National fields of civic integration: Operationalization of citizenship requirements

Abstract

In comparative studies of European migration and civic integration, most attention tends to be invested in analyzing the content of policies and national citizenship models. How these policies have been operationalized, i.e., how different European governments translated their policies into actual civic integration programs, is a relatively less explored area of study. In this article, the Bourdieusian concept of ‘field’ guides us in opening the box of national models and generates a complex and dynamic analysis of civic integration as a policy field: Which actors have been involved in processes of defining the form and content of civic integration? How has their involvement affected the rules and norms of the resulting civic integration regime? These are the main questions the case studies address, relying on original empirical qualitative data gathered in 2011 in France, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Using historical analysis, I reconstruct and compare how the composition of the particular civic integration field in each country influenced the actual civic integration programs as migrants experienced them in practice.