Minority Ethnic Segregation, Integration and Citizenship: A European Perspective

Questions of minority ethnic settlement and integration have recently moved up the political and policy agenda across Europe. This paper re-examines the way in which minority ethnic housing segregation and integration are currently represented in political discourse across the European Union and reviews their implications for housing policy, inclusion and the social rights of citizenship. The paper draws on the RAXEN project reports of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia to provide a comparative investigation of housing segregation and integration across the 15 member-states of the European Union prior to its enlargement in 2004. The paper concludes that political discourses on ethnic segregation tend to accentuate the pathological characteristics of ethnic clustering, and to privilege explanations based on ethnicity and cultural difference at the expense of racialised inequalities in power and status. Such discourses are founded on a limited understanding of the link between ethnic segregation and integration.