On the brink of multiculturalism’s demise in Europe, ‘culture’ configures prominently in the immigration politics of Europe and its nation-states. New discourses of integration emphasize dominant values and norms and define civic membership through cultural commitment or loyalty. How is Europe doing integration, and what is integration doing to Europe? Taking its cues from the Dutch Integration Exam, this article analyses how ‘culture’ is paradigmatically disciplined upon new aspiring citizens. It argues that the citizenship test functions as a technique of governmentality that normalizes secular liberalism in its appropriation of the migrant Other. By employing cultural tropes of sexual freedom, gender equality, freedom of speech and individuality as emblems of Dutchness, integration is identified as the successful adaptation to hegemonic liberal and secular virtues, leaving little room for cultural or religious variations. By reflecting on the popularity of the Dutch model, the article assesses the paradoxes and tensions involved in thinking the citizen-subject within Europe.
This article investigates legal performativities of grievability in contemporary child migration and argues for a scalar approach to analyse and understand the cultural politics underpinning current debates on the 'moving' child. I turn to two court cases in the Dutch context that involve alleged child trafficking in international adoption on the one hand and the threat of deportation in child asylum on the other. These two forms of child migration have rarely been investigated in tandem although both concern the transnational movement of children from the global South to the wealthy North. By focusing on the legal concept of 'the right to family life' and 'the best interest of the child' I point to the performativity of law and the ways in which cultural constructions of the child, childhood, kin and humanitarianism intervene in our work of justification. My contention is that placing these 'different-but-same bodies' within a scalar dimension -one that takes into account spatio-temporal conditions of grievabilityenables us to understand modern investments in child-bodies and the complexities of justice in globalization.
Marc de Leeuw and Sonja van Wichelen’s ‘Transformations of ‘Dutchness’: From Happy Multiculturalism to the Crisis of Dutch Liberalism’ provides a discussion of Islamophobia in the Netherlands, placing it within the context of multiculturalism in Europe.
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