'Integration', 'solidaritat' and the discourses of national identity in the 1988 Bundestag election manifestoes

This paper examines the discourses of German identity in the manifestos of the parties elected to the Bundestag in September 1998, and analyses partic ularly the functions of the terms Integration and Solidaritat as they apply (or not) to non-German residents, German citizens, ethnic Germans and Euro pean integration. It also examines in a coda the uses of Integration in the commentary accompanying the March 1999 bill to change the German citizensh ip laws. It concludes that within the two discourses of identity (the natio n as an open community of rights or a closed community of ethnicity and cus tom) Integration is a semantically empty verbal marker, used by all parties , around which to express attitudes of acceptance or covert rejection of no n-German groups in the central process of (re-)defining Deutsche/r. Solidar itat, on the other hand, is reserved by some parties for use in connection only with Germans. It is subjected to explicit re-definition by one party i n an attempt to claim the word for its particular ideology. Consequently th e paper proposes that the concept of Begriffe besetzen can be applied to So lidaritat but not to Integration, and situates these phenomena in relation to recent writing on political language.