International audienceWhat explains the restrictive turn towards immigrants in European countries like Denmark? Are countries returning to nationalism, or are they following a general European trend towards a perfectionist, even 'repressive' liberalism that seeks to create 'liberal people' out of immigrants? Recent developments in Danish policies of integration and citizenship, education and anti-discrimination suggest a combination of these two diagnoses. The current Danish 'integration philosophy' leaves behind a previous concern with private choice and equal rights and opportunities to emphasize other historical elements, especially the duty to participate in upholding democracy and the egalitarian welfare community, and to promote autonomous and secular ways of life. However, the virtues of this 'egalitarian republicanism' are seen by right-of-centre intellectuals and politicians as rooted in a wider Christian national culture that immigrants must acquire in order to become full citizens

Many western European states are adopting integration and naturalization policies that focus on the practices, values and identities of citizenship. On this background, and given the combined crisis of multiculturalism and decline of old-school ethno-nationalism, it has been argued that national, cultural–ideological distinctiveness matters less for what is traditionally the heartland of national sovereignty and identity. A comparison of three citizenship/integration trajectories – Germany, Great Britain and Denmark – suggests that the thesis of liberal convergence must be qualified. Although occurring in civic and liberal registers, national citizenship policies still reflect continuities, and path-dependent reactions to such continuities, of culturally bounded nation states. Germany’s development reflects a republican normalization, facilitated by reunification, but also a distinct liberal and political culturalism and discourse of membership, which grows out of the country’s post-war nationhood. The British critique of multiculturalism is more a re-balancing whose concepts represent the continuity of a weak, non-state-oriented citizenship. And Denmark’s development represents a civic–egalitarian nationalism, embedded in the welfare state, which was never challenged, but recently politicized with Muslim immigration.

There is a widely shared view that the appeal of multiculturalism as a public policy has suffered considerable political damage. In many European states the turn to 'civic' measures and discourses has been deemed more suitable for the objectives of minority integration and the promotion of preferred modes of social and political unity. It is therefore said that the first decade of the new century has been characterised by a reorientation in immigrant integration policies -from liberal culturalist to the 'return of assimilation ' (Brubaker, 2001), on route to a broader 'retreat from multiculturalism ' (Joppke, 2004). In this article we argue that such portrayals mask a tendency that is more complicated in some cases and much less evident in others. To elaborate this we offer a detailed account of the inception and then alleged movement away from positions in favour multiculturalism in two countries that have adopted different versions of it, namely the UK and the Netherlands, and two countries that have historically rejected multiculturalism, namely Denmark and Germany. We argue that while there is undoubtedly a rhetorical separation between multiculturalism and civic integration, the latter is in some cases building on the former, and broadly needs to be understood as more than a retreat of multiculturalism. Taking seriously Banting and Kymlicka's argument that understanding the evolution of integration requires the 'the mindset of an archaeologist', we offer a policy genealogy that allows us to set the backlash against multiculturalism in context, in manner that explicates its provenance, permutations and implications.

This special issue addresses the question of how to understand the civic turn within immigrant integration in the West towards programs and instruments, public discourses and political intentions, which aim to condition, incentivize, and shape through socialization immigrants into ‘citizens’. Empirically, it focuses on the less studied Scandinavian cases of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In this introduction, we situate the contributions to this special issue within the overall debate on civic integration and convergence. We introduce the three cases, critically discuss the (liberal) convergence thesis and its descriptive and explanatory claims, and explain why studying the Scandinavian welfare states can further our understanding of the nature of the civic turn and its driving forces. Before concluding, we discuss whether civic integration policies actually work.

Many authors have written about the 'civic turn' in European migrant integration politics and policy that began in the late 1990s, but few have focused on the conceptual or normative dimensions of this turn. The purpose of this special issue is to help correct this situation. In this substantive introductory article, we begin with a discussion of the 'convergence or national models' debate that dominated early work on the subject. The next section presents the argument that civic integration is best understood as an ideological turn. It expands 'good citizenship' into personal conduct and values, shifts the responsibility for integration from the state to individuals, and institutionalises incentivising and disciplining integration processes, which are often really just a means of migration control. This is accompanied, we argue, by a civic nationalist conception of membership that appeals to shared political values, but defines those values through the culture of the state's national majority. We then move on to the mechanisms and effects of civic integration, followed by a discussion of its normative analysis, before finally summarising the articles included in this special issue and how they address the concerns that we have raised.