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’Integration’, ’Solidarität ’ and the Discourses of National Identity in the 1998 Bundestag Election Manifestos[Note 1. This is a significantly extended and re‐written version of ...]
Author(s) -
Gould Robert
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
german life and letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 12
eISSN - 1468-0483
pISSN - 0016-8777
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0483.00184
Subject(s) - german , identity (music) , ideology , ethnic group , political science , politics , citizenship , sociology , law , media studies , linguistics , aesthetics , philosophy
This paper examines the discourses of German identity in the manifestos of the parties elected to the Bundestag in September 1998, and analyses particularly the functions of the terms ‘Integration’ and ‘Solidarität’ as they apply (or not) to non‐German residents, German citizens, ethnic Germans and European integration. It also examines in a coda the uses of ‘Integration’ in the commentary accompanying the March 1999 bill to change the German citizenship laws. It concludes that within the two discourses of identity (the nation as an open community of rights or a closed community of ethnicity and custom) ‘Integration’ is a semantically empty verbal marker, used by all parties, around which to express attitudes of acceptance or covert rejection of non‐German groups in the central process of (re‐)defining ‘Deutsche/r’. ‘Solidarität’, on the other hand, is reserved by some parties for use in connection only with Germans. It is subjected to explicit re‐definition by one party in an attempt to claim the word for its particular ideology. Consequently the paper proposes that the concept of ‘Begriffe besetzen’ can be applied to ‘Solidarität’ but not to ‘Integration’, and situates these phenomena in relation to recent writing on political language.