Towards a comprehensive integration policy: A critical analysis of how social imaginations underpin Flemish integration policies

摘要: As the title of this edited volume reveals, the first official Moroccan labor migrants set foot on Belgian soil some 50 years ago. During these five decades, the ‘Moroccan community’has grown to be one of the largest ethnic minority communities in Belgium and Flanders. During this period, a new policy agenda and discourse on the ‘integration’of foreigners, migrants, newcomers, and even allochthones emerged as a response to continuing migration flows and settlement processes. Rather than discussing the history of Moroccan migration, which is covered in chapter 8 by Van Puymbroeck, in this chapter we focus on Flemish integration policies from a more theoretical point of view. We explore several imaginations of what the Flemish nation is or represents and how they (might) underpin the Flemish integration policies. What are the dominant stories of Flemish peoplehood that migrants and minorities, and Moroccans in particular, are confronted with or are expected to integrate into? Are the integration policies primarily concerned with finding a common identity within a context of increasing diversity, or are they rather invoked in order to exclude the ‘cultural, ethnic or religious other’and hence to build/maintain a kind of fixed and preexisting identity?