How to define a Foreigner? The symbolic politics of immigration in German partisan discourse, 1978–1992

Abstract

This article tries to answer two questions. First, how did Germany, a de facto country of immigration, manage to espouse a counter‐factual ideology in the 1980s and early 1990s? Second, what have been the political consequences of upholding a political discourse that denied the reality of immigration? In a polity that officially denies migration and the development of a multiethnic society, issues such as immigration regulation and the settlement of the regulation of labour migrants’ immigration have not been directly addressed in partisan discourse. An ethno‐cultural conception of citizenship has facilitated a politics of exclusion of ‘guestworkers’ from voting rights, but inclusion of ethnic Germans, and a redefinition of asylum as labour migration. This has reinforced the symbolic uses of politics by Christian Democratic and populist parties and politicians: immigration, asylum and the multiethnic polity have come to be meta‐issues that can be referred to as causes of manifold problems in a context of rising unemployment and a ‘crisis of the welfare state’. Moreover, the main alternative to the dominant partisan discourse‐ ‘multiculturalism’ ‐ has remained a mirror image of an ethno‐cultural conception of membership by advocating a similar one‐dimensional positive image of cultural autonomy of ethnic groups in multiethnic states, excluding issues of socio‐economic and political participation.