Constructing Welcome: Refugee Origin, Regional Socio-Political Culture, and Willkommenskultur in German Media
This paper argues that Germany's "welcome culture" is not a coherent national discourse but a contested symbolic field shaped by the intersection of refugee origin and enduring regional socio-political cultures, with former East German media consistently framing migration through anxieties about national identity regardless of whether refugees are from Syria or Ukraine.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
When a country welcomes people fleeing war, the story it tells itself about that welcome is rarely simple. It is not just a matter of opening doors; it is a complex negotiation about who belongs, who is seen as a neighbor, and who is viewed as a stranger. In the study of migration, scholars have long observed that people do not react to refugees in a uniform way. Instead, their responses often depend on how "deserving" they perceive the newcomers to be. This judgment is shaped by factors like the refugees' religion, their culture, and whether they look or sound like the people already living there. At the same time, the place where the story is told matters just as much as the people in the story. A country is not a single, flat voice; it is made up of different regions with their own histories, political leanings, and cultural memories. In Germany, for instance, the divide between the former East and the former West has left a lasting mark on how people view the world, creating distinct political cultures that persist decades after the country was reunited. Understanding how these two forces—the identity of the refugee and the background of the host community—mix together is essential for seeing the full picture of how nations handle crisis.
A team of researchers set out to examine this dynamic by looking at how German media talked about two major waves of refugees in the last decade: those arriving from Syria in 2015 and those arriving from Ukraine in 2022. The term used in Germany to describe this phenomenon is Willkommenskultur, or "welcome culture." While this phrase is often used to suggest a unified national spirit of hospitality, the researchers suspected that the reality was far more fractured. They gathered a massive collection of 1,769 German-language newspaper articles and transcripts from television and radio broadcasts published between 2014 and 2023. Their goal was not just to count how often the word "welcome" appeared, but to see what other words and ideas were consistently linked to it. They used computer tools to map out the relationships between words, treating language like a network where concepts that appear together often share a deeper meaning. By analyzing these connections, they could see whether the idea of "welcome" was being built on a foundation of solidarity and help, or if it was tangled up with fears about national identity and social challenges.
The researchers first looked at the difference between the two groups of refugees. As they expected, the way the media described Ukrainian refugees was generally warmer and more focused on shared values like democracy and humanitarian aid. The language used for them suggested a sense of cultural closeness. In contrast, the coverage of Syrian refugees was more mixed, often weaving together themes of help with concerns about integration and the strain on society. However, the story became much more complicated when the researchers split the data by region. They separated the articles based on whether they came from media outlets in the former West Germany, the former East Germany, or national publications that covered the whole country.
What they found challenged the idea that Germany speaks with one voice. In the former West, the media tended to produce a more expansive and positive version of "welcome culture," even when discussing the Syrian refugees. The language there included more humanitarian themes and less focus on conflict. But in the former East, the picture was starkly different. Regardless of whether the article was about Syrians or Ukrainians, the media in the East consistently linked the concept of welcome to migration-related anxieties, national identity, and the challenges of integration. Even when discussing Ukrainian refugees, who were generally viewed more favorably across the board, the Eastern media discourse remained colored by a sense of threat and a focus on the boundaries of the nation. The regional context was so powerful that it softened the usual differences between the two refugee groups; the "East-West" divide mattered more than the "Syrian-Ukrainian" divide in shaping the tone of the conversation.
The study also revealed that looking only at national-level media gives a misleading impression. When researchers analyzed the national publications alone, the results looked somewhat balanced, as if the country had a single, coherent debate. But once they peeled back the layers to look at the regional differences, that coherence vanished. The national view acted like a blur, smoothing over the sharp contrasts between the East and the West. The researchers concluded that "welcome culture" is not a fixed national value that everyone shares. Instead, it is a contested space where the meaning of belonging is constantly being negotiated. It is shaped by who the refugees are, yes, but just as much by where in the country the conversation is happening. The findings suggest that to truly understand how a society receives refugees, one must look beyond the national headline and listen to the different, often conflicting, voices that make up the whole.
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