Antidiscrimination Meets Integration Policies: Exploring New Diversity-Related Challenges in Europe

Tina Magazzini

doi:10.3390/socsci10060221

Abstract

Contemporary European societies are increasingly diverse. Migration both within and to Europe has contributed over the past decades to the rise of new religious, racial, ethnic, social, cultural and economic inequality. Such transformations have raised questions about the (multi-level) governance of diversity in Europe, thus determining new challenges for both scholars and policy-makers. Whilst the debate around diversity stemming from migration has become a major topic in urban studies, political science and sociology in Europe, Critical Race Studies and Intersectionality have become central in US approaches to understanding inequality and social injustice. Among the fields where ‘managing diversity’ has become particularly pressing, methodological issues on how to best approach minorities that suffer from multiple discrimination represent some of the hottest subjects of concern. Stemming from the interest in putting into dialogue the existing American scholarship on CRT and anti-discrimination with the European focus on migrant integration, this paper explores the issue of integration in relation to intersectionality by merging the two frames. In doing so, it provides some observations about the complementarity of a racial justice approach for facing the new diversity-related challenges in European polity. In particular, it illustrates how Critical Race Studies can contribute to the analysis of inequality in Europe while drawing on the integration literature.

Highlights

In a globalized yet very unequal world, issues of diversity management linked to the processes that either promote or halt social justice represent an ever more urgent matter
In recent years increasing attention—both scholarly and from a policy perspective—has been paid to ethnic, religious and racialized minorities, and to the need for diversity management stemming from migration flows in particular
2020), a ‘diversification of diversity’ and migrant integration become major topics in urban studies, political science and sociology; Critical Race Studies and Intersectionality have become central in US approaches to understanding inequality, racial and social injustice (Crenshaw et al 1995, 2019)

Summary

Introduction

In a globalized yet very unequal world, issues of diversity management linked to the processes that either promote or halt social justice represent an ever more urgent matter. One pressing concern for contemporary democracies is how to cope with changes in the composition of their population and how to manage inter-group relations, at a time in which Western countries are confronted with population aging and with increasing levels of inequality across group lines Within this field, European and North American research on migration, multiculturalism, diversity and integration share questions and ambitions: how to frame and understand persistent inequalities, immigration and integration patterns through analytical contributions and evidence-based data. European and North American research on migration, multiculturalism, diversity and integration share questions and ambitions: how to frame and understand persistent inequalities, immigration and integration patterns through analytical contributions and evidence-based data They remain largely disconnected in their methodologies, debates and approaches to these issues. Includes some excerpts from interviews carried out between February and August 2020 to policy-makers, integration experts and media representatives, which were part of the fieldwork conducted for a broader research project on radicalization, secularism and the governance of religious diversity. What emerges from comparing the main frameworks employed in continental Europe and the United States are the very different assumptions that lay at the core of ideas of antidiscrimination, race, ethnicity and, who constitutes the body politics

Locating the Issue

Black students of attending the recently

Findings

Bringing Race into European Integration