In the UK, integration and social cohesion policy date back as far as policy to control immigration flows. In the late 19th century, for example, successive governments gave attention to the housing and employment conditions of Eastern European Jewish migrants, although the terms integration and social cohesion were not used at that time. These two words did not become part of the British policy lexicon until the early 21st century. While integration and social cohesion are now used extensively in government documents, both are contested concepts about which there is little clarity.

This chapter discusses the varying definitions of integration and social cohesion. It looks at how past events have shaped today's confused and conflated meanings of these terms, and then argues for newer and clearer redefinitions.

Defining integration

The dictionary meaning of integration invokes a planned combination of two different parts into a well-functioning whole and is used in this context to describe processes such as organisational mergers. But it was not until the 1980s that the term was used to describe relations between migrants or minority ethnic groups and wider society. At this time, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees described local integration as one of the long-term solutions for refugee displacement. Soon after, integration for migrants (not just for refugees) was articulated as a policy objective of the EU. But contemporaneously in the UK,settlement was the preferred term to describe policies that aimed to improve the social and economic participation of migrants, as integration was felt to have connotations of the assimilationist social policies of the 1950s and 1960s that have been described in the previous chapter. The Refugee Council, for example, published Developing a Refugee Settlement Policy for the UK in 1997, a document that covered issues such as employment, housing and education (Refugee Council, 1997).

Around 2000, integration entered the policy lexicon in the UK, notably in Full and Equal Citizens, the government's refugeeintegration strategy (Home Office, 2000). At this point NGOs and local government started to use the term as well, although some lingering resistance to it remained. Yet the introduction of the term ‘integration’ brought no real clarity to the concept and Full and Equal Citizens offered no definitions.