13 juli 2025
“De samenleving is nooit af” – Society is never finished. This simple yet profound claim lies at the heart of Stichting Civic’s recent manifesto. At first glance, it may sound like a poetic observation. But its implications are deeply political – particularly for how we think about integration and civic integration policies in the Netherlands and beyond.
Er is ook een Nederlandse versie van dit artikel: De samenleving is nooit af: een fundamenteel ander perspectief op ‘integratie’ aan de hand van het Manifest van Stichting Civic
Stichting Civic’s manifesto pushes back against the common belief that newcomers must fit into an already complete and unified society. In the Dutch context, this often means absorbing so-called “Dutch values” – a fixed set of cultural expectations that migrants are supposed to learn and adopt. Integration, in this view, becomes a linear, one-way street: moving from “them” to “us.” But this idea is built on a flawed assumption. It imagines society as something finished and unchanging, simply waiting to absorb others. In reality, societies are never static, uniform or homogenous. They’re diverse, constantly evolving, and shaped by long historical conflicts over inclusion, exclusion, and power.
Willem Schinkel, a leading author critiquing the idea of “integration”, argues that integration is not a neutral or technical process. Instead, it’s a system of control – one that governs people through rules, classifications and measurements. Migrants are constantly compared to an imagined standard: the “proper citizen.” This system does not integrate – it produces the category of the “other”, while demanding sameness.
Sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad captured this contradiction in the 1990s with his metaphor of the asymptote. Imagine two curves that move closer and closer, yet never meet (see image) (1). Integration, in this view, is seen not just about narrowing the gap – it’s about recognizing that the gap never fully closes, the curves will never actually touch.
The “to-be-integrated migrants” are placed on one curve, the “always-already-integrated citizens”, i.e. “society” on the other. The idea of integration requires us to separate who has to integrate and who is thought to be already, by default, “integrated”. This separation has lasting consequences. To be marked as someone who must integrate means being endlessly measured against a (shifting) norm. It means your children – and their children – are held up to a standard they can never fully reach: the ideal of the “integrated” Dutch citizen, the other curve in the asymptote metaphor.
The idea of a unified “Dutch society” is rarely, if ever, questioned. This has much to do with the way integration is researched – both in university academic settings and through large-scale national and European statistical survey studies. Researchers often default to broad ethnic categories such as Turkish, Moroccan, or Surinamese, comparing these groups to one another and to the Dutch “norm”. Integration is measured using a wide-range of indicators like educational attainment, employment, crime rates, and social networks. These indicators are treated as signs of how well someone has “integrated”. But what is striking about this: the integration of the “native Dutch” citizens is never measured. Their integration is assumed, taken for granted, never put under scrutiny. And when the “Dutch” category does appear in research, the critical questions are: Who counts as Dutch? Has this category been “whitewashed” to erase the ethnic and cultural diversity that exists within Dutch society itself?
Even when research shows that “native Dutch citizens” score lower than migrant groups on so-called indicators of integration this is never labelled as a problem or as an “integration failure”. Studies reveal, for instance, that “native Dutch people” often have fewer cross-ethnic ties than the very groups seen as not integrated enough. Yet this fact does not prompt concern or policy action – and to be clear, we don’t argue that it should. But it highlights something different: “Dutch society” is imagined as already integrated and modern by default. Even when it falls short by its own standards, it avoids scrutiny. Integration is a one-sided challenge, a problem that belongs to the “migrant”. That mindset shifts the responsibility for “success” or “failure” away from systems, policies, and historical inequalities, and places it squarely on individuals.
In response to this criticism, some scholars have argued that integration should be understood as a two-way process, with migrants and “society” needing to adapt to each other. At first glance, this sounds more inclusive. But it still imagines society as a unified, intact, national “whole”, with fixed values everyone should adopt. These values are seen as modern, desirable, and worth striving for – even though, in practice, not everyone agrees on what they are. Meanwhile, deeper issues often go unaddressed. When society is portrayed as complete, homogeneous, and modern, it becomes the destination migrants are expected to reach. But this framing sidesteps uncomfortable truths – like structural inequality, institutional racism, and the colonial roots embedded in what Dutch citizenship has come to represent.
Stichting Civic’s manifesto is not just a critique of how we think of integration; it calls for deeper reflection. It urges policymakers, educators, researchers and citizens to question their own assumptions about belonging, normality, and national identity. It urges researchers to understand that images of “already integrated society” and “non-integrated migrants” are a direct result of the way we conduct and share research.
The manifesto, and this last statement of it, urges us to embrace society’s unfinished, pluralistic, and constantly changing nature. That means being open to uncertainty, discomfort and disagreement – but also to creativity, contestation, and transformation. Critical scholars have challenged the idea of “universal” values, as in the supposedly universal “Dutch values” , or the supposedly universal “modern” values believed to characterise European nation states. Liberal democracies, by nature, aren’t built on a single set of values. They thrive on value pluralism. As the political scientist Chantal Mouffe argues, liberal democracy should be seen as an open space for ongoing contestation, where power is always questioned and no outcome is ever final. She calls for agonistic pluralism: a democracy in which conflict and division are inherent to politics. (2) Sociologist Stuart Hall echoed this idea with his vivid description of democracy, not as a harmonious consensus but “an absolutely, bloody-unending row”; “the sound of people actually negotiating their differences in the open”. (3)
In that sense, Stichting Civic’s claim is not just critical – it is hopeful. It, and its manifest, are attempts at confrontation and contestation, at highlighting the power relations which have shaped our notions of “society”, of “values”, of “migrants” and of “integration”. Notions which have shaped public and political debate without being actively questioned. Notions which are accepted and operationalised into research and then presented to the public as “fact”.
As Stichting Civic, we argue through this last statement of our manifest for a notion of society which is inherently plural, diverse and ever-changing and a system of governance which responds to the needs of this diversity, without separating individuals according to where they (supposedly) come from or the values they (supposedly) (do not) embrace, against an imaginary of a unified, finished “society”.
This is a hopeful call, because, a society never finished is a society still capable of becoming something better: more inclusive, more diverse and as such, more democratic.
Stefan Manser-Egli is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. He completed his PhD at the University of Neuchâtel on Il/liberal Integrationism and the integration requirement to adopt “shared values”. He has co-initiated a popular initiative to facilitate naturalization in Switzerland.
Notes:
1. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Asymptote-1-over-x-plus-x.svg
2. Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso.
3. Hall, Stuart. 1997. ‘Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.’ In Culture, Globalization, and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, edited by Anthony D. King, 41–68. University of Minnesota Press.
Voorzitter
