Integration and Resistance

The Relation of Social Organisations, Global Capital, Governments and International Immigration in Spain and Portugal

Ricard Moren-Alegret

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351927192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Integration is a key challenge facing modern society today. Integration and Resistance offers a new theoretical perspective for considering integration. By focusing on international immigrants and their organisations from a wider perspective the author demonstrates that the threat to social integration does not lie with the immigrants themselves but with global capital and the state. By analysis of data collected in Spain and Portugal the book breaks new ground in providing information on processes occurring in intermediate-capitalist countries that share some aspects of economic development, social and migration features with Northern Europe and America whilst also sharing other features such as the economic dependence of more impoverished countries.

1 The complexity of integration

I live in a banlieu without information
I am en Europe et j'ai quitté Africa
J'ai laissé my brother, my mother et my father
Et c'estl'immigration I'exil for all my brother
in a fric fashion...
Quand tu es à la rue tu vois l'indifference
Tu vois la supercherie tu vois la fausse transparence
D'une société de gaspillace de très grosses carences
sur la moquette de Babylon s'entasse la pourriture
Pendant que des enfants n'ont pas de nourriture
II ya dans ce pays un clivage une cassure
entre le fond et la forme, la forme a plus d'importance

(Gnawa Diffusion, 1997)

Both in the academic sphere and the mass media, the word 'immigration' is often uncritically linked to 'integration' issues, taking for granted that those who migrate always face more problems of integration than the rest of the population. However, as Àngels Pascual de Sans (1992) has suggested, migration often serves as a front for other phenomena, and social conflicts that are considered to be associated with migration often conceal more fundamental conflicts.

Thirty years ago Herbert Marcuse noted – during the so-called 'Cold War'– that the coexistence between capitalism and 'the communist bloc' was explained, on the one hand, by capitalism's metamorphosis towards certain state intervention (to mitigate market harmful effects), and, on the other hand, because the deformation that the original idea of socialism suffered in practice, which was in part due to external capitalist pressure¹ (Mattick, 1972). Thus, after the Berlin Wall collapsed, societies under capitalist rule in the 1990s lost that external 'help' for their integration called 'real socialism'. Is that sufficient reason to explain the recent repetitive use of the term 'integration'?

One of the contexts in which it is common to find this term 'integration' is in debates on immigration into Europe. In these debates, a rigorous analysis, a formulation of relevant questions, working hypotheses and systematic observations is required (Pascual de Sans, 1992), so to advance that research the first step is to obtain the maximum precision in the use of terms.

'Integration', as Rainer Bauböck (1994, pp.9-10) suggests, is a 'rather elusive concept'. However, according to him, two main meanings can be found, in general linked to one type of integration, the so-called 'social integration':

• - the first interpretation refers to the internal cohesion of a system or aggregate composed of a multitude of singular units or elements;
• - the second one designates the entry into the system of elements which had not been part of the environment before, or the extension of the system to incorporate such external elements or units.

If this Janus-faced conception is taken into account, it would be worthwhile to substitute the study of immigrants' integration for the study of the integration of all social groups (Pascual de Sans, Cardelus, 1987). However, even if it is not possible to study in detail all society at the same time, it is feasable to take into account the general context and to avoid the study of a specific group called 'immigrants'. In any case, although many categories can be seen as problematic, in order to reject mainstream categories and to suggest useful alternative ones, it is necessary to take into account and criticise the former ones, in a similar way to Marx's methods (Carver, 1975). This is also what John Holloway (1995, p. 119) is suggesting: 'The different academic disciplines take these forms (the state, money, the family) as given and so contribute to their apparent solidity, and hence to the stability of societies under capitalist rule. To think scientifically is to dissolve these forms, to understand them as forms; to act freely is to destroy these forms.' In this book, the theoretical approach is not just on 'immigrants', but the general framework of enriched and semi-enriched countries under capitalism has been taken into account, and 'integration' is defined in a broader way than usual.

In the following pages, an overview of the origins and evolution of the term 'integration', and its location in contemporary social sciences is offered.

Approaches to integration

Through the history of social sciences, diverse approaches to the concept of 'integration' can be found, and the elusiveness of such a term is not new. A review of the contributions of Durkheim, Tönies, Landecker, Parsons and Mills can be a starting point.

At the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Émile Durkheim made a key contribution to social integration theories. As Harry Alpert (1941, p.28) emphasised, for Durkheim 'society is an organisation, a more or less definite and permanent system of relationships. It is association, interaction, and communication, it is also system and unity'. Alpert also suggested that sociology had amassed much evidence to show that society is integrated, that it is a state of being whole.

To undertake the analysis of social integration, this concept may be differentiated in several ways. Thus, Durkheim indicated two fundamental and different principles of social integration: one based on the attraction of like for like (the similitudinous or mechanical solidarity); the other organised on complementary differences: the organic solidarity, which more cohesive instance would be that based on the division of labour (Alpert, 1941), on the specialisation of individuals in different kind of jobs. Nevertheless, looking directly to the texts of Durkheim, the organic solidarity would be stronger, in general, than the mechanical one, especially in industrial societies (Durkheim, 1893, p. 124)

Thus mechanic and social solidarity have been considered parallels to the two main ways towards social cohesion or integration noted by Ferdinand Tönnies in 1887: Gemeinschaft – social solidarity based on commonality of bonds of sentiment, sense of place and purpose, identity, emotional commitments and values along with dense social networks and regular person to person relationships – and Gesellschaft – characterised by impersonal and superficial relationships, isolated lives, normlessness and heterogeneous identifications (Vertovec, 1997).

However, Émile Durkheim already suggested that organic solidarity (functional integration) does not integrate on its own. A certain level of mechanical solidarity (moral integration) is necessary as well. But under capitalism the latter can disappear and then anomie may appear as a problem of moral integration that is demonstrated in the lack of a moral force – external to the pure individual interest – that is able to force, for instance, the fulfilment of a contract (Beriain, 1996). As this author notes, then symbolic integration exists – which in modernity often takes the shape of the symbolic national community – the one able to alleviate the increasing social differentiation. Following Niklas Luhmann (1982), Beriain suggests that the trend towards a social differentiation in crescendo will frame the debate on integration.

Later, some social scientists broadened the typology of integration. Thus Landecker (1951) developed one typology on the premise that for sociological purposes the smallest units of group life are the cultural standards on the one hand, and the persons and their behaviour, on the other. From this premise, he found three varieties: integration among cultural standards, integration among persons, and integration between cultural standards and the behaviour of persons. But these three varieties, for Landecker, represented four types of integration:

• - Cultural integration is the consistency among cultural standards; and
• - Normative integration is the integration between cultural standards and the behaviour of persons and it measures the degree to which the standards of the group constitute effective norms for the behaviour of the members.

In relation to the connections between persons, Landecker suggested two different types of integration:

• - Communicative integration is integration among persons in the sense of an exchange of meanings, or communication; and
• - Functional integration is integration among persons in the sense of an exchange of services, or division of labour.

On the other hand, Talcott Parsons (1960), excluding cultural integration, distinguished between functional integration (specialisation and interdependence of individual social actors), normative integration (internalisation of society's norms, values and morality) and 'diffuse solidarity' (complex and functionally differentiated social system integrated through attachment to abstract and common normative values).

In this sense, Parsons (1971, pp. 18-28), in one of his later works, suggested the following methods of integration in increasingly differentiated and plural societies:

• the legal system: law as the general normative code regulating action of, and defining the situation for, the member units of a society, where there is governmental monopoly of violence as an instrument of compulsion;
• membership in the societal community: it is named citizenship, as composed by civic, political and social rights; and
• three main types of operative organisation: markets, bureaucracy and association structures.

However, arguing against Parsons' statements, C.W. Mills (1959, p.54) suggested that there is no answer to the question 'What holds a social structure together?', because social structures differ profoundly in their degrees and kind of unity: 'There is no 'grand theory', no one universal scheme in terms of which we can understand the unity of social structure' (pp. 56-57). Mills suggested that the existence of an abstract 'grand theory' 'tends strongly to legitimate stable forms of domination'. Instead, Mills proposed the study of every different 'mode of integration'.

The question is, are all these visions of integration sufficient to understand the key dynamics that transform and preserve enriched or semi-enriched capitalist countries?

Systemic integration and social integration

The approaches to 'integration' mentioned above suggest interesting dimensions which need to be taken into account in order to understand today's societies. However, they seem to anchor us in a limited perspective. In order to delve deeply into them and to extend their scope, it is possible to start distinguishing between 'integration of social reality' and 'integration in social reality' (Sánchez Casas, 1996). According to this author, integration of social reality is the unification in a whole – that is possible to reproduce – of the different processes and activities that make social reality. On the other hand, integration in social reality is the immersion of all elements and sub-elements – that is to say individuals, social groups, institutions and physical bodies – in the pre-existing and in the continued transformation of historical totality of which they are part.

Social reality is defined by Carlos Sánchez Casas (1996, pp. 163-164) as the result of the interaction between society (social whole), system (institutional 'field'²), and habitat (environment) in such a form that, apart from the reciprocal integration of these three, the self-integration of each one is required.

Thus there are three components that have to be taken into account in relation to the integration of social reality: social integration (integration of society), systemic integration (integration of the system) and habitat or environmental integration (integration of the habitat).

However, if integration is understood as integration in social reality, as Sánchez Casas suggests, this makes reference basically to the social whole and, to a minor extent, to the two other elements: the institutional and physical 'fields'. In this way, focusing on the integration of the social whole in the social reality, that author notes the following ideas:

• - Social integration is a direct integration (in the same way as it occurs with habitat integration) but systemic integration is an integration mediated by the institutional 'field'.
• - In direct integrations the 'mortar' is communicative action and, as a consequence, language and understanding. In indirect integrations, the 'mortar' is power and instrumental action.

It is in this context of integration of the social whole in the social reality that the concept lifeworld, popularised by Jürgen Habermas (1987), makes sense. It is understood as support to social and habitation integrations.

In geography, the life-world has been studied in several occasions. Anne Buttimer (1976) defined it as the culturally defined spatio-temporal setting or horizon of everyday life. In other words, the totality of a person's direct involvement with the places and environments experienced in ordinary life. According to David Ley (1977), life-world is not characterised by isolation but by being a place of socialisation (thus to reach the latter, solidarity is necessary).

In a work on the integration of modern societies, the sociologist Josetxo Beriain (1996, pp.75-85) analyses from a dual perspective systemic integration (system) versus social integration (life-world). This dual perspective can be exemplified through the work of several authors. Beriain, apart from Durkheim (mentioned above with his differentiation between organic and sociocultural solidarity), notes Marx, Weber, and Habermas. Karl Marx (1867), in his comment on the 'working day' in the first volume of Capital, describes the two voices that take part in the process. On the one hand, from the systemic perspective, capital does not have any other instinct than to grow and create surplus, it takes refuge in the commodities of exchange law, and its objective is to obtain the maximum profit from the value of use of its commodity. On the other hand, from what can be called social perspective, 'living crises' suffered by the worker due to transformations at work and in the way of life lead to the emergence of exploitation, feelings of injustice, resentment, illness and alienation. But not only that, it also can lead to a defensive solidarity of 'labour' resistance and, later, 'capital' counterpressure:

That a capitalist should command on the field of production, is now as indispensable as that a general should command on the field of battle ... the end of the capitalist production is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labour power to the greatest possible extent. As the number of the cooperating labourers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital, and with it, the necessity for capital to overcome the resistance by counterpressure (Marx, 1867, p.336).

Max Weber, who is considered the bureaucracy theorist in Economy and Society and critic of the bureaucratic processes in Political writings, also reflects two levels of analysis. On the one hand, from the systemic perspective, the modern bureaucratic organisation is supposedly superior to any other organisation form. Precision, rapidity, univocity, officiality, continuity, discretion, uniformity, rigorous subordination, saving of friction and objective and personal costs are, according to Weber, far better in a severe bureaucratic administration. However, from the social perspective, from the perspective of clients and bureaucracy members, its characteristics, so appreciated by capitalism, can be developed only if it is 'de-humanised', if it removes love, hate, and all those sensitive personal elements, all irrational elements, that are outside calculation³, Weber defends a kind of bureaucratic fatalism, as for him there is almost no alternative to the bureaucratic machine (just re-building a peasant society):

When those subject to bureaucratic control seek to escape the influence of the existing bureaucratic apparatus, this is normally possible only by creating an organization which is equally subject to bureaucratization. ... Without it, a society like our own ... could no longer function. The only exception would be those groups, such as the peasantry, who are still in pos...