National
integration is the feeling that binds the citizens of a country. Its aim is to
put individual's best efforts for the optimum growth, prosperity and welfare of
the country as a whole.
It
does away with inter-state, inter-linguistic, inter-religious and
inter-cultural differences. It promotes a spirit of tolerance and respect for
the view-point of other cultural groups. To Kanungo, "Every country at
every time needs national integration but India needs it the
most."
India's passing through a critical period these days. The
integrity of India
is in danger. Therefore Indians will have to act carefully. In India national
integration is needed due to following reasons:
Fruitful type of
cross-national work, particularly those located at sub-national levels
such as the city (i.e., Ireland, 1994;
Bousetta, 2000).
However, away from these
predominantly North American led comparative efforts, more explicitly
policy-oriented studies with a comparative range have tended to follow the
least sophisticated academic approaches. This has certainly been the case with
work produced through the sponsorship of European institutions.
For example, the big winner
from an intense bidding struggle among academics in this field for money from
the Targeted Social and Economic Research (TSER) programme on ‘exclusion’ was a
national models-based study – led by well-known national figures Friedrich
Heckmann and Dominique Schnapper – that explicitly structured its
investigations around the idea that immigration and ethnic relations in each
country are determined by classic policy ‘models’ rooted in political cultural
differences between France, Germany, Britain and so on (Heckmann and Schnapper,
2003). A models-based approach of this kind will often itself reproduce the
ideological fictions each nation has of its own and others’ immigration
politics.
Schnapper and associates
duly found that minorities and majorities do indeed talk about the
issues in each country in ways that follow the distinct national ideologies.
But little or no self-reflexive effort was made to ask how these
nation-sustaining ideas about distinct national ‘models’ have themselves been
created and sustained by politicians, the media and the policy academics
themselves in each country, precisely in order to foreclose the possibility
that external international or transnational influences might begin to affect
domestic minority issues and policy considerations.
Practical institutional
imperatives also dictate that the policy study packages and presents its
findings in a narrowly targeted way, which naturally curtails many of the more
interesting lines of enquiry. This has been well-understood by one of the more
influential NGOs in this field in Brussels – the Migration Policy Group – who
have been involved in two of the most wide ranging funded surveys on
integration policies across European society (Vermeulen, 1997; MPG, 1996). In
the latter, the ‘societal integration project’, they set up roundtables in
around twenty countries, and listened to the expert opinions of policy makers
and policy intellectuals, generating a mass of material about how policy makers
talk about the same issues in different places. However, in the end the slim
report of highlights and recommendations boiled all this down to a
reaffirmation that convergence was the source of future norms on citizenship
and integration across Europe. Being limited
to the typical state-centric talk and self-justification of policy makers, it
was unable to offer any genuine comparative evaluation. Moreover, the freedom
of reflection of such a project is naturally cut down by the expectations of
the sponsors who lay down the lines of research. By definition, such
comparative policy studies produce findings which reinforce the state-centred,
top-down formulations familiar at national level.
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