LITMIR.BIZ

Introduction

      The opening scene of Gillo Pontecorvo’s film La Bataille d’Alger (1966). The Colonel Mathieu joins his soldiers in a room where they have a captive Algerian man who has been tortured. They have dressed him as a French soldier and are going to take him to the casbah where he will reveal to them where the leader of the Algerian Liberation Front is hiding. Mathieu tells them to give him a French soldier’s hat. The soldier next to the Algerian smiles broadly and shoves the hat on his head.

      ‘Intégration!!’, the soldier laughs . . .

      [To the soldier] ‘Fais-pas l’idiot!’ [Don’t be an idiot!], says the Colonel.

      The Algerian starts crying, then suddenly desperate, runs towards the window, wailing . . .

      ‘NON!!! . . .’

      The soldiers grab him, tell him to stay calm, or they’ll start on him again. They push him towards the door.

The notion of ‘immigrant integration’ is found everywhere as a progressive concept – among students, scholars, research funders, policy makers, politicians, journalists, lawyers, social workers and many others concerned with how societies should respond to international migration and include new members on fair and equal terms. ‘Integration’ is widely accepted as the most encompassing term to refer to both the process and end state by which highly globalized societies imagine they will restore unity and cohesion after large-scale immigration and the diversity it brings. In Western Europe, where the term has been most elaborated, it has largely eclipsed discussions of multiculturalism and is seen as a more progressive goal than assimilation. It appears to have more sociological scope and weight than close synonyms such as social cohesion, inclusion, incorporation or participation. Indeed, integration has a kind of aura as a default concept in forward-looking thinking about the consequences of migration and the diversification of society. It is used at once to signal the necessary adaptation of diverse cultures to dominant western norms and as an idealized image of intercultural dialogue that will be transformative on both sides. And despite its pervasive and often confusing range of use, there are surprisingly few sustained discussions of its conceptual roots and theoretical implications, although frequent attempts are made by scholars to propose ideal-type ‘models’ or ‘indicators’ of integration.

The invocation of intégration in the shocking first scene from Pontecorvo’s La Bataille d’Alger, recounted above, should underline how integration is and always was a fundamentally colonial term. As I will argue, it is embedded in a modernist development paradigm which assumes both a trajectory towards a certain kind of individualist citizenship and the dominant relation of ‘the West to the Rest’. At heart, it is concerned with the rearguard perpetuation of ongoing nation-state building on the western model in an otherwise globalizing world: of re-fashioning a sovereign, bounded social order from conflict and diversity as a form of modern progress. This is the power of the ‘integration nation’. As shrinking metropolitan nation-states came to terms with the end of empire, and the absorption of populations inherited as their post-colonial legacy of global domination, they turned to the idea of ‘integration’ as a means of re-imagining their ongoing civilizational mission in the face of global diversity. So when progressive scholars and policy makers ingenuously propose integration as the reasonable middle way between conservative cultural conformism and radical celebrations of cultural hybridity and diaspora, they are buying into and reproducing a colonial world view that is also deeply nationalist in its implications.

      As a work in political theory, The Integration Nation sketches the core component of what may be thought of as a political demography of liberal democracy (see also Weiner and Teitelbaum 2001 and Goldstone, Kaufmann and Duffy Toft 2011 for contrasting uses of this term). That is, how modern advanced nation-states classify and enumerate populations which are inherently mobile and diverse into ‘legible’ legal and institutional distinctions: of ‘citizens’ and ‘migrants’, ‘nationals’ and ‘aliens’, ‘majorities’ and ‘minorities’. They do this in order to constitute their own pastoral and governmental powers, and thereby sustain a global order of territorialized and bordered national populations

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