Imagined Societies
A Critique of Immigrant Integration in Western Europe

Imagined Societies analyses how discussions of immigrant integration, culture, religion, and sexuality promote notions of national societies.

Willem Schinkel (Author)

9781107573093, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 January 2019

279 pages
15 x 22.5 x 1.5 cm, 0.42 kg

'Schinkle offers an imaginative view of European identity and the immigration phenomenon at the center of current heated debates throughout Western Europe. His stimulating monograph underscores that what it has meant to be European has been both ephemeral and intangible for centuries.' P. Lorenzini, Choice

In many countries in Western Europe, the demand for immigrant integration has inevitably raised questions about the 'societies' into which immigrants are asked to integrate. Imagined Societies critically intervenes in debates on immigrant integration and multiculturalism in Western Europe. Schinkel argues that the term 'multiculturalism' is not used primarily to describe a type of policy or political philosophy in countries such as the Netherlands, France, Germany or Belgium, but rather as a rhetorical device that promotes demands for 'integration'. He analyses how such demands are ways of imagining the very idea of a 'host society' as 'modern', 'secular' and 'enlightened'. Starting from debates in social theory on social imaginaries, and drawing on public debates on citizenship, secularism and sexuality, and on the social science of measuring immigrant integration, this book presents a highly original study of immigrant integration that challenges our understanding of the concept of society.

1. Immigrant integration imaginaries in Western Europe
2. Imagining society: social theory and/as social imagination
3. Measuring society: moral monitoring and the social science of 'immigrant integration'
4. Transformations of racism: the rise of culturism
5. Traditionally modern: contemporary frameworks of sexuality and religion
6. The uses of citizenship
7. Social science: between moral monitoring and public sociology.

Subject Areas: Politics & government [JP], Social theory [JHBA], Sociology & anthropology [JH]