‘Mainstreaming’ has recently been considered as a possible new strategy for advancing immigrant integration in Europe. However, policy documents and current academic literature have hardly conceptualized what we label as ‘ethnic equality mainstreaming’. In this article, we lean on the widely available research on gender mainstreaming, to provide such a conceptualization of ethnic equality mainstreaming. Once conceptualized, we verify whether there is indeed a trend towards mainstreaming in Western Europe's old immigration countries. Our results show that there is no straightforward trend towards ethnic equality mainstreaming in these countries. However, the indicators that served to detect the existence of ethnic equality mainstreaming allowed us to uncover a new double and paradoxical trend in immigrant integration policies. This ‘new style’ immigrant integration policy can be depicted as follows: increasing ‘colourblindization’, in combination with ‘ethnic monitoring’. In other words, states increasingly monitor the impact of ‘doing nothing’.
Freedom of movement (FOM) in the European Union (EU) has become a highly salient issue in political and public debates. Most of the literature on FOM is heavily focused on the judiciary interpretation of this EU right, or on conflicting attitudes towards FOM within the national arena. However, the EU and its institutions as political actors that define and shape the content and meaning of FOM are largely absent from this literature. If mentioned, EU actors are often depicted as ideological and orthodox defenders of FOM. We argue that this perspective is empirically inaccurate, which leads to skewed theoretical assumptions. It not only overlooks an EU-level discourse on FOM that has changed significantly in recent years but also fails to acknowledge that even fundamental rights and key pillars of EU integration can be subject to discursive change at the EU level. A frame analysis of documents from the European Commission, the European Council, the Council of the EU and the European Parliament from 2004 to 2016 forms the basis of our argument. During this period, restrictionist arguments have increasingly entered EU actors’ discourse on FOM. Viewed almost as an absolute right of EU citizens during the 2000s, FOM during the 2010s has been framed in terms of the conditions underlying the exercise of this right. We conclude that EU actors are engaged in a political debate over what FOM means and that their discourse has shifted to support an increased conditionality of FOM.
This article analyses how states adapt generic policies to the increasing diversity that characterises contemporary European societies. More particularly, it zooms in on how migration-related diversity is mainstreamed into education policies in the Netherlands and Flanders and why we observe different policy trends in these two cases. We find that the focus on migration-related diversity largely faded in Dutch education policies in the period from 2000 to 2014. In Flanders, this trend towards ‘migration-related diversity retrenchment’ is less prevalent during this period, even though a similar evolution has started to take place more recently. These findings present a puzzle, as the most evident explanation for diversity retrenchment, namely the increasing politicisation of migration and diversity, cannot account for this difference since the Netherlands and Flanders are characterised by similar degrees of politicisation of migration-related diversity. Our findings thus call for an exploration of underemphasised explanations for diversity retrenchment. We show that the diverging degree of diversity retrenchment can be explained by the presence or absence of a sub-state nationalist project and diverging degrees of neoliberal retrenchment policies. Sub-state nationalism seems to have temporarily offered a buffer against the neoliberal retrenchment of migration-related diversity.
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