The value-based Nationalism of Pegida

Abstract

In the fall of 2014, the new German grassroots political protest movement “Pegida” emerged. The movement’s targets of criticism include the pronounced ‘failures’ of German asylum and immigration policy, refugees, and a so-called “Islamization.” This contribution is an analysis of Pegida's programmatic publications. Pegida claims to promote national values and already has a positive image of Germany in particular and the nation state in general. Germany is seen as an agency of ‘humanity’ that fulfils a selfless moral mission in granting asylum to refugees. For Pegida, the consequences of this policy include ‘foreign infiltration,’ as well as so-called “Muslim parallel societies,” which are seen as dangerous imports of competing moralities. To save the ‘good order’ that said “patriotic Europeans” imagine as their home, the integration of foreign ‘national identities’ is seen as both necessary and hard to achieve. Therefore, Pegida demands the optimization of state force and its use to establish a requirement of integration and enforce the sanctioning of criminal immigrants and “asylum betrayers.” According to this logic, the preservation of home through a “zero tolerance policy” is a self-purpose, ensuring to prevent negative social consequences like poverty and unemployment. The result of this analysis proposes an explanation approach to the xenophobic logic of Pegida's value-based nationalism.