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BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

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identical patterns of immigration, because they conformed with deeply ingrained traditions of<br />

“elite national self-understanding.” Over the long term, discounting the xenophobic phase of the<br />

Jacobin revolution, the French adhered to a republican tradition of inclusion in contrast to the<br />

German self-representation of cultural homogeneity essentially closed to multicultural<br />

citizenship—the distinction between a French Staatsnation and a German Kulturnation observed<br />

by German historian Friedrich Meinecke as early as 1908. 32 Subsequent challenges to Brubaker’s<br />

thesis derive from the difficulty in differentiating a politics of identity from a politics of interest<br />

behind the veil of citizenship laws, yet the historical continuity of French and German<br />

naturalization policies does suggest a division between political and cultural perspectives on<br />

national identity. 33 The bipolarity between complete assimilation and exclusion might best be<br />

seen as a continuum that requires varying degrees of conformity to a political or cultural ideal, a<br />

view that makes Hans Kohn’s “two kinds” of national identity a singular sociological<br />

phenomenon with organic/voluntarist or ethnic/civic variations. 34 These dualities in fact frame<br />

32 Ibid., 45-46, 182-87. Heike Hagedorn recalls Meinecke’s description in his<br />

reassessment of Brubaker following recent changes to the 1913 Prussian citizenship law that<br />

since 2000 have made German nationality laws barely distinguishable from French. See<br />

“Republicanism and the Politics of Citizenship in Germany and France: Convergence or<br />

Divergence?” German Policy Studies/Politikfeldanalyse 1, no. 3 (2001): 243-45, http://www<br />

.spaef.com/file.php?id=833.<br />

33 See Annemarie Sammartino, “After Brubaker: Citizenship in Modern Germany, 1848 to<br />

Today,” German History 27, no. 4 (2009): 583-99, a survey of recent work by Andreas Fahrmeir,<br />

Dieter Gosewinkel, Joyce Marie Mushaben, Eli Nathans, Oliver Trevisiol. See esp. 585-89, on<br />

the questionable correlation between parental citizenship and ethnic background, the patchwork<br />

quality of immigration laws, the primacy of residency in many localities and the fact that either<br />

patriarchal privilege in claiming illegitimate children or willingness to serve in the military could<br />

trump ethnic affiliation.<br />

34 Smith, Nationalism, 40-42, remarks that the situation of Jews within the early French<br />

Republic, where individual rights trumped ethno-religious practices, presaged more recent<br />

46

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