In the midst of the current European political landscape, the question of refugees and integration dominates public debate across many countries, from Germany and France to Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden. Most political parties, including some centre and centre-left parties, tend to explain the success or failure of integration through cultural, religious or ethnic factors, as though these were the decisive determinants of the matter. There is no doubt that religious and cultural factors play a role in certain aspects of integration, yet this role remains limited and insufficient to explain the phenomenon at its core.
The debate across most of Europe, particularly within right-wing and far-right parties and occasionally in some circles that consider themselves part of the left, revolves around language, dress, religious values and what is called “culture”. This narrow focus deliberately or inadvertently conceals the deeper social, economic and political factors, reducing a profoundly complex issue to a simplified electoral slogan that serves the agenda of voter mobilisation more than it seeks to understand the problem or offer realistic and just solutions.
Rather than approaching integration as a complex social and historical process in which structural, psychological and economic factors intertwine, it is reduced to simplified cultural and religious slogans deployed to stoke fear and mobilise voters. Some of this discourse goes beyond the rights-based values enshrined in European constitutions and international human rights instruments, effectively treating European citizens of immigrant origin—particularly those from majority-Muslim countries—as though they were suspects required to continuously prove their innocence, despite the fact that the vast majority of them work, contribute and integrate actively into their societies.
Yet a deeper question is rarely raised in public debate: what does the state mean to those who have spent a large part of their lives under a state that represses and plunders? And how does this deeply ingrained experience shape their relationship with any other state? The matter is not confined to the first generation alone, as this image of the state may pass indirectly to the second generation through the everyday language of the home and the way institutions, authority and law are spoken about. A child who grows up in an environment that views the state with suspicion and fear may inherit that outlook before having any personal experience of it, making the addressing of this psychological and historical dimension a necessity that touches generations, not merely individuals.
The state as they knew it: an apparatus of repression, not a public institution
Many refugees from the Middle East and parts of Asia and Africa have spent most of their lives under corrupt authoritarian states. For them, the state was not a public institution serving society and protecting the rights of its members. In their daily experience, it was a repressive power apparatus working in the interests of a narrow elite at the expense of broader society, bound up with systematic corruption, bribery, security services dominating public life, and bureaucracy unaccountable to the people. It was in most cases an unelected authority or one that resorted to sham elections serving as nothing more than a facade of legitimacy for an already entrenched rule, treating people as submissive subjects rather than citizens with rights.
This deeply rooted experience with falsified elections—or their complete absence—explains an important part of the lower electoral participation rates among European citizens of foreign origin compared to native-born citizens, something researchers observe across many countries. Electoral participation is not an innate behaviour; it is an acquired practice built on a firm conviction that one’s vote makes a real difference. Those who have known nothing in their lives but ballot boxes that change nothing or are used to falsify the popular will need time and tangible experience to be convinced that things are different here.
More importantly, these states in many cases did not arise in a vacuum. They took shape and consolidated power through a close alliance between political rulers and local and global capitalist elites. These were states that frequently received political, military and financial support from Western international powers under the pretext of regional stability and combating extremism, while simultaneously crushing civil society and preventing any form of independent democratic or trade union organisation. The Western societies that today ask why integration is so difficult bear at the same time a considerable degree of historical responsibility for sustaining the regimes that produced these refugees and created within them this deep relationship of suspicion and fear toward the state.
In such repressive and corrupt systems, it becomes entirely natural for people to try to circumvent the state rather than cooperate with it. They avoid official procedures, find ways around laws and avoid paying taxes, and rely on personal and family networks rather than public institutions that no one trusts. This is not an inherited cultural trait in any simple essentialist sense. It is in most cases the logical outcome of a long historical experience with a state that made a practice of repressing and plundering society rather than serving it.
A model born of class struggle
When these refugees arrive in Western Europe, they find themselves confronted with a model entirely different from anything they have known. Although the modern state remains part of a class-based social structure within the capitalist system, most Western European states rest on democratic institutions, free elections, relative institutional transparency and legal rules applied to a large degree equally to all.
Yet this model did not emerge spontaneously, nor was it a gift from the state or the ruling bourgeois class. It is the product of a long and arduous history of class struggles by the labour movement, trade unions, and left-wing and social movements that managed, through collective organisation and sustained political work, to gradually impose a wide-ranging system of social rights. Free public education, universal healthcare, the social security system and workers’ protection laws were not born with the modern European state. They were wrested away through decades of struggle between labour and capital.
Yet these gains are not permanently secured. They are always vulnerable to erosion and circumvention whenever the left and trade union movements weaken and their presence in the public sphere recedes. The history of capitalism demonstrates that capital does not voluntarily surrender what has been taken from it, and that every retreat in the power of collective organisation opens a window for rolling back these rights under ever-renewed pretexts. This is what makes the preservation and development of these gains dependent, in every generation, on the vigilance of progressive movements and the continuity of their organisation and active political participation.
These states also rest on a legal framework grounded in human rights principles, including legal equality between women and men, the separation of religion and state, the protection of children’s rights, and the right of all citizens and residents to education, healthcare and human dignity. For many refugees coming from societies where these rights do not enjoy adequate legal protection, absorbing these rules and understanding their logic is not merely cultural adaptation. It is an essential part of understanding the nature of the secular democratic state itself.
The vast majority of refugees gradually adapt to this model. They learn to trust public institutions, enter the labour market, pay taxes and participate in community life. Yet there remains a small minority that stays captive to the old experience of the state, engaging with the European system through the logic of what they knew in their previous country—working outside the formal framework, circumventing legal procedures, or relying on personal networks rather than public institutions. Among the manifestations of this is also the persistence of certain patterns of patriarchal authoritarian thinking in the management of family affairs, a pattern produced not by culture alone but nurtured by decades of the absence of laws protecting women and the dominance of the logic of force in societies that never knew a state of citizenship.
Integration policies and the problem of understanding the state
The integration difficulties of this minority are most often interpreted as a deep cultural or religious problem requiring more restrictions, tests and conditions. The more precise explanation is that the issue in many cases is a difficult transition from a deeply ingrained conception of the state as an apparatus of repression and corruption to a fundamentally different conception that sees it as an institution of social solidarity worthy of trust and participation.
Current European integration policies do not adequately address this essential dimension. Rather than focusing on explaining the nature of state institutions, how they function and the history of struggle that produced them, integration policies have accumulated under growing pressure from the right and far-right, shifting toward tightening laws, expanding value-based tests and imposing increasing restrictions on residency and social rights. These are policies that proceed from a prior assumption that the refugee is a problem to be contained, not a human being carrying a complex historical experience that needs to be understood.
This approach does not merely fail to achieve integration. It may reinforce in some refugees the old image of the state as a hostile entity lying in wait for them—precisely the opposite of what declared integration policies claim to seek.
What genuine integration requires is a clear explanation of how state institutions grounded in the principle of citizenship actually function, the organic relationship between taxes and public services, and the role of trade unions and labour laws in protecting workers. Learning the language is undoubtedly necessary, but it is not sufficient on its own to understand society.
Genuine integration: a social experience and a shared responsibility
Integration policies can incorporate practical and concrete examples: explaining how schools and hospitals are funded through taxes and how workers obtain their rights through formal employment contracts and trade unions. This understanding can be further reinforced by encouraging refugee participation in political, civic and trade union life and in local associations.
When people see how democratic institutions function in daily life and how labour and trade union movements have wrested broad social rights through collective organisation, integration becomes a genuine social process rather than a mere administrative obligation or a values examination.
Integration also rests on a shared responsibility involving multiple parties. The host society and its institutions bear a responsibility to explain the nature of the state and its history of struggle. The media bears a responsibility to focus on the many positive aspects of the integration journey rather than amplifying certain wrongful practices that remain exceptions rather than the rule.
For their part, the minority that still views the state through the lens of previous experiences is in genuine need of reconsideration. The state in Western Europe, despite its shortcomings and class contradictions, is not an apparatus of daily corruption and repression as many knew it in their previous countries. It is to a significant degree a public institution that guarantees basic rights, provides extensive social services and upholds the law for all.
Respecting laws, registering work, paying taxes and engaging transparently with public institutions are not merely legal obligations. They are a form of genuine participation in a social solidarity system shaped over long decades of struggle by blue-collar and intellectual workers alike and by trade union and social movements.
Political participation: a democratic duty and an act of solidarity
From this very standpoint, participation in political life in all its forms—from joining trade unions and civil associations to taking part in protests and social campaigns, through to voting in elections—becomes an inseparable part of genuine integration in societies whose achievements were built on collective struggle. The electoral vote in a democratic society is a tool of real influence over decisions that affect everyone’s daily life, from the level of health and education services to labour laws and housing policies. European citizens of foreign origin who hold back from this participation due to an inherited distrust of political engagement leave the field open for voices that shape policies at their expense.
In the face of the rising right and far-right across Europe, a clear stake is on the line: preserving and developing the social gains wrested by the historical left, or allowing the ongoing process of their gradual erosion to continue. In this context, the social and environmental left forces that reject racist discourse toward migrants and demand integration policies grounded in equality and human dignity represent the political framework closest to the principles of social justice that produced the European model itself.
There is a question that cannot be bypassed in this context: how do we call on the migrant to integrate into a society we simultaneously describe as a capitalist class society? The answer is that this society, despite its class character, is not a homogeneous bloc. It is a terrain of struggle in which the left and labour movements have, across generations, wrested real and substantial social rights. The integration intended here is not submission to the existing order but active engagement in that very struggle. The migrant who pays their taxes, joins their trade union and participates in political life acquires the tools of collective struggle and becomes a partner in the ongoing effort to transform society, not merely a beneficiary of its achievements.
And those who have long lived under a state that stole their votes and criminalised their political work now have a real opportunity: for their political participation in all its forms to become part of safeguarding and strengthening this model. Integration and the struggle for a more just society are two sides of the same coin.
