Drawing the Boundaries of the Nation: Racialization in the French Civic Integration Program

• In Event: 174 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 18. Racialization and Religious Boundaries

Abstract

National civic integration programs for non-European migrants have become increasingly common across Europe. While the official purpose of these programs is to facilitate migrants’ entry into society, scholars argue that they may actually reinforce the boundaries that separate migrants from the national community. In order to address this potential paradox, I propose a theoretical framework that combines the concepts of racialization and symbolic boundaries and effectively locates integration programs in the long historical relationship between Europeans and non-Europeans. In applying this framework, this paper draws from an ethnography of the French civic integration program – the “Reception and Integration Contract” – and field interviews with program staff.

I find that the program represents the French nation as modern, secular, and striving towards gender equality, and immigrants as traditional with patriarchal gender relations and public religious practices that conflict with French Republican values. Using these representations, the program discursively draws racialized boundaries between the French nation and participating migrants based on language, culture, and religion. While program personnel with immigrant origins challenge and blur these boundaries, they also often reinforce them and facilitate this process of racialization.

Overall, the essentialist and hierarchical representations within the program discourses appear to reproduce the historical contrast between European and non-European and limit the possibilities for boundary crossing and entry into the nation. The paper concludes with a consideration of how this theoretical framework could be applied to the US in order to compare contemporary racialization across national contexts.

Author

• Elizabeth Onasch, The New School