In the woke perspective, integration has a meaning contrary to everyday language. In everyday language, integration is often understood as the process of migrants adapting to the rules and culture of the host society. The adaptation performance of migrants to society describes a social process that leads to a gradual adoption of cultural attitudes and behaviours. Migrants are to learn through integration to adopt the partly unwritten rules of coexistence. The host society does not have to reintegrate itself but perceives integrated migrants as part of society after a successful integration process and appreciates migrant achievements. At the same time, a well-integrated migrant sees themselves as part of society and contributes to society with their performance. Classical integration counteracts segregation according to origin and identity.
Such notions of integration are regarded in woke activism as oppressive.215 In identity-political terms, the everyday concept of integration has been deconstructed as alleged assimilation. In the new integration paradigm, integration is to be the goal of the entire society.216 Integration is now a code word for intersectional identity politics. The entire society is to integrate itself by implementing the demands of new-left activists (see Dominant Society and Negotiations). In academic jargon, this reads as: integration represents a project through which “the equal economic, legal, and political participation of all citizens in the central goods of society, the creation of equity, and the reduction of discrimination and inequality” are ensured.217
According to the integration researcher Prof. Naika Foroutan, recognition is to be thought of as “a meaning-giving endpoint in the narrative of a new integration paradigm” (see Empowerment).218 To this end, integration is to be detached from its coupling to the term migration. According to Foroutan, it is now not the migrants but the entire society that is to be integrated into a heterogeneous, post-migrant society (see Transformation). For Foroutan, integration is therefore “not a question of cultural, ethnic, religious, or national origin alone, but equally a question of class and stratum, gender, sexual orientation, etc.” 219
In short: from a woke perspective, integration is a cipher for intersectional participation. The entire society is to be transformed into a post-migrant, liberated society.