western Europe and beyond. The perplexing challenges of this area of public policy will no doubt continue to persist well into the future.
Christophe Bertossi is a Senior Research Fellow and the director of the “Migrations, Identities, Citizenship” research program at the Institute for International Relations (Ifri) in Paris. He obtained his Ph.D. in Political Science in 2000 from the Institute of Political Studies in Aix-en-Provence (France). He has researched and lectured in political sociology at the University of Warwick, New York University, the American University in Paris, Sciences Po (Paris), and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Toulouse. Previously, he was a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, University of Warwick (UK). He has been a visiting fellow at New York University and, in France, at the Institute for Advanced Research/Collegium in Lyon as well as at the Institute of Political Studies in Toulouse. He has coordinated several international collaborative research projects on citizenship and ethnicity, notably with Washington University in St. Louis (MO), the Amsterdam University, the American Sociological Association, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, and the Social Science Research Council in New York. His publications include: Les frontières de la citoyenneté en Europe: nationalité, résidence, appartenance, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2001; European Anti-Discrimination and the Politics of Citizenship: France and Britain, Basingstoke/New York, Palgrave, 2007 [ed.]; Les couleurs du drapeau: les militaries français issus de l’immigration, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2007 (with Catherine Withold de Wenden).
This release was written by Thomas Arndt, doctoral student and teaching assistant in the Division of Global Affairs.
