ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how the first part of the research question posed in Chapter 1 will be answered: how and why did power relations transform in the debate on integration? I focus specifically on the debate on the opinion pages of broadsheet newspapers. This setting formally approximates Habermas’s ideal speech situation in the sense that all persons with the “competence to speak” can submit articles, express attitudes, desires and needs, and question the assertions of others (Habermas 1990: 86). What Weber considered the essence of power – the capacity of actors to carry out their will in spite of resistance from others – is absent from the opinion pages, since actors in this setting cannot use formal authority or physical force to coerce their opponents (Weber 1964: 156).
