Background

In the wake of rapid, increasing and increasingly complex, international migratory flows, most European Union (EU) host countries are facing serious challenges to their internal social stability. Policies, variously labelled ‘integration’, ‘cohesion’ or ‘community cohesion’, are commonly seen as the way forward, but there is much confusion as to what these mean and how they should be translated into policy and practice. The focus of this chapter, and indeed the book, is on Britain but this wider context is vital for the core arguments.

The emergence in Britain of what one might call the ‘cohesion paradigm’ is relatively recent yet the events that proved the catalyst (for its emergence) were not, in essence, a new kind of phenomenon. The arrival of Huguenots after 1685 and the Jewish migrants in the 19th century, for example, prompted widespread unrest and consternation among the political classes and citizenry. More recently, Britain witnessed many instances of urban unrest in the past four decades (Rowe, 1998) with immigration (and ‘race’) at the fulcrum. It is instructive to ask, then, why this new policy tack was taken. Among the plethora of reasons that could be mooted, two stand out: (a) historical amnesia and (b) the pervasiveness of neoliberalism as a guiding philosophy.

This chapter first of all traces, in what is inevitably a rather abbreviated and oversimplified form, the historical and ideological backdrop to the emergence of cohesion policies. It then interrogates the concept of ‘community cohesion’ and outlines the development of the associated policies and practices. The narrative then shifts to the relationship between the latter phenomena and the rapidly evolving equalities agenda. This reveals a series of tensions that undermine the utility of the existing cohesion paradigm. The conclusion is that the focus on ‘community cohesion’ is misplaced, and that policies should be driven by the much more fundamental notion of ‘social cohesion’; the reasoning being that the tensions in Britain's towns and cities have roots much deeper and more extensive than divisions based on ‘race’, ethnicity and faith.

The genesis of a policy paradigm

Following the Second World War, Britain was in desperate need of workers for its factories, offices and public services. However, instead of turning to the New Commonwealth (as is often wrongly surmised), the country looked in the first instance to Europe for this replacement labour supply.