Conflicting Conceptualisations of Europeanisation – Germany Country Report

This report explores how recent processes of immigration have changed discourses about “Europe” in Germany. It aims at a) capturing conflicting Europeanisation in the German context and to aid theory-construction by adding to a comparative picture, b) developing a perspective on the role of media in domestic audience-making in this context and c) understanding how the above impacts on different professional audiences, including the stakeholders assembled within the RESPOND project. The report is based on discourse and content analytical approaches, which are applied to small corpora of significant political speeches and media articles. In order to assess the repercussion on stakeholders, a content analysis of stakeholder interviews was performed with emphasis on their perspectives on Europeanization. Three main discursive lines can be distinguished: 1) The programmatic approach emphasises the EU as a historical peace project, highlights the moral obligation for Germany after World War II and promotes an emphatic idea of European solidarity as far as the distribution of refugees is concerned. 2) The utilitarian approach underlines the economic and political benefits of European collaboration. From this vantage point, a “fair” distribution of refugees based on the economic capacities of member states must be reached. 3) The technocratic approach takes a logistic stance on the institutional mechanisms of European collaboration and integration, e.g. by promoting an evolutionary understanding of Europeanisation as a result of aggregated bilateral cooperation. In this perspective, any decision at the EU level for refugee distribution should take into account the diversity of national interests and trajectories among member states