Despite their collaboration as key players in a united Europe, the nations examined differ in the degree of state involvement in immigrant integration. As a result, we can expect variation in both strength and form in their efforts to productively use benchmarking information on disparities between Muslims and non-Muslims. This chapter clarifies differences in the national role on key questions of the relationship between the individual and the civil society, and between religion and the state. At the end of the chapter, we provide information on each state's Muslim population.

European state involvement in minority integration policy does not refer solely, or even primarily, to the removal of barriers to a group's participation in educational, political, social, civic and other institutions (cf. Doerschler and Jackson, 2010a; Jackson and Parkes, 2007). Rather than simply legislating equal access to opportunities for success (for example, in education, employment or access to public facilities), European nations open state and social structures to minorities and immigrants only after they have met certain cultural gateways, or in order to ensure specific equality goals set by the state.

Some scholars of Europe have described relatively fixed and historically grounded national models of state/citizen relations guiding minority integration policy (cf. Bleich, 2003; Brubaker, 1992; Castles, 1995), and offered data on the continuing relevance of ‘national citizenship regimes for incorporating migrants’ (Koopmans and Statham, 1999: 659). But recent examination documents continuing change in these paradigms, in the requirements for cultural gateways to access membership privileges in European nations, and in the nature of the equality goals to be met by the state (cf. Faas, 2010a; Grillo, 2010; Joppke, 2007; Prins and Saharso, 2010; Modood and Meer, 2010; Schönwälder, 2010; Sunier, 2010a, 2010b). Change in states’ conceptualization of the national model of integration is reflected in the shifting mechanisms of their accommodations to the requirements of Muslim well-being.

Mechanisms of state accommodation to Muslim well-being

Britain

Geddes (2003: 44) describes UK minority and immigrant integration policies as situated on a framework of multiculturalism described by former Home Secretary Roy Jenkins ‘as “not a flattening process of assimilation”, but “equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity”.’