‘Integration’ is an example of a concept that operates in the most diverse registers, ranging from materials science, the social sciences and humanities, to contemporary political discourses. It moves in a conceptual field of tension.

A concept used in a variety of scholarly contexts

First, it designates the cohesion of a unit that is not simply arrived at through the mere sequencing of elements, but through the intertwining of the elements composing that unit, so that the cohesion stands on a relatively durable foundation.

Second, it denominates the variety of the components of which the integrated unit is composed. When applied to society or culture it therefore does not signify an amorphous mass of similar elements, but on the contrary, a connection of heterogeneous elements that are related to one another in complex ways – for instance, through complementarity, functionality or non-substitutability. ‘Integration’ therefore stands conceptually between heterogeneity and homogeneity.

‘Integration’ appears in social scientific and humanistic scholarship as well as in political and public discourses, and the latter are often related to the former. One may call to mind the persistent debates over the ‘integration’ of migrants in mainstream German society, which have currently reached a fever pitch with the arrival of refugees, and which have historically often drawn on scholarship in the social sciences and culture studies. In this a characteristic of the concept of integration is further revealed: it changes between description and prescription, between the analysis of sociocultural constellations and the ideas and suggestions for the securing of these constellations.

Homogeneity vs. heterogeneity

In these oscillations the relation of tension between homogeneity and heterogeneity that inheres in the concept of integration plays a decisive role. The social sciences, humanities, as well as sociopolitical discourses have long been familiar with this contention. In sociology, ever since the 19th century, a debate has revolved around the question of how modern societies, which are articulated through institutions with very various functions, can be integrated on a normative level.

Instances for such a tradition of debates may be found in the social sciences and humanities – above all in ethnology and anthropology, but also in semiotics and literary studies – that address the question of the degree of internal heterogeneity that is admissible before the disintegration of a culture, or the question of whether cultures are in fact dependent on the emergence of heterogeneous elements, in order that they may constitute themselves as homogeneous by demarcation. The concept of integration therefore represents a trans-disciplinary ‘idiom of social analysis’, for it enables the generation of a perspective that, for its part, and before every empirical observation, justifies and legitimizes entire branches of scholarship.

Migration as a prime example

Against this general background, the debate over mainstream society’s handling of migration can be seen as a prime example of the continuity between social science and humanistic arguments and the articulation of general sociopolitical principles. Since the 1920s sociological and anthropological concepts that were supposed to make the cultural relations between migrants and mainstream society comprehensible have been brought forward.

For a long time the dominant paradigm was the so-called assimilation paradigm, according to which immigrants must lay aside the guiding principles of the cultures of their countries of origin, in order to fully enter their host societies. Though this concept has since then been subject to intense criticism in the social sciences and humanities, as well as in artistic production, for, amongst other things, fostering an unrealistic container-model of culture and society, it still asserts itself as a seemingly clear and self-evident consequence of the normative demand that societies and cultures can only tolerate a certain measure of inner heterogeneity.

How much internal homogeneity can societies and cultures tolerate?

The question of how much internal homogeneity societies and cultures can tolerate is thereby overshadowed. If one of the preconditions of integration is the differentiation of the integrated object, then scientific as well as sociopolitical perspectives must examine the methods of conjunction, linking, and fusion of these units.

In this regard perhaps material studies is ahead of the social sciences and humanities. The latter however in principle have at their disposal the potential for comprehending integration as a dynamic process in which cohesion is never conclusively achieved, but that it is subject to processes of transformation – processes that, when one calls to mind the future of the European Union, urgently require investigation.