Running from our shadows: the performative impact of policy diagnoses in Dutch debates on immigrant integration

This article examines the performative politics of claiming policy failure in the integration of immigrants in the Netherlands, often articulated as the failure of ‘the multiculturalist model’. Four consecutive ‘post-’discourses are distinguished, in which we see the construction of increasingly explicit notions of Dutchness. This idea of the Dutch is as much about the style in which it is articulated as it is about the symbolic resources through which Dutchness is imagined. Examining the national imagination in policy diagnoses helps us to understand why immigrant integration has been so consistently presented as a failure of multiculturalism.