The Integration Nation. Adrian Favell
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further complication is added by noting that international migration subject to integration is also heavily distinguished from population movements that take place within and across the territory of nation-states. The canonical distinction between internal and international migration has long been criticized by geographers in migration studies (King and Skeldon 2010). It is often an arbitrary distinction which reifies the international border when both/all are forms of spatial movement, simply viewed. However, normatively, the modern nation-state clearly views things differently. In the contemporary view, internal populations are already integrated as nationals; they are not at all subject to the same linear immigration to citizenship template, let alone the same nation-building symbolism as ‘immigrants’. In historical terms, this distinction is clearly arbitrary and a figment of the late modern world (Harzig et al. 2009) – in the past, it did not apply to many regional periphery-to-urban migrations within incomplete nation-states or across macro-regional spaces (Moch 2003). Their migration patterns might, in that view, resemble those of immigrant foreigners – as do contemporary internal migrants moving across regions in contemporary China, for instance (Xie, Leng and Ritakallio 2016). Here, a nation-building ‘integration’ perspective might work, even in the absence of immigrants. As we will see, the ‘integration’ of people assumed already to be ‘natives’ is often left unexplored in discussions of immigrant or minority integration.
On the other hand, different concerns may indeed apply to migrations between countries within empire-scale systems of governance, or across macro-regional common markets, which also do not (or should not necessarily) count as ‘immigration’. It can be argued that free-moving EU citizens within the single market space of the European Union, who retain their own nationality and enjoy a different kind of (European) citizenship as the basis of residency, rights and recognition, are not subject to integration when they settle in another country – until perhaps circumstances change, a border crosses them, and they become ‘immigrants’ needing to think about permanent settlement (Gonzales and Sigona 2017). Other historians would further complicate this and de-naturalize the normality of the narrow sliver of migration and mobilities that is viewed as state-sanctioned immigration in the contemporary view: for example, the movement of settler colonials within empires (Bhambra 2014), or the ongoing movement of expatriates living and working for corporations around the world (Kunz 2020). These movements all have consequences that fall outside conventional patterns of migration, settlement, integration and citizenship. At the other end of the scale, other anomalous cases include the international movement of labour as slavery or the forced migration of stateless persons held in spaces outside receiving state jurisdiction (McNevin 2011).
The shrunken post-colonial nation-states that as empires were built on mass population movements to and from the colonies, outside any immigration-to-citizenship model, have worked hard to reduce the many historical and contemporary anomalies this produced for the Westphalian view. One recent example I will return to later illustrates their ongoing effects. British subjects from the West Indies and South Asia who moved across the empire to live and work in Britain in the immediate post-war period did not move as ‘immigrants’; they only became ‘immigrants’ retrospectively with changes in nationality law and a momentous historical rethinking of nationhood from boundless global empire to bounded European nation-state and sovereign island (Bhambra 2016). Victims of the Windrush scandal have discovered the power of the modern political demography of immigration and integration self-imposed on the sovereign United Kingdom, when they were unable to prove their long-term right to live in Britain for lack of citizenship papers (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss and Cassidy 2019).
The point of these various examples linked to the broader continuum of mobilities at a global scale is to underline that the singular contemporary notion of immigrant integration and its linear properties is particular to the present moment and serves a very particular normative purpose. This is for reasons to do with the central symbolic importance of immigration control, bordering and population management to sovereign nation building in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a particularly charged vision of the reaffirmation and recomposition of the nation-state-society focused on a very particular, selected mobile population – perhaps ironically in an age in which its future as a basic political unit never seemed less clear because of the regional integration and globalization associated with new forms of mobility and population flux.
Similar things may be said about diversities in the modern world. If global or (better) planetary society is the totality of all diversity, the modern nation-state clearly is preoccupied with cutting down and managing this diversity in order to differentiate itself as a unit from the outside world. National integration – whatever rhetoric it may have when it celebrates multicultural or multiracial inclusion – is therefore necessarily about reducing diversity as well as unifying it within some singular, bounded whole. Globalization and the transformation (or hollowing out) of national cultural distinction by ongoing migration and mobilities is, on the other hand, a de-differentiation – an integration into larger-scale units, with greater degrees of diversity, which indicates a loss of national power (i.e., sovereignty) over its own specificity and definition of ‘diversity’. A separate issue may be raised here about the homogenizing pressures of capitalism as an institutional form of global integration – I will go on to question neo-liberalism as a supposed challenge to national integration. But in any case nation-states, to again put this in Luhmannian terms, can only assert sovereign powers over their territories and population by reducing the noise of the planetary environment. Immigration control and its management via integration are one of the key means of getting a grip on diversity, not least as a growing and diversifying international population movement is taken as a dimension of globalization. Managing this globalization is key. The integration nation at its most powerful is not one which falls back onto some archaic, closed ethno-cultural self-definition but one which successfully governs immigration as a source of power: where it builds integration after diversity.
As with mobilities, I therefore take diversity as a background assumption, without seeking to be exhaustive of its definition. Thinking about integration after diversity refers to the condition induced by rising international migration and mobilities, as well as the ongoing differentiation – in all kinds of intersectional senses – observable in ever more porous global societies, economies and cultures. Integration to a particular model of immigration and citizenship is how the modern nation-state-society responds to these diversities, by reducing them. This has tended to be an isomorphic process in the context of global societies – against the background of global capitalism and its systems of governance – yet is still expressed in nation-state form (Meyer 2010). Although forward-looking and modernist in its outlook, integration tends to be inherently conservative because of the reduction of diversities implicit in national modes of self-differentiation. Yet nation-states may still be diversifying internally. Immigration observers have noted an ethno-cultural and racial ‘transition to diversity’ in recent decades in nearly all highly developed global societies (Alba and Foner 2015) – even long-standing exceptions such as Japan (Liu-Farrer 2020). Other scholars emphasize the increasingly intersectional properties of the new diversity: as a form of ‘superdiversity’ no longer encompassed by relatively stable post-colonial patterns of migration and intercultural contact (Vertovec 2007).
There has also been a critical literature, emerging out of concerns with multiculturalism, which has pointed to the rhetoric of diversity as a typical, flattening policy device of neo-liberalism (Ahmed 2012): an empty rhetoric that hides much tougher issues of racialization and ethno-racial differentiation and intersectionality present endemically in supposedly free, open, egalitarian liberal democracies. I will come back to critically assess some of the more optimistic variants on superdiversity associated with transnationalism, globalization from below, cosmopolitanism, diaspora, hybridity, conviviality and so on in a later chapter. For sure, the global integration of neo-liberalism irrevocably linked to these progressive ideas so redolent of the optimistic 1990s has to be evaluated negatively – while not excluding all the potentially transformative effects of migration, mobilities and diversification of this era.
Integration is, in any case, positioned solidly against these ‘post-national’ forms – yet has found its own way to encompass and incorporate certain ideas of legible diversity made safe for the nation-state.