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Citizens and Citizenship.The rhetoric of Dutch Immigrant Integration Policies
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The past generation has seen a switch to restrictive policies and language in the governance of migrants living in the Netherlands. Beginning in 2010, a new government with right-wing populist backing went further, declaring the centrality of proposed characteristic historic Dutch values. In this article, we investigate a key policy document to characterize and understand this policy change. Discourse analysis as an exploration of language choices, including use of ideas from rhetoric, helps us apply and test ideas from governmentality studies of migration and from discourse studies as social theorizing. We trace the chosen problem formulation; the delineation, naming, and predication of population categories; the understanding of citizenship, community, and integration; and the overall rhetoric, including chosen metaphors and nuancing of emphases, that links the elements into a meaning-rich world picture. A “neoliberal communitarian” conception of citizenship has emerged that could unfortunately subject many immigrants to marginalization and exclusion.
The past generation has seen a switch to restrictive policies and language in the governance of migrants living in the Netherlands. Beginning in 2010, a new government with right-wing populist backing went further, declaring the centrality of proposed characteristic historic Dutch values. In this article, we investigate a key policy document to characterize and understand this policy change. Discourse analysis as an exploration of language choices, including use of ideas from rhetoric, helps us apply and test ideas from governmentality studies of migration and from discourse studies as social theorizing. We trace the chosen problem formulation; the delineation, naming, and predication of population categories; the understanding of citizenship, community, and integration; and the overall rhetoric, including chosen metaphors and nuancing of emphases, that links the elements into a meaning-rich world picture. A “neoliberal communitarian” conception of citizenship has emerged that could unfortunately subject many immigrants to marginalization and exclusion.
Keywords: citizenship, communitarianism, immigrant integration, national identity, neoliberalism, population categories formation, social exclusion
The past generation has seen a switch to restrictive policies and language in the governance of migrants living in the Netherlands. Beginning in 2010, a new government with right-wing populist backing went further, declaring the centrality of proposed characteristic historic Dutch values. In this article, we investigate a key policy document to characterize and understand this policy change. Discourse analysis as an exploration of language choices, including use of ideas from rhetoric, helps us apply and test ideas from governmentality studies of migration and from discourse studies as social theorizing. We trace the chosen problem formulation; the delineation, naming, and predication of population categories; the understanding of citizenship, community, and integration; and the overall rhetoric, including chosen metaphors and nuancing of emphases, that links the elements into a meaning-rich world picture. A "neoliberal communitarian" conception of citizenship has emerged that could unfortunately subject many immigrants to marginalization and exclusion.
The governance of migrants in the Netherlands in the 1990s to 2000s was marked by an early and striking switch to ‘radically harsh policies and public debates vis-à-vis migrants’ (van Houdt 2014: 163). From 2010 a new government with right-wing populist backing went further, to declare the centrality of proposed characteristic historic values of Dutch society, and (yet) to further reject the model of multicultural society. We investigate a key Netherlands government document of 2011 on immigrants’ integration, entitled Integratie, binding, burgerschap (Integration, Connectedness/Cohesion, Citizenship). Tools from discourse analysis as exploration of language choices help us to apply and test ideas from governmentality studies and from discourse studies seen as social theorizing. Overall, we consider whether and how a concept of citizenship could contribute to migrants’ marginalization and exclusion.
We look at several aspects of the policy document: its chosen problem formulation; its delineation, naming and predication of population categories; its central concepts of citizenship, community and integration; and its chosen metaphors and nuancing of emphases, the backgrounding of some matters and foregrounding of others, stitching together the argumentative elements into a meaning-rich world-picture with a particular emotional content and force. The analysis suggests how a reconceived—moralized, ‘neo-liberal communitarian’ (Schinkel & van Houdt, 2010)—conception of citizenship shapes migrants’ given identities, allocates positions in society, and can render many migrants subjects of marginalization and exclusion.
Schinkel, W., and van Houdt, F., 2010. The double helix of cultural assimilationism and neo-liberalism: citizenship in contemporary governmentality, British Journal of Sociology 61(4). van Houdt, F., 2014. Governing Citizens. The Government of Citizenship, Crime and Migration in The Netherlands. Doctoral thesis, Erasmus University Rotterdam.
