European civic integration programmes claim to provide newcomers with necessary tools for successful participation. Simultaneously, these programmes have been criticised for being restrictive, market-driven and for working towards an implicit goal of limiting migration. Authors have questioned how these programmes discursively construct an offensive image of the Other and how colonial histories are reproduced in the constructions seen today. The Dutch civic integration programme is considered a leading example of a restrictive programme within Europe. Research has critically questioned the discourses within its policies, yet limited research has moved beyond policy to focus on discourse in texts in practice. This study presents a critical discourse analysis of texts used in the civic integration programme and demonstrates that they participate in multiple discursive constructions: the construction of the Dutch nation-state and its citizens as inherently modern, the construction of the Other as Unmodern and thus a threat, and the construction of the hierarchical relationship between the two. The civic integration programme has been left out of discussions on decolonisation to date, contributing to it remaining a core practice of othering. This study applies post-colonial theories to understand the impacts of current discourse, and forwards possibilities for consideration of decolonised alternatives.
In January 2022 the new Dutch Civic Integration programme was launched together with promises of improvements it would bring in facilitating the ‘integration’ of newcomers to the Netherlands. This study presents a critical discourse analysis of texts intended for municipalities to take on their new coordinating role in this programme. The analysis aims to understand the discourse in the texts, which actors are mobilized by them, and the role these texts and these actors play in processes of governmental racialization. The analysis demonstrates shifting complex assemblages are brought into cascades of governance in which all actors are disciplined to accept the problem of integration as a problem of cultural difference and distance, and then furthermore disciplined to adopt new practices deemed necessary to identify and even ‘objectively’ measure the inherent traits contributing to this problematic. Lastly, the analysis displays that all actors are disciplined to accept the solution of ‘spontaneous compliance’; a series of practices and knowledges, which move the civic integration programme beyond an aim of responsibilization, into a programme of internalization, wherein newcomers are expected to own and address their problematic ‘nature’, making ‘modern’ values their own.
With a lack of a clear definition, though a normalized use, the discursive weight of the concept of integration is felt throughout policy and civic integration programmes. In wider societal discourse the term integration is used in a taken-for-granted way, with an assumed understanding of its meaning and the actions which one takes to display its attainment. Studies which aim to explore or measure integration, further reproduce these taken-for-granted realities, a fact which has contributed to the recent debates on the discursive power of ‘integration’ in migration studies. While the debate on integration unfolds within the academic sphere, it’s implementation and discursive power continue in practices which take place in everyday life. Practices which construct the ‘doing’ of integration and which shape the lived experiences of those who encounter them. Practices which contribute to the reproduction of Othering and racialized categories which accompany the concept of integration and its current discursive frame. This paper will thus explore how integration as a concept is shaped and promoted in practices, practices such as texts which migrants encounter in civic integration programmes as well as activities which are promoted during the integration pathway. This analysis allows us for an understanding of integration as it lives and is operationalized at the level of practice and enacted through daily activities one undertakes. This critical discourse analysis will shine light on how these practices contribute to strengthening of hierarchical divisions based on colonialist categories of modernity and Eurocentric depictions of a ‘successful’ everyday life.
