Interrogating Integration explores how media campaigns, public debates, and international sporting spectacles construct national identity in an era of rising nationalism. Across Europe, “integration” has emerged as a guiding concept to regulate and control cultural differences, particularly in Germany where integration has become a watchword since the introduction of birthright citizenship in 2000. The expansion of German citizenship threatened the homogeneous definition of the nation and spurred increased scrutiny of people identified as migrants. This has opened a new chapter in the complicated, often ambivalent relationship between the White Christian-German majority and immigrants and Germans of color, particularly Muslim and Black Germans. The celebrations, scandals, and debates analyzed here reveal how the admission of new citizens inspired an optimistic cosmopolitanism that claimed to definitively separate the new Germany from its fascist past while simultaneously reinscribing racialized hierarchies and providing fuel for growing far-right politics.

Using touchstones of public memory, including events surrounding men’s World Cup soccer and the record-breaking success of a book blaming Muslims for Germany’s decline, Zambon challenges persistent problems in European conceptions of race, where racializing projects take place under an “ideology of racelessness” and the atrocities of historical and transnational racisms are used to deny current local forms of racism. Interrogating Integration builds on this concept by exploring how the integration paradigm in popular media played into a new nationalist resurgence and how nativist arguments have deep roots to the core of modern democratic policies and discourses. 

Kate Zambon is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire.