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

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Assimilation, Orientalism, and Constitutional Patriotism in the Federal Republic of Germany UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Illiberal Integrationism: Assimilation, Orientalism, and Constitutional Patriotism in the Federal Republic of Germany A Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in Sociology by Joseph Loe-Sterphone III Committee in charge: Professor G. Reginald Daniel, Chair Professor John Foran Professor Fernando López-Alves Professor Paul Spickard March 2017 The thesis of Joseph Loe-Sterphone III is approved. _____________________________________________ John Foran _____________________________________________ Fernando López-Alves _____________________________________________ Paul Spickard _____________________________________________ G. Reginald Daniel, Committee Chair December 2016 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project was only possible with tremendous help and guidance from friends, colleagues, and mentors. In particular, I would like to thank my committee members, whose comments, guidance, and encouragement were absolutely invaluable: G. Reginald Daniel, Paul Spickard, Fernando López-Alves, and John Foran. I would like to thank my friends and acquaintances, near and far, who offered consultation and confirmation on the most difficult and complicated translations, even if they found parliamentary debate tedious and boring. Similarly, I want to thank my friends and colleagues in the UCSB Sociology department for their advice and support, especially Laura Halcomb and Jamella Gow. I also need to thank Sharon Applegate, for providing both professional and emotional support. Last but not least, of course, I need to thank my spouse, Danielle Loe-Sterphone, for listening to outlines, reading first, second, third, etc. drafts, and telling me frankly when my writing was so unclear that it might have been better in German instead. iii ABSTRACT Illiberal Integrationism: Assimilation, Orientalism, and Constitutional Patriotism in the Federal Republic of Germany by Joseph Loe-Sterphone III 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 iv 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. v Table of Contents Introduction - German Citizens and German Nationals 1 Chapter Overview ................................................................................................................................... 6 Chapter I - On the Production and Reproduction of National Meaning 9 Nation - modernity and imagination ..................................................................................................... 13 National - politics and representation ................................................................................................... 20 Nationalism - reproduction and exclusion ............................................................................................ 30 Towards a methodology for studies of nation and nationalism ............................................................ 35 Chapter II - Theoretical Framework and Methodology 39 Comparative Historical Methodology .................................................................................................. 40 Method, case selection, and theory ...................................................................................................................... 44 Limitations and concerns ..................................................................................................................................... 51 Research Design ................................................................................................................................... 54 Data Collection .................................................................................................................................................... 56 Chapter III - Citizenship and the German Nation, 1870-2000 59 Ethno-cultural and ethno-racial nations ................................................................................................ 62 Citizenship and Nationhood: 1945-2000 .............................................................................................. 70 Collective guilt, national memory, and national symbols..................................................................................... 74 Germany, Europe, and the West ........................................................................................................................... 83 Immigration, naturalization, and Leitkultur ......................................................................................................... 88 Ethnic Germans and Citizenship .......................................................................................................... 96 Chapter IV - Citizenship and Nation-making: Integration Courses and Citizenship Tests, 1999 to Present 101 Re-centering Integration in 1998-9 Policy Debate ............................................................................. 103 Generating institutional requirements for assimilation: integration courses and citizenship tests ..... 112 Learning to integrate: privileged knowledge of the Occident ............................................................ 117 “Without Christian influence, modern German culture is inconceivable” ........................................................ 118 National history: Europeanization and liberal democratic values ..................................................................... 120 Expectations for immigrant integration: who is responsible? ............................................................ 125 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 130 Discussion and Conclusion - Producing German Nationals 135 German Cultural Nationalism ............................................................................................................. 137 Orientalism and Naturalization ........................................................................................................... 143 Producing German Nationals ............................................................................................................. 146 Avenues for Future Research ............................................................................................................. 149 vi Bibliography 153 vii Introduction German Citizens and German Nationals On March 13, 2016, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) [Alternative for Germany], a right- wing populist political party founded in 2012 under the name Wahlalternative 2013 [Electoral Alternative 2013], surprised everyone by receiving the second largest share of votes in the state election for Saxony-Anhalt, and the third largest share in both Baden- Württemburg and Rheinland-Palatinate. Certainly, this level of success from such a new political party is surprising, but what has concerned news outlets, establishment politicians, and onlookers is the slate of policies supported by AfD: they are a Eurosceptic, populist political party with a distinct anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic agenda. As a party, AfD opposes Germany’s continued participation in the European Union. For example, Armin Paul Hampel, who is the director of AfD’s branch in Lower Saxony and was one of the party’s candidates in the last European Parliament election, has opposed immigration within Europe, claiming that “other parties want immigration only so that they can incorporate Germans into a large European slurry.”1 Furthermore, many have attributed this recent electoral success to popular backlash against Merkel’s acceptance of substantial numbers of Syrian refugees over the past year. In fact, it seems that AfD’s open and
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