Across Europe, the rise of exclusionary and anti-migrant politics is reshaping how migrants’ integration, belonging and citizenship should be negotiated in public life. These political narratives are shifting the debates of civic integration to the ‘othering’ of specific cultural groups by reducing their social membership through the restrictive and selective lens of cultural compatibility. These dynamics have pushed migrants’ freedom of cultural expression to a political test of conditional inclusion, blurring the meaning of inclusion in modern democratic societies. The core characteristics of human-right based democratic societies (recognition, visibility, agency, and participation) are compromised by the restricted acceptance and conditional belonging.

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This shift in European politics is an important turning point that may have serious consequences for democracy. Particularly, it is a challenge for the countries that claim a foundational commitment to multiculturalism, human rights, and pluralistic governance. When political narratives target cultural differences to frame distinct identities and cultural expressions as threats to national identity, the notion of inclusion no longer functions as a democratic commitment. Instead, it becomes an assimilationist mandate to disregard migrants’ visibility, regardless of their formal integration through language proficiency, education, and employment. Subsequently, the politicization of visibility (by problematizing cultural differences) calls belonging into question. This risks stripping ‘inclusion’ of its democratic value and transforming it into a political device for exclusion.

In this article, I argue that to reclaim the democratic meaning of inclusion, we must rethink the fundamentals of the concept, emphasizing its core value and essence. I present the idea of “inclusive inclusion” insisting that inclusion is genuinely inclusive rather than defined by conditionality, conformity, or compliance. Inclusive inclusion neither penalizes religious or cultural visibility, nor reduces belonging to mere assimilation. Instead, it restores inclusion as a democratic commitment to equal participation, recognition, and lived belonging, connecting democracy and human rights in both theory and practice.

Visible cultural expressions (such as a cultural dress codes or religious symbols) have become boundary markers of national identity. They are used to construct binary judgments of migrants’ inclusion as “integrated” or “failed”, oversimplifying the complex........

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