Integration Measures and Conceptual Limits: The Example of Germany

This paper examines legal and public policy measures adopted in Germany aimed at integrating non-Germans in the wake of a massive influx of refugees in recent years, and the organizational structures responsible for implementing them. Beyond giving an overview of the goals of these measures, I investigate how the term “integration” has evolved historically in Germany and how it is deployed currently. Often bonded with the word migration in an aspirational gesture, integration has become a catchall term connoting peaceful civil society. It embodies tensions, however, that policy makers should not ignore. Integration as a program seems to present the means and end as one and the same. But can learning German, finding a job, and adapting European values make outsiders into insiders without changing both outside and inside?

The anxiety that the national culture will wither with the influx of foreign elements has fueled the emergence of far-right politicians in Germany and Europe. Their unsettling and dangerous form of nostalgia has in turn awakened resistance on the part of proponents of multiculturalism and defenders of democratic values. There efforts, however, have not supplied a coherent image of a multicultural or integrated society because the goal of integration itself seems to imply a monolithic German culture. How can integration be achieved and how much will it cost? -- Those are the questions at the forefront of policy debates and national reporting. This paper instead focuses on the perplexing incompatibility of integration and multiculturalism as policy goals.