Civic integration and the negation of collective selfhood: A normative analysis through Paul Ricoeur’s notions of identity

Abstract

ABSTRACT Requirements of immigrants to prove language skills, undertake knowledge tests, or complete courses of civic education, have become central in the process of attaining formal legal membership in the political community. However, while civic integration often is furthered as an emancipatory process and way to strengthen social cohesion, this article maintains that civic integration deviates from a notion of integration as the mutual transformation of migrant and receiving polity alike. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s discussion of ipse- and idem-identity, the article analyses the normative underpinnings of civic integration and argues that civic integration is conditioned on a community based in sameness rather than in an inclusive and reciprocal respect for diversity, meaning that civic integration will emerge as strikingly similar to the assimilationist practices it seeks to overcome. Thus, drawing on idem-identity, civic integration is seen to not only defeat its own goals of political emancipation of the migrant and the social cohesion of the community, but also to negate the very possibility of collective selfhood. By contrast, through exploring Ricoeur’s notion of identity as imbued with temporality, this article gestures towards how the normative standards of reflexivity, tolerance and mutuality ought to guide any idea of integration.