This comparison of Canada and Germany focuses on a particular dimension of these countries’ respective approaches to governing migration and integration. It is guided by a key conceptual assumption: Cities and regions have become important laboratories for deliberating, developing, and implementing immigration and, in particular, integration policies. With this analytical lens, the article investigates the form and degree to which subnational levels of government have come to play a more prominent role in this policy field. Both Canada and Germany show a comparable diffusion of governance authority across different levels of government. Yet the factors driving this development vary considerably across national contexts. While Canada’s multicultural policy has set a comprehensive national framework for addressing the task of migrant integration, in Germany the momentum in this policy field has moved decisively to regions and cities.

This article analyses how right-wing populist actors claim to represent the “voice of the people” and express “popular sovereignty” as a mode of challenging the traditional constitutional foundation of liberal democracy. This hypothesis is illustrated by an investigation into the political discourse of the Alternative for Germany considering how this populist actor has developed a political strategy claiming to speak for the “people” in an authentic and immediate fashion. The analysis of this actor's political mobilization shows how the championed direct democratic representation is couched in a sovereigntist discourse that relies on divisive identity markers rather than genuine democratic participation. Drawing on Carl Schmitt's concept of the political, the article interprets right-wing populism as invoking a permanent “state of exception” that employs an emotionally charged friend– enemy distinction whose logic of representing the people has the potential of triggering radical political change as well as undermining the integrity of rule-based democracy.

Immigration policies in Europe, since the late 1980s and the early 1990s, have become increasingly politicised, challenging, for example, attempts to recruit migrant labour and placing more and more emphasis on demands for immigrants to adhere to cultural, social and legal norms of the host societies. Despite these developments, however, the situation in Europe remains rather puzzling: besides the adverse political climate, certain European countries have experienced remarkable progress in promoting the integration of newcomers from non-EU member states. In order to explain the dynamics behind integration policy formation in Europe, we consider it necessary to move beyond a conceptualisation that is restricted to national politics. We link this observation to the structural changes in Europe's emerging system of multi-level governance, which has empowered sub-national levels of governance in their efforts to design and implement integration policies. Employing a political opportunity structure model, we hypothesise that the diversity of these dynamics (i.e. competition between parties and interaction with organisations within civil society) may produce different policies than those at the national level. Our argument is based on a comparative case study of Emilia-Romagna in Italy and North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany.

This article considers the growing rift between Western and Eastern Europe regarding the commemoration of Europe’s recent past and related historical narratives of nationhood that shape contemporary political preferences. More specifically, it investigates the connections between collective memory, national identities, and democratic cultures as they manifest themselves in Germany and Poland. With the help of an interpretative analysis focused on the discourse of political elites in both countries, the article identifies competing ways of interpreting 20th-century history and providing it with meaning for contemporary audiences. The national case studies of Germany and Poland present a contrasting logic in this respect: the promise of freedom and democracy in Poland is primarily narrated as the liberation from foreign rule and the desire for national independence. This narration is significantly built around a notion of popular sovereignty in which dissenting views of the heroic national past tend to be discredited and largely banned from public debate. In contrast, in Germany, the memory of fascism and the Holocaust has established a stronger rights-based approach to democracy in the liberal tradition and an openness to contesting historical narratives in the public domain.

This article investigates the link between rising levels of social inequality and years of austerity on the one hand and the rise of populist, anti-establishment protest on the other. This connection is explored by analyzing the discursive practices of activists as a way of reconstructing the key argumentative and emotional structures organizing actors' understanding of politics. Empirically the article is based on 40 narrative interviews with supporters of the German right-wing, anti-immigrant party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), and the newly established left-wing movement Stand Up. The findings of the discursive analysis point to a profound sense of exclusion amongst left- and right-wing populist affiliates defined both in socio-economic terms and with a view to being deprived of a proper political voice. At the same time, the results show that the supporters of the AfD, in contrast to those from Stand Up, develop a strong, mobilizing collective identity that is instrumental in popularizing their discontent with the political establishment: The dramatized conflict between the virtuous German people and the threatening Other—manifested primarily by immigrants and the European Union—provides an emotionally charged binary that is at the core of the contemporary populist resurgence across Western democracies. In addition, the collective identity is instrumental in offering a particular interpretation of the origins of and desirable response to growing inequality that rely more on culturalist rather than traditional class-based arguments. Building on this analysis, the article offers an interpretation of the relative weakness of the populist left that, in the German context, so far has not succeeded in using deepening socio-economic cleavages for their political mobilization effectively.