You want a multicultural immigration country, but we don't want it: ideologies, interests and discursive strategies in German parliamentary debate on the 2004 Immigration Law

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Thesis

Reference

You want a multicultural immigration country, but we don't want it:

ideologies, interests and discursive strategies in German parliamentary debate on the 2004 Immigration Law

MATTILA, Heikki Seppo

Abstract

La confusion qui souvent caractérise le débat public sur l'immigration et sur les politiques migratoires est à l'origine de cette étude. Le débat est souvent insensible à la diversité de l'immigration, et l'argumentation politique, même la représentation des faits, est quelquefois manipulée pour servir des intérêts politiques, souvent populistes et xénophobes. Cette étude analyse le débat parlementaire mené en Allemagne entre 2001 et 2004 sur un projet de texte proposé pour une nouvelle loi à propos de l'immigration. La méthodologie utilisée est issue de l'analyse du discours critique, en particulier l'approche discours-historique de Ruth Wodak et ses disciples, et de la théorie du discours développée par Ernesto Laclau et Chantal Mouffe aux années 1980. A travers une déconstruction méticuleuse, l'analyse démontre les stratégies discursives du gouvernement et de l'opposition, et met en évidence la rhétorique populiste utilisée par la dernière pour empêcher la réalisation de la réforme proposée.

MATTILA, Heikki Seppo. You want a multicultural immigration country, but we don't want it: ideologies, interests and discursive strategies in German parliamentary debate on the 2004 Immigration Law. Thèse de doctorat : Univ. Genève, 2014, no. SES 844

URN : urn:nbn:ch:unige-399252

DOI : 10.13097/archive-ouverte/unige:39925

Available at:

http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:39925

Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version.

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“You want a multicultural immigration country, but we don’t want it!”

Ideologies, interests and discursive strategies in German parliamentary debate

on the 2004 Immigration Law

(Idéologies, intérêts et stratégies discursives dans le débat parlementaire sur la loi d'immigration de 2004 en Allemagne)

Thèse

présentée à la Faculté des sciences économiques et sociales de l’Université de Genève

Par

Heikki S. MATTILA

pour l’obtention du grade de

Docteur ès sciences économiques et sociales mention : sociologie

Membres du jury de thèse :

Prof. Sandro CATTACIN, directeur de thèse, Université de Genève Prof. Matteo GIANNI, président du jury, Université de Genève Dr Khalid KOSER, Geneva Center of Strategy Policy, Genève Prof. Michal KRZYZANOWSKI, Université de Örebro, Suède

Thèse N° 844

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La Faculté des sciences économiques et sociales, sur préavis du jury, a autorisé l’impression de la présente thèse, sans entendre, par là, n’émettre aucune opinion sur les propositions qui s’y trouvent énoncées et qui n’engagent que la responsabilité de leur auteur.

Genève, le 14 juin 2014

Le doyen

Bernard MORARD

Impression d’après le manuscrit de l’auteur

How to cite: Mattila, Heikki S. (2014). “You want a multicultural immigration country, but we don’t want it!”. Ideologies, interests and discursive strategies in German parliamentary debate on the 2004 Immigration Law. Geneva: University of Geneva, Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences, Department of sociology.

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Preface and acknowledgements

So many years have passed since the beginning of my project that there are quite a few people who have helped me to work through it. Let us start with my thanks to Josette Bapst and Sandra Lancoud in the secretariat of the Department of Sociology at the University of Geneva, for always warm and helpful accueil, starting with the vital technical help to register in the University in the first place.

In early 2011 I went to Berlin to consult the Bundestagsarchiv, where really sweet and helpful people made my work easy, so warm thanks to Gustav Schlüter, Petra Jungklaus and Evelyn Paschke. In the same connection, many thanks to Cornelia Staudacher and Adrian Staudacher, and Steffen Angenendt for support and sharing expertise.

Thank you to Anu Pulkkinen and Leo Riski, earlier in the Finnish Embassy in Berlin, for sharing their knowledge.

I want to thank the Fondation Schmidheiny for financial support.

Thanks go to Annik Dubied and Gaetan Clavien who advised me in the beginning, Gaetan also very generously shared his considerable library on discourse analysis, as did Barbara Lucas, thank you.

Many thanks for Annika Egan Sjölander and Jenny Gunnarsson Payne for very kindly sending their book.

I want to thank Kerstin Lau from IOM Library in Geneva for always helpful and kind support. I also want to thank IOM Offices in Abuja, N’Djamena, Ankara and IOM Iraq in Amman for offering me work during these years, and in some intensive work period making me come out from the comfort zone, necessary to get this project done.

Many thanks for Ruth Wodak for her advice and for the short but inspiring conversation in Bern in October 2013.

Many thanks to all members of the Jury, especially to Sandro for advise and such kind support all along, and to Michał, for support and help with expertise.

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I want to thank my friends Alessandro, Alexandre, Aline, Esa, Gyula and Heidi for their warmth and sharing energy.

I want to thank my parents.

And finally all my thanks and feelings to Aline, for creating the comfort zone, almost always, and to the progeniture for the love and light.

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List of abbreviations

BAMF Bündnis 90/Die Grünen

Bundesanastalt für Migration und Flüchtlinge

Green Party of Germany (created 1993 from the two parties)

CDA Critical Discourse Analysis CDO Christian Democratic Opposition

CDU/CSU Common parliamentary group of Christlich Demokratische Union and Christlich-‐Soziale Union

CEE Central and Eastern Europe DHA Discourse Historical Approach DA Discourse Analysis

DT Discourse Theory

EU European Union

FDP Free Democrats (Freie Demokratische Partei) FRG Federal Republic of Germany

GOC Governing Coalition (the red-‐green Governement) GDR German Democratic Republic

OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development PDS Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus. Merged in 2007 into

the new Linke

SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands

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In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Harold Pinter, in 1995

I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.

Abigail Adams, wife of the second U.S. president John Adams, in a letter to her husband.

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Executive summary

The study proposes a hermeneutic framework, with discourse analytic methodology, to better understand the complexities of current migration debate. Migration takes many forms, and migration policy planners face the challenge to reconcile global and national economic, security, and human rights -‐based rationales. This is made further more difficult by the rhetoric of anti-‐immigration parties, projecting immigration as a threat, and fallaciously an exclusive alternative to the domestic labour force and beneficiaries of social security. Such populist rhetoric, which has proved successful in many countries, also hampers such unavoidedly necessary multi-‐faceted migration policy to fulfill countries’ commitments for international protection, to address labour shortages (while trying to mobilize the domestic labour reserves) combat irregular immigration, integrate the legally arrived, let alone to plan relief through migration to stagnating populations in the industrial countries, and the ensuing problems to continue financing the welfare state with increasingly narrow participation of the native population in the labour force.

The study highlighted the extreme politicization of migration decision making at a historical period in the beginning of this millennium when Germany tried to turn a new page in its paradigm on immigration; to recognize that it is an immigration country; an expert consensus had been reached on that but many ambitions to reform the immigration legislation were sacrificed in the political duel between the Governing Coalition and the Christian Democratic Opposition; my discourse analysis of the parliamentary debate puts that in detailed evidence.

From the viewpoint of theory and method, my study showed the usefulness of the quite rarely applied combination of the discourse theory and critical discourse analysis in analyzing political communication. The discourse theoretical concepts and dynamics, such as the binary, antagonistic organization of the political debates; negative, antagonist positioning used in the self-‐profiling of political groups in order to articulate the sharpest possible public profile (in the common populist

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mise-‐en-‐scene with the need to identify an enemy); and hegemonic attempts to dislocate the opponent’s discourse with the help of empty and floating signifiers, were particularly fitting to my material and the political debating arena of the German Parliament.

The study also showed the usability of the Discourse-‐Historic Approach as the specific type of the Critical Discourse Analysis, in effectively combining a) the political macro approach, where the contextualization with historical and political background is key to the substantial, political decoding of the debate, and b) the text-‐centred rhetorical and argumentative analysis to map out the hegemonic attempts of the opposing political camps.

Furthermore at the method level, the study showed my own contribution, the rather micro level coding of the corpus into very small units (deconstruction stage), that I called specific discourses, which helped to present an analytic, interpretative mapping of the corpus, and with this detailed knowledge, in further reading to distinguish the larger discourses of the politically opposed camps as totalities or discourse coalitions (reconstruction stage).

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Introduction

International migration appears nowadays as one of the most challenging and complex issues for governments to handle. Requirements are presented for coherence in migration policy, which is no easy goal, as in the governance of such a multi-‐faceted phenomenon, widely varying goals and values need to be reconciled, including economic, security or humanitarian.

Such different goals and interests may first contradict when, for example, governmental authorities try to prevent illegal forms of immigration with tighter control, which may, in turn, make it more difficult for asylum seekers to access a safe country and lodge their applications for a refugee status. A similar contradiction may surface in the action against the use of undocumented immigrant labour force, illegal but maybe favouring the competitiveness and even survival of some economic sectors as suggested by Reynieri (2001).

And at the same time when governments try to sort out how best to pursue their interests in regulating migration flows there are lots of migration-‐generating phenomena that the receiving – or any – governments have hard to influence upon, in particular population growth, conflicts, environmental degradation, problems of governance and poverty in the developing world.

Such difficulties to deal with all the variety of migration flows give the unavoidable impression that migration policies in practice almost always fail to obtain their goals. Such imperfections offer permanent opportunity for the political opponents of governments to attack the policies in place.

In the debate on migration policies, due to the complexity of the issues, contradictory, even opposite interpretations of reality can be considered true. For example, in the labour market the simultaneous occurrence of shortages of certain professional groups, and massive unemployment (that theoretically, mathematically could offset labour shortages, but does not because of the often occurring mismatch between labour supply and

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offer), may seemingly justify contradictory, and confusing statements of the state of affairs, as to the existence, or not, of lack of domestic labour force, and thereby a verified need for immigrant labour. Here I can already refer to my text Corpus and the German parliamentary debate where such contradicting views were advocated.

The political sensitivity of migration issues is further increased by extremist parties who use immigration as one main issue in their own political “marketing”. Such parties highlight, seemingly in a very calculated manner, the imagined threats, playing with the ignorance, fears and frustrations of the electorate, and promote “order” that they claim to be able to deliver, contrary to the alleged failures of the more moderate mainstream forces in power.

For populist parties the goals of migration policy talk look often different: they have not necessarily even the ambition to tackle with the complicated issue, but use simplifications of it as useful election propaganda, playing with the fears, frustrations of the electorate, pointing out boucs emissaires for social problems. My study of the German experience suggests that such ‘populist pattern’ of constructing political discourse is spread wider than among the traditional populist parties only…

Despite the success of the anti-‐immigration movements, in Europe and elsewhere in the industrial world the stagnation and decline of population, and the concrete shortages of both skilled and non-‐skilled persons in the IT, care sector, construction, tourism and manufacturing, have put pressure on governments to facilitate some forms of immigration (see for example OECD’s yearly migration reports), while at the same time the same countries are struggling to find solutions to deal with irregular migration.

Immanuel Wallerstein, in his critical work on European Union (Wallerstein 2006) presents what in his view are the three main lines of the ideological and value content to the current actions of the European Communities: the defence of human rights, the notion of the shock of civilizations, and thirdly, the absence of alternative to neo-‐liberalism.

Wallerstein’s characterization of EU’s horizon of values looks very

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relevant to migration context as well, including my corpus; indeed these aspects seem to cover large parts of the debate that I analyse below and already these three interests seem very hard to co-‐ordinate.

I will however not problematize the background values as such, I will rather attempt to identify values, or interests and discursive rhetorical strategies, and thus elaborate a general interpretative mapping of the analyzed migration debate and at a specific context, the national parliament of Germany, and likewise, to provide a reading of the motives and interests articulated in the course of the analyzed debate.

Following the multiple elements and interests involved in the migration policy making in wealthy and industrial countries – economical, security, humanitarian, demographic and pension funding, and the difficulty to control irregular migration, Stephen Castles notes that despite the raised controls, and increased attention to migration mangement, there is the strong public perception that migration is out of control (Castles 2004b: 857).

It is of course a question by itself, how controllable can international migration or any other social phenomenon be. Both governments and international organizations offering policy solutions to governments may have the interest to keep keep up an illusion of the controllability of migration. Exposed to ferocious criticisms towards practically any immigration policies, governments may feel forced to project themselves on top of the issue in trying to fend off criticisms and to claim that their policies of selected immigration do make a difference.

In any case, migration is a phenomenon touching all countries, and practically all political groups advocate some kind of policy interventions to manage the flows, some degree and way of regulation as opposed to laisser aller. With the inherent contradictions and political passions the complex policy area is easily over-‐sensitized and much politicized (Castles 2008a).

While strong and firm opinions on migration are easily voiced, the many forms of international migratory flows, and the political, social and

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economic dynamics generating them make comprehensive analysis and understanding already difficult, and the political debates look fluid and confusing.

Looking at the complexities of migration policy Castles argues that the circumstances of global migration dynamics and domestic policy-‐making are so complex that “states tend towards compromises and contradictory policies”, “partly because of conflicts between competing social interests and partly because of the way the policy process works”. Furthermore, he points out that an important underlying reason for the policy shortcomings and contradictions was the “contradiction between the national logic of migration control and the transnational logic of international migration in an epoch of globalization” (Castles 2004b: 854). Indeed, in mixing the international and nationally frameworks and logics, seems to lie one important source of the confused policy debate.

James Hollifield (2004) illustrates this contradiction by saying that states are trapped by the liberal paradox: in the globalized world of increasingly liberalized international exchanges of goods, services, capital, and also people, the state as an actor from the viewpoint of migration management becomes a trading state (Rosecrance 1986) whose physical borders are less relevant, whereas in international law the state remains the principal responsible unit in granting rights and keeping relations with other states, and holding the responsibility of security within its borders.

In line with Castles’ argument of national logic of migration control Hollifield argues that whereas the domestic political forces push the state towards closure, the liberal forces of globalization lead the state towards opening.

But Hollifield argues further that while states have to negotiate between the economic interests of the trading state and control interests, sometimes using symbolic politics and policies to “maintain the illusion of border control, and thus to fend off the forces of closure and defend the economic interests”. Besides these two main roles of the states, Hollifield argues that states have also assumed, and should have done so, a third role a “migration state” where one key element is rights of migrants, which have come on the way of forces of closure, and gives migrants a more

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multidimensional profile than pure homo economicus. According to Hollifield, EU’s regional migration regime helps states also “to finesse, if not escape” the liberal paradox.

In my study, and in the course of the analysed parliamentary debate, an interesting tripartite division took place as well, as a formation that highlighted migrants’ rights profiled itself against the other two formations (I called them Discourse Coalitions in the German Parliament), who were close to a similar mutual constellation of closure vs. openness to migration, in a setting as described by Hollifield. As these two Coalitions were negotiating with each other, and in the eys of the third Coalition, compromising the human rights aspect.

Since the 1990s a sense of urgency and crisis seems to have emerged to the migration policymaking; indeed the rising numbers of international migrants, conflicts generating displacement and the ongoing pressure towards industrial countries from the South has given experts reason to speak about a global migration crisis Weiner (1995) and Zolberg (2001).

It is not difficult to see a range of factors and development that could give justifification to such crisis talk. Pressures of migration from the third world to the industrial world, challenges to control the ensuing irregular migration which coincide with demographic stagnation in industrial countries, contributing to structural labour shortages both at the high and low end of the labour market, and further keep up demand for immigrant labour, both officially and in informal economies. Responding simultaneously to the irregular migration and trying to satisfy the needs for imported labour force continues to be a different balancing act for governments, with the economic recessions and inter-‐cultural and -‐

religious challenges capitalzed by anti-‐immigrant movements.

The national governments usually get the blame of failed policies, although the mentioned transnational logic and dynamic generating migration may be to a large part beyond the ‘circle of influence’ of national policies.

The ongoing migratory pressures towards the preferred immigration countries, relatively strong anti-‐immigration sentiments nourished by

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populist parties, close monitoring of the media and NGOs have contributed to the situation where the “migration crisis” has become permanent, as Cattacin (2013: 7) remarks.

Thus the migration policy debate and themes of research have evolved to somehow recognize the multiplicity of frameworks and dynamics that generate migration and influence the life of both migrants and their communities of origin and destination.

The term transnationalism covers quite a few of the topics that both policy-‐making and research have moved onto in the have in last 10 -‐15 years (Vertovec 2009) and which Cattacin (2013: 9-‐12) analyses in observing that there has been a change of approach from migration towards mobility, which for some professional and age groups (financial professionals, students) may be rather the state of normality, and with the diluting borders (at least to some) the issue of geographical belonging has transformed from old national framework – with facilitated travel and internet -‐ to more complex system of global, cosmopolitan, urban networks, and transnational presence and family life (Cattacin 2013:7).

Transnationalism and mobility have become integrated into the toolkit of migration management through the concept of circular migration and eventual managed temporary migration schemes (European Commission 2007); and through the grown international interest in migrants’ money remittances, and new solutions to diversify and facilitate their use by the family left in the country of origin, with the modern communication and information technology facilitating the family life with distance, and integrating the family finances across continents.

Likewise, authorities at central and local levels in many countries have had to take position in regard to the complex reality of the the presence of undocumented migrants and their families, (not least the Roma) and decide whether or not to facilitate access to health care and schools, recommended both on grounds of public health, economic and human rights arguments, opposed by more anti-‐immigrant and populist political forces.

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Since the 1990s, along with the raticication of the UN Convention of the rights of Migrant Workers in 1990, and its entry into force in 2003, the voices reminding of the rights-‐based approach in migration management have grown stronger; now the EU, ILO, IOM, UNHCR and other international organizations contribute to the promotion of migrants’

rights, advising states in their policy development.

The recognition of the increased complexities of migration and mobility, and the new demands for policy are however not shared by all, in fact they may increase the already complex world of migration which only experienced experts may understand, and are, sometimes, listened by politicians, who are either prudent or bold sensing the political wind in such touchy area.

Thus the complexity of the expert approaches which are not easy to understand to most, the national ‘optique’ has defended its positions quite well. Populist movements and their simplified discourse, usually against any projects of elites, and posing as defendors of people (Laclau 2004:

250) is continuing to appeal and has shown that appeal in such events as the success of the initiative against “mass immigration” in Switzerland on 9 February 2014, where interpretations and causalities were effectively mixed by the initiators, who anayway score a narrow victory, which dealt a serious blow to the Swiss bilateral EU-‐relations, and which has caused lots of work to the political Swiss elite for managing the unexpectedly large fallout.

I will get back to the discussion on current populist forces and their approach on migration, in the conclusions. In the German case that I studied for this thesis, there was no official and usual populist anti-‐

migration party as a participant in the debate, but the political opposition in the Parliament used very comparable discursive strategy. And maybe not only comparable: accoding to one of the lead influences on this study , Ernesto Laclau (2005: xi) populism is not about the content, it is “a way of constructing the political”. If we share this view, the German experience

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with the Immigration Law of 2005 turned into a victory of populist forces incanated by the Christian Democrats.

It is thus in my view fair to say that a policy confusion seems to characterize migration debates in many Western industrial countries, where different forms of migration are discussed in a commensurate way and the interests of the participants vary greatly. This kind of lump fallacy, taking migration as one unilateral phenomenon, may be one key bias and source of that confusion, and further of the sense of crisis and inability.

Recognizing the growing complexities of migration dynamics and policymaking, it might still help to structure the approach, if it were more highlighted, that there are many types of migration flows and there are separate national and international legal and policy regimes to deal with the different types of flow. Secondly, and linked to this, the dynamics that generate different types of migration flows vary a great deal, and part of the economic and social mechanisms of globalization, or poverty are certainly beyond the influence of national immigration policy. As to the national policies with regard to various immigrant groups, there are different economic and social interests, both national and international, vested into the arguments of different stakeholders (industries, trade unions, human rights organizatons etc.).

These interests and interest groups give most variable, even contradictory, interpretations of social and economic trends and thus most differing conclusions and recommendations for immigration policies.

These latter are also very much affected by the often extreme politization of migration policy making and the debates between government and opposition, and also as pursued by the populist anti-‐immigration parties and sensationalist media, are contributing to the difficulty of policy making and confusion on the interests of various participating groups related to the substance and to the practices and rhetoric used in the struggle between political parties/the government and opposition.

The notion of “clientelist politics” (Freeman 1995) refers to the government-‐led policymaking as an arena of negotiating strong organized interests, and Hollifield argues, as discussed that governments should rise above the clientelist servicing of interest groups and defend the humans in

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the centre, the migrants themselves. Castles points out that in trying to understand to the complexities and contradictions of migration it is essential to understand and investigate both the political economy of interests and study the political sociology of the state and the interaction of these two, because both “influence policy outputs and outcomes”

(Castles 2004b).

The government’s policy, whether actively articulated or implicitely deducted from the visible actions and outcomes of migration flows and their consequences and effects, is usually countered by the political opposition, who normally tries to argue that the governmental policies have failed. Furthermore, populist anti-‐immigration voices add to the polyphonic chorus, sometimes in the ranks of the government, in the opposition, or beside these two main groupings.

Hollifield argues that state is more than just a forum where economic interests are reconciled. In his model (Hollifield 2004, 2007/8) state assumes roles traditionally in economic and security dimensions, but recently the migration state has in his view emerged, not least through the obligation and commitments assumed by the states in the area of human rights, and following intervention of judicial authorities who have pointed out to governments the rights that immigrants accrue the longer their stay in their host country becomes. Thus these rights give gravity to the third pole of state role beside the control and economic interests.

Giuseppe Sciortino (2000) speaks of low rationality of migration policy in relation to its declared goals. S. studies the social structure of migration policymaking, rather than the interests. Using Luhman’s model of the sociology of the political system, Sciortino argues that migration policy actually is closer to the Unstable/unable pole” instead of “stable/able pole” where it is generally thought to gravitate, like economic and labour market policies. That converges with my argument of confusion.

Also, even if the society were formally egalitarian and democratic, and its institutions produce decisions formally according to the rules, the political deliberations and the struggle between competing policy views

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mean struggle for power and influence, which cannot fall in similar portions to everybody. One can ask like the Finnish poet and playwright Paavo Haavikko: “If the people has the power, who has it?” In the debate that I analysed some speakers appeal to people’s alleged majority opinion as the authoritative one, but use it against an artificial and biased projection of the camp’s policy.

Castles asks, after discussing some migration policy failures, whether democratic state posses: 1) the capacity to analyze and forecast the long term consequences of migration policy decisions; 2) the political ability to reach consensus, on long-‐term goals in this field; and 3) the policy tools to achieve these goals in a manner consistent with democracy and the rule of law. He answers dryly: “I have my doubts on all these counts” (Castles 2004b; 856). I am afraid that my study, documenting and detailing the very politicized debate in the parliament, cannot provide much encouragement to him.

How to navigate in this complex space with arguments of so varied motivations, can some kind of hypotheses be formulated as to the linkages between the interests, ideologies and political strategies? That is a difficult questions, but my earlier exercises (Mattila 2001) studying German migration debate shows that an analysis of the discourses can offer a reading help to structure the elements in a debate. I found a number of discourses from the German debate, part of those discourses being more anchored to the substance of migration (such that I named e.g. ‘expert’ and

‘realist’ discourses) and part of them indicated, in my interpretation, more indiresults of the politicization of migration debate and brought about primarily to mount opposition towards the government or satisfy the expectations of own political constituency and electorate.

For this doctoral thesis, I wanted to familiarize myself more thoroughly with discourse analysis, and then find and study a comprehensive ‘national debate’ which would have contained, if only possible, an exhaustive range of ideologies, interests and political opinions that a debate within one country could possibly have. Originally I even aimed to study and compare three national debates, but found it hard to find comparable national

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material packages and also, the exercise risked to become too large with the limitations of time available and volume reasonable for the thesis.

And with material from one country alone, it was not evident that ‘one debate’ however delimited, would be achievable and contain the totality of national voices and interests. Nevertheless the exercises that was passed in Germany to prepare for the 2004 migration law looked as close to such a comprehensive national exercise as possible, with the independent Süssmuth Commission and the CDU/CSU Commission (Müller Commission) at work simultaneously in 2000-‐01, and extensive research done for the independent Commission especially, thus educating the political class on migration and preparing for the legislative process to reform immigration law.

However, the text material covering all the years and different studies, policy papers and proposals and policy documents from individual parties; position papers of various national organizations (of industries, unions, charities, religious organizations and academia, and parliamentary protocols from the specialized Committees (Ausschüsse) and plenaries from both bot upper and lower chambers (Bundesrat and Bundestag respectively) amounted to thousands of pages, and was also quite heterogeneous for a commensurate study.

Therefore I ended up to the set of nine protocols of the parliamentary plenaries that were had in 2001-‐2004 in the legislative process in the upper and lower chambers of the German parliament, and ended with passing of the Immigration Law that entered into force in 2005.

But why then choose Germany as the target country, and not some other one? Comparison of course would have been ideal and it may be relevant to do later in a possible continuation of the exercise, but after the decision to pick one country, Germany seemed particularly interesting, for a number of reasons: it had no colonial past but had rather soon after the war started recruiting foreign labour force, but continued to tell others and itself that it was no immigration country. Such discourse had an effect

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on the policies especially on integration of its anyhow multi-‐million immigrant population.

In the beginning of this millennium Germany however started to change it paradigm recognizing that it was an immigration country.

Despite a seeming consensus especially among experts about such a migration profile, turning the new page and reforming policies proved however more difficult at the level political decision making. The focus of my empirical analysis is in that difficulty, the friction between expert analysis and political combat between the Government and the Opposition, that at the end seemed to hijack the ambitions of the policy reform. Through the analysis of the parliamentary debate, I wanted to analyze that process in detail.

Germany’s migration history is a particular one among European countries. Whereas the colonial backgrounds of such other large Western European countries as France, the UK and Spain have made these countries exposed to immigration from their former colonies, in Germany the comparable area was for a long time Eastern Europe and Russia, where ethnic Germans had settled since the 13^th century. After the Nazi era and the second world war such Aussiedler and Übersiedler from the Eastern part of Germany returned to the Western Germany in millions.

Despite the fact that need immigrant labour force from outside the German settlements emerged with the Wirtschaftswunder since the 1950s, the division of the country between 1945 and 1989 and the “return

“ of Aus-‐ and Übersiedler continued to be prioritary issues and the non-‐

German Gastarbeiter were allowed in temporarily only.

That prioritization continued however also after the active recruitment of foreign labour force was finished in 1973 with the Anwerbestoppverordnung (decree for recruitment stop) but the temporariness of the then residing immigrant workers was not enforced, their family members joined them and with the continuing asylum seekers and other migrant family members , and the children born to the immigrant families the population of foreign citizens was in 1980 already one million larger than in 1973.

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Despite the multi-‐million population of foreign citizens, the division of the country and the priority in receiving, integrating and naturalizing ethnic Germans from the east, contributed to the upholding the doctrine – hegemonic discourse -‐ that “Germany is not an immigration country”, of which followed that the millions of immigrants could not benefit from active integration measures, which also made the integration of the second and third generation immigrant youth more complicated than it would have been with more active reception support and special education that were only introduced as part of the federally adopted policy after the new immigration law in 2005.

After the reunification, there came, besides the ethnic Germans, also massive waves of refugees from the Balkan wars, there were waves of attacks towards foreigners in the 1990s, large shortages of labour force emerged simultaneously with mass unemployment, and the widening recognition of the need to a more comprehensive policy and legislation towards the end of 1990s. The new Red-‐Green Coalition entered in power in 1998 and from 200 onwards launched measures to reform Germany’s immigration policy recognizing that the country had for a long time been an immigration country, contrary to the official doctrine.

Such a through learning process across the political spectrum could supposedly have produced many new migration experts and raised the general level of knowledge on the issue among politicians. With this assumed enrichment of the political immigration debate I wanted to examine the ensuing law debate in the parliament, and if the argumentation would be enlightened on both sides.

Theoretically, possibilities for such rich and quality argumentation (this happened but on one side only) could have been increased by the fact that the parliamentary power relations were very tight in the German parliament in the 14^th legislature: in the lower house the Bundestag, the Red-‐Green governing Coalition retained a clear always available majority, but in the Upper house, the Bundesrat, the Coalition actually was in minority against Christian Democrat (CDU/CSU) led Bundesländer and

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one where the Free Democrats (that maintained a non-‐politicized, substance-‐based approach to the law) could have cast a decisive vote.

Indeed, at the Parliament, in the plenary sessions of both upper and lower chambers, the main opposition party Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) started immediately to profile itself as completely opposed to the law proposal. Indeed, in starting to build its discourse, starting from the lead intervention of their Chancellor Candidate Helmut Stoiber, the opposition seemed to consistently project a picture of the law that would open to more migration, against which the opposition stood firmly presenting a series of arguments in the name of national interest, and appealing to the through the surveys established opposition of the majority of Germans to more immigration. I will argue later that this building of the opposition discourse decidedly against the law project was (maybe because of the coming elections) with the discursive strategies, a populist, antagonist discursive strategy that seemed rather aim to distinguish and profile the opposition from the ruling Coalition, rather that focus on how to deal with the many-‐side migration management through the law.

Every country may have their own particular tendencies to build expressions to somehow manage certain phenomena, or hide unpleasant or controversial and sensitive issues in administrative euphemisms and political correctness. Germany has certainly given its own strong contribution to that in certain times: we have entartete Kunst, Endlösung, Duldung (patience/tolerance) and Kettenduldung documents for the foreigners etc. This kind of cultural capital gives its own semiotic particularities to the national exchanges. Part of it certainly stays hidden to a foreign researcher, but some of such national heritage I could also find.

At the start of the study the research problem was, as may often be the case, quite broadly and loosely defined, as well as the methodology.

Generally, I wanted to map out a national debate, a package of texts, into an illustrative chart of discourses, and thus reveal the “ideologies, interests, and discursive strategies”, and thus better understand and extract the ‘real’ and substantial migration element in the debate,

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imagining, as a migration expert, that the faster the political element can be identified, separated and put aside, the better chances to try and solve the actual ‘purified’ issue.

As mentioned, I was fascinated by the German process and a seeming change of the époque and paradigm, supported by the profound educative and widely participated process that the Süssmuth Commission carried out, in preparation of the legal changes. For Mattila (2001) I went through a pile of German newspaper material from 2000-‐2001, when the Süssmuth and Müller Commissions worked (Unabhängige Kommission Zuwanderung 2001, Bundesausschuss der CDU Deutschlands 2001) and appreciated the sachlich expert discourse of Mr Müller gratifyingly converging with Ms Süssmuth. Both agreed that Germany had been for long been an immigration country.

But when Mr Müller handed the report of his Commission to his party leadership in spring 2001, these latter already took distance the realist and expert findings of their Commission, in what I already then named antagonist discourse.

That little study and limited knowledge of discourse analysis (DA) led later, with this study as the goal, for further study of Fairclough (1992, 1995) and van Dijk (1997a and 1997b) Wodak (2000, 2009) and other developers of critical discourse analysis, whose methodological developments and theoretical reflections on the concept of discourse itself, on such important concepts as intertextuality and politically and historically conscious contextualization, and the extensive linguistic-‐argumentative toolkit that especially Wodak presented in her works (Reisigl and Wodak 2000, 2009) helped to detail my own methodological development for this study, in parallel with the first reading of the Corpus.

Eventually, I found also Discourse Theory (DT) and despite of its philosophical depths, relative “inaccessibility” as Phillips and Jørgensen (2002) put it, I found that Laclau’s and Mouffe’s (1985) views on the binary dynamic, according to which hegemonic articulations of discourses would arrange in the all-‐encompassing social universe, quite plausibly

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corresponded to how I provisorily understood the discursive structuring in the German Parliament.

As for the research questions, the original ambition of a detailed mapping and structuring of a “politicized and confused migration debate”

remained, and I carried it out. But also, further questioning and reflection emerged about the relation between the rational deliberation on one hand and politically hegemonic combat on the other; that was actually part of my original aim to separate these if I could.

However, the results of the analysis, and the actual victory that the politicized Discourse Coalition had scored in Germany against the substance-‐oriented reformateurs, and similar victories of non-‐rational, purposively constructed discourses (such as the Swiss vote on “mass migration” on 9 February 2014) led to further questioning about why and how come such hegemonic discourse have that success, even in the parliament and executed by non-‐populist mainstream parties such as the CDU/CSU. One response presented was obviously electioneering, but is it all? I will reflect these questions in the Conclusion.

In any case, the results produced with discourse analysis are always highly subjective proposals of the researcher, so it is in this case as well.

Anyhow, methodologically, this study showed how well the two political forms of discourse analysis, the discourse theory and critical discourse analysis could be combined; the first one, DT, to give a good number of concepts and theses to discern the political positioning and dynamics of the debating camps, and the second CDA, sharing much of the theoretical view of of the DT, combining both the political-‐historical savvy and an extensive methodological toolkit for the analysis of the text, that helped to manage the text corpus and know and characterize its contents thoroughly.

In the next, first Chapter, I present the theoretical, conceptual and methodological elaboration on critical discourse analysis and discourse theory, and continue in Chapter 2 presenting my own particular application of the critical discourse analysis, for this study. In Chapter 3 I start the political and historical contextualization, apresent a brief historical background of migration, and migration policy in Germany

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ending up with the legislative process, from which my text Corpus is taken from. Chapter 4 I introduce the corpus and present a dramaturgic overview interpretation of the analysed parliamentary debate, using the characterizations that resulted from my discourse analysis. In Chapter 5 I expose that analysis and the final Chapter 6 is dedicated for discussion and conclusions.

You want a multicultural immigration country, but we don&#039;t want it: ideologies, interests and discursive strategies in German parliamentary debate on the 2004 Immigration Law