Migration and the Limits of European Identity
No issue has stressed the internal coherence of European identity more than migration. Not the euro, not Brexit, not Russian aggression — migration. Because migration makes the identity question concrete in a way that abstract debates do not: who belongs, what belonging requires, and who decides.
The liberal position on migration and European identity is coherent but demanding. If European identity is grounded in values rather than ethnicity — in commitment to rule of law, democratic participation, individual rights — then membership is in principle open to anyone who adopts those values, regardless of origin. This is a genuinely inclusive vision. It is also one that places significant integration demands on new arrivals and significant cultural confidence demands on the host society.
The demand on host societies is the part that has been undermanaged. Integration requires something to integrate into — a shared public culture with legible expectations, a language of civic belonging that new arrivals can acquire and existing residents can articulate. Where that shared culture is well-defined, integration happens. Where it has been hollowed out by the same forces eroding other forms of social solidarity, integration stalls and resentment accumulates on both sides.
The populist right has exploited this failure with considerable skill, offering an ethnic substitute for the civic culture that liberalism failed to maintain. The response cannot be to cede the identity question — to act as though the concern is always and only bigotry. Some of it is. Much of it is not. The legitimate core of the concern is that successful integration requires a destination, and the destination must be clearly enough defined that everyone can see it.
Europe’s challenge is not that it has received too many people. It is that it has not decided, with sufficient confidence, what it is asking them to become.