Recent Trends in German Integration Discourse: From the Sarrazin Controversies to the Decline of Political Correctness

Thilo Sarrazin sparked a heated discourse on German immigration and integration policies with his controversial but bestselling book published in 2010. As part of a larger research project, which investigates the interplay between on- and offline discourses about the multicultural society in Germany, this article provides a deep insight into the book and the debate around its main topics. Using a template analysis (qualitative data analysis) on preselected textual data, themes and actors within the integration policy debate are identified and Sarrazin’s society model discussed. Based on the social identity theory (Brown, 2000; Hogg, 2001a, 2001b), in-group versus out-group categorizations and attributions are evaluated, concluding that Sarrazin stereotypes Muslims, depending on their economic value and their sociocultural compatibility to Western civilization. Our results indicate different opinion camps within the discourse.status: publishe