LEI_F_02 Creating Unity: The “Integration Dispositive” and its Concepts in British and French Society and the Two Germanys in the Long Twentieth Century

Objectives / Research Questions

In this project, we investigate how different societies reacted to political and social transformations that seemed to call their unity and the existent national (or imperial) order into question. We seek to shed light on the ways in which historical actors attempted to create cohesion and unity in different historical contexts. In doing so, we draw on a fundamental insight of historical semantics: that is to say, social and political transformations are condensed in a changed language and a changing use of concepts. In our project, we thus analyse and compare different semantics of integration along with different ideas of (and conflicts over) the creation of one nation, society, or community in the long twentieth century. While we are constantly drawing comparisons, we are also looking at transfers and entanglements between the different, closely interconnected Western European societies.

The project thus contributes to both a theoretical and a historical reflection on central concepts used to evoke or describe the creation of social unity (such as integration, assimilation, and acculturation), and it aims to deepen our understanding of how different groups in different contexts make sense of society. By focusing on the differences and interconnections between different Western European societies, the project expands the view beyond the German case. Moreover, by comparing the two Germanys, it also focuses on the similarities and differences between liberal democratic and socialist societies.

Thematic relation to social cohesion

Social cohesion has never been and will never be given; instead, it has to be produced continuously. Over the course of the twentieth century, contemporaries presented diverse groups, developments, and ideas as threats to a stable social and political life, and they had changing ideas of who or what was forcing societies apart. Closely connected to dominant ways of imagining society (or nation), they also made use of shifting notions of integration and suggested different ways of “making unity”.

In view of mass migration, social polarization, and globalized communication, a central assumption of globalization debates today is that nation-states are finding it increasingly difficult to establish unity and belonging. However, in order to determine what is (and is not) new and specific about this configuration, the project makes a case for historical approaches. It confronts the discourse of newness, which claims that we live under completely new, unfamiliar circumstances with a source-based, historical perspective. Apart from suggesting a genealogical approach to the concepts and practices used to achieve unity, the project also opts for a transnational perspective in order to arrive at a historically informed, systematizing understanding of social cohesion.