Epilogue: Shaping the Nation through Civic Integration: A Postcolonial Perspective on Paradoxical Policies

An article by Saskia Bonjour published in 2020 in the Revue Europeenne des Migrations Internationales, 36(4), 135-142. https://doi.org/10.4000/remi.17349. Also available in open access.

Introduction

Civic integration policies shape migrants’ pathway to residence and citizenship in Europe and North-America. These policies invite or oblige migrants to learn the customs and language of their new country of residence. Either by inculcating migrants with certain skills and knowledge, or by barring certain migrants from accessing national territory and citizenship, civic integration policies are instruments through which states purport to shape their nations. In this epilogue to the thematic dossier on civic integration policies in France and Canada, I explore this state endeavour to shape the nation through civic integration, highlighting paradoxical features that are common to civic integration policies in Canada, France, and elsewhere in the “Western” world.

The paradoxical nature of civic integration policies has been noted by scholars in this thematic dossier and beyond. Civic integration policies appear to vacillate between civic education and selection: aiming to emancipate, assimilate, and exclude migrants — all at the same time. Civic integration policies emphasize the national values that found the national identity — but these values are defined very similarly in all countries which introduced civic integration policies. Civic integration policies impose a legal obligation on migrants to prove their will to integrate — as if free will were compatible with compulsion.

In order to elucidate these paradoxes in civic integration policies, I propose to draw parallels with the colonial governance and production of ethnoracial difference. In drawing these parallels, I take to heart the warning of Sayad (1994: 10) that “while the comparison between the colonial situation yesterday and the immigration situation today is very illuminating” it cannot and should not “mask the essential difference, difference in nature, between these two cases.” Indeed, while racial hierarchies persist in contemporary European and North American social structures and informal state practices and discourses, they are no longer laid down either in law or in official state ideology, as was the case in colonial contexts (Hajjat, 2012: 35). However, in colonial governance then as in civic integration policies now, states regulate and thereby (re)produce national, cultural and racial boundaries. Paradoxes that were once inherent in colonial governance, continue to characterise civic integration policies today.