Title : « The nationalization of strangers ? Genealogy, anatomy and subjective effects of integration courses for Non-European migrants in Europe »

Author : Emma Barrett Fiedler<fnref n="1" />

Abstract : The continental generalization, since the beginning of the new millennium, of a mandatory “integration courses” scheme addressing all third country national adults who are candidates to sedentarization, seems to renew the work of legal immigration administration. By going back over the Dutch genealogy of this migratory device and the theoretical corpus associated with it, this article analyzes its concrete implementation in France and Germany, through an ethnographic immersion that questions the subjective experience of the participants.

Keywords : Migrations – Neoliberalism – Integration course – Subjectivation – Nationalization

"For the outsider, the cultural model of the new group is not a refuge, but an adventurous land. Not something understood, but a subject of investigation to be questioned, not a tool to unravel problematic situations, but a situation itself that is problematic and difficult to master (...)."

(Schütz, 1944 : 502)

Around twenty Sudanese, Eritrean, Syrian, Algerian, Russian and Chinese adults respond to their teacher's oral questioning on the previous day's lessons, which focused on the topographical and toponymic elements of the map and territory on the syllabus. The classroom has become their daily environment, and recitations in grammar or history a familiar activity; everyone here knows the rules: tardiness is reprimanded, any unjustified absence is reported to the management, and chatter in the mother tongue is strictly forbidden. Tired faces remain docile until break time.

While such a situation may seem anecdotal, it illustrates a recent, major inflexion in the administration of regular, or so-called "legal" immigration: since the 2000s, the cultural codification of the right to acquire nationality has gone hand-in-hand with the pioneering introduction, in the Netherlands, of compulsory integration courses for any adult migrant who is a first-time immigrant and non-European citizen obtaining a residence permit, i.e. a "right of citizenship" prior to (very) later "becoming a citizen" (Balibar, 2001: 68). While this shift in the "public action paradigm" in favor of a certain "civic turn" has already been the subject of international comparative analyses (Michalowski, 2007; Hachimi-Alaoui & Pélabay, 2020), the state of research generally reflects a lack of empirical linking of schemes on an European scale, obscuring the collective advent of such measures deployed nationally. The aim of this article is to review the conditions of emergence and dissemination of the "integration course" object at a

<footnote n="1">¹ Contractual PhD student in anthropology at Aix-Marseille University, IDEMEC laboratory (Institut d'ethnologie méditerranéenne, européenne et comparative), UMR 7307, MMSH, 5 rue du château de l'Horloge, CS 90412, 13097 Aix-en-Provence cedex 2, France ; emma.fiedler@etu.univ-amu.fr</footnote>
continental level, starting with the "pioneering" example offered by the Dutch case, which has
led to the development of abundant literature.

My thesis fieldwork, carried out between 2016 and 2018 in France (Marseille) and Germany (Leipzig), provides material for an empirical immersion in training courses under the French CIR (Contrat d'Intégration Républicaine) and their equivalent on the German side (Integrationskurse), in a comparative framework based on an old case study to be revisited. The classic opposition between the French and German "models" of jus soli and jus sanguini respectively, of the "inclusive" society of citizens and the exclusive community of nationals, has become obsolete in the face of legal convergence in the administration of foreigners. An ethnographic analysis of the administration of legal immigration requires us to consider the state institutions holding the initiative from the angle of organizations that are both concrete - setting up "integration schools" for migrants, objects that are completely new in the history of migration - and "moral" (Fassin, 2013: 23).

A review of the genealogy, implementation and routine day-to-day operation of these "normalization" technologies (Foucault, 1975), which in this case rely on a coercive system of financial and/or administrative sanctions, cannot overlook the subjective experience of the adult migrants who are confronted with them and are the first to be affected by them. To this end, we will return to the interviews we conducted with them, and to our participant observations within these courses - declined into linguistic and civic training aimed paradoxically at the autonomy of the public concerned - of the OFII (Office français de l'immigration et de l'intégration) in France and its equivalent of the BAMF (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge) in Germany, by outlining the stakes involved in placing learners in a position of heteronomy and liminality - on the threshold of the host society - at a time when the institutionalization of integration processes tends to produce, ultimately, strangers. Their experience of exile, often woven of wanderings and frustrations, is reinforced by the additional constraint imposed on them by the administration of regular immigration; the obligation they are made to submit to translates into effects of subjective resistance, in the maintenance of an inaudible "quant-à-soi", because silent and resigned in the face of the institution.

At the origins of a matrix

While language and civic training programs have long existed in North America and Israel,
their recent widespread introduction in Europe is the fruit of a singular genealogy. In her
introduction to an analysis of the rapid spread of a new "Dutch model" for the administration
of legal immigration in Western Europe, Ines Michalowski (2007: 9) asks: "How is it possible
to observe a convergence of integration policies between European Union countries that for
decades embodied opposing models par excellence? In the absence of clear directives from the
European Union (EU), national systems are remarkably similar. The homogenization of
practices within the EU is based on the obsolete paradigm of the nation-state - in view of the
EU's post-national ambitions and the transnational turn of migration studies. It responds to a
form of collective "problematization", understood - in the Foucauldian sense of the term - as
the public and strategic identification of an "emergency" to be resolved (Foucault, 1994: 299),
in this case that of a "failure of multiculturalism". The debates initiated by political, media and
scientific elites at the end of the 1990s in the Netherlands, the first European country to
implement a "pioneering" model of integration courses, signaled the distancing of differentialist
and pluralist positions, based on a set of discourses and a concrete policy of "recognition" of minority particularisms that had hitherto been the subject of consensus. Relying on the idea that "good intentions sometimes make bad policies" (Koopmans, 2003), having transformed the recognition of difference into a generalization of "indifference" towards the "real" socio-economic situation of immigrant populations, the denunciation of the "multicultural drama" (Scheffer, 2000) urgently called for the adoption of a "new realism" with the courage to "break the taboos" of Dutch society (Prins, 2002). An unemployment rate measured as five times higher than that of the majority population would be identified as the collateral product of an ethnocultural separatism long proudly claimed in the Netherlands, and would justify a new plea for a principle of cohesion<fnref n="2" />.

The scholastic institutionalization of integration processes for (im)migrants imagined to achieve this goal can be seen as a "device": "a formation which, at a certain point, had to answer a question", based on "a heterogeneous set of public discourses, institutional bodies, decisions, laws, administrative initiatives, scientific or philosophical expressions, or moral judgments" (Foucault, 1994: 120). Introduced in 1998, the *Wet Inburgering Nieuwkomers* (WIN) project for the "encitoyennisation" of new arrivals provided a standardized, compulsory pathway for all non-European adult newcomers<fnref n="3" /> (with the notable exception of nationals of the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland), comprising 600 hours of Dutch language and social/cultural orientation courses over a period of eighteen months, culminating in written and oral tests. In the spirit of a practical legal-administrative junction of the immigration and integration fields, passing the exams would then determine the granting or renewal of residence permits, ensuring a selection of the most assimilable profiles and the eviction of those deemed unassimilable. This response to a cultural "problem" with a political solution, considered a posteriori by some critics as part of a "civic turnaround" (Mouritsen, 2008), was paradoxically accompanied by the discursive elaboration, in the Netherlands, of a "fixation of origins", through the use of a new rhetoric of autochthony for "natives", and allochthony for those not yet belonging to the national community, leaving open the mystery of the acquisition in kind of an ideal autochthony (Geschiere, 2009).

A series of political assassinations in the early 2000s - including that of filmmaker Théo Van Gogh in 2004, by a Dutchman of Moroccan descent in Amsterdam, during the screening of the film *Submission*, which denounced the "repression of women by Islam" - further heightened the spectre of post-9/11 Islamophobia, and consequently hardened the apparatus of integration courses. "Allochthonous" audiences would then be systematically confronted with learning about the liberality and tolerance that characterize Dutch society, through the much-publicized viewing of women going topless on the beach or homosexual couples kissing on camera, and information about laws prohibiting polygamy, honor killings, domestic violence and female

<footnote n="2">² Pluralism in the social and political organization of the Netherlands has its historical roots in the 18th century, when William of Orange introduced the principle of "pilarization" (*Verzuiling*), aimed at pacifying the religious coexistence of separately evolving communities with their own institutional spheres.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ This applies to any prospective immigrant aged over eighteen, who has been in France for less than five years and holds a first residence permit, and who is a national of a country outside the European Union.</footnote>
genital mutilation<fnref n="4" />. This "culturalization"<fnref n="5" /> of Dutch citizenship (Suvarierol, 2015) has, moreover, gone hand in hand with a withdrawal of the State: a movement to privatize language and civic training has transformed this public service offer, which was a compulsory right, into a form of continuing education to be paid for by the people concerned, even though it remains necessary for them to settle in the long term. The private market for the integration of (im)migrants, which pits training schools against each other, hitherto financed by municipalities and authorized to teach nationally-defined programs, goes so far as to offer digital learning "packages" for purchase in order to prepare autonomously for increasingly demanding final exams, decoupling attendance from non-negotiable test success. What some identify as a neo-"governmental strategy", the combined product of a detour into socio-cultural assimilationism and a shift to the most ferocious economic neo-liberalism (Schinkel and Van Houdt, 2010), has emerged at a time of global recasting of welfare into workfare and heated debates rationalizing the "costs and benefits" of immigration, while increasingly "indexing" the alien character of so-called "allochtones" to their recourse, deemed too frequent, to social minima. Thus, the standardized production of "citizen-workers" (Suvarierol, 2015) who are autonomous because they are adapted to the labor market requires the "activation" of newcomer populations, formulating an "empowerment" of Dutch citizenship, whereas the implementation of "illiberal means to liberal ends" (Triadafilopoulos, 2010) paradoxically amounts to the institutionalization of pathways by aiming for their autonomy. The neoliberal character of civic integration for migrants, aimed at their "employability" in the host country, also makes economic activity a "civic" act today in many European countries (Hachimi-Alaoui and Pélabay, 2020: 18) other than the Netherlands.

## Benchmarked nationalization

The fabrication of a "fictitious ethnicity" (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1988: 30) - aimed at creating the conditions for an overlap between political spaces and cultural entities, an adequacy between *Demos* and *Ethnos* towards which all nationalist projects tend, at least in the anthropological sense of the term (Gellner, 1983) - relies on linguistic and cultural unification, notably through the institutional control of the development of compulsory public schools. The paradigmatic example of what we might call the "nationalization" of society (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1988: 122) can be borrowed, in this context, from the more than belated "francization" of French rural areas under the work of the Third Republic and its hussards noirs, as described by historian Eugen Weber (1976) in a work challenging the agreed idea of an early "integration" of French society before 1914-1918. The classic triptych of such cohesion-building - that of the nation-state, its schools, and foreigners, defined as "strangers" to both a state and its nation - now seems to be mobilized not for Breton, Corsican or Provençal children (or for the children of Italian, Polish or Armenian immigrants), but for adult (im)migrants, new comers and third-country nationals from countries such as Syria, Eritrea, Russia, China or Brazil. In short, we can describe this scheme as an attempt to "nationalize strangers". For several decades now, the word "integration" has generally been preferred to the old-fashioned "assimilation", now connoting a unilaterality and authoritarianism that produces ethnocide.

<footnote n="4">⁴ The educational film produced by the Dutch Immigration Service is entitled *Naar Nederland*.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Some analysts even refer to a "racialization" of Dutch culture, noting that the content transmitted is indeed directly oriented against non-European and Muslim otherness (Bonjour, 2020: 136).</footnote>
However, it also has the unfortunate tendency to be used exclusively in relation to recent post-
colonial immigrant minorities, whereas an older sociological usage - inspired by Durkheim<fnref n="6" /> -
encompassed the idea of integration of society as a whole. In addition to confirming the
essentially individualized nature of integration, one of the key innovations of the Dutch
"integration courses" model is to make it a measurable object at a given point in time, as planned
by the institution, thus responding perfectly to the contemporary injunctions of "quantification"
while at the same time evacuating the processual character of adaptation to a new environment.
The results of standardized written and oral final tests represent numerical performance
indicators that lend themselves to the new quantifying mode of "governance by numbers"
(Supiot, 2015) adopted by the EU. Indeed, the "soft" principle of the so-called "Open Method
of Coordination" (OMC), which is at the root of the rapid spread of the Dutch matrix model, is
based essentially on numerical comparison practices specific to Benchmarking and "New
Public Management", without recourse to a clear and binding collective directive, while
representing a formidable instrument for transferring "policies" from one state to another. A
2006 study by the Danish consulting firm Rambøll Management assessed the results of
integration courses in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Denmark and Sweden as
encouraging, since they had helped to reduce the unemployment rate among immigrants
 Michalowski, 2007: 154). Relying on such comparative figures, the pioneering experience of
the Netherlands would quickly attract the interest of its neighboring countries, which would be
supplied with techniques and skills by international delegations aiming to imitate it.

Since the early 2000s, the widespread adoption of the "injunction" integration course model
(Gourdeau, 2013) has altered the conditions under which "newcomers" are "welcomed" in
Spain, Greece, Italy and all Scandinavian countries, from Belgium and England to Hungary and
Poland. In 2005, Germany followed the Dutch example by introducing - after decades of
admiration for the multiculturalist model practiced in the Netherlands (Thränhardt, 2002) -
programs known literally as *Integrationskurse*, organized and financed on a national level by
the state institution BAMF (*Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge*), part of the Federal
Ministry of the Interior. In 2007, France inaugurated the CAI (*Contrat d'Accueil et d'Intégration
– Reception and Integration Contract*) - since renamed the CIR (*Contrat d'Intégration
Républicaine* - republican integration contract), in a semantic evolution far from being neutral
- organized and financed by the OFII, a state institution also under the authority of the Ministry
of the Interior, with a clear focus on security. Delegated to service-provider associations
selected according to specifications that determine the allocation of funding within a (still)
public contract, the language and civic training courses offered by the BAMF and OFII, aligned
with programs predefined by the central bodies, are based on the standardized transmission and
learning of the official language, history, institutional system, "culture" and "norms and values"
of the countries of settlement. A comparative ethnography of the symbolic production generated
by these state bodies can be combined with that of the organizational implementation of
equivalent schemes in two "national orders of things". While Franco-German delegations are
working towards a convergence of organizational guidelines, there are still notable
discrepancies in the requirements set by the schemes on both sides of the Rhine: the required
language level (B1 versus A1 according to the European classification) and the length of

<footnote n="6">⁶ Durkheim, obsessed by the modern risk of anomie, was also a pedagogue, confident in the role of the republican school in "putting into the child's mind the essential similarities demanded by collective existence" (Durkheim, 1922: 17), and this in the first hours of his primary socialization.</footnote>
training courses (up to a year versus two to three months) make the German variant the more restrictive.

## The workings of a coercive system

I therefore set out to observe and participate in the day-to-day running of BAMF and OFII language and civic training courses in Leipzig (Saxony) and Marseille. Difficulties of access to the field are the first elements to reveal the "closed" character of these training centers, which we would like to be "open", nevertheless with national variations inaugurating the beginnings of a form of "ethnography of the State". While many of the German BAMF's service provider associations are reluctant to open their doors to outside observers, this has more to do with the structural overwork of their teams, working on a permanent just-in-time basis, than with any reference to the authority of the central body in Berlin. So, after being turned down by a dozen of them in Leipzig, I could obtain permission to take part (rather than observe) in a course for two months as a foreign student in a small structure whose director would tell me "she has nothing to hide", without having to refer to the state body. The closure of equivalent OFII-authorized associations in France, on the other hand, is due to a "pyramid" hierarchy dominated by the Paris head office, whose regional branches can decide to withdraw service providers from a local public contract: for a year, I had to negotiate with the management of the Paris-based organization, while the Marseille school deferred to the decision taken. Once my access to training courses had been secured - in the position of "observation trainee" - the school would retreat into a perpetual logic of withholding information, always citing the risk of being reprimanded by OFII management by being removed from the approved list. A ban on photography and filming, or a ban on communicating with "trainees"<fnref n="7" /> taking part in courses - and on meeting them outside the formal framework of my "internship" - reveal an established culture of suspicion, far removed from a public service endowed with transparency.

The associations providing integration courses follow a fairly homogeneous typology, namely that of training centers at the antipodes of any militant culture, neutral pedagogical spaces addressing a variety of audiences and thus willing to apply state directives. The teachers at these training centers for migrants are mostly FLE (French Langue Etrangère – French as foreign language) and DAF (Deutsch als Fremdsprache – German as foreign language) teachers, whose pedagogical style can vary considerably between individuals and generations, although the materials and methods used are most often inappropriate. My primary experience of this infantilization would be that of my immersion in a German classroom in the position of learner, faced with an unscrupulous "teacher" who, from the outset, was on a first-name basis with her "pupils", constantly questioning them, in a way that arbitrarily left nothing open to discussion and created an anxiety-inducing atmosphere. While younger teachers may use more "horizontal" teaching methods, these are often based on "playful and motivated" learner participation, which is ill-suited to the situation and no less problematic. In our subsequent interviews, course participants came back to the teaching conditions that put them in an uncomfortable position. Michel<fnref n="8" />, a Lebanese pupil being reprimanded by the Marseilles teacher

<footnote n="7">⁷ The OFII prefers to use the term "stagiaire" (trainee), while the BAMF uses the term "Teilnehmer" (participant), although the teachers informally and apologetically use the simpler term "élève" (pupil).</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ The first names of training participants appearing here have, of course, been changed to ensure anonymity.</footnote>
younger than him for his unauthorized speech (threatening to "put scotch tape on his mouth"),
told me:

"In Lebanon, I'd never accept this, that's for sure: I'm a thirty-eight-year-old man, not a child.
But in France, I'm obliged to adapt, I know I have to accept all that...".

Baram, another participant in the OFII courses in Marseille, a Kurd from Turkey and former schoolteacher in his country, also told me:

"I feel like they're doing with me what I did with my pupils in Istanbul."

It is also interesting to note that, within these structures, national school rhythms are
reproduced: participants are involved throughout the week, from Monday to Friday (except
Wednesdays in France), for an average of five-six hours a day, sometimes concentrated in the
morning on the German side, sometimes spread out over the whole day on the French side, with
the lunch break planned in advance<fnref n="9" />. In addition to regular attendance and active daily
participation, students are required to complete the "homework" assignments distributed from
one day to the next, written exercises that are collectively corrected by oral questions at the
beginning of class.

"Pupils" are referred to training courses as early as possible, and their language level is first
tested at a collective "reception platform" at the regional OFII and BAMF offices. A number of
hours of training is then prescribed, depending on the assessment of their "needs" by civil
servants (amounting to a minimum of 200 and 600 hours respectively), on the basis of a written
test and an individual interview. Exemptions from language training may then be granted to
those whose command of French or German is deemed sufficient, although civic training
remains non-negotiable. In addition to this platform pre-test, a compulsory medical check-up is
carried out by general practitioners on the premises to ensure the migrants' general state of
health - and, above all, any potential epidemiological risk they may represent<fnref n="10" /> - reminiscent of
the immigration administration practices once used on Ellis Island. Once the (im)migrants have
been "welcomed", the authorities must ensure that they duly attend the training courses
prescribed by the public-sector schools, by imposing sanctions that threaten their residence
permits and/or state financial cover. While course participants, whose status varies widely,
already benefit from an initial "right of residence", prolonged (over three consecutive days) and
unjustified (i.e. without written proof) absence from the course deprives them of the right to
renew their permits - which means that teachers have to scrupulously check in at the start of
each course and report each absence to their superiors, who then refer the matter to the
organization. In Germany, "recognized" asylum seekers (anerkannte Asylbewerber) are
threatened with a simple and clear cut-off of their monthly financial resources in the event of

<footnote n="9">⁹ In fact, the specifications for the OFII public procurement contract include the provision of catering facilities. During civic training days, participants are invited to eat a free "universal" meal served at the local restaurant, based on a budget of eight euros per person enrolled.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ When I spent a whole day at the OFII reception center in Marseille, I noticed that the premises were equipped with an X-ray room, where lung examinations are systematically carried out to rule out any risk of a tuberculosis epidemic. The OFII offices in the countries of departure also prescribe a compulsory lung X-ray for applicants wishing to emigrate to France.</footnote>
proven non-cooperation, according to a precise administrative scale<fnref n="11" />. Integration courses are part of an institutional complex that includes residence permits and minimum social benefits.

## From discipline to mobilization

The content of school curricula defined by state bodies - sometimes in the form of standard textbooks, as in the case of German civic training courses - invariably has a normative character, with the common feature across Europe of insisting on the norms and values of the themes of "gender equality" and "tolerance", particularly with regard to homosexuality (Michalowski, 2007). Language training courses are in themselves a pretext for tackling such subjects indirectly, through grammar exercises or role-playing dialogues. Civics training, on the other hand, is much more direct and explicit, setting out the norms and values - always nationally defined - that are to be acquired, with the implication that these are to be opposed and banned. In France, the treatment of secularism and the republican motto ("Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité") gives rise to "catechism" scenes in which the history of the 1789 Revolution, with its specific vocabulary (Bastille Day, Sans-Culottes), is evoked in a mythical and teleological way before participants who, for the most part, are beginners in the French language; the 1905 separation of Church and State is a date hammered home on a regular basis. The history of the Federal Republic of Germany<fnref n="12" /> begins in 1945, with references to the Second World War and Nazism illustrating the need for "historical responsibility" (geschichtlische Verantwortung) to be passed on to newcomers. The principles of "religious diversity and tolerance" legitimize a compartmentalized public presence of religion, although secularization is a recurring theme. Relocation efforts are both temporal and spatial, in that they involve learning about national topography and toponymy, from the numbers and names of neighboring countries, regions, capital cities and main towns, to rivers and mountains, natural landscapes and local identities, gastronomic specialties and festivities. The organization of the national calendar is also covered, with Christian holidays explained. In this way, elements of an institutional and political order are often blended with the "cultural", although the "civic" inflection of discourse is even more pronounced in France.

What at first glance appears to be a disciplinary approach to teaching worthy of the elementary school of the Third Republic - in which schoolteachers are transformed into megaphones of a national identity - tends to become more complex when one device turns out to conceal another. In Germany, the injunction to attend classes regularly, and the use of coercive methods to compel participants to do so, are justified by a rhetoric of rights and duties - the right being transmuted into a "privilege" establishing a duty: an institutional "moral economy" is woven here, incriminating those who refuse to take part in the scheme under the banner of incivility. BAMF staff, including teachers, consider the *Integrationskurse* to be a "privilege" generously

<footnote n="11">¹¹ In Germany, refugees receive a monthly allowance of 400 euros, even though they have no work permit. A first warning for misbehavior corresponds to a cut of a quarter of their resources, potentially up to a complete cut, a rather effective procedure.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² The history of the socialist German Democratic Republic is dealt with only briefly, and always in a negative light: the East/West tensions rekindled by the textbook speech were palpable in Leipzig.</footnote>
provided by German taxpayers<fnref n="13" />. Migrants, on the other hand, believe that they are obliged to do so in order to meet the expectations of the Jobcenter<fnref n="14" />. My immersion in the BAMF's training courses would therefore progressively inform me of the presence of a third organizational actor playing a central role over and above the routine collaboration between the Ministry of the Interior and the "integration schools" providing them: the Jobcenter functions here as a local control body empowered to implement appropriate sanctions in the event of any breach of the rule, migrants being defined first and foremost as unemployed, and therefore job-seekers. Followed in parallel to their schooling by a Jobcenter "personal advisor" helping them to formulate career strategies, the "clients" - as they are called by the employment agency - are expected to regard the *Integrationskurse* as further training enabling them to be more competitive on the German job market. Such a Janus-like complex also explains the residual presence of intra-European migrants - Greeks, Spaniards, Portuguese, Poles and Italians - in language and civics classes, as they come to work in Germany only to find themselves accidentally unemployed, without a sufficient command of Goethe's language. The fact that they are from outside the EU is thus surpassed by the fact that they are unemployed in the definition of their foreignness, and integration becomes above all "reinsertion".

In this instance, the "career management" mission entrusted to the Jobcenter since its
appearance in 2004, in the wake of the "Hartz" reforms on the neo-liberal agenda of the
Schröder era, is aimed at foreign residents as much as nationals, where the identification of a
"failure of multiculturalism" once corresponded with the need to reduce the unemployment rate:
"There is no right to laziness"<fnref n="15" />, therefore, and especially not for newcomers. The principle of
their "activation" supposedly rests on their willingness to "mobilize" themselves, while at the
same time blossoming in search of themselves: here we see the emergence of an empowerment
ethic typical of the "third spirit of capitalism" (Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999) and of a
governmentality enjoining the development of techniques of the self (Foucault, 1988). In a
classroom where the map of the *Bundesländer* stands next to a poster entitled "At the
supermarket", school curricula have to adjust their content by proposing exercises in job
hunting through classified ads, curriculum vitae creation, simulated job interviews, advice on
communicating with superiors and colleagues, or virtuous self-entrepreneurship. Consumer
themes recur systematically in language and civics manuals, drawing on imagery of "healthy"
practices ranging from jogging and yoga to recipes for fresh smoothies. Work and shopping
seem to have become the two obligatory points of access to a form of "active" citizenship (Rose,
1999) formulating the project of a free because responsible society, a paradoxical injunction in
view of the methods used by the institution.

<footnote n="13">¹³ My civics teacher would tell me, during our interview, that she and her colleagues can't stand the idea of a student missing roll call: "I find it very disrespectful, really. Who pays for all this? We do! We're the ones financing all this for them, and they don't come!", where motivation should be constant.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ The participants in BAMF's training courses would unanimously confide in me, between two course units, that the reason for their daily attendance at the school is motivated by a debt: "because the Jobcenter pays for us".</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ I quote the words of the Chancellor himself ("*Es gibt kein Recht zu Faulheit in unserem Land*"), paraphrasing Paul Lafargue, to legitimize the drastic socio-economic measures then undertaken by his Agenda 2010.</footnote>
## The arts of subjective resistance

The participant observations or "observant participations" carried out in French and German integration courses between 2016 and 2018 are a prerequisite, in my survey, for in-depth semi-directive interviews with the migrants concerned by the scheme, in order to gain a better, intimate understanding of their reception of it. The course participants I interviewed - around twenty in Leipzig and Marseille - reflect the highly heterogeneous composition of the classroom, with extremely varied profile. They range from Syrian and Eritrean refugees to Afghan asylum seekers and Georgian migrant women, as well as spouses of French nationals, Uruguayans, Chileans, Lebanese, Moroccans and Algerians. The only thing they have in common is that they are foreign nationals from outside the EU, legally defined as "adults" because they are over eighteen. My position as a foreign participant - in a situation of "observant participation" - in a German integration course for almost three months enabled me to establish a connivance with my respondents by sharing their daily lives, including outside the institution and class hours. On the French side, my immersion as an "observation trainee" and as a Frenchwoman demanded a recurrent effort on my part to set aside latent suspicions about my presumed affiliation with the OFII: interviews were only possible, in short, when it had become clear to them that I was not just another agent of the state, and that my concerns towards them were quite different. These interviews, in addition to a number of informal conversations, were conducted outside the institution, as often and as far as possible in a friendly domestic setting. Whenever possible, we also gave priority to the use of their mother tongue, using the services of interpreters.

Despite the great heterogeneity of the public concerned, depending on continent and country of origin, administrative status (asylum seekers seeking subsidiary protection and well on the way to obtaining it, refugees who are already beneficiaries, "economic" migrants, subjects to family repatriation) and level of education, the common obligation of active participation imposed on them in exchange for the right and means to settle permanently lessens the general feeling of inadequacy. The apparent docility of these "trainees" cracks in the spaces and moments of relaxation: informal exchanges at coffee or lunch breaks, and interviews conducted with participants outside the institution's corridors, give access to their real situations and concerns, elements of a discourse inaudible during grammar lessons or Jobcenter counseling sessions. In this respect, the coffee breaks between classes - often accompanied by cigarettes for the many smokers - were privileged moments of exchange between two hours of lessons, and the "smoker's corner" an important place in my investigation: their criticism, mute in normal times and in the face of the institution, could be sharpened there in the entre-soi of this moment when the mother tongues of the participants regain their right, sheltered from the reproving gaze of the teacher. The arts of subjective and discursive "infrapolitical" resistance (Scott, 1990) are audible only in the interstices and moments of respite, in the utterances made "behind the backs" of institutional agents.

The "metaphysics of sedentarism" (Malkki, 1992) contained in the programs and tests of integration courses, undertaking a relocation of participants' belonging, attachments and identity references ideally<fnref n="16" /> as soon as they arrive on national territory - in a voluntarist, individualist and linear conception of integration and republican citizenship understood as a

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Depending on the availability of places, it can take up to a year before people are able to take part in training courses, even if the formal intention of the organizations is to provide guidance as soon as possible.</footnote>
"daily plebiscite" - are in the first place profoundly at odds with the conditions of anchorage and access to local resources of migrant "publics". The first misunderstanding here is based on the accepted idea that people embarking on settlement processes have "chosen" their host country for its intrinsic qualities, which should justify their motivation to make efforts to establish themselves there in deed and in thought, disregarding all the ups and downs of migratory trajectories often woven of wanderings, confusion, back-and-forths and constraints. It's not uncommon for asylum applications to be rejected or for residence permits not to be renewed at the end of training courses, and integration courses are frequently "repeated" between European countries, so that migrants move from learning one national order of things to another, in a constantly readjusted mimicry. This was the case, for example, of two Afghan asylum seekers in their twenties, who first attended Swedish and then German integration courses, before having to take refuge in France, where they were obliged to attend OFII courses in Marseille once again<fnref n="17" />.

Once a residence permit has been granted, the question arises as to whether it can be reconciled with the long, complex, intimate processes of subjective "sedentarization": in this case, the lack and absence of loved ones, in a situation of exile weighed down by traumatic memories, make the "plebiscite" encouraged by the institution in the short term difficult to envisage. The anecdote most representative of such a discrepancy between the institution's ordinary requirements, forbidding the use of cell phones in the classroom, and the "extra-ordinary" concerns of certain participants, is that of two young Syrian refugees who had fled their country's military service, in 2016, to Leipzig, and desperately tried to reach their families left behind in Damascus, caught under the bombardments, only to be reprimanded by a teacher eager to "complete the program". After class, one of the two youngsters said to me:

"Mrs. K. has no idea about our life, or my life either. Once, she asked me in class how I'd got to Germany, so I told her my story, but she didn't believe me, she thought I'd arrived by plane, just like that (...)."

Selim had fled Syria alone at the age of seventeen, escaping drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. Another older Syrian participant had already obtained refugee status in Leipzig, and had been waiting for a year for his wife and three children, who had stayed behind, to be repatriated. Alone and distraught, Marwan suffered from severe concentration problems and repeated nightmares. This phenomenon of "subjective absence", which is recurrent among participants who have not yet had the opportunity to "settle down" - and not only among refugees who have suffered trauma - explains why the content transmitted during integration course is often not received, or at least not properly. The conditions under which these lessons take place, from the choice of their temporality to the discipline they establish, often hinder the transmission of content. Many of them tell me they haven't understood or heard entire lessons.

Perhaps even more problematic is the lack of care outside the "school", particularly in France: the structural problem of access to housing for asylum seekers and refugees in Marseille produces situations where participants, tired from nights spent at acquaintances' homes, or on the street, or on the stairs of the train station, still have to be present and actively participate in

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Fazal, one of them, who also lost his father and two brothers in Taliban attacks in Afghanistan, and has had no news of his mother since, had to be institutionalized for six months due to severe depression. He was particularly absent "subjectively".</footnote>
class, while having done their homework from the previous day. Like Eyasu, an Eritrean refugee taking part in OFII courses in Marseille in 2018, who had no fixed address:

"It is too much for me now, with the school: I have to go here and there all the time, I need to rest, I'm tired...".

Others, with no financial resources, are obliged to work outside school hours by negotiating with their employers, and thus claim to have "no time for integration": this formula was used by two of my interviewees, one a Georgian asylum seeker in Germany, Lali, and the other a Tunisian construction worker in Marseille, Saïd - both forced to juggle school obligations and salaried work, in addition to their "paper careers". In the best of cases, however, the central organization makes arrangements for salaried "trainees" in the form of evening or Saturday classes, although most are enrolled in intensive courses spread over the week, from Monday to Friday.

The intensive school rhythms imposed by language and civic training tend to reinforce a state of "liminality", an in-between time leading to the subjective absence of "students" despite their physical presence in the classroom, contradicting the need for their motivation. While most institutional agents see an equivalence between the participants' dispositions in a school situation and their ability to integrate outside of school, those concerned tend to make a clear distinction between the two, going so far as to consider these compulsory courses as a hindrance to their social adaptation, due to the confinement they engender. Well aware, however, of the need for them to pass both the written and oral final tests, some of them come up against the limits of the "meritocratic" ideal disseminated by the institution, first and foremost those most lacking in school habitus and/or cultural capital, or those no longer feeling too old to learn; this is the case of Bassem and Hayat, a retired Syrian refugee couple in their seventies on an OFII course in Marseille, who said to me at the coffee break:

"We are too old now to learn a new language like that, we just want to live in peace here".

Moreover, around a third of participants fail to achieve the objectives set by the examinations organized at the end of the training courses, a failure with serious consequences, ranging from "repeating" the prescribed course hours to non-renewal of their residence permit. The Kantian injunction to autonomy and empowerment they are given here, "to want what one must in order to be able", is a priori at odds with the very reasons for their forced presence on French soil: the case of intra-European migrant workers in Germany from the south and/or east of the continent confirms the real discrepancy that sometimes exists between "what one must and what one wants"; their individual decisions to emigrate are not free from any form of push-and-pull socio-economic structural constraint. Elena, a Spanish participant from a village in Andalusia who has settled in Leipzig with her husband, told me during our interview:

"We had no other option but to leave, back home there's no more work."

The couple planned to return to Spain as soon as possible. In such circumstances of liminality and heteronomy, the discipline and content of integration courses seem to reinforce the difficulties generally associated with the exile experience, including phases of "disorientation, frustration, rejection and isolation" (Kronsteiner, 2003). National curricula, these official
"scripts" - and their frequent and unofficial, but always situated<fnref n="18" />, "descriptions" (Akrich, 1987) by teachers in the classroom - propose a fixed, often arbitrary and reductive model of the host country, its nationals, and their "relatively natural conception of the world", tending to further encourage participants not to "feel obliged to worship the idols of the tribe" (Schütz, 1944: 38). The principle of repeating themes and concepts creates a system of "references" and "relevance"<fnref n="19" /> that tend to be taken seriously by (im)migrants, especially if they are given too few opportunities to relativize the transmitted image through other significant and contradictory experiences<fnref n="20" />. This process of "typification" at work - during a year's training in Germany - may suggest that integration courses contribute to reifying a vision of a collective, homogeneous and external "other" among the participants, and thereby a schema of opposition between "Us" and "Them", making "identification" even more difficult. In this prolonged situation of "otherness" (Gourdeau, 2013) vis-à-vis national society - and against a backdrop of "double absence", in a dissonance of no longer being "there" in body and not yet being "here" in thought (Sayad, 1999) - typical exile withdrawal reflexes are reactivated, in the form of nostalgia or self-exoticism.

While not forgetting the rational reasons behind their decision to emigrate, most of the participants tend to develop an idealized, sensual image of their home country, contrasting it with the mirror image of a cold, inhospitable "host country": Syrian refugees in Leipzig spoke of "security without feelings" when evoking their new life in Germany, despite all the gratitude they might otherwise express to this country. While recognizing the need to learn French or German here, a rejection of the language - learned through grammar lessons, dictations or mock job interviews, often with unsuitable materials - is also palpable at the end of these language courses. As the exiled Alfred Schütz (1944: 30) wrote, it may be necessary to have written "love letters" in the language of the country of settlement in order to make it one's own.

The narrative work carried out by the exiles outside this institutional world, experienced as factitious and alienating, made up above all of performance grids, lists and acronyms, which the administration of legal immigration to Europe has become, leads us to conclude that this enterprise of standardized production of "citizen-workers" tends rather to become, in a counter-productive way, the factory of strangers developing essentially instrumental, or even hostile, relations towards their "host country". This is particularly audible in the fact that most participants declare, at the end of the training courses, that they have no desire, in the near or distant future, to become "nationals" by applying for naturalization, except in order to be able to secure their status, and this despite the fact that integration courses are seen as a prerequisite. It would seem that German and French nationality is not an "imaginable reality" for them (Fassin and Mazouz, 2007).

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ When, for example, a German civics teacher situates the values of "tolerance" on the side of the Bible, and therefore as "Christian", while elsewhere they are described as "republican".</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ BAMF's programs tirelessly repeat the function, approach and benefits of waste separation, almost making *Mülltrennung* a "key symbol" of contemporary German "culture".</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ In particular, by realizing, empirically, that the standards and values described are indeed theoretical.</footnote>
Conclusion

The "nationalization of foreigners" is a paradoxical device based on both explicit ideals and latent motives that contradict each other (Bonjour, 2020 : 135). At first glance, the civic and linguistic integration of migrants into European national spaces seems to reactivate ambitions for assimilative "cohesion" through free and, above all, compulsory public schooling for foreign adults. The "bizarre" aspect of such a schooling enterprise becomes less surprising when we understand the selective aim around which this (im)migratory scheme is organized: the sorting of non-European migrants according to the criterion of their "assimilability", measured here in terms of their behavior in class and quantified through their written and oral results at the end of exams, undeniably produces a tension between "inclusive" and "exclusive" approaches (Bonjour, 2020 : 136). The fact that teaching is mainly reserved for non-European foreigners can give rise to a postcolonial reading of these European migration policies, through the prism of a reaffirmation of the symbolic boundaries between "Us" and "Them". The content of these programs, though redefined nationally, has the common denominator of being directed against a non-European otherness, with Muslim fundamentalism and tribal violence as common repellent figures, as evidenced by the discourse on gender or on the democratic fundamentals of a separation of religion and politics, conveyed by integration programs. While any overhasty comparison with the colonial situation must be avoided (Sayad, 1994 : 10), the paradoxes of "exclusive inclusion" inherent in the "civilizing mission" of the colonial project, which predates the immigration of former colonized populations into the European space, seem to be present in today's civic integration schemes (Bonjour, 2020: 135), in a "mise en altérité" of the publics concerned, enjoined to integrate in order to erase their difference (Gourdeau, 2013). The policies of "colonial mimetics" (Bhabha, 2004 : 122), like those of assimilation, set goals of similarity, even identity, to be achieved, while pointing to the dissimilar.

The singular genealogy, within the EU, of the civic integration paradigm, responds to a contagion of return to the promotion of "national identities", in contradiction with current ambitions for a "post-national" European citizenship. Most analyses agree that the "civic turn" in fact corresponds to a "thickening", in the form of a "renationalization" of citizenship, based here on particular cultural ferments (Hachimi-Alaoui and Pélabay, 2020 : 13). This cultural substantiation goes hand in hand with the neoliberal character of a scheme aimed at reducing the costs of immigration by focusing on access to employment and rapid economic self-sufficiency for migrants, while insisting on the need for their individual responsibility, motivation and mobilization. The matrix of the "Dutch model" already contained this "innovative" association between the logics of cultural assimilation and integration through work, which are generally dissociated. The dissemination of current practices in the Netherlands attests to the permeability of usually divergent "models" in the field of integration, while reminding us of the interdependence of European countries in this field, even without the implementation of a clear and binding collective directive.

Our immersion at the heart of the French and German systems not only provides us with an empirical understanding of the day-to-day, routine operation of these "integration schools", but also enables us to question the differences that may remain between two countries that have long embodied contradictory logics of "managing" difference. In our view, the results obtained put into perspective the "Franco-centric" observations that this "contractualization" of integration is a recent drift away from the universalist, assimilative spirit. The German model, in terms of curriculum content and implementation by teachers, presents a much more markedly
Germanic conception of the "cultural nation", when "francité" is still defined essentially in terms of republican values. Moreover, the formula implemented by BAMF is much more faithful to the Dutch model in its economic and neoliberal application.

Above all, questioning the subjective reception of the migrants concerned by these courses, confronted with a coercive discipline on pain of sanctions threatening their living conditions, sheds an intimate and central light on the phenomenon. The fast-paced nature of the compulsory courses takes place within biographical timeframes that are already prey to the experience of exile. Testimonies on teaching conditions, even more than on content, paradoxically reveal an exacerbation of feelings of isolation, frustration and nostalgia, to the point of accentuating the sensation of being strangers to the host society.

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