Discursive construction of the perception of refugees in 2015-2016 in Germany, in the Land of Baden-Württemberg and its municipalities

Résumé En

In the fall of 2015, Germany was an exception in Europe. There were two reasons for this: the very high number of people who arrived on its territory, and above all a political, media and societal discourse that was at odds with the idea of a crisis, and which was moreover, favourable to the welcome of foreigners (Willkommenskultur).Based on this observation and on a multi-scalar analysis, centred on the regional level (that of the Land of Baden-Württemberg and its municipalities), this article proposes to analyse the discursive construction of migrant-reception over the period 2015-2016 and, henceforth, to question the performative dimension of the discourse. The aim is to trace the genesis of discursive frameworks in relation to the federal migration policies of the 2000s and the reorientation of the integration policy for migrants carried out by the Land when the Green party came to power in 2011. To this end, the temporal and spatial emergence, the changes in meaning and resistance, and even the transfers between spheres (economic, media, political) and levels (national, regional and local) of two main discourses are studied: the Willkommenskultur discourse and the crisis discourse. Particular attention is paid to the effects of inter-discourses and the memorial reconstruction of past policies (migration and asylum) on crisis framing, in other words, on the negative contents usually resulting from the association of the terms migration and crisis.