Securitization of migration in Germany: the ambivalences of citizenship and human rights

Abstract

In this article, we examine elements of contemporary securitization discourse about immigration and citizenship in Germany, looking both at the German-domestic and European contexts. We seek to identify mechanisms of exclusion from citizenship rights and from human rights that securitization discourses serve to establish. The current disaster faced by refugees and forced-migrants in the aftermath of the Arab Spring is a dreadful illustration of persistent ambivalences: The Federal Republic, in the post-Nazi era and the European Union from its very inception, proclaim allegiance to human and citizens’ rights, which serve, in ones and the same time to promulgate the promise of inclusion and equality, and as instruments of securitization and exclusion. This ambivalent role of citizenship rights and human rights is illustrated in the article by the following cases: Germany’s reform of citizenship law and subsequent rules of social exclusion pertaining primarily to Muslim citizens; the ‘normalization’ of Roma minorities in Germany and other EU member-states. We conclude that the persistence of this ambivalence is remarkable and it ought to be reckoned with, if the emancipatory potential – impaired as it may be – of citizenship and human rights is to be safeguarded.

Keywords:

• Securitization
• human rights
• citizenship rights
• social exclusion
• Roma minorities
• border policies
• migration regimes
• Germany

Notes

1. The description of citizenship as a form of closure and boundedness is not a value judgement. The question whether this feature is desirable is a separate one.

2. For a discussion of the egalitarian promise of citizenship and its limits, see e.g. Brubaker (1990, 385–392); Arendt ([1951] 1968, 267–302).

3. In 2015, the Constitutional Court eventually repealed the ban on headscarves for teachers as unconstitutional.

4. European Union citizenship, as we are aware, is one among many regimes in Europe that confers rights, and refers mainly to the legal side of citizenship. European citizenship is sometimes used as the broader conception that includes political, cultural and social aspects of citizenship, as well as how citizenship regimes emerge and change (Isin and Sarward 2013, 23).