Illiberal Integrationism: Assimilation, Orientalism, and Constitutional Patriotism in the Federal Republic of Germany

In March of 2016, German right-wing nationalist-populist political party Alternative für Deutschland took the second and third largest seat shares across three state-level elections. These electoral successes, in combination with the rise of anti-immigrant groups such as PEGIDA, have prompted a renewal of public discussion about what constitutes Germanness and who can really be German. This thesis engages with these two questions formulated thusly: (1) what does it mean to be a German national, and (2) to what extent do German citizenship and naturalization policies promote national exclusion? Drawing on the literature on nation and citizenship, this thesis takes a comparative historical approach to understanding German national exclusion by examining changes to the German national over time as well as taking a cross-sectional approach to contemporary legal developments. The first section draws on citizenship law in combination with popular debates over the content of the German national in order to construct an understanding of what it means to be German and how citizenship law produced and maintained legal boundaries around the national community. Further data includes analysis of the content of the citizenship test, which was introduced in 2007, and workbooks used in integration courses, introduced in 2004, both of which contribute to understanding how Ausländer are expected to “integrate.” The consensus understanding of the German nation and nationalism is currently that Germany is a nation-state that established itself through ethnic nationalism that has been shifting more towards civic nationalism. Ultimately, this study finds support, however, for the presence of longstanding barriers to citizenship predicated on being culturally national. Most notably, this study finds that what it means to be national is now cast in terms of Western liberal-democratic norms, which allows for and encourages essentialist distinctions between Occident and Orient

“Der Rassismus kommt bei Ihnen immer, nicht?”: the (re)production of anti-Muslim racism and whiteness in Germany

While scholars are increasingly studying the maintenance of racial and national hierarchies as interrelated systems of categories in Europe, there are few studies examining the ways that Europeans produce and maintain their respective societies as “spaces free of race” (El-Tayeb 2001:xv) while nonetheless maintaining racial and national categories “in good repair” (Heritage 1984) as discursive and interactional resources. In the wake of the Holocaust, popular orientations to race as a social construct, and thus “not real,” have resulted in a shift in articulations of racial thinking towards culturally essentialist arguments that also serve to reproduce nationhood. This has led to a popular conception of Germany as a “space free of race,” wherein race is popularly understood not to be a category of practice (Brubaker 2013), and thus often disregarded as a category of sociological analysis. In this study, I take up this gap by analyzing the practices and resources available to and deployed by Germans for producing commonsense knowledge about both Muslims and Germans as racialized and nationalized social categories. To do so, I combine discourse-historical and conversation analytic methods, examining texts and archival resources, as well as naturally-occurring interactional data collected from parliamentary speeches. This methodological approach is fundamentally informed by an ethnomethodological perspective that emphasizes the local, moment-to-moment sense-making processes, participant orientations, and the (re)production of human sociality in everyday life–namely, in interaction. The first part of my analysis emphasizes the (dis)continuities in anti-Muslim racism across the 20th century, exploring German colonial and imperial projects in Eastern Europe, West Asia, and at home. Next, I examine the discursive resources publicly available to and deployed by Germans after 2000 as they are organized around contrasting conceptions of Germans and Germanness as liberal-democratic and Christian. I also demonstrate the ways that this contributes to a conception of Germany as non-racial. Finally, using conversation analysis, I analyze the practices members use to produce accusations of racism and, through doing so, exculpate themselves of culpability for racism. In doing so, I show some of the ways whiteness or white racial privilege is produced and maintained as relevant, yet invisible, and thus deployable through “dog-whistles” or other subtle and unmarked utterances. I conclude with a discussion of the quotidian practices through which racial and national categories are nevertheless (re)produced in everyday life through interaction. Specifically, I take up how the treatment of anti-Muslim racism (Fekete 2004) as something commonsensically done by neo-Nazis or other extremists, allows for the mainstream and everyday practices for the reproduction of racialized conceptions of German nationhood that do not rely on the explicit use of racial categories

Challenging racism in public spaces: Practices for interventions into disputes data set

Data were collected for Joyce's doctoral dissertation (2017-2019) and supplanted with Sterphone's own collection (2019). These video data were edited using Adobe Premiere Pro and transcribed using Microsoft word. Data include video recordings of disputes transpiring in public spaces, and Jeffersonian transcriptions of those recordings

Challenging racism in public spaces: practices for interventions into disputes

In everyday life we may hear someone being racist or saying something otherwise objectionable in a public space. Calling out that person for being discriminatory is generally regarded as morally imperative, yet it is evidently very difficult to do so when one is outside of an ongoing conversation. This article maps some interactional practices overhearers use to enter an ongoing dispute in which there is evident racism. We show how interveners design and time their turns at talk to take a stance against some racism oriented to as egregious or disruptive whilst walking the accountability tightrope. That is, we analyse their efforts to remain ‘outside’ of the dispute and not accountable for their entry. By documenting the design and timing of an intervener's turns, we argue against using a participation framework approach to track participation, and contend that challenging racism, despite one's moral obligation to do so, requires careful coordination between the disputants, overhearers, and the intervener

Challenging racism in public spaces: Practices for interventions into disputes data set

Data were collected for Joyce's doctoral dissertation (2017-2019) and supplanted with Sterphone's own collection (2019). These video data were edited using Adobe Premiere Pro and transcribed using Microsoft word. Data include video recordings of disputes transpiring in public spaces, and Jeffersonian transcriptions of those recordings