ABSTRACT
For a long time, the German politics of citizenship was characterised by a defensive approach maintaining that ‘Germany is not a country of immigration’. This was supposed to render unnecessary all efforts to change the rules of the games of citizenship and nationality fundamentally. At the same time, a policy network was created to deal with the reality of immigration and its consequences. Recently, under the Schröder government, there was a radical departure from this regime, beginning with the passage of the new citizenship law, effective on 1 January 2000; this continues, despite the annulment of the new immigration law of 2002 by the Constitutional Court. Many observers argue that this shift in the politics of citizenship reflects two major developments. First, it marks Germany’s long-overdue ‘catching up’ with its Western European neighbours, that is, the modernisation of its politics of citizenship by combining a residence-based nationality code (ius soli) in addition to the origin-based current code (ius sanguinis) with a wellregulated immigration policy. Together, these codes offer official acknowledgement that Germany has become a country of immigration. Second, it reflects the need of the new Germany to abandon its timehonoured ‘equilibrium strategy’, that is, the labour-exclusionary strategy consistent with the German model which ignored, among other things, the long-term need to increase immigration to meet labour market needs.
