During this IMES Podium Rogier van Reekum and Jan Willem Duyvendak examine the performative politics of claiming policy failure in the integration of immigrants in the Netherlands, often articulated as the failure of ‘the multiculturalist model’.
Since the early 2000s, claims in the public and political debate about the ‘failure’ of integration have been omnipresent in many of Europe’s ‘old’ immigration countries. These debates often invoke national ‘models’ or traditions of integrating immigrants and members of minority groups. But it is questionable whether such models have any durable, empirical relevance. This article examines the performative politics of claiming policy failure in the integration of immigrants in the Netherlands, often articulated as the failure of ‘the multiculturalist model’.
Four consecutive ‘post-’discourses are distinguished, in which we see the construction of increasingly explicit notions of Dutchness. This idea of the Dutch is as much about the style in which it is articulated as it is about the symbolic resources through which Dutchness is imagined. Examining the national imagination in policy diagnoses helps us to understand why immigrant integration has been so consistently presented as a failure of multiculturalism.
Discussant: Jean Tillie
