The political psychology of integration strategies: the case of the European Commission’s interculturalism

Abstract

This article uses the concept of security as an analytical tool to map and explain socio-psychological reactions of political communities, as expressed through identity-management and cultural integration strategies, to immigration-related identity crises. To this end, I build a typology of three psychologically driven identity-management frameworks: securitising collective identity (through assimilation or exclusion); desecuritising collective identity (through multiculturalism); and managing the securitisation of collective identity (through interculturalism). On an empirical level, this article focuses mainly on the European Commission’s (EC) central texts and the Commissioners’ self-expressions from 1999 to 2013 that relate to the questions of immigration to Europe and the integration of third-country nationals, and it uses the third framework to explore the EC’s socio-political psychological reactions to recent immigration-related identity crises.