| Crynodeb: | <p>Drawing on sixteen months of fieldwork within the migrant/refugee solidarity movement in Berlin, discourse analysis and doctrinal legal research, this thesis provides an empirically grounded account of the controversies surrounding the normative implications of the Rechtsstaat ideal with respect to the question of migrant exclusion in post-2015 Germany. The thesis’ central argument is that these controversies were fuelled by, and therefore provide a window onto, a deeper clash between conflicting visions of justice in immigration and, more specifically, different conceptions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. The specific and contingent vision of justice in immigration embedded in the post-war Rechtsstaat, I argue, is best understood as a form of moderate nationalism and/or moderate cosmopolitanism – a normative framework that places procedural and substantive constraints on the sovereign right to exclude migrants but does not fundamentally question that right and the underlying nation-statist order. Yet, many of those who participated in the politics of immigration and asylum in post-crisis Germany – including political leaders, bureaucrats, civil society actors and migrants/refugees themselves – embraced more “radical” conceptions of cosmopolitanism and nationalism that were not only irreconcilable with each other but also with the moderate strands of these two principles which the liberal-constitutional Rechtsstaat arduously tries to balance. In so doing, these actors effectively – if not always explicitly – challenged the very assumption that the Rechtsstaat constitutes a benchmark of political legitimacy in matters of migrant exclusion.</p>
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