Bulletin n. 2-3/2013
February 2014
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Goeke Simon
    The past 10 years of German history give evidence of a paradigm shift in Germany’s national narrative. The early years of the decade were marked by widespread denial at the elite level that Germany was a country of immigration and adherence to an assimilationist model of integration but progressed to the creation of a National Integration Plan by Christian Union Chancellor Angela Merkel and the liberalization of public opinion. Germany’s recent history shows dramatic discursive and policy changes. This article documents the changes in elite discursive scripts, showing the gradual acceptance and rejection of discourses about integration and their implications for national identity. It concludes that, though the changes are not universally liberal, the decade as a whole constitutes a remarkable liberalization of both elite discourse and public opinion.
    in Journal of Contemporary History , Volume 49, Issue 1, January ,  2014 ,  160-182
    This article looks at the migration policy of the trade unions as well as the political activism of migrants in West Germany during the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that migrants’ political activities have been rather neglected in historiography, because the research has followed the governmental view on migration which has led to an unnecessarily rigid analysis of migrants’ individual motivations to emigrate and ignored their demands. Through several instances of migrant protest and self-organization, the article emphasizes the importance of migrants’ political activism for the social history of the Federal Republic. Ultimately the idea of integration in historiography is discarded as a discourse that covers the migrants’ precise demands for equal rights.
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