International Symposium on Interculturalism: Travails of Integration in the Netherlands

Figure 1, reflecting the variable Dutch scores on integration indicators that are part of the Migrant Policy Integration Index or MIPEX, reinforces the point:  Dutch policy and performance vary along several dimensions.  Leaving aside reservations about the MIPEX measures, it is also fair to infer that by its scoring the Netherlands does not appear to have become a heartless and exclusive fortress of resistance to minority integration.
MIPEX, like much of the discussion of integration policy, is interested in outcomes.  It takes an instrumental approach:  policy is a tool to remake society.  That is fair enough, of course, but the link between tool and outcome is often difficult to establish.  And policy is never just a tool.  Especially in this arena, it also works as a form of symbolic politics or  “identity work,”  an effort to  articulate what it means to be Dutch while ostensibly crafting solutions to migrant problems.  Geddes (2003), among many others, was quite right to detect a nationalizing thrust in Dutch policy discourse.  That very thrust, however, sets limits to the plausibility of interculturalism, since for better or worse the relevant policy discourse concerns itself with the nature of the “we” that are to be integrated:  before “we” can decide how to deal with diversity, “we” must know first who “we” are...Read more