Recently the thesis of the two models of national incorporation of migrants and ethnic minorities has undergone some intense revision. According to this thesis, in the European space, England and France represented two contrasting models for dealing with migrants and minorities. Whilst the former was supposedly more multicultural taking ethnic minorities’ diversity into account in public policies, the latter was civic republican with the focus on the individual and shying away from group representation in the public sphere. Complexity seems to make its way into this dichotomy when we try to classify countries like Portugal. In the case of Portugal, public and political discourses have offered a new version for models of migrant incorporation, one that is often called by public authorities, a “Third Way”. The linchpin of the so called “third way” has been interculturalism. I argue that interculturalism has been a state sponsored ideology for the national and metropolitan cosmopolitan imaginary, one that avoids the recognition of ethnic minorities by seeing it as a potential dispeller of social cohesion. In order to do that I offer an overview of institutional building, public policies and the emergence of interculturalism as the paradigmatic way of governing diversity.

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