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The word “integration” is highly relevant for contemporary European politics in two ways.
On the one hand, integration describes the efforts of states to foster closer economic and cultural ties, often through multilateral agreements and common rules. To integrate into a greater unit with the goal of preserving what one has in common.
On the other hand, integration is also a political project in European countries with significant immigrant populations. It is generally understood as a way to bring inhabitants with different cultural backgrounds closer to the mainstream society in terms of a combination of more superficial concepts, such as language and economic status, and deeper concepts such as values and self-identity.
No matter what the exact mechanics for the project is, both the integration of European nations into a greater whole and the integration of immigrants into their host cultures stand before great challenges in today’s society. Why?
We must first identify what it is one must integrate into. A European Union, or more abstractly and less attached to any current existing political superstructure, a European community? The common talking points for what makes Europe what it is are all valid – an intimately shared history from which to derive experiences from, a common intellectual tradition which serves as a foundation for values, and an intrinsically shared destiny through geographical circumstances. All of these things on paper have promoted European community and unity historically, and continue to be the ideological impetus for constructive cooperation between its nations. So far so good.
All of these factors largely apply to individual nations as well, however on a smaller scale (for good measure, a shared language ought also to be mentioned as a prerequisite here). The groundwork for immigrants to integrate into something is right there, which is why the idea of integration is so ubiquitous in European politics.
Yet, while these commonalities between Europeans and between the citizens of a nation may be widely recognised on a surface level, many of them can be called into question under the digital, global culture that we live under today. This goes especially for Western and Northern Europe, which have cultures that place a lot of emphasis on the individual as opposed to the context of the individual. The result is that the average European is atomised, with fewer attachments to the people she shares her society with.
The mainstream is no longer necessarily national, but it is global, and it is found online. Increasingly the culture that modern people consume is individualised, and communities of shared interests are found across the world wide web, as opposed between people who live in the same city, or country. This shapes the diffusion of language, of values, and of patterns of consumption. A good example of how this has actively affected not just Europe, but modern societies in general, is through the increased experiences of loneliness among the populace, lower birth rates, and severe political polarisation. While all of these social problems may not only be directly traceable to digitalisation and globalisation, they are no doubt accelerated by our cultural addiction to digital communication.
The historian Benedict Anderson theorised that national identity, which he calls the “imagined community”, proliferated into the public consciousness through common mass media, such as written propaganda, nationally circulated newspapers, and radio and television broadcasts. This explains the discernable formation of nation states in early modern Europe, which was harvesting the fruits of the invention of the printing press.
While a conservative mind may question the idea that nations are constructed out of media, the theory serves well to understand how national identity is at least maintained through common media experiences. Thus, what we are seeing in today’s digitally addicted and fractured online media landscape, is the crisis of the real-life community.
If the real-life culture is too diverse and contains too many contradictions to generalise, what is Europe supposed to integrate into? What are immigrants supposed to integrate into?
We’re seeing a divergence across digital spaces of the values and identities that are supposed to underpin Europe. The current integration projects on our continent might have to take a step back and reflect on how to “reintegrate” the modernised, digitalised peoples of Europe into real, healthy nationships again.