Bücher von Samuel Skipper

The topic of immigration is never simple. Questions such as 'who belongs to society?' and 'how do you define national identity?', or 'what values are needed to maintain a coexisting society?' are extremely difficult to answer. Global migration introduces unprecedented challenges for conceptualising the integration of immigrants. On a European scale, Germany can be said to represent the first destination for immigrants since its unification in 1989. On a global level, Germany is the second largest immigrant receiving country after the United States. Nevertheless, only recently has Germany recognised and admitted that it is an ethnically and culturally diverse society. Before the 1998 elections, successive governments have always stuck to the maxim that Germany is 'not a country of immigration'. The infamous phrase came under increased pressure with the electoral victory of the Red-Green coalition in 1998. New laws regarding immigration, integration and citizenship were on the agenda with the aim of replacing the traditional ethnocultural model of German nationhood with a more liberal and modern model by moving away from the concepts of Volk and ius sanguinis. The conservative CDU, however, accused the Schroder government of trying to jeopardize German cultural identity, causing a fierce debate known as the Leitkultur (Guiding culture) debate. On the one side of this debate there were the conservative CDU politicians who viewed Germany in ethno-nationalist terms, while on the other members of the Green Party and the SPD, who attempted substituting the 'volkish' tradition with a multicultural model of citizenship that guaranteed universal human rights. The aim of this study is to assess which of these two models are currently prevailing in moulding immigration and integration policy. Has the progressive left achieved its objective of moving away from the traditional ethnocultural and assimilationalist model defining citizenship towards a more inclusive multicultural model?

This study examines the role of the various processes entailed in globalisation in the rise of the New Right in Italy and Germany. The first section aims to clarify what is meant by the term globalisation, for it is more easily used than defined. Thus, several perspectives, such as those of the tranformationalists and the hyperglobalists, are taken into account. Then, economic and cultural globalisation considered to be the most influential forms of globalisation are analysed in depth. The second part specifically examines the Italian and the German cases by analysing the political and ideological discourse of successful New Right cultural movements and parties, e.g. the Italian Northern League and National Alliance. This analysis explains the difference between the populist New Right and the extreme right, and how the rise of New Right parties can be linked with the strengthening of cultural and economic globalisation.