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In many ways, the 2015 New Year's Eve celebrations in Cologne marked a turning point in the German refugee debate. The sexual harassment by mostly North African asylum seekers sparked a paradoxical alliance between the Far-Right and some feminists. This paper sheds light on the origins of this convergence. Did feminists betray their emancipatory ideals? Or did the convergence result from shared ideological values? Drawing on a discourse analysis (N = 111) of two far-right newspapers, a right-wing blog, and a major German feminist magazine, this paper traces the construction of a rhetorical device I call geography of trauma. The device allowed feminists and the Far-Right to justify their shared vision of an exclusive, homogenous German nation by dramatizing, collectivizing, and spatializing individual trauma. Ultimately, this case study highlights the active role that seemingly progressive forces can play in normalizing racist nation-building projects more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This comparative statistical analysis is of tolerance and how it was perceived and experienced by minorities and majorities in the UK and Germany before and after two defining national events that both focused on immigration and national identity. Based on combined sweeps of the European Social Survey (2012–2018), this study applied logistic regression modelling to determine that during the Brexit vote in 2016 and the German Refugee Crisis in 2015, majorities from lower socioeconomic backgrounds were more likely to be intolerant towards minorities, who were more likely to experience discrimination. Majority intolerance and minority perceptions of discrimination increased after both events among less well-off groups. However, majorities from higher socioeconomic backgrounds were less likely to exhibit intolerance towards minorities before these national events and after. This study offers an original perspective on race and ethnic relations at times of national crises over identity and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2015 refugee crisis is at the center of public and political discourse across Europe, especially among nations that have accepted refugees. Utilizing ethnographic fieldwork and 48 in-depth interviews conducted in 2011 and 2016 with Iranians in Hamburg, Germany, this paper considers how the refugee crisis impacts the racial boundaries between Germans and immigrant communities. It details how the crisis has made ethnic nationalism, Islamophobia, anti-foreigner prejudice and racism more pronounced and salient throughout Germany. The interviews demonstrate that this climate affects Iranians in several ways: they cite feeling more threat and stigma, as well as experiences of marginality, perpetual foreignness, and discrimination. This research contributes to sociological scholarship on migration and race by examining how critical international events influence and shape processes of racialization, identity and belonging, and social boundaries and hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enjoying a surge of national pride, the German media celebrated the 2010 German World Cup team's success in South Africa. A dominant theme in this coverage was the 'immigration background' of 11 of the 23 players on the team and their claim to German identity despite their ethnic diversity. Amid debate over the changing nature of German citizenship, the national team's 'multicultural kickers' became the focal point for those who wished to reframe German identity. This article examines German newspaper and magazine coverage of the national soccer team emphasizing the role that media played in constructing competing definitions of the German citizen and nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although it has been highlighted by several authors that the notion of diaspora has become a politicized identity discourse, little is known about how it becomes a banal part of migrants’ everyday lives. Based on a theoretical understanding of banality, the article focuses on the interaction of the banal and the non-banal within this context of the fiftieth anniversary of Ghanaian independence in Berlin in 2007. It is argued that diasporic nationalist rituals are spaces of intersection between politicized and banal spheres of social life. By enacting and institutionalizing particular forms of interaction that are ‘banalizing’ dissent and conflict among migrants the examined series of public rituals contributed to give life-worldly relevance to the otherwise questionable and contested identity category of diaspora. In this sense, the primary product was not group formation but the banalization of diasporic nationalism as a category of identification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Welfare-state retrenchment, transnational migration and the integration of immigrants have been accompanied by a growing ethnicization and racialization of welfare-state politics in the United States and Germany. Although ethnicization and racialization may have other, deeper causes, immigration and its effects on social policies and provisions has become one of the main targets of dissent in the politics of West European and North American welfare states. While in the United States these developments have reinforced race-class cleavages that have existed since the emergence of her welfare state, German welfare-state politics has evolved from being primarily class-based to class-ethnicity divides in recent years. These cleavages have disadvantaged social democratic positions that tried to bridge protection of native workers and humanitarian obligations towards refugees but have supported nationalist-populist trends. Cosmopolitan-liberal positions face the formidable task of developing institutional mechanisms for handling conflicts in ethnically pluralist' welfare states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the work of figures from different cultures who contributed fundamentally to the transition from traditional cultural norms to modern nationalism. These people included Edward Wilmot Blyden of Liberia, Johann Gottfried von Herder of Germany and Wang T'ao of China. They are prime examples of the ' or 'historicist intellectuals' identified in the current literature on the origins of nationalism. Their experiences and their ideas were remarkably similar even though they worked in different times and locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]