Abstract

This dissertation explores a foundational question of political theory and social ethics: Who is to be included in a political community, and on what terms? This question is approached through an examination of the case of foreign workers and their families in Germany who, although they have become permanent residents and enjoy a number of social and economic rights, remain effectively excluded from the German polity. The roots of this exclusion are traced through an examination of the interrelated processes that have shaped the German ethnonation, state, and citizenry, the developments that led to the establishment of the foreign worker minority in Germany and the relationships of ethnic discrimination, socioeconomic inequality and legal disadvantage through which this minority is presently subordinated . Next, an analysis of contemporary German "membership debates" on issues such as citizenship, naturalization, assimilation and multiculturalism provides the basis for a typology of five basic normative conceptions of political membership . These competing conceptions--labeled the closure, culture, choice, coexistence, and cosmopolitan positions--are criticized with reference to their empirical suppositions, internal consistency and assumptions about the political nature of human beings . There follows an attempt to construct a normative theory of political membership employing a political anthropology that appropriately balances the communal, voluntaristic, and universal aspects of persons . The theory defended owes much to Michael Walzer's treatment of membership, but unlike Walzer's theory it is formulated explicitly in terms of human rights, understood generally as the rights of individuals or groups not to be dominated. The nature of the modern territorial state, it is argued, grounds a right of all established residents to full political membership; moreover, in states with commitments to democratic politics, equality of political membership will often require a combination of individual and group rights. By way of conclusion the theory is applied to the German case, where it is shown to support a membership policy combining the extension of citizenship to the migrant worker minority with the institutionalization of certain group rights in the socioeconomic and cultural spheres