Ilke Adam

Immigrant Integration Policies of the Belgian Regions: Sub-state Nationalism and Policy Divergence after Devolution

For almost a decade now, there has been a debate among scholars of regional and federal studies about how to explain policy evolution after devolution. Surprisingly, this literature has attached little importance to the policy impact of sub-state nationalism. This article assesses existent institutionalist and societal hypotheses in the case of immigrant integration policy divergence in Belgium after devolution. This empirical test shows that although several of these hypotheses yield valuable insights in explaining integration policy divergence in Belgium, they have difficulties in accounting for a striking feature of this policy divergence, i.e. the different interventionism regarding the cultural dimension of the integration process. This article argues that sub-state nationalism, and in particular the differing degrees of regional government involvement in sub-state nation building, provides explanatory insight into how policy frames diverge.

Diversity and nationalism in the Basque Country and Flanders: understanding immigrants as fellow minorities

Why have immigrant integration policies in the Basque Country and Flanders been framed according to multicultural principles? This paper offers an addendum to rationalist and institutionalist approaches, arguing that we cannot make sense of multicultural policies in these two cases without considering the interplay between historical narratives that undergird the nation and elite decision-making. Narratives of cultural oppression have been essential for nationalist mobilization in the Basque Country and Flanders. In turn, the choice of multiculturalism over assimilation by sub-state elites made sense because it fits with their understanding of the nation as an oppressed group.

Divided on Immigration, Two models for Integration.: The Multilevel Governance of Immigration and Integration in Belgium

Since the federal elections of 2007, and especially since the new elections in 2010 which led to a new government after a world record-breaking 541 days of negotiations, elites from both sides of the language frontier in Belgium have had extreme difficulty in agreeing on nearly anything. As a result, the possibility of dividing the country has been seriously discussed. Although the final government formation in December 2011 brought a temporary ‘armed peace’1 between the political elites of both linguistic communities, this is widely considered as a temporary and very delicate solution until the federal elections of 2014. In these elections, the Flemish nationalist party NV-A, favouring an independent Flanders, is expected to gain such electoral success that the future of Belgium will — again — no longer be certain. Although not the main source of conflict, immigration and migrant integration policy are areas in which Flemish and Francophone political elites tend to hold diametrically opposing views. From the 1990s onwards, this linguistic cleavage was apparent in all government negotiations and parliamentary debates on immigration and citizenship issues, which both fall under the jurisdiction of the central state.

Nationalist parties and immigration in Flanders: from Volksunie to Spirit and N-VA

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the literature on the sub-state nationalist and regionalist parties (SNRPs) by investigating the policy positions in the immigration ambit taken by the Flemish nationalist party Volksunie, and by its successors after the party fell apart in 2001. We do so by analysing the party manifestos for all elections between 1978 and 2014. Beyond providing a detailed case study, the article has broader ambitions. The paper bridges the gap between the party literature and the literature on immigration and integration policies. It does so in two ways. First, it relies on a more nuanced categorisation of policy positions proposed by the immigration policy literature, which is absent in the party literature. Second, it draws explicit attention to the nation-building strategy of SNRPs as an intervening explanatory variable, mediating the influence of party competition and ideology.

The three “i”s of workplace accommodation of Muslim religious practices: instrumental, internal, and informal

ABSTRACT The accommodation of Muslim religious practices is an increasingly salient political issue across Western Europe. Hitherto, most research has focused on how states accommodate Muslim religious practices, and sociological scholarship on workplace accommodation is still extremely scarce. This article fills the gap in the extant literature by presenting a qualitative analysis of over 300 requests for religious accommodation in the workplace in Belgium. The authors contend that turning the spotlight from state to workplace accommodation of Muslim religious practices allows the discovery of different answers to the “hows” and the “whys” of minority religious accommodation. Different than state accommodation, workplace accommodation is characterized by three “i”s: it is granted or refused on the basis of instrumental argumentations; it is regulated informally and resolved internally. This article proposes an institutionalist framework adapted to the world of work to explain the specific features of workplace religious accommodation of Muslim religious practices.

Defying the traditional theses: Intergovernmental relations on immigrant integration in Belgium

ABSTRACT This article considers the features of intergovernmental relations (IGR) on immigrant integration in Belgium and critically examines the dynamics that shape them. The characteristics of IGR on immigrant integration in Belgium are shown to vary over time and differ across regions and sub-policy areas (immigrant reception policies and anti-discrimination). The comparative case study indicates that the primary traditional theses of the international comparative IGR literature, namely classical institutionalism and party politics, do not provide insights into the nature and mechanisms of IGR on immigrant integration in Belgium. Less established variables like European integration and sub-state claims for distinctiveness constitute key explanatory variables. While European integration explains the increase of IGR over time, notwithstanding the appearance of party incongruence, sub-state claims for distinctiveness enlighten the more conflictual nature of IGR with Flanders, even in cases of more party congruence than for Francophone authorities.

Intergovernmental relations on immigrant integration in multi-level states. A comparative assessment

ABSTRACT The study of intergovernmental relations (IGR) is a classical research area in scholarship on federalism and territorial politics. However, it has largely ignored the relatively new, and recently decentralized area of immigrant integration. The aim of this Special Issue is twofold. First, it aims to analyse how governments in multi-level states coordinate on immigrant integration. Second, it wishes to explain the dynamics that shape the features of intergovernmental relations. In doing so, we focus on four multi-level states; two of which are federal (Belgium and Canada) and two that are decentralized (Italy and Spain). Whilst we engage with the established literature on intergovernmental relations to formulate hypotheses about the nature and dynamics of intergovernmental relations, we also formulate less explored hypotheses. Our overarching argument is that the scholarship on IGR benefits from in-depth comparative case studies comparing IGR not just across countries, but also across policy areas and over time.

Monitoring the impact of doing nothing: New trends in immigrant integration policy:

‘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 Europes 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’.