Revisiting the European Union framework on immigrant integration: The European integration forum as a technology of agency

Abstract

In the last 15 years, a European Framework on Immigrant Integration has been developed through soft law tools, aiming to create a common understanding of the concept and promoting the coordination, funding, and exchange of best practices among states, local administrations, and nongovernmental actors. In this article, we first contextualize the emergence of immigrant integration policies at the European Union level. We then examine the principal European Union documents on this issue, paying special attention to the link between integration and immigrant participation. Finally, based on an empirical study, we analyze, from the perspective of governmentality, the European Integration Forum, an apparatus considered the “last word” in immigrant integration policies at the European Union level.

Keywords

European Integration Forum governmentality immigrant participation technologies of agency Common Basic Principles for Immigrant Integration Policy Common Framework for the Integration of non-European Union nationals

Introduction

When it comes to migration-related diversity, integration is an ambiguous notion that informs debates and policies. The genesis of this concept must be placed in the mid-1970s,¹ when the presence of migrants began to be conceived as a problem by European countries with long-term immigrant traditions, and specific public policies were developed, oriented toward promoting the “integration” of immigrants in the receiving context, as much in countries with a republican tradition (France) as in others with a multiculturalist focus (the United Kingdom and the Netherlands). In fact, more than 30 years later, the implementation of immigration policies is not uniform throughout European Union (EU) territory. These policies continue to be a state-level responsibility, with each nation-state maintaining its own distinct characteristics linked to its nation-building process and its particular imperial/colonial history. Although the Treaty of Lisbon (Art.79.4) foresaw EU responsibility when it came to establishing the means to promote and support the integration policies of member states, it excluded any harmonization of these policies. Notwithstanding, it must be observed that in the last 15 years, a European Framework on Integration (of “third-country nationals,” according to official language) has been developed through soft law tools, aiming to reach a common understanding of integration and promoting the coordination, funding, and exchange of best practices among different actors. In this sense, we have been witnessing increasing discursive production on the concept of integration as well as the implementation of different apparatus related to its management. This phenomenon obliges us to move beyond a formalistic approach to policies and to take into account the different ways in which this recently created political field has not only opened a transnational space of political practices — putting into contact a plurality of multilevel actors: national, regional, and local stakeholders, as well as civil society organizations — but also has had a (partial) influence on the attitude of state-level actors, conditioning their priorities and demands as well as creating new conflicts and opportunities.

Although we are aware of the tensions between the national and the EU levels, examining such tensions is not the goal of this paper: our article focuses on the study of integration policies from the perspective of EU institutions. Faced with the impossibility of tackling the whole variety of facets implicated in integration policies, we have chosen to center on those aspects most closely related to participation. We do so for three reasons: (1) the growing importance attributed by European institutions to the involvement of both immigrants and the receiving society in integration; (2) the fact that the dimension of participation is strongly implied in the official EU definition of integration; (3) the consideration that integration policies, insofar as they often relate to processes of inclusion/exclusion and classification of certain populations, represent a particularly appropriate context in order to test the real inclusiveness of institutional participative discourse. We start by elaborating on the emergence of integration policies within the European context. Next, we examine the principal EU documents on integration — looking back to the Tampere European Council (1999) and from there to the present day — focusing on the relationship between “integration” and “participation.” And finally, in order to assess our conceptual approach within a specific apparatus, we refer to the case of the European Integration Forum, a dialogue platform recently set up by the European Commission (EC) with the aim of analyzing how the concept of integration is materialized concretely and explaining why our empirical study leads us to understand the Forum participatory practices as a technology of agency.

Antecedents to integration policies in the context of Europe

The concept of integration has been used, and continues to be used, in distinct historical and geographical contexts, to denote measures ranging from forms of naturalization, family reunification, antidiscrimination laws, and positive discrimination and basic legal and social protection, through to: the creation of associations and religious organizations for immigrants; the redistribution of funds for specific groups, policies of housing and of law and order; mediation services, language and self-esteem courses; multi/intercultural education; professional education, access to labor market; self-employment; mini-credits; apparatus for specific social intervention and a long, etc. However, and in spite of its dissemination, the use of this notion in reference to immigrants is relatively recent. Until the mid-1970s, it was not considered that the immigrant population posed a problem for national order because it was supposed that foreign workers would not stay any longer than the length of their work contracts. This instrumental definition and reduction of immigration to a workforce, tolerated as a minor evil but never desired, cracked when it gave way to a populating immigration (Sayad, 2000). In contrast to what governments and business owners expected, immigrants did not return to their countries of origin, and moreover, supported by the right to family reunification, they sent for their families.

The profound economic and social changes that accompanied the industrial reconversion of the early 1970s affected this panorama on different levels, since the increase in unemployment and the precariousness of employment itself, changed the working and living possibilities and conditions of the wage-earning sectors, and thereby of the population of immigrant origin. At that point, and in the context of what has been called the metamorphosis of the social question (Castel, 1997), certain immigrant populations (and their children) began to personify the new ‘unadaptable’ groups, and became the object of insertion policies. It was within this framework that the immigrant presence started to be thought of, and to be managed, in terms of integration, which according to the political rationality² of “advanced liberalism” (Rose, 1999) was conceptualized in “personal” and “cultural” terms in a very particular fashion. On the one hand, integration was considered not as the outcome of social processes but as a personal responsibility of the individual, who was conceived as an autonomous, rational, and “self-made” subject. On the other hand, belonging to another culture — some cultures more than others — was understood as a kind of deficit for integration, an expression of certain difficulties “to be and act like the rest” (Castel, 1984: 124). Immigrants had to demonstrate a high level of personal involvement and effort in order to fulfill the receiving society's expectations, while simultaneously, unsuccessful integration was explained through the paradigm of cultural deficit.

As various comparative studies have shown, the form and content of policies directed at immigrants display important variations between one country and another, often linked to the respective histories of nation building in the states considered, their political cultures, and legal traditions (Brubaker, 1999; Favell, 2000; Gil Araujo, 2011; Koopmans et al., 2005). However, since the 1980s, in spite of the variations from state to state, the majority of practices directed at managing the presence of immigrants have been developed under the rubric of integration (Favell, 2001). In the last decades, in most European countries, the political debate over immigration has focused on the possibility of integration of immigrant populations and the danger that their presence could pose for national unity and security (Rudolph, 2006). In the majority of cases, debates end up trapped in the narrow parameters of national identity; in this framework, policy makers have begun to theorize about citizenship, not only in terms of rights and responsibilities, but rather, and above all, in terms of cultural and moral demands on the new members of society as proof of their identification with the nation (Favell, 1997). In a shift toward the radicalization of this conception of immigration as a menace to national identity, from the beginning of the current century, a growing number of EU countries have begun to put into practice integration tests, programs, and/or contracts (see Van Oers et al., 2010). These measures have been applied not only with regard to naturalization processes, but also to family reunion and long-term residence applicants, in an approach that has been legitimized by the EU Directive on Family Reunion (2003) and the EU Directive on Long-Term Residence (2003). In this way, the designated integration policies have become an instrument of immigrant restriction and selection. As some scholars have argued, the EU approach to immigration policies has indeed driven a strong process of confluence across Europe around the idea of integration tests (Carrera and Wiesbrock, 2009; Joppke, 2007).

Revision of EU documents in terms of immigrant integration (1999–2011)

We have already mentioned that EU institutions have driven growing levels of coordination of immigrant integration policies, facilitating and incentivizing the exchange of information between states, local administrations, and nongovernmental actors, as well as implementing the technical means and necessary finances to achieve this end. If the Amsterdam Treaty (approved in 1997 and entered into force in 1999) had communitarized immigration and asylum policies by moving them to the first pillar of the European Union, the much ‘softer’ cooperation at EU level in the field of immigrant integration had begun in the frame of the Tampere European Council (1999),³ the conclusions of which affirm the need to adopt a “more vigorous integration policy” toward legally residing third-country nationals. Although the approval of two Directives on Racial Equality (2000/43/EC) and Equal Treatment in Employment and Occupation (2000/78/EC) seems to pave the way to a rights-based approach to non-EU migrants from the perspective of antidiscrimination (see Geddes, 1998, 2000; Guiraudon, 2000, 2003), the idea of integration as a “demand” and a “duty” for the immigrant would rapidly turn hegemonic with the establishment — within the EC — of a Directorate-General (DG) ‘Home Affairs’⁴ (1999) characterized by a markedly ‘restrictive’ approach, tending to conceive integration as a tool of immigration policy (Carrera and Parkin, 2010). Later, a milestone in the constitution of a common European framework would be the Common Basic Principles on Integration (CBPs), adopted in November 2004 by the Justice and Home Affairs Council. They are a collection of nonbinding directives from which member states can elaborate their integration policies. Through the CBPs, integration is defined and made “real” and its specific components are listed and made visible. The principles most directly related to integration and participation are: CBP 1, which defines integration as “a dynamic, two-way process of mutual accommodation by all immigrants and residents of Member States”; CBP 7, which emphasizes the importance of “frequent interaction between immigrants and Member State citizens,” demanding the promotion of common forums and intercultural dialogue as a key element for successful integration; and CBP 9, which stresses that “the participation of immigrants in the democratic process and in the formulation of integration policies and measures, especially at the local level, supports their integration.” The CBPs were acknowledged by the EC in September 2005 with the establishment of a Common Agenda for Integration, which aimed to put into practice the CBPs through concrete political orientations.

In order to better operationalize the concept of integration and to convert the CBPs into practical tools aimed at managing efficaciously the presence of non-EU nationals, the EC has also published three editions of the Handbook on Integration for Policy-Makers and Practitioners (2004, 2007, 2010), developed through 14 technical seminars with the contribution of member states' experts, the National Contact Points on Integration (NCPIs). Their main purpose is to foster the active and responsible conduct of stakeholders through the exchange of information and “good practices.” The first edition of the Handbook stated that participation is a key element for the practice of active citizenship, pointing out that “migrant organizations are also key partners in the exercise of participatory government” (2004: 10). In accordance with this manual, political participation involves multiple facets. In the field of electoral rights, the importance of local level elections is insisted upon; whereas outside the electoral process, the participation of foreign residents in consultative forums and dialogue platforms is sought out. Moreover, The Handbook makes specific mention of the importance of the acquisition of nationality for opening up opportunities for integration and participation, but it emphasizes that it is not a “magic measure” (2004: 45), and that naturalized immigrants may continue to suffer from discrimination that impedes the development of a sense of belonging to the society. It should be noted that the EC has no jurisdiction over electoral and naturalization policies regarding third-country nationals. In this sense, the EU approach seems to be centered on the promotion of the idea of “active citizenship,” through supporting and funding the aforementioned dialogue platforms at the national, regional, and local levels. Two important apparatus fueling the debate on integration directly at EU level had been established in 2009. The first is the European Integration Forum, a dialogue platform whose creation was especially supported by the Commission and the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC); the second is the European Website on Integration, which puts in contact experts, practitioners, administrators, and “civil society.”

Further, a Council Decision had established in 2007 the European Integration Fund in order to support national and transnational projects aimed to implement the CBPs. It is worth stressing that the Fund must be used in accordance with the CBPs, since the actors that will be financed are required to implement them through their own projects. The real effectiveness of this requirement has been questioned by recent studies⁵; nonetheless, the mere existence of this link shows that European institutions have attempted to condition and channel the implementation of state-level policies toward both the achievement of EU objectives and the dissemination of their own understanding of integration. However, the Third Annual Report on Migration and Integration (2007), evaluating the implementation of the CBPs, indicates that the significant application of the first CBP, which suggests that integration is a two-way process, is “a long-term challenge requiring further efforts. Structural initiatives targeting the host population to reinforce its ability to adjust to diversity are still underrepresented in national strategies” (2007: 8). Later, The Stockholm Programme (2010), developing the approach suggested in previous programs, states that the integration of third-county nationals with legal residence is the key to making the most of immigration's advantages and continues to insist upon the necessity of an integration policy directed toward comparable rights and obligations between third-country national residents and EU citizens.

That same year, 2010, the third edition of the Handbook insists upon the same elements: the necessity for the active participation of all citizens and residents to achieve successful integration; the encouragement of joint dialogue platforms; the elimination of legal barriers to the civic participation of immigrants; the significance of equalizing of rights and obligations; the importance of creating opportunities for frequent interaction between immigrants and nationals; and the necessity for migrants to have a voice and an active role in policy development. Also in 2010, the fourth Ministerial Conference on Integration, held in Zaragoza, introduces a debate on indicators and modules. Indicators are conceived as a tool to monitor and evaluate the results of national integration policies, at first in the field of employment, education, social inclusion, and active citizenship. Although a consensus on this topic has not yet been reached, it is interesting to note that the concept of indicators once again brings up the idea of achieving EU goals through the promotion of agency, as well as through the enhancement of performance and the fostering of competition among a plurality of actors (Walters and Haahr, 2005: 119). On the other hand, modules constitute the development and stronger operationalization of the “best practices” contained in the handbooks, with a special emphasis on their transferability from one context to another (DG Home, 2011). It should be noted that the initial draft on modules creates three different types: one on introductory and language courses, another on strong commitment by the receiving society, and the last one on active participation of immigrants in all aspects of social life. According to interviews with participants in the European Integration Forum,⁶ it seems that only the first type of modules — the ones most clearly related to integration tests — actually meet member states' approval, while the second and the third, the ones that more clearly refer to the concept of participation, have been considered to be somewhat “confusing”; currently, the discussion on them is at a standstill.

Finally, in July 2011, the EC had proposed the European Agenda for the Integration of Third-Country Nationals. Declaring that the first Common Agenda (2005) had already been implemented, but that the economic, social, and political context had changed, and that not all the measures had turned out to be successful, the new Agenda presents itself as an up-to-date contribution to the debate over how to understand and promote integration. Although integration has been defined as a process in constant evolution, requiring continual efforts, innovative focuses, and bold ideas, the Commission once again recommended to member states that they undertake all necessary efforts to eliminate obstacles to the political participation of immigrants, seeking to increase the involvement of immigrant representatives in the design and implementation of integration programs and policies. In addition, it discusses “integration through participation,” a notion that suggests the latter is not an objective in itself, but rather a necessary requirement to achieve a more successful integration process. So it seems that “participation” is somewhat subordinated to “integration.” It also emphasizes the importance of the involvement of countries of origin, stating that integration begins abroad, by means of predeparture measures. In this sense, it opens a new dimension of integration, conceiving it de facto as a “three-way” process, addressing not only the responsibility of member states, but also that of non-EU countries.

Introducing the European Integration Forum

In this section, we analyze an apparatus considered the “last word” in immigrant integration policies at the EU level, the European Integration Forum. We begin by contextualizing its creation, in order to then review its main characteristics, functions, and objectives, also taking into account previous experience on immigrant participation at EU level. Following this, we introduce the topics debated in the eight meetings held so far. Finally, we focus on the two aspects most relevant to this article: the struggles around the definition of ‘integration’ — understood as a conceptual tool for the achievement of EU goals — and the participatory activities that take place within the Forum. Contrasting the previous analysis of EU documents and the current inquiry helps us to closely observe the variety of conceptions and strategies developed by various agents.

In July 2008, the EESC adopted, at the request of the EC, an exploratory opinion regarding the promotion of measures for the integration of third-country nationals, underlining the importance of the role played by civil society organizations when it comes to “ensuring the coherence and effectiveness of the social processes of integrating immigrants, defining policies in the EU and in evaluating these policies” (EESC, 2008). Thus, the establishment of a dialogue platform between EU institutions and civil society representatives becomes a priority measure. After some meetings with representatives of European associations and after an exchange of letters between the Vice-President of the Commission, Mr Jacques Barrot, and the President of the EESC, Mr Mario Sepi, the Forum was finally instituted. In April 2009, the platform met officially for the first time.

The document Rules of Procedures of the European Integration Forum (Barrot and Sepi, 2009), released by the EC, officially defines the Forum's mandate, functions, and organization. It is to have no more than a hundred participants and it is to meet in plenary session twice a year. The selection of the members, run by the Commission and the EESC, will include representatives from European civil society umbrella organizations, along with those from state associations or platforms, in a 2:1 ratio in favor of the latter.⁷ It will also include: representatives of the NCPIs; delegates from the Presidency of the European Council, present, past, and future; spokespeople from the Commission, the Parliament, the EESC, and the Committee of the regions; local administration networks and academic experts. A bureau comprising four people will preside over the Forum's meetings and meet four times a year, before and after each plenary session, to evaluate its achievements and establish the future agenda. The members of the bureau must include a representative of the EC, one of the EESC, as well as a spokesperson for civil society organizations at the EU level and another at the state level. A secretariat will also be established, comprised of two, with responsibility for logistical and bureaucratic management.

We have seen that the official mandate of the Forum is that of encouraging civil society participation, in the interests of it having a role in the definition, evaluation, and implementation of EU integration policies. Therefore, the aim of the meetings must be as much one of exchanging information and “best practices” as one of organizing working groups to tackle specific aspects of integration, and, similarly, more technical questions. The Forum will also be entitled to produce reports, whether under its own initiative or at the request of other EU institutions, in both cases with a consultative role. Nonetheless, the intention is quite clearly to channel the debate within the limits defined by the EU's official political agenda, as suggested by the following regulation:

The Common Basic Principles on Integration will be the guide for the Forum's activities. Participants should be free to discuss a whole range of issues related to the integration process as such. But in order to provide a ‘useful input’ into the development of the EU's policy on integration, the legal mandate and the policy context would frame the discussion. (Barrot and Sepi, 2009)

The insistence on usefulness is better understood through the example of a prior attempt to establish a dialogue platform on immigration, the European Union Migrant's Forum. This Forum, which ended up failing, had been set up in the early 1990s by the Commission, following an initiative of the European Parliament, and it involved around 130 migrant organizations. According to existing literature, the reasons for its failure can be found in the strong confrontations that took place between Turkish and Moroccan representatives, the divergent associations' strategies (Guiraudon, 2003), as well as poor financial management (Geddes, 2000). According to the main actors within the current Integration Forum, this previous experience embodies a paradigm of “failure” and it is considered an example not to follow. Asked about the reasons for this failure, an interviewee (a representative of civil society, 6 June 2012) underlines—in a negative sense—the “philosophical” nature of the debate that took place within the Migrants' Forum, implying it was disconnected from current political issues and unable to provide useful input to EU institutions. Other scholars also point out the minimal influence of the Migrants' Forum (Kastoryano, 2004). In the light of the limits that have been identified in the Migrants' Forum, it is easy to understand the current demand for the Integration Forum to be efficacious and to mark a clear discontinuity with the previous one, especially by linking itself more closely to breaking political news. An expert closely involved in the elaboration of various important integration tools at the EU level describes the function of the current Forum as follows:

The Commission wanted to have an interlocutor, like it has in other areas, […] that continues to push it, to go higher in its standards, where they already agree on the common objectives. So it's helpful for the Commission to have an organization that helps to overcome the democratic deficit at the European level, encourages the mobilization of civil society, in an area where the Commission and civil society tend to share a similar point of view, in order to have more bonds in its discussion with member states. (Interview with a member of a think tank, 24 March 2011)

This quotation can be read as an attempt, developed by the promoters of the current Forum, to help align the EU's objectives in the management of integration with the participatory practices undertaken by civil society actors. This effort is rooted in the consideration that civil society organizations share a similar point of view to that of European institutions on this issue, even while (supposedly) more critical toward the (deemed) restrictive positions of certain national governments.

In order to deepen our analysis, we now take in chronological order the principal subjects of debate addressed in European Integration Forum meetings. This allows us to observe their evolution and better understand the reflections, references, and criticisms of participants themselves. All meetings of the Forum have taken place in Brussels, in the buildings of the EESC. Until now, the structure of each meeting, though varying in some details, has always included introductory and concluding sessions (both plenary), one or more debate sessions on specific topics (also in plenary form) and several simultaneous working groups.

The first meeting⁸ (April 2009) included general topics about the EU framework and set up working groups for looking into the consequences of the economic crisis and the work of the Forum. The second meeting (November 2009) continued debating general subjects in the plenary session and developed four workshops on cross-cutting integration policy and the advances of the European Integration Fund. In the third meeting, The Civil Society Input to the Second European Agenda for Integration and The Relation between Migrants and the Media was debated (June 2010), and there were four working groups, all related to the media. The fourth meeting tackled, as much in the plenary session as in the four workshops, the Active participation of migrants and strong commitment by the host society (December 2010). The fifth meeting (May 2011) concentrated on Integration through local action, developing four different working groups: intercultural dialogue, political participation, disadvantaged neighborhoods, and the European Integration Fund at the local and regional levels. The sixth meeting addressed The involvement of countries of origin in the integration process (November 2011), developing roundtables on predeparture measures; diaspora communities; and the relation between integration, circular migration, and development. The seventh meeting witnessed a provisional change of format, being a public audit (with no working groups) about the possible revision of the family reunion directive, where numerous representatives of national governments, nongovernmental organizations, and EU institutional heavyweights all debated together (May–June 2012). Finally, the eighth meeting (October 2012) went back to the traditional format, concentrating on The contribution of migrants to economic growth in the EU and establishing three working groups related to the labor market and migrant workers and entrepreneurs.

By reading the programs of each meeting, the work in progress nature of its first stages is clearly perceived, in particular in the continual restructuring of the working groups. This provisional character has also been confirmed by the participants interviewed; nonetheless, some of them also mentioned that along its trajectory, the Forum has strengthened itself and has been acknowledged as an effective “organizational machine.” In the following section, we will concentrate on the definition(s) of the concept of integration and the participatory activities that emerge from the very actions of the Forum's protagonists.

The concept of (immigrant) integration: Struggles for its content

Within the existing legal frameworks, the Commission's strategy appears to be that of creating a series of tools able to condition, beyond their formal prerogatives, the debate and the public policies of member states, favoring the diffusion of approaches and measures that translate integration into practice according to the EU concept. In this way, the Forum assumes the formal “two-way process” definition of integration proposed by CBP 1. The representatives of the Commission and the Committee usually insist upon this bi-directionality, contrasting it with the restrictive and unilateral approach of some governments. Moreover, the concept used by the Forum's promoters seems to distance itself from certain essentialist nuances, preferring to promote respect for “civic-political” values shared by all EU residents, rather than adaptation to the “customs” and “traditions” on the part of specific migrant collectives. If CBP 2 suggests: “Integration implies respect for the basic values of the European Union,” without subsequent specifications, a member of the bureau provided his interpretation of said values and principles in the following way:

From my point of view, they are those established by the Treaty which are later finalized in the Charter of Fundamental Rights […]. There are many European citizens, whether of immigrant origin or not, who do not share these values and are not the object of a reduction in their rights. I don't think that legislation with the objective of integration should be used to reduce fundamental rights. Another question is that the authorities and civil society should promote the values of open democratic and egalitarian societies amongst all residents. (Interview with a member of the Bureau, 24 February 2011)

This statement, though without any formal value, demonstrates that the ambiguity of the official definition of certain principles lends itself to a game of interpretations. Consequently, the success of a particular definition will depend on the power relationships existing at a given moment. We must not forget that the CBPs were first established by the Justice and Home Affairs Council in 2004—that is, passing through the filter of member states—and later assumed by the Commission in its Communication of 2005. Therefore, we should not be surprised that its translation to operational concepts is subject to different nuances, being an expression of the plurality of conceptions belonging to situated subjects. However, this observation does not refute the fact that the CBPs, beyond the aforementioned contradictions, still operate as a conceptual tool that pushes toward convergence among the practices of the different actors involved in the process.

In addition, more or less explicitly, criticisms of the integration policies of countries like France, Germany, Netherlands, or Italy represent a common sense shared as much by the members of the Forum, who are representatives of EU institutions, as by organizations of a transnational character. For example, one person interviewed, speaking about state integration policies, suggested the following:

It was very difficult to see, in certain countries, whether there were even any integration policies at all, and not the government or the receiving country just expecting migrants to assimilate […]. At the EU level, integration as a two-way process has been recognized as one of the CBPs, but we can see that on a national level, quite a number of countries are not really taking that into account or putting it into practice, and then a lot of the burden is put on migrants. (Interview with an NGO representative, 3 March 2011)

Thus, we see that the use of the concept of integration alludes to the existence of a symbolic battlefield, where different conceptions square up to each other to determine their content. Trying to simplify, we observe on the one hand the existence of a more proactive or “civic-political” meaning, which is embodied in the vision of the Forum's promoters, and on the other, that of a more reactive and “culturalist” meaning, which according to those interviewed should be attributed to the approaches of some national governments. Such governments, though accepting the objective of integration, in reality seem to translate the concept into practice in a different way, directing it toward an assimilationist path, stressing the importance of the immigrants' duty “to be integrated” before the joint responsibilities of social and political agents. In other words, they seem to conceive of integration de facto as a one-way process.⁹

However, this struggle for content does not occur solely along the EU-states vector, but rather it also takes place in the Forum, within the same “proactive” field. In effect, although participants from European civil society usually share criticisms of certain state policies, this does not mean that they have the same notion of integration, or that the approach represented by the Commission and the EESC is exempt from criticism. For example, one interviewee underlined that the same term integration, in reality, is falling into disuse at a local level, often substituted by “inclusion”:

More and more cities don't use the term integration anymore in the official policy papers, partly because they say it's something that involves the host society, while ‘integration’ often suggests that migrants have to adapt. It goes in an assimilationist direction, so they would use something like ‘inclusion’ […]. But I think you need to look at the substance and there, the two-way approach is really important […]. So a two-way approach, more pragmatic things, this also means that the legal distinctions are not always so important. (Interview with an NGO representative, 31 March 2011)

Another person interviewed believed that the use of the word “integration” by EU institutions is written into a process of inclusion/exclusion, in which certain classifications are used to distinguish between EU citizens and third-country nationals:

Why do poor natives, for instance, not have the right to integrate and why should society only integrate people from outside and not people from inside? This kind of exclusive/inclusive concept implied in the term of integration doesn't function; it's untrue […]. What we push when we have to talk about integration is: ‘Fine, but we always have to associate integration with another term, what are we talking about? Access to the labor market? What are we talking about? Participation? Citizenship? Naturalization? Housing? Employment?’ So I would really try to use that empty word and really immediately associate it with what we want to say. (Interview with an NGO representative, 18 March 2011)

These statements display, on the one hand, the complexity of the interpretive game surrounding integration, a concept it is difficult to consider static and unequivocal, and on the other, the strategy of certain actors who, though adapting to the political framework of the EU, attempt to modify its coordinates “from within.” We can thus observe how the mainstream discursive context conditions the way demands are articulated on the part of the participants, who, though they do not completely share the working concepts being used, design a strategy of resignifying its contents “as they go along”: in the instance of the first quotation, evaluating the priority of the specific processes over the legalities, and in the second, proposing that a somewhat empty concept be filled with content and its application extended to new subjects. Another criticism shared by European NGOs is directed at the prerequisites that migrants must fulfill in order to be residents legally. Due to these requirements, until now, the Forum has found it impossible to tackle questions such as the integration of refugees (which is rather the responsibility of the European Refugee Fund) and undocumented migrants. This occurs, furthermore, in spite of the fact that within the Forum—again as a consequence of the pressure exerted by civil society—they participate in organizations such as the European Council on Refugees and Exiles and the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants. Thus, the Forum finds itself in a contradictory position and the possibility of subsequent developments and future modifications is not to be excluded. The presence of such contradictions until now seems to attest to a kind of tension between the aforementioned necessities of efficacy and efficiency and the impossibility of reducing said issues to any artificial separation that attempts to unlink its complex articulations.

In sum, this brief review of the concept of integration as elaborated in the Forum at once shows its resistance to easy crystallizations, the complex and multilevel articulation of the struggle for its content, and the existence of inclusion/exclusion mechanisms inside and outside the same process.

Participation as a technology of agency

In relation to the participatory process that takes place within the Forum, there is a general feeling that “more could be done,” in particular among the representatives of civil society. On the other hand, the consciousness that it is an experimental and ongoing process is also present, as clearly expressed in the following statement:

We have to see; we don't know yet. It costs some money to bring all these people to Brussels and I think the feeling that many participants had so far was: “We have to get something done; otherwise this is a bit of a show. But it's also true that it takes some time and we have to see.” (Interview with an NGO representative, 31 March 2011)

Taking into account this common point of departure, the subtleties usually vary quite markedly depending on the particular position of the interviewee within the process. As one might expect, institutional members tended to underline the positive elements of the process. For instance according to a member of the bureau, the Forum:

works through very participatory systems. They are meetings that last only a day and a half; therefore, the agenda is limited. But all the members can speak on one or several occasions in the debates; thus, it is very participatory. (Interview 24 February 2011)

The general functioning of the Forum's meetings has already been mentioned; now, we take a closer look at some modalities of participation. The buildings of the EESC where the meetings are held contain a kind of small, semicircular parliament, at the center of which the president's table is found; here are seated the members of the bureau and/or the speakers of the different sessions, surrounded by the other participants. During the plenary sessions, there is usually a significant presence of institutional members—representatives of Parliament, of the Commission, of the current presidency of the EU Council, etc.—ad hoc guests invited for a specific session who do not always stay for the duration of the whole meeting. In this part, the contribution of noninstitutional participants is usually limited, consisting of brief contributions during the debate, which are, in turn, answered by the table. Upon direct observation, moreover, the prevalence of quite general questions has been noted, rather than more articulated contributions. The working groups are developed during the afternoon of the first day, in different rooms and obviously (being simultaneous) with a reduced number of participants. In these contexts, a wider and more “horizontal” debate usually emerges. Additionally, each workshop entrusts the presentation of the principal points and achievements of the discussion to a rapporteur the following day. In the general opinion of civil society participants, this method of functioning is usually considered insufficient, due to, among other things, the inequality that exists between the spaces for collective debate and the moments of “propaganda” for EU policies. For example, in relation to the plenary sessions, an interviewee stated:

In terms of how it works, you basically have opening speeches. Then you have the Commissioner that will say a few words, and then the Commission that will explain what's being done on the Commission level on integration. They'll generally promote their tools and what has been done so far, and then you might have an hour to debate, a general debate on integration issues. (Interview with an NGO representative, 3 March 2011)

Another recurring criticism is directed at the content of certain debates, considered impractical and translatable only with difficulty to specific policies. For example, two of those interviewed consider the subject of debate in a plenary session from the third Forum on The relation between migrants and the media, not to have any practical consequences, not affecting a EU responsibility. On the other hand, the change of format of the seventh Forum to a “public audit” is particularly appreciated, with many stakeholders considering it more participatory and useful. Another striking question is that of the power of setting the agenda. It has already been said that the order of the day of the Forum's meetings is established by the four members of the bureau. In addition, there seems to be a clear asymmetry of power relationships between the institutional representatives of the bureau and those of the civil society, which is also reproduced within the Forum. The perception is shared that this composition creates a kind of informal direction, in which the weight of civil society representatives is limited. In fact, the associations cannot fix any topic of debate without the consensus of the two “heavyweights” of the Commission and the Committee, as lamented in this particularly strong statement:

Can we set the agenda, for instance? Can we say: “Ok, next meeting we want to talk about this”? This is not possible and you see the majority relations in the Bureau as such that you cannot just dictate something as the majority of civil society organizations. (Interview with an NGO representative, 31 March 2011)

In addition, informal sources pointed out that the topic of the sixth Forum was not really responding to a civil society demand; rather, it seemed to be an institutional hierarchical decision. In this sense, the relationships of forces that materialize within the Forum reflect in quite a crystallized way the framework of its original mandate, which means that these participatory practices are not producing any significant changes in the dynamics of power. The agenda debated at the Forum is the same agenda established by the EU. A semi-institutional platform such as this cannot free itself from the fundamental objectives for which it has been created. Thus, we arrive at a central question inherent to the limits of participation: is it enough simply to be consulted or is more necessary, to have effective power over the agenda and a real influence, to be heard? A joint text by different associations of European civil society stresses the importance precisely of the necessity that the voice of migrant organizations be heard (ENAR, 2010). Along these lines, one source suggested:

I must admit that I was quite disappointed with the Forum. I think we were hoping for much more, because we thought it would be a platform that would really consult NGOs and really take into account our views […]. Ok, it's still the early days, but it felt very much like it's just another platform for NGOs to just say what they have to say, and everyone says all the same things, over and over again. And you know, you have a few officials and half of the time, they'll make their own speeches; and then, if you're lucky, there may be one or two people there when the EU actually has time to debate and discuss things, but there's no actual follow up after that. It's not like that they can put forward recommendations or anything to the Council . (Interview with an NGO representative, 3 March 2011)

In spite of disappointments, the prevailing attitude of the NGOs is one of recognizing the Commission's “genuine” interest in improving things, considering that the majority of the problems boil down to logistical questions—like the low numbers of DG Home officials dedicated to integration—or, again, to the limited powers of the Commission in the face of states. The gap between the EU and nation states, on the other hand, not only manifests itself in the conceptual struggles over the meaning of integration, but is also articulated in the participatory practices that take place within the Forum. In fact, the sources interviewed have confirmed that, apart from the technical difficulties present in a constant process of learning by trial and error, the problems of the relationship between the Commission and the NCPIs owe as much to the lack of knowledge of different specific situations as indeed to the fact that, from some member states, the associations most “akin” to national governments' agendas are chosen rather than those most representative.

Following the above considerations on participatory practices, a contradictory feature of the Forum is observed: the fact that the model of participation proposed seems to be at the same time both active as well as enclosed and channeled within an established frame. In fact, the promoting institutions—or at least some sectors within them—seem to have honestly invested in the Forum, in order for it to be an efficacious and active tool, trying to link it to the latest political developments at European level and striving for it to be a respectable voice. Nevertheless, the need for civil society organizations to be active must be contextualized within a reactive frame, within the lower level of autonomy it has, in comparison with the previous Migrants' Forum, when it comes to setting the agenda of the debate. Although it's true that the demand for a stronger link to the European political framework is shared by civil society representatives, we must remember that this stronger “efficacy” couples with the practical impossibility to question the general frame, the main problematizations and the definition of overall priorities. Civil society participation is active within a reactive frame, whose configuration cannot be established by civil society itself. An interviewee puts it clearly:

Whereas the Migrant's Forum was supposed to be a continuous body that really brought together civil society on its own priorities, we have the Forum now, which is a reactive Forum that's really ad-hoc at the moment. It is not yet caught up with the way policies are made on integration. (Interview with a member of a think tank, 24 March 2011)

In sum, we believe that the participatory practices that take place in the Forum are exempt neither from ambiguities nor from tensions produced by political and logistical problems, and in particular, by the very clear delimitation of the general framework, the agenda, and the subjects for debate. Far from being a space of “unlimited” self-organization and self-determination of civil society—key factors for the emergence of a European public sphere—the Forum is rather a tool oriented toward the implementation of political priorities established elsewhere. Nonetheless, at the same time, its very existence could push participants to seek other meeting times, outside the formal spaces and institutionalized dynamics, allowing them to articulate common advocacy strategies. Definitively, this platform is a good example of the thin line existing between relationships of power and processes of subjectification. It shows how public authorities, in order to achieve their own political goals, do not simply develop a top-down approach—something that would be impossible within this soft policy domain—but rather opt to create specific fields where they can “shape” the patterns of action of the stakeholders. In fact, we can see a clear attempt to capture and align their (limited) agency, to make it compatible with the requirements of the political priorities, to channel their participatory practices toward the achievement of EU goals. In this sense, the Forum represents an interesting example of how government¹⁰ works in the context of integration policies at EU level.

Based on our analysis, we consider that the Forum can be interpreted as a technology of government, that is a heterogeneous assemblage of a diversity of objects and relations—forms of practical knowledge, practices of calculation, vocabularies, nonhuman objects and devices, and so on—which aspires to shape conduct, working to align governmental aims with the conduct of the governed (Rose, 1999: 52). More specifically, it can be considered a technology of agency. This is a specific kind of governmental technology, which emerges from those policies centered on concepts of “empowerment” and/or “active participation” (of stakeholders) and works in a twofold sense. On the one hand, it constructs them as “free and active citizens” (Walters and Haahr, 2005: 75), “informed” and “responsible” consumers, and “self-managing communities and organizations” (Dean, 2010: 196). On the other hand, it strives to “capture” their agency and “involvement” in order to achieve more efficient governmental aims (De Marinis, 1999). Our analysis suggests that the practices of participation taking place in the Forum seem to work exactly as a governmental tool, operating as a form of liberty as much limited as it is necessary—that being the reason for the continuous insistence on usefulness and efficacy—in the interests of shaping the conduct of the participants and to align it with the governmental objectives.

Conclusion

In this article, we have dealt with migration-related diversity, taking into account the emergence of immigrant integration policies, both at the member state and the EU level. We have argued that, although European institutions do not have any direct jurisdiction over such policies, the recent creation of a common European framework based on soft law has had an influence on the interactions between the EU, nation states, and other multilevel actors (both institutional and of civil society), as well as on the practices developed by them. We have focused on a specific issue within this policy domain, that of participation, first showing its relevance (and ambiguities) in the most important documents of the EU and then analyzing the concrete participatory practices taking place in the European Integration Forum. Our analysis reveals that participation, within this policy field, seems to be considered by EU institutions a fundamental dimension for the implementation of policies, much more than for their decision making. The question pending answer, then, is whether participation is considered an enriching attribute to the process of integration, or if it rather constitutes the preferred method through which that very process should be conducted, in the interests of being effective, and, possibly, of lowering its social and economic costs through the direct involvement of the interested parties.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Part of the work on this paper has been elaborated in the context of Eurosphere, an integrated project funded by the European Union's 6th Framework Programme (CIT4-CT-2006-028504).

Notes

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