Dealing with migration related diversity in Europe Executive Training Migration in the EU and its Neighbourhood Florence, 21 January 2013 by Anna Triandafyllidou

1. Dealing with migration related
diversity in Europe
Prof. Anna Triandafyllidou,
Part 1, Joint Executive Training
Seminar

2. Integration
• In the EU context, integration is understood as a dynamic, two-way
process of mutual accommodation by all immigrants and residents of
Member States (CBP1). The promotion of fundamental rights, non
discrimination and equal opportunities for all are key integration issues.
The STOCKHOLM Programme:
• Integration is a dynamic, two-way process of mutual interaction, requiring
not only efforts by national, regional and local authorities but also a
greater commitment by the host community and immigrants.
• Member States’ integration policies should be supported through the
further development of structures and tools for knowledge exchange and
coordination with other relevant policy areas, such as employment,
education and social inclusion. Access to employment is central to
successful integration.

3. 11 Principles guiding integration
They aim to assist MS in formulating integration policies
a) Provide a means to judge and assess their own efforts;
b) set priorities and further develop their own measurable goals;
c) a basis for MS to explore how EU, national, regional, and local authorities can
interact in the development and implementation of integration policies;
d) best engage other actors involved in integration (NGOs, women's and migrants'
organisations, businesses, private institutions);
e) complementary to existing legislative frameworks, including the international
instruments on Human Rights, Community instruments containing integration
provisions, EU objectives on gender equality and non-discrimination and other EU
policies;
f) dialogue between governments and all other relevant institutions and stakeholders
at EU-level;
e) assist the EU to explore how existing EU-instruments related to integration can be
developed further; and
f) assist the Council to reflect upon and, over time, agree on EU-level mechanisms and
policies needed to support national and local-level integration policy efforts,
particularly through EU-wide learning and knowledge-sharing.

4. The Challenge
• Migrant populations and post-migration minorities present a challenge to nation-
states.
– Seeking political representation and participation as citizens,
– Establishing special minority institutions to ensure the survival of their
cultures and traditions.
– challenge the dominant view of national history (e.g. colonialism)
• Minorities challenge what is considered ‘acceptable’, ‘normal’ or ‘deviant’
behaviour.
– different religious beliefs
– different conceptions of gender relations, family, community
• Migrant and minority groups in several EU countries characterized in media and
political debates as ‘unsuited’ for European democratic and secular societies.
Most stigmatised Muslims (regardless of their ethnic origin) and (migrant) Roma
(regardless of their citizenship).

5. What is a nation?
• ‘a nation is a named and self-defining human
community whose members cultivate shared
memories, symbols, myths, traditions and values,
inhabit and are attached to historic territories or
“homelands”, create and disseminate a distinctive
public culture, and observe shared customs and
standardised laws’ (Smith 1991, also in Guibernau
2004)
• Also: imagined community (Anderson 2006)
• Nation state a misnomer

6. National heritage, nationalism and
citizenship/nationality
• a set of cultural forms that characterise a specific nation and
which provide for the framework within which the members
of the nation are socialised.
– There can be competing definitions of the national
heritage (e.g. Turkey)
• Nationalism = ‘ideological movement for attaining and
maintaining autonomy, unity and identity on behalf of a
population deemed by some of its members to constitute an
actual or potential nation’.
• Nationality/Citizenship

7. What is diversity?
• Ethnic diversity: individuals or groups of different ethnic
descent from the majority group in a country
• Racial diversity: different physical characteristics of
individuals and groups
• Cultural diversity: people and groups with different cultural
traditions, customs and language
• Religious diversity: individuals and groups of a religious faith
other than the majority one
• These are not hard and fast distinction. In everyday reality
they overlap

8. What is racism?
• Racism is the belief that a person’s identity is
predetermined by genetic origin. More specifically, it
is the belief that factors associated with a person’s
descent (ethnic, national or racial) predetermine not
just their physical traits but also their psychological
predispositions, mental abilities and other capacities.
– Biological racism
– Culturalist racism
– Racialisation of differences

9. Xenophobia, racism and prejudice
• Xenophobia is an attitude that expresses itself through hostile reaction to
foreigners in general. It is linked to specific preconditions (above all
economic factors) that foster its development.
• Racism is linked to established practices - social, political and economic -
that deny certain groups access to material and symbolic resources. Not
simply a negative attitude towards outsiders but rather aims at
subordinating the minority group.
• Prejudice (Allport, 1957) an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible
generalisation. It may be directed toward a group as a whole, or toward an
individual because s/he is a member of that group. The net effect of
prejudice is to place the object of prejudice at some disadvantage not
merited by his own misconduct.

10. How to accommodate diversity?
• How is cultural, ethnic and religious diversity
accommodated in European liberal
democratic societies? (which have different
historical traditions, contexts, practices,
institutional arrangements?)
• European level minorities: Muslims, ‘Black’
people, Roma

11. Assimilationism and integration
• Assimilationism
– Full assimilationism: One way street ‘integration’: migrants are
expected to gradually adopt the values, culture, language and other
traditions of the host country and to abandon their own.
– Civic assimilationism: Migrants are expected to confine their religious
and cultural traditions to their private life. As regards public life they
are expected to adopt the civic values and political culture of the
receiving society.
• Integration: 2-way street: both migrants and receiving society adapt to
one another. In reality integration is often understood as civic assimilation
in Europe today

12. • Approaches to integration into receiving society
• Integration
•
• Accommodation
•
• Separation Segmented assimilation
•
• Marginalisation Assimil. into underclass
•
• Rejection Accult./Assimil.
• into mainstream
•

13. Four models of migrant-receiving society relationship
• Four models proposed by Portes
– Integration-accommodation (the migrant asks for her/his needs and
the group’s needs to be accommodated – society has to make room in
the public space for new traditions, identities, beliefs (see
interculturalism and multiculturalism below)
– Segmented assimilation: assimilating but to an underclass
– Ethnic marginalisation – rejecting the receiving society’s values and
culture without strongly identifying with the culture of origin
– Ethnic separation (ethnic activism, keeping to your culture and
seeking to preserve it intact within the receiving society – revival of
ethnic identities)

14. Normative approaches: Multiculturalism
• Multiculturalism is a diverse set of normative ideals and policy
programmes that promote (in different ways and by different
means) the incorporation and participation of immigrants and
ethnic minorities into state and society, taking into account
their ethnic and religious differences.
•
Extending that thought, multicultural citizenship refers to:
• A set of rights and duties that takes into account the cultural,
ethnic and religious diversity of the groups that form part of a
state and appropriately integrates their needs into an
existing set of rights and duties attached to their citizenship.

15. Interculturalism
• Interculturalism focuses on dialogue between cultures
– a process based on dialogue and actual engagement between
individuals from different cultures.
– The intercultural perspective acknowledges that a multitude of
cultures may co-exist within a society.
– Individuals are seen as the carriers of different cultures, and thus
intercultural dialogue involves dialogue between individuals of
different ethnic or religious groups.
– This is not a private dialogue (one that takes place, for instance, within
a family) but rather a public one that can take place in institutional
contexts such as the school or the workplace.

16. Tolerance
• Relevant concepts: Tolerance, Acceptance,
respect
• Tolerance:
• X tolerates Y, where:
• X does not approve of Y
• X has the power to interfere with Y but
refrains from doing so

17. Types of tolerance
Passive- Liberal tolerance
not interfering with practices or forms of life of a
person even if one disapproves of them
Active- Egalitarian tolerance
institutional arrangements and public policies
that fight negative stereotyping, promote
positive inclusive identities and reorganise the
public space in ways that accommodate
diversity

18. Acceptance/respect
• Egalitarian tolerance is similar to acceptance and respect.
• Acceptance and/or respect involve going beyond mere
tolerance, changing institutional and societal arrangements to
accommodate minority needs and claims
• Tolerance and Acceptance/Respect are not hierarchically
related (i.e. one is better than the other). They are
appropriate for different kinds of claims. Tolerance can be
ethically minimalist but politically viable.

19. • End of Part 1
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