Читать книгу The Integration Nation - Adrian Favell - Страница 11

The United Kingdom has its peculiarities as a nation-state, but this complicated set of arrangements regarding migration, immigration, free movement and other forms of mobility is not atypical of liberal democracies worldwide. To summarize, the archetypal liberal democratic nation-state – the ‘integration nation’ – is able to define itself when it identifies a (usually small) subset of the mobile international population as ‘immigrants’: those who have crossed a border and ‘settled’, and who are therefore subject to ‘integration’. Going beyond its formal definition (i.e., receiving nationality or a passport), citizenship as full membership will be defined by this process. This imposes a particular kind of obligation on both the state and the immigrant. This obligation does not apply to many other mobile populations, present on or passing through the territory, who are thereby ‘foreigners’ or ‘aliens’ and irrelevant to this question and excluded from it. This is regardless of whether they are in fact socially present, engaged in interactions with or connected in some way in the society – unless, of course, their legal status changes and they become ‘immigrants’. From the point of view of ‘integration’, the anomalous position of long-term or permanent foreign residents, as much as the undocumented or irregulars present, here becomes apparent. Asylum seekers awaiting a decision on ‘settlement’ and ‘immigration’ are also anomalous. Later, we will see how transnational populations more generally create further anomalies for ‘immigrant integration’. These groups are not yet, and may never be, a part of its national population, as defined by the sovereign designation of who is considered a member and who is not. Immigrants in contrast have to be, however diverse they are or however recently they arrived. Their linear progress towards citizenship is crucial to the nation-state’s power. In other words, this process – what is called ‘integration’ – defines the nation-state-society at its borders, as much as the means by which it binds all its members together in some unified and recognized sense as legitimate and formally equal citizens.

The state asserts these powers by naming these processes and its components, and claiming sovereignty over them (Sayad 2004 [1996]). The inherent political demography of nationalism and nation building I have been describing becomes methodological nationalism when it is blindly reflected in research on ‘immigrant integration’, rather than foregrounded and studied: i.e., work that simply assumes the object of study to be the objective process of transforming outsider ‘immigrants’ into insider ‘citizens’ of a pre-existing population container, according to measures of attainment of parity with existing members. Such work overlooks how those same actions work to define, constitute and reproduce the container itself, and how other categories of people are left out, made invisible or fail by definition to attain these statuses.

This key point – about how integration defines what is immigration – can also be made in relation to how integration defines true or accomplished ‘citizenship’ as full membership. Two examples may make the point. Citizenship requires integration in order to fulfil its richer potential of signalling more than just formal legal status; it denotes a membership that is fully and equally recognized and functioning in that society (as a specific territorial unit). A new citizen who holds a passport and can claim the formal rights it bestows but who is facing racial discrimination at work, or who is practising violent ideological beliefs that break the laws of the country, is not conventionally considered to be integrated. By the same token, a culturally or nationally distinct newcomer who is successfully pursuing a career and can express their voice freely and equally in politics, yet who is not considered by their neighbours yet to be really British (or French, or whatever) is also not (quite) integrated – even if on all other technical measures they might be. Citizenship as fully accomplished and recognized membership matters to integration: there is a process of becoming taking place with an end point that can be attained, and which provides a normative benchmark of its success. The emancipatory mission implied in this moves integration from a pastoral to a governmental (biopolitical) logic. As we will see, integrating newcomers on these terms means that many are effectively set up to fail (see Anderson 2013).

The duly designated ‘immigrant’ who has been able to fully integrate as a ‘citizen’ affirms the successful national sovereignty of the nation-state over the complex social, economic and cultural processes that produced this outcome. It is an assertion of sovereign power strictly delimited to the transformation of selected foreigners into immigrants and then citizens that could have been seen otherwise as part of the emergence of some unbounded global or post-national society within or beyond a national territory. Transnational visions of society have no need to limit the discussion to selected ‘immigrants’ and will very likely seek to dissolve the artificially maintained political and legal lines between different forms of mobility or international movement. Indeed, they will also often seek to dissolve distinctions between ‘mobile’ and ‘immobile’ populations. In the linear definition, integration necessarily does limit the discussion to ‘immigrants’ who have moved and crossed an international border.

These definitional properties of integration in the standard view also offer a clue to the pervasive, often default, use of the term to encapsulate post-immigration processes in society. As the discussion suggests, the definitional use of integration implies investing these situations so described with a distinctive, encompassing, national territorial scale and border-drawing functionality that is not automatically attached to terms like ‘inclusion’ or ‘participation’. Moreover, while the narrower term ‘incorporation’ tends (like integration) to be linked to an accomplishment of bounded citizen membership, ‘acculturation’ could certainly be conceived as referring to something not strictly bounded and national in scale: such as acculturation into White Anglo-Protestant norms or a dominant Judeo-Christian culture (etc.). Integration has emerged as the pre-eminent concept, not only, as I will show, through sidelining other politically questionable terms at various junctures but also by swallowing up more precise or less comprehensive terms (other potential synonyms include absorption, accommodation, cohesion building, enfranchisement, unity from diversity, etc.). Among these terms, its competitive relation to ‘assimilation’ and ‘multiculturalism’ requires special attention, as does its problematic relation to ‘race’ (i.e., ‘anti-racism’) and ‘transnationalism’. I will discuss these in later chapters.

Ultimately, the power of integration is as an encompassing paradigm of social thought: intended here in the full sense of the term, as an embedded conceptual framework that determines society and its scientists’ view of normal functioning social reality, both consciously and unconsciously (Kuhn 1962). Its full origins are rarely spelt out: but, as I will show, its roots run back through the emergent West European immigration politics of the 1960s to 1980s, to modernist development theories emanating from the post-war triumph as a global power of the United States, to its high point in the structural functionalism of Talcott Parsons and his ‘theory of successful modernity’ (Alexander 1986). His highbrow American reconstruction of Durkheimian thought was itself grounded in a naturalization in social theory of a Kantian philosophy of the subject. Protagonists and modellers of ‘immigrant integration’ today – even those who seek to use the term as a neutral descriptive concept, or pragmatically at a very local scale – may only be dimly aware of this theoretical genealogy and the colonial modernist ends to which it was put, but they are bound by its implications and history.