Muslim Women and Youth in the West: Background Paper

Chapter III: Incorporation and Integration

Scholars and policy makers agree that there have been important failures in integrating successive generations of Muslims in the West. Yet there is disagreement over the meaning of integration itself, which has varied between countries and changed over time in response to historical processes of immigration. Discussions have focused on the degree to which conformity to a national community model is expected from and/or imposed on immigrants.

Two dimensions are important in understanding how immigrants have negotiated communal boundaries within different countries: the rigidity of boundaries between the “ins” and the “outs” and the permeability of these boundaries. In highly defined “Jacobin” models, typified by France, the boundaries are firm, but may be crossed without either insiders or outsiders having to change their basic identities. In multicultural models, typified by the United States (and formerly The Netherlands), overlapping memberships and collective identities blur these boundaries, often leading to greater inclusion or exclusion. ¹⁰⁴

The integration of immigrant religions has always been difficult in the West, and Islam is the latest in a line of successive challenges to the existing order. Catholicism called into question the dominant Protestantism of the United States and proved to be very difficult to integrate, both because of the large numbers of immigrants mostly Irish and German—who started arriving in the early 19th century and because of the hierarchical nature of the religion. Full integration, marked by the election of a Catholic president, was not achieved until the mid-20th century. Likewise, Judaism was problematic for the United States and for countries in Western Europe, where Eastern European immigrants started arriving in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Jews had to contend with a deep history of anti-Semitism in Europe and found that their practice challenged not only religious values on both sides of the Atlantic, but also emerging secular values in Europe.

As questions of religious expression have been confounded with those of class and race, there is a growing awareness that a high proportion of young Muslims, men in particular, have been economically and educationally marginalized. Except in the United States, a third generation of Western-born Muslims has experienced high levels of rejection, one often–cited measure of which is discrimination in employment and housing. ¹⁰⁵ Limited studies on the subject are inconclusive about whether discrimination is related to ethnicity or religious background, or both. But despite two directives enacted by the European Union in 2003 and requiring all member states to implement rules for equal treatment on a variety of grounds including race and religion, ¹⁰⁶ there is still a widespread belief among Muslim youth that they continue to be targets of discrimination.

A high level of unemployment persists among European Islamic communities and among youth in particular. In France, follow–up reports on the 2005 riots indicated that 95 percent of the rioters were French citizens, two–thirds of whom were of immigrant origin. What all the rioters had in common was youth, a high level of unemployment, and limited future prospects for socio–economic advancement. ¹⁰⁷ Muslim youth unemployment rates are generally double those of the national average in countries of high unemployment, such as France,¹⁰⁸ and sometimes more than twice as high, as in Britain.¹⁰⁹ One study from 1999 ranked three countries with relatively low overall unemployment—Denmark, The Netherlands, and Sweden—as the OECD countries with the worst record for employing immigrants.¹¹⁰ It is not surprising, then, that the unrest of Muslim youth has been seen as a manifestation of a new class politics and is not well understood by traditional interlocutors such as trade unions and political parties of the left.

Models of Integration

Countries in the West appear to be committed to very different approaches to integrating their immigrant populations, with variance seen in the use of state institutions to promote integration, the kinds of policies pursued, and the assumptions that inform these policies.

The most explicit process seems to be the French Jacobin model, which is often misunderstood as a coherent government program for integration. In fact, it has been more of an orientation—what one scholar has called a “public philosophy” ¹¹¹—toward how public policy should be used. The details of this orientation have become clearer as its assumptions have been challenged by the most recent waves of immigration. In principle, the French state only recognizes collective ethnic and religious identities for very limited purposes (the aforementioned religious council, for example) and instead provides “color–blind” public support—and recognition—for individual advancement. In other words, the French State does not engage in “positive discrimination” to remedy past discrimination or permit the census to count those who are defined as “minorities” in the British context. The census differentiates only between French citizens and immigrants—those people born abroad, legally resident in France but without French citizenship—but does not differentiate people in terms of race and religious affiliation. The expectation is that immigrants will conform to French cultural and legal norms and accept that common public spaces are not venues for religious expression.¹¹²

In contrast, the American multicultural model recognizes collective identities as a basis for public policy, leading to widespread ethnic lobbying. The United States emerged from the civil rights movement of the 1960s with far–reaching legislation in support of a variety of ethnic, religious, and language expressions. This was markedly different from the more assimilationist “Americanization” approach it had adopted in the early part of the 20th century, which had left far less room for expressions of diversity. ¹¹³

The British approach to integration, while also multicultural, is different from the American model in that it is based on race:

[T]he central dynamic of British elite reaction to Third World migration has been an attempt to structure the politics of race to take race out of conventional politics. Seen in these terms, the attempt to produce a coherent politics (or non–politics) of race has passed through three . . . distinct stages: (i) pre–political consensus (1948–61). . . . (ii) Fundamental debate (1958–63). . . . (iii) political consensus (1965 to the present), when the front benches of the two major parties developed a new consensus, politically arrived at, to depoliticize race once again. ¹¹⁴

The British Race Relations Act of 1965 was a consensus approach to immigration, race, and multiculturalism. The act made written or spoken expressions of hatred on the grounds of color, race, or ethnic/national origins (“expressive racism”) subject to prosecution. It also made discrimination in public places unlawful (“access racism”) and established a Race Relations Board to receive and manage complaints.

Subsequent extensions in 1968 and 1976 to include housing and employment widened the scope of this act, as did the strengthened powers of the Race Relations Board (now the Commission for Racial Equality), which enabled it to investigate discrimination even without complaints. ¹¹⁵

From the 1950s onward, British political debates about immigration applied the distinction of “race” to New Common–wealth immigrants, primarily those from Pakistan and India (as opposed to those from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). This view of “colored” immigrants was essentially similar to those in France or Germany; the difference was in the formal policy framework that was developed to incorporate them:

The emphasis on assimilation was . . . rapidly abandoned in favour of “good race relations,” namely peaceful coexistence through tolerance, diversity and pluralism. There is an obvious contradiction between the belief in stringent immigration control and in diversity as contributing ipso facto to social order, but the compromise was driven by party–political necessity.¹¹⁶

In France, this kind of pluralism, often called “insertion” (for example, by the Commission de la nationalité, Etre français aujourd’hui et demain, cited above), was seen as a substitute for full participation in society and rejected.

In The Netherlands, legislation in 1983 established a network of multicultural programs to integrate Muslims while encouraging them to retain their cultural identities. The goal was to create a multicultural society “in which immigrants, individually and as a group, would enjoy equal rights and opportunities with the native population.”¹¹⁷ Thus, immigrants would be accepted as separate groups that would retain their cultural identities and would be supported by publicly financed communal institutions.

This “minorities policy” was derived from the long tradition of “pillarization” through which Dutch society had been organized hierarchically and power shared through the political party system.¹¹⁸ Pillarization has been described as

. . . a differentiation within society whereby the population is divided into ideologically based social segments each with its own schools, political parties, broadcasting organizations, newspapers, hospitals etc. It is a vertical differentiation running through all of the social classes . . . During the first half of the 20th century, Dutch society was divided into a Roman Catholic “pillar,” a Protestant “pillar,” which was further divided internally, and a neutral “pillar.”¹¹⁹

Although the minorities policy was inspired by this heritage, the key objective was integration into the dominant norms and values. Recent research argues that while the heritage of pillarization facilitated the establishment of religious schools and mosques, pillarization had little to do with the minorities policy itself, which was oriented toward integration. ¹²⁰

By the early 1990s it became clear that there was a growing gap between the policy and the objective, as the minorities policy was seen as having marginalized Muslims instead of bringing them into the economic mainstream.¹²¹ A decade before Pim Fortuyn exploded on the scene, Dutch governments had begun to move sharply away from the multicultural model.¹²² In much the same way as the Dutch minorities policy had appeared to be the leading edge of a European movement toward integration in the 1980s, the breakdown of that policy served as a powerful symbol of its failure.

Nevertheless, the minorities policy was arguably more successful in promoting integration than is generally acknowledged. What finally appeared to undermine it was less socioeconomic failure than the value gap between a majority population that agreed on certain progressive values and a minority Muslim population that challenged the consensus. These days, far from encouraging pluralist concepts of citizenship, “the Dutch have become less willing to make room for cultural differences.”¹²³

These various understandings of how immigrants are incorporated into host societies are based on what Theodore Lowi has called a “public philosophy,” a model that colors, shapes, and justifies state formation of public policy.¹²⁴ There is often a wide gap, however, between stated public philosophies and policy on the ground. Belgian political sociologist Marco Martiniello notes that deviation from any public philosophy is inevitable, and that both integrationist and multiculturalist policies can and have been applied in ways that are quite different from their intended goals.¹²⁵ France, for example, has dealt with and supported immigrants as groups,¹²⁶ while Britain and The Netherlands have increasingly limited their acceptance of multiculturalism. ¹²⁷

Understandings of integration models often ignore the evolution of public philosophy and policy over time. Philosophies are finally altered when they are challenged by empirical data and by the contradictions of the very policies they are supposed to describe.¹²⁸ Moreover, such models often fail to appreciate how the process of integration itself has altered what it means to be a native of the host country, resulting in what one scholar has called “negotiated identities.”¹²⁹

A Crisis of Integration?

Each of the aforementioned models is perceived to have failed in particular ways. The British model has made it more difficult to handle questions of discrimination against religion as opposed to race,¹³⁰ although it has been far more effective than others in dealing with discrimination in general.¹³¹

In contrast, the French model has failed to adequately manage problems of employment, discrimination, and urban alienation, which are widely understood to have been at the root of the 2005 riots. A year later, the French government had yet to develop an acceptable plan to address discrimination against “suburban” youth applying for jobs and had only just begun to formulate policy approaches to a host of other problems such as educational attainment and the inflexibility of the job market. ¹³² Local governments and private employers, however, have been particularly active in developing initiatives to deal with employment and discrimination in the “sensitive” suburbs since then. ¹³³

Integrating Muslim youth has been far less problematic in the United States. In part, this is related to the class structure of Muslims who have immigrated there during the past few decades¹³⁴ and in part to the relative openness of the economy and society. Things began to change after the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, however, and worsened after the second attack in 2001. There have been widespread detentions of young people thought to be Muslim, largely based on questionable ethnic profiling.¹³⁵ Not surprisingly, more than 40 percent of Muslim respondents in 2006 answered affirmatively to the question, “Have you ever felt discriminated against or profiled?”¹³⁶ By other measures—voting, associational memberships, and manifestations of patriotism—however, American Muslims appear to be even more committed to core U.S. values than most Americans. ¹³⁷

Table 3 Muslims in Europe: Attitudes Toward Identity, Fellow Citizens, and Modernity
Muslims	Positive views of Christians	Positive views of Jews	No conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in Modern society	Consider yourself first: a citizen of your country/ muslim	Muslims in your country want to adopt national customs
French	91%	71%	72%	42%/46%	78%
British	71	32	49	7/81	41
Spanish	82	28	71	3/89	53
German	69	38	57	13/66	38
Sources: Pew Research Center, “The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other” (Washington, DC: Pew Global Attitude Project, June 22, 2006), pp. 3, 11–12; and “Muslims in Europe: Economic Worries Top Concerns About Religious and Cultural Identity” (Washington, DC: Pew Global Attitude Project, July 6, 2006).

Whether or not integration has succeeded in the West may be less important than a growing perception that it has failed.¹³⁸ After all, it is such perceptions that have fed the support for extreme right parties in France, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, and Italy. Perhaps more telling, by the fall of 2006, leftist Prime Minister Tony Blair had joined a growing wave of criticism of British integration policy. In the guise of questioning whether the full–face veil is a “mark of separation,” he said, “People want to know that the Muslim community in particular, but actually all minority communities, have got the balance right between integration and multiculturalism.”¹³⁹ The minicrisis in Britain has provoked similar reactions in other European countries, including Italy and The Netherlands. ¹⁴⁰

The success of integration in the West has varied considerably and unexpectedly. For example, two measures of integration—attitudes toward intermarriage and political commitment—indicate that French policy has been more effective than is generally acknowledged. ¹⁴¹ Only 15 percent of French Muslim immigrants would disapprove of the marriage of a son and 32 percent that of a daughter to a non–Muslim; about the same percentage of a general sample would oppose the marriage of a child to a Muslim. Among French citizens of immigrant origin, higher percentages than among a general sample think that democracy is working well and that it would be terrible to suppress political parties or the National Assembly. A far larger percentage, though

Table 4 Policy Choice for Integration of Muslim Elites, by Country of Residence
	Denmark %	Sweden %	France %	Germany %	Netherlands %	U.K. %	Total %
Secular Integrationist	20.8	37.5	60.0	25.0	13.6	10.7	23.5
Voluntarist	33.3	37.5	30.0	30.6	59.1	17.9	33.8
Anticlericals	33.3	12.5	0.0	22.2	9.1	0.0	14.7
Neo–Orthodox	12.5	12.5	10.0	22.2	18.2	71.4	27.9
Total	100	100	100	100	100	100	100
Source: Jytte Klausen,The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 95.

still a minority, express confidence that they can change things in the country—although the percentage not registered to vote (23 percent) is more than three times the national average. ¹⁴²

Among immigrant groups in Europe, French people who identify as Muslim appear to be the most “European” in terms of their identity and compatibility with national customs. As a minority community, they have the most positive views of their Christian and Jewish compatriots and are among the least sympathetic to radical Islam. ¹⁴³ They are also by far the most supportive of the idea that there is no conflict between Islam and modern society.

Jytte Klausen’s study of Muslim elites in Europe indicates a similar pattern. She has developed a typology of four preferences as modes of integration for Muslim populations:

Secular Integrationist: respondents believe that Islam is compatible with Western value and that the organization of Islamic practice should be integrated into existing frameworks of church–state relations.

Neo–Orthodox: respondents believe that Islam is not compatible and should not be integrated into existing frameworks.

Voluntarist: respondents believe that Islam is compatible in terms of values, but should not be integrated into existing frameworks.

Anticlerical: respondents believe that Islam is not compatible in terms of values, but should be integrated into existing church–state relations. ¹⁴⁴

The responses of Muslim elites by country are indicated in Table 4. The two most strikingly different patterns are those of the French and the British subsamples, each of which overwhelmingly fits into a single category. While the support of French Muslims for “secular integration” largely conforms to French norms on church–state relations, their strong support for “voluntarist” policies indicates a distrust of the state but an acceptance of the compatibility of French and Islamic values. It is also worth noting that the French sample has the lowest “neo–orthodox” response of all the European groups.

In contrast, the support of British Muslims for the “neo–orthodox” pattern indicates their strong sense of isolation from British norms and makes the United Kingdom different from every other country in the study.

These survey results reiterate that among immigrants of Islamic origin in Europe, those in France have the strongest national identity and are most inclined toward integration. It is likely, therefore, that the sense of alienation manifested in the 2005 riots was less a rejection of French society than a demand for greater integration. One reaction among youth in riot–affected suburbs was a surge in voter registration. ¹⁴⁵ Intellectuals and the government also reacted with a practical move away from Jacobin integration and toward a focus on questions of discrimination and employment that is more typical of multiculturalism.

Perhaps the greatest challenge posed by failures to integrate Muslims in the West is the immediate threat of radicalized Islam. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, government distrust of Islamic communities in the West has been tempered by the realization that the struggle against radicalism must be aided by cooperation with these same communities. Thus, efforts to develop programs against discrimination were given a new impetus and were directly connected with domestic security. These programs will be discussed in greater detail in chapters 4 and 5 of this paper.

Politics and Integration

One of the most significant failures of integration in Europe has been the relegation of Muslim populations to the edge of the political process. Understanding immigrant populations as potential voters—and candidates—has policy implications as well as organizational consequences for political parties. Yet European political parties have barely attempted to address issues that immigrants consider to be important, nor have they integrated new ethnic populations into their organizational structures and their processes for selecting candidates. ¹⁴⁶

As Richard Alba and Nancy Foner have noted, election of immigrant candidates to political office is a measure of their integration “in the same sense that entry by minority individuals into high–status occupations is. It is an indication of a diminishment, however modest, in differentials in life chances that exist between majority and minority.” ¹⁴⁷ Representation also gives immigrants a voice in the distribution of public goods and clout within the communities in which they live. Finally, by achieving elective office, immigrant groups gain access to patronage from civil servants and influence over the decisions they make. Irish Americans offer a compelling historical example of successful political integration; they used their leadership of the reigning Democratic Party to bring about massive municipal employment of their coethnics a century ago. ¹⁴⁸

Studies indicate the failure of both the French left and the right to make much effort to mobilize immigrant voters and potential voters. In 2004, there were barely 1,000 municipal councillors of non–European origin (less than 1 percent) in France, a drop from 3 percent in larger towns between 1995 and 2001; this percentage did not rise in Marseille and Paris, cities with a greater concentration of immigrants. There was better representation among regional councillors (2.6 percent) and among deputies in the European Parliament (almost 4 percent), but both of these institutions are relatively marginal in terms of their decision making. ¹⁴⁹ On the national level, there were no ethnic minority representatives in the French National Assembly, the directly elected lower house of parliament, although in September 2004 two French women of Muslim origin, Alima Boumediene–Thiery and Bariza Khiari, were elected to the SŽnat, the indirectly elected and less prominent upper house of parliament.

Research by Romain Garbaye suggests that the reluctance to name minority candidates in France has been related to pressure from the National Front, ¹⁵⁰ but another study by the same author attributes the relative success of the northern town of Roubaix in electing an unusually high percentage of minority candidates to party weakness and the strength of community organizations.¹⁵¹ The French Socialist Party, in comparison with the British Labour Party, for example, has been less inclined to see immigrant voters as a political resource, in part because decisions on candidates are made beyond the neighborhood level and are often dictated by national priorities.

In contrast to France and the United States, immigrants from the NCW in Britain are part of the electorate as soon as they establish residency in the United Kingdom, as was noted earlier. At about 6.6 percent of the electorate, over 80 percent of immigrant minorities are in the electorate, compared to only about half in France (2.7 percent of the electorate—based on census data). ¹⁵² Alba and Foner have observed that the overall representation of immigrant groups on local councils has been considerably lower in Britain than in France, relative to the size of the voting population. Where there are concentrations of immigrant groups, however, British Muslims have been far more successful in winning local office than their French counterparts. In the London boroughs, 10.6 percent of the local councillors in 2001 were ethnic minorities. In all of the British towns where ethnic minorities exceeded 10 percent, the community from the Indian subcontinent achieved a position close to parity and exceeded parity in more than a quarter of these towns. ¹⁵³

Representation at the national parliamentary level, however, has been far less impressive. In 2004, 15 minority members of Parliament were elected to the House of Commons (2.4 percent). This is about a third of what we might expect in proportion to the population, but it is significant. Since no minority candidate was elected in France in 2002, the comparison is relatively favorable, but it is about half that of the United States, where Hispanics comprise 23 members of the House of Representatives (5.3 percent) and three members of the Senate (3 percent).

Unlike France—where, as we have seen, local level recruitment is an exception and has been attributed to party decentralization and weakness—the relative success of immigrant candidates in the United Kingdom is related to the ward–based system of candidate designation in the Labour Party. This system simultaneously empowers local ethnic politicians and accentuates the advantage of concentrated ethnic votes in a single member district.

While the local political influence of immigrant voters in the United Kingdom can be transferred to national candidates through the Labour Party, there is no evidence that minority representation has influenced Labour or Conservative policies that are important to immigrants. ¹⁵⁴

To the extent immigrants are understood as a political resource rather than a challenge to identity, representation is a reasonable index of how much they are mobilized for electoral purposes, generally by political parties, but also by community organizations. Self–identified Muslims, cross–nationally, tend to vote overwhelmingly for the left, but the level of voter registration of Muslims in Europe tends to be far lower than the remainder of the population. ¹⁵⁵ French data indicates that the left cannot take the Muslim vote for granted, however. Sylvain Brouard and Vincent Tiberj’s study notes that, while there is immense support for the left among first–generation immigrants, this support is considerably smaller among the second generation. Young Muslims, in particular, tend to support smaller parties and the right. ¹⁵⁶

There are no studies of Muslim representation (as opposed to overall minority representation) in the United States, but there are other significant indications of Muslim political integration. Unlike their European counterparts, a slightly higher than average proportion of Muslim voters in the United States claims to vote regularly. In addition, reported associational membership among Muslims is far higher than average.¹⁵⁷ Both tendencies may be related to the higher educational attainment among American Muslims. Like comparable voters in Europe, most American Muslim voters also show strong support for the leftist Democratic Party. Several support no party at all, however, and in this regard they mirror the “independent” tendency of the rest of the American electorate.

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