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ABSTRACT
Over the past twenty-five years, Germany has seen substantial shifts towards more robust and expansive migration and integration policies addressing immigration primarily as a socio-economic resource and an irreversible reality defining contemporary German society. Yet, the idea of Germany as a ‘country of immigration' has remained contested and polarizing in electoral politics particularly on the political right: While the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) under Chancellor Merkel's leadership has gradually endorsed immigration as an integral part of its socio-economic modernization agenda, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has embarked on a nativist rejection of all forms of immigration and cultural diversity. Based on a frame analysis, the article argues that the idea of middle-class nation-building through immigration has allowed the Christian Democratic Union to move away from its traditional anti-immigrant stand and integrate related issues into its market-driven political agenda. The key hypothesis is that the Christian Democrats have been able to modernize the party’s middle-class nation-building ambition by adopting its basic rationale to the recruitment and integration of immigrants into German society. In contrast, the AfD has embarked on an opposing trajectory as the political advocate for identity-driven, anti-immigrant sentiments and an exclusionary nationalism.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 I would like to acknowledge the support provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) that has made the research for this article possible (see for details: https://www.eucanet.org/projects/democracy-and-populism/). I would also like to thank the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study where I had the privilege of being a fellow during the work on this article.
2 Sociologists and economists have delineated the middle class with a view to income, occupational status, wealth, property, social status, and other measures related to the social stratification. Yet, middle class is also used as a self-identified categorization or a socially constructed marker of distinction and prestige (Wacquant Citation2019).
3 An influential sociologist of that time, Helmut Schelsky, conceptualized this vision in terms of a nivellierte Mittelstandsgesellschaft (‘level middle class society’) in which class differences and their divisive political implications would gradually disappear in an increasingly prosperous post-war society (see: Schelsky Citation1963; Braun Citation1989; Schäfer Citation2000).
4 Of critical importance is the historically specific tradition of nationhood and the much-discussed primordial basis of German Citizenship Law enacted in 1913 (Brubaker Citation1992).
5 Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) reports (https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Population/Migration-Integration/_node.html).
7 I deliberated focused on the CDU and did not include the Bavarian sister party CSU for the reasons depicted in the previous section.
8 A total of 313 documents were analyzed and coded according to the competing frames in (for period 1: 85; for period 2: 262; for period 3: 243). Documents could be coded for individual frames more than once or not at all, depending on the relative importance of one of these frames in organizing the meaning of the text.
9 PEGIDA refers to the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West movement, which is built on strong anti-Islam, anti-migrant sentiments (see: Vees-Gulani Citation2021).
10 See: https://www.dw.com/en/migration-mother-of-all-political-problems-says-german-interior-minister-horst-seehofer/a-45378092 (accessed 9 September, 2019).
11 In 2019 – responding acute structural labour shortage shortage in Germany's labour market – the German Parliament passed a comprehensive legislative bundle on the Regulation, Steering and Limitation of Migration (,Ordnung, Steuerung und Begrenzung von Migration‘), – the so-called ,migration package‘ („Migrationspaket“).
14 For the interview in German see: https://www.cdu.de/artikel/muessen-die-modernste-partei-europas-werden.
15 See the OECD data: https://www.oecd.org/employment/German-Middle-Class-2021-Highlights.pdf Immigrants in Germany are less likely to constitute part of the middle class than in the 1990s. The relative drop of immigrants coming from other EU member states since then can partly explain this trend.