MIGRATION AND ETHNICITY IN THE NATIONAL WELFARE-STATE

This article maintains that hostility toward foreigners and renationalization processes in recent political debates in the Federal Republic can be best understood through an historical approach to the ethnicity problematic and the changes this problematic has gone through in the course of the development of the national state to a welfare state. Nationality and ethnicity can be conceived as unitary semantics that develop in convergence with the formation of modern nation states. Furthermore, the paper argues that in Germany in the context of a difficult history of nation state development as well as in the context of the establishment of the welfare state these semantics have run through processes of valorization and devalorization. The recent revalorization of these semantics in the context of increased migration, economic upheavals, and processes of social fragmentation due to the difficult reunification process can be best understood when these developments are traced to the history of nation state formation, the devalorization of ethnicity semantics in the German welfare state, and its history of dealing with migration and its results.