Download Davide Zoletto

Davide Zoletto
REGIMES OF SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL INTEGRATION OF FOREIGNERS IN
EUROPE
This essay intends to provide a contribution to the training and work of those who operate in formal
and non-formal educational contexts of contemporary societies by examining what Yasemine Soysal
calls the regimes governing, in historical and social contexts characterised by cultural contact, the social
and educational integration process of foreigners in Europe.1 The first part presents the theoretical
framework used to carry out the analysis; the second part deals with the various regimes for the social
integration of foreigners in Europe and the next one examines a number of educational integration
regimes, both having regard to the most recent European reports on integration. Lastly, some research
areas are suggested for approaching the issue from a different angle. The overall objective of the essay
is, above all, that of offering researchers, operators or educators working in integration regimes, an
opportunity to practise their critical skills so that they can develop the professionalism required to provide
answers that are more timely and effective because they are well thought out and problematizing.
1. The theoretical reference framework: integration as a situated and complex interlacement
The situated and complex character of the various regimes for the social and educational integration of
foreigners may be grasped by highlighting the just as complex and never generalizable interconnection
of
1. cultural traits of the minority and dominant groups,
2. statal and suprastatal social and procedural technologies,
3. local and transnational economic dynamics,
4. theoretical and applied knowledge and disciplines.
As and when appropriate, these four elements interconnect to give rise to a sort of regime that is, not
always or not only, structured in a planned and conscious way to allow integration, i.e. turn foreigners
or individuals belonging to minority groups into more or less upstanding citizens of this or that statal or
suprastatal entity. The types of individuals and groups facing this change will vary depending on the
contexts and the integration regimes: foreigners who have just arrived, temporary workers or
permanent residents; foreigners who have arrived into the country to join their families or second
generation immigrants; asylum applicants or naturalised citizens; refugees or immigrants who come to a
foreign country for economic reasons (ecorefugees, some of them would defiantly say).
Cultural traits. Integration is all too often addressed in strictly cultural terms or, as Seyla Benhabib clearly
points out, considering the collective state and identity of the groups that should integrate simply as a
result of the traditions and cultural histories that these groups have supposedly carried with them from
their home countries.2 However, this type of approach is not flawless, the first weakness being that it
does not take the traditions and cultural histories of the dominant groups into consideration and it
disregards their interaction with those of the foreign or minority groups. Moreover (and this is the
second weakness), even if it did take them into consideration, just like when it dwells only on the
groups to integrate, this kind of approach is effectively based on an essentialist epistemology which,
through the reification of the cultural traits produces both epistemological and operational
misunderstandings which lie at the base of most multi- and inter-cultural debates. These
misunderstandings, are summarised in the assumption that cultures represent predefined and rigid sets
Cfr.Y. SOYSAL, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe, University of Chicago Press, Chicago
1994.
2 S. BENHABIB, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2002.
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of rules which mould individuals where, instead, as shown by microsociology and etnomethodology,
the latter deal with them through their own past experiences, actively contributing, though often
unconsciously, to maintaining and handing them down and/or redefining them through their daily
interactions.3 An ongoing bustle of negotiations which might be more coherently described using a
constructivist approach to cultures, an approach that does not diminish the substance of the analyses
carried out, on the contrary, it bestows on them all the realism of ongoing, daily micropolitics of
cultures which, instead, used to fade in the abstractions of a “basic” essentialist approach.4 In this
respect, for the purpose of highlighting the always political nature of these negotiations, it is interesting
to note how philosophers like Benhabib, mentioned earlier on, and anthropologists like Aihwa Ong,
happened to discuss about struggles and skirmishes where the identity of both foreigners and natives
was at stake, though starting from the viewpoint of different disciplines.5
Social and procedural technologies. Both Benhabib and Ong underline that these identity struggles cannot be
read only through the lenses of the alleged cultures these individuals belong to. As in every battle, also
in identity struggles the battlefield becomes a decisive factor. In this case, the context set up by the
social technologies which mould the identities of individuals, especially their citizen identities, becomes
a key issue. In fact, not only do statal or suprastatal organizations like the European Union, have
numerous legal, economical and political rules which define the status of individuals who live there or
pass through it in transit (citizens, asylum applicants, refugees, permanent residents, etc.), but turn these
rules into a mesh of procedures and daily routines which is just as imperceptible as it is effective. This is
what Ong, borrowing from an interpretation suggested by Foucault, calls the governmentality of host
societies,6 for example their welfare system, the one that in Italy is currently attempting at coordinating
itself into integrated territorial systems, through Law No. 328/2000, by liaising with the Local Health
Authorities. Here we are dealing with an interconnection of diverse rationalities which are, at times,
even contradictory: health services, welfare offices, reception centres, social cooperatives, courts, etc.
All these rationalities intersect with one another in the “industry of integration” and converge to shape
up foreign and natives “users”, and even operators, turning them into specific types of citizen-subjects
of the host country. Here too, one cannot consider only one of the two interacting poles, in this case
the governmentalities of the host country, in fact, it is always necessary to note that also the
governmentalities regulating individuals and foreign groups play a major role, e.g. family, social and
political rules that link them to their fellow countrymen/women abroad or in their home country. In
particular, it is important to look closely at the interactions that develop between these different types
of governmentalities and the ways in which individuals and the foreign, minority and dominant groups
try to manage those interactions.
Local and transnational economic dynamics. The way in which different cultures and governmentalities merge
with specific integration regimes is considerably affected by the extent and, above all, the way in which
both are modified or contaminated by the current local and transnational economic context, that is by
what is pompously defined as the information & knowledge society, but which can be more prosaically
and realistically defined in the words of Ulf Hannerz, as the global markets of competencies.7 On the
plane of cultures, in fact, local and transnational economic dynamics are always reasserting the
misunderstandings of multiculturalism seen earlier on. This is confirmed, for example, by the rhetoric
of global intercultural management that has been interlacing more and more often with several integration
policies and that links the global arena (the transnational market) with the local arenas (the markets),
built and identified so that the cultures identifying those markets (the cultural that always characterises
D. ZOLETTO, Gli equivoci del multiculturalismo, «aut aut», 312, novembre-dicembre 2002, pp. 6-18.
J. CLIFFORD, “Taking Identity Politics Seriously: ‘The Contradictory, Stony, Ground…’” in P. Gilroy, L. Grossberg, A.
McRobbie (eds), Without Guarantees: Essays in Honour of Stuart Hall, Verso, London 2000, pp. 94-112.
5
Cf. S. BENHABIB, The Claims of Culture, cit.; A. ONG, Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America, University of
California Press, Berkeley 2003.
6 A. ONG, Flexible Citizenship. The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Duke University Press, Durham 1999, pp. 217-218.
7 U. HANNERZ, Cultural Complexities. Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning, Columbia University Press, New York 1992.
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every local) are constantly stereotyped and rigidly identified.8 The very same rhetoric, supporting the
view that nowadays companies need competencies capable of mediating between various cultures,
actually legitimates policies that exclude individuals and groups by recognizing, often on the pretext of
integrating them, differences which should be defined as class rather than cultural differences: from the
IT workers of Bangalore and the Silicon Valley to the immigrants/human resources that fill up the
small and medium-sized enterprises in the Northeast of Italy.9 On the other hand, also the
governmentalities that control citizenship are under considerable tension in what Behabib calls, yet
again, the global.com civilization:10 foreigners gain first-hand experience of this as and when they
realise, through the integration process, that «the norms of good citizenship in advanced liberal
democracies have shifted from an emphasis on duties and obligations to the nation to a stress on
becoming autonomus, responsible choice-making subjects who can serve the nation best by becoming
“entrepreneurs of the self”».11 That is when they realise that, as foreigners, they will integrate more
easily, also regardless of their own alleged culture, if and when they demonstrate that they are capable
of becoming worthy citizens, citizens that conform to the idealtype of the well-integrated subject: a
«mobile homo œconomicus».12
Theoretical and applied knowledge and disciplines. The link necessary to connect these first three aspects is
represented by integration-related knowledge and disciplines. Abdelmalek Sayad, an Algerian scholar
and one of the leading sociologists on migration in Europe, noted that no matter how valuable and
necessary these may be, they are often labelled science of immigration and of immigrants (i.e. built in
and by the immigration society) and never science of emigration (i.e. built in and by the emigration
society). In this sense, also an issue such as integration, if viewed as something relating to the presence
of immigrants as foreign bodies in the host country, may be considered as being «totalement imposée,
extérieure à l’objet dont elle traite» .13 It is no accident that integration knowledge and sciences, just like
the debates and practices spewing from them, “unite” immigrants with the various institutions they
need to deal with as a result of their immigrant status: “immigrants and work”, “immigrants and
housing” etc. In each of these cases it is evident, Sayad noted, how knowledge that is believed to be
fashioned on immigrants and for immigrants, is in fact, above all, knowledge produced by the host
society to solve “public order” issues that immigrants are likely to raise in the various areas of social
life. A disenchanted and bitter realism, the one of Sayad, based on a life of painstaking and shared field
studies: every integration regime produces and, at the same time, is the product of «une somme de
savoirs d’une importance capitale, tant du point de vue pratique (i.e. pour le contrôle, l’adaptation, la
domestiation, l’insetion des immigrés, c’est-à-dire pour leur neutralisation ou le réduction de l’altérité,
de l’hétérogénéité, qu’ils introduisent avec eux) que du point de vue heuristique (i.e. pour la
compréhension des mécanismes sociaux, démographiques, économiques, culturels qui président à
l’immigration depuis l’acte initial qui est l’acte d’émigrer jusqu’à l’acte final de dissolution, de fusion
totale, d’absorption ou d’assimilation, au sens de la métaphore digestive, dans la société à laquelle les
immigrés finissent par s’agréger et s’identifier) combination of extremely important knowledge, both
from a practical point of view (i.e. for the control, adaptation, subjection and integration of immigrants,
that is for their neutralization or the reduction of otherness, heterogeneity they carry with themselves)
and from a heuristic point of view (i.e. to understand the social, demographic, economic and cultural
mechanisms that govern immigration from the start, from the very action of emigrating, to the end, the
D. ZOLETTO, “The ‘value’ of diversity. Cultures of integration and global interculural management”, paper delivered at the
XXIIst CESE Conference – Granada (E), 3-6 July 2006.
9 Cfr. A. ONG, Buddha Is Hiding, cit., chapters 9 and 10.
10
S. BENHABIB, The Claims of Culture, cit.
11 A. ONG, Buddha Is Hiding, cit., p. 8.
12 Ibidem. Cfr. anche N. ROSE, Governig the Soul; The Shaping of the Private Self, Free Association Book, New York 1999 e G.
THAO, “Governig the Soul” through Remolding the Self: The American Approach, «American Journal of Education», 111, 2005, pp.
245-266.
13 A. SAYAD, Le double absence. Des illusios de l’émigre aux soufferences de l’immigré, Èditions del Seuil, Pairs 1999, p. 178.
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final dissolution action, the one of total fusion, absorption or assimilation, as in the 'digestion'
metaphor, in the society the immigrants adhere to and end up identifying with)» 14
14
Ivi, p. 179.