National models of immigrant integration: The costs for comparative research

Abstract

National models of integration are omnipresent in public and political discourses about how Western European immigration countries address the presence and integration of immigrants and minority groups. That France is viewed as a ‘republican’ country, the Netherlands and Britain as ‘multicultural’ and Germany as an ‘ethno-national’ country, is something that has structured most of the public analyses and political debates within these countries. Models are conceived of as ‘national traditions’, ‘legacies’, sometimes ‘sanctuaries’, by a variety of actors involved in the policymaking and the politics of integration, ranging from civil servants, policymakers, opinion leaders and the media. This, however, changed in the early twenty-first century, models now being seen as a burden to the integration of immigrants. This reaction was directed at the Dutch and British multicultural politics in the 2000s and 2010s. This did not, however, alter the conventional political wisdom that views the Netherlands and Britain as countries with (a history of) multicultural models. Scholars too have shown a strong interest in the notion, for the obvious reason that models help identify differences among countries with various integration policies and public conceptions of citizenship. In turn, scholars attempted to explain why different countries had followed these different pathways for integrating immigrants. In doing so, they found that different normative value systems were the basis for these cross-national differences. These systems thus defined were those used in the public discourses, as comparative research focused primarily on public narratives and official discourses where cultural idioms or philosophies of integration could be found (Brubaker, 1992; Favell, 1998).