Immigrant integration and the transformation of national self-understanding in Germany

在20世纪80年代的“洋人政策”中，西德的政治家和知识分子从保守的观点来讨论和实践“移民限制”，或从自由和左翼的观点来讨论和实践“多元文化社会”，都认为“外国人”和“德国人”之间的文化差异是理所当然的。这项研究将这种类型的话语称为文化差异话语。但随着新的国籍法和移民法在本世纪头十年颁布，移民的“融合”成为辩论的关键问题，移民对共同的“自由”价值观和规范的信仰以及德语技能被更严格地要求。正如2010年的“萨拉津辩论”所表明的那样，现在德国政治和舆论中要求“融合”的压力越来越大。这导致了排外的“右翼民粹主义”的兴起，它严厉地谴责声称没有“自我融合意愿”的“伊斯兰主义者”。

In the "foreigners' policy" of the 1980s, West German politicians and intellectuals discussed and practiced "the restriction of immigration" from the conservative viewpoints or "a multicultural society" from the liberal and left-wing viewpoints", both taking the cultural differences between "foreigners" and "Germans" for granted. This study calls this type of discourse "the discourse of cultural differences". But as the new citizenship law and the immigration law were promulgated in the 2000s, the "integration" of immigrants became a pivotal issue of debates, in which the belief in the common "liberal" values and norms as well as the German language skill were more rigidly required for immigrants.As the "Sarrazin debate" in 2010 shows, the pressures for "integration" is now strengthened in the German politics and public opinions. This leads to the rise of xenophobic "right-wing populism", which critically condemns "Islams" who it claims have no "will to integrate themselves".