Description

Ruth Wodak gave a guest lecture at Newcastle University on 4th October 2013 as part of the MACS seminar series hosted in the School of Arts and Cultures and in collaboration with the Newcastle Critical Discourse Group.

National Identity, Citizenship and Migration: A Critical Discourse-Analytical Perspective

Inclusion and exclusion of migrants are renegotiated in the European Union on almost a daily scale: ever new policies defining and restricting immigration (usually from third world countries) are proposed by European member states. Thus, a return to ever more local policies and ideologies can be observed, on many levels: traditions, rules, languages, visions, and imaginaries are affected. I claim that we are currently experiencing a re/nationalisation in spite of (or perhaps because of) multiple globalising tendencies. Moreover, recent heated political debates across Europe, about citizenship, language tests related to citizenship and immigration, and the construction of the immigrant per se seem to coincide with the huge crisis of the welfare state. We are dealing with global and glocal developments (Wodak 2010, 2011). Post-nationalism (Heller 2011) and cosmopolitanism (Bauman 1999) have become utopian concepts.

In my paper, I will analyse recent developments in respect to immigration policies across Europe from a discourse-historical perspective: I focus on the discursive construction of national and transnational identities, on the analysis of citizenship- and language tests, and on the continuous reconstruction of national histories by frequently 're/inventing new narratives'. More specifically, I will focus on the discursive construction of the 'real' Austrian/British/Finn persona (and so forth) as a means for inclusion and exclusion from access to citizenship and democratic rights. I will juxtapose these new developments with some 'voices of migrants' (Delanty et al. 2011) which reflect ever new boundaries and challenge the new policies. The data - analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively - consist of a range of genres (focus group discussions, citizenship tests and language tests, party programmes, TV documentaries, and election campaign materials).