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UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Ethnicized ontologies : from foreign worker to Muslim immigrant : how Danish public discourse moved to the right through the question of immigration Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8fd0g7h7 Author Yılmaz, Ferruh Publication Date 2006 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Ethnicized Ontologies: From Foreign Worker to Muslim Immigrant. How Danish Public Discourse moved to the Right through the Question of Immigration A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Communication by Ferruh YÛlmaz Committee in charge: Professor Daniel Hallin, Chair Professor Yen Espiritu Professor Robert Horwitz Professor Ernesto Laclau Professor George Lipsitz Professor Michael Schudson 2006 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page……………………………………………………………………………iii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………iv List of Figures.....................................................................................................................vi List of Tables.....................................................................................................................vii Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………..…viii Vita……………………………………………………………………………………......xi Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………..xii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Ethnic Homogeneity................................................................................................9 Data........................................................................................................................12 Qualitative Interviews............................................................................................14 Newspapers............................................................................................................20 The Political System..............................................................................................22 Chapters.................................................................................................................23 Chapter 1 Discourse and Hegemony.…………………………………………………….28 The Social is Thoroughly Heterogeneous..............................................................32 Empty Signifer: Common Sense............................................................................38 Theoretical Roots...................................................................................................45 Laclau and Mouffe‘s Theory of Hegemony...........................................................47 Analyzing Hegemony in Discourse.......................................................................54 Discrimination as Constitutive Moment................................................................82 The Prejudice Problematic.....................................................................................86 Analyzing Variability and Stability.......................................................................88 An Analytical Model of Argumentation................................................................91 Integration: The Impossible Ambition.................................................................109 Hegemony: Long-term Effects............................................................................113 iv Chapter 2 Hegemony and Retrospective Ethnicity…………………………………….124 Ethnicity œ A Possessive Investment in Welfare.............................................…127 Danishness: The Name of the New Hegemony...................................................131 A Brief History of Immigration: The Late 19 th Century......................................133 Immigration since the 1960s................................................................................137 Analyzing Hegemony..........................................................................................141 Analyzing Change in Discourse...........................................................................145 Analyzing the Construction of Immigrant Culture as a Threat............................153 The Media, Crime and Explanatory Framework.................................................161 Ethnicity, Culture and Mainstream Politics.........................................................168 Ethnicized Hegemony..........................................................................................172 Ethnicization of the Whole Field of Discursivity................................................183 Populist Ideas Move Into the Center of Political Discourse................................186 The Transformation of the Political Landscape...................................................192 Chapter 3 From Extreme to Mainstream: The Populist —Revolution“ in 1986…………200 The Context..........................................................................................................201 1984: The Beginning of a Moral Panic................................................................205 The Discrepancy between Editorial Line and News Coverage...........................213 Feature Stories and the Culturalization of Discourse..........................................219 News and Sources................................................................................................224 The Criminalization of Refugees.........................................................................229 1986: The Intensification of the Debate: New Rounds of Moral Panics.............237 Letters to the Editor: The Distance between the Elite and the —People“.............248 Turing Point: Right-wing Intervention................................................................255 Culturalization of the Debate..............................................................................263 A Year Later (1987): Collapse of Political Consensus and New Moral Panic...266 A New Moral Panic.............................................................................................275 Cultural Hegemony..............................................................................................283 1987-Present: Successive Series of Moral Panics as a Way of Sustaining Hegemony................................................................................................289 Chapter 4 Rhetoric of the Hegemonic Intervention…………………………………….298 Krarup: The Son of a Resistance Fighter.............................................................309 Rhetorical Strategies............................................................................................312 The Day-After —Reverberations“.........................................................................331 A Similar Case: Powellism in the UK.................................................................335 Hegemony as Normality......................................................................................340 Do Hegemonic Crises Need to be Resolved by Hegemonic Interventions?........343 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...346 References………………………………………………………………………………366 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1: T-schema (Whales=mammal).………………………………………92 Figure 1.2: T-schema (Shoes)…………………………………………..………..95 Figure 1.3: T-schema (Honor)……..………………………………………….…99 Figure 1.4: Expanded T-schema……….……………………………………….101 Figure 1.5: Editorial in Aktuelt……….………………………………………...104 Figure 2.1: The cover of the DPP‘s book………………………………………178 Figure 2.2: Denmark‘s future………………………………………………..….179 Figure 2.3: Politiken‘s logo for the immigration theme in August 2001……….182 Figure 2.4: The Liberal Party‘s election poster in the fall of 2001…………..…188 vi LIST OF TABLES Table 1.1: Danish and non-Danish attributes as reproduced in Henrik (2004).…62 Table 1.2: Statements about immigrants and Danes from my own sample……..64 Table 2.1: Perspective in all stories………………………………………….…174 Table 2.2: Perspective in news stories………………………………………….174 Table 2.3: Perspective in commentaries………………………………………..174 Table 2.4: Integration contract………………………………………………….191 Table 3.1: Panic in news stories………………………………………………...208 Table 3.2: Changes in the number of panic stories..……………………………245 Table 3.3: Positive stories………………………………………………………246 Table 3.4: Description of refugees in the press…………………………………265 Table 3.5: Tone in letters to the editor………………………………………….265 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT There is one important lesson that I learned from the writing process: do not ask finishing Ph.D. students, —are you done yet?“ or —When will you finish your dissertation?“ During the last two years where I lived the usual, isolated life of analyzing data and writing up, many people have been involved and their names could fill pages. I would like to thank everyone who sat through the many beer-drinking sessions where I discussed ideas, got excited, thought of giving up, complained about my life as a Ph.D. student and about writing the dissertation. Their contribution has been invaluable because they kept me sane through this process. There are institutions and people who were involved in a more direct manner and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them. First of all, this project would not have started without a scholarship from the Danish Social Science Research Council. Special thanks to those grant-reviewers who believed in my project. I hope they will like the result. A special thanks to Danish Refugee Council who granted me free access to their newspaper archive on immigrants and