Illiberale Demokratisierung. Eine Geschichte der Sicherheitskultur des Deutschen Kaiserreichs 1871–1914

The thesis demonstrates that the approaches of historical security studies offers an interpretation that combines disparate empirical subject areas informing a new perspective on the German Empire. The concept of security culture – adapted from political science – is used to frame different developments, dynamics, and actors. It describes - in relation to the German Empire - a social and political framework in which disparate topics underwent converging developments because they were subject to the same conjunctures of changing threat perceptions and attributions. These security-cultural characteristics and changes are identified through the analysis of threat communication as a concrete indicator of an approach to securitization, signifying the construction of security relevance. Labor protection, free trade and prostitution serve as empirical fields of investigation. These subject areas are selected on the basis of historical-semantic preliminary work, which identifies references for as many parts of society as possible. Based on the empirical investigation of threat communication - especially in parliament/Reichstag debates, publications and lectures transcripts - overlapping developments can be demonstrated in all three topics. Superimposed as templates, they produce a coherent picture of the threat perceptions that determined the debates, which is abstracted in a second literature-based step by including numerous different disparate case studies as characteristic of the entire security culture of the empire. While the focus of contemporary threat discourses in the years of the founding of the empire was on internationally connoted threats to the newly achieved sovereignty of the nation state, between 1878 and the turn of the century the threat scenario of a (socialist) revolution was the focus of German security culture, to which all social and political actors had to refer in order to plausibilize/justify extraordinary measures. Even the Social Democrats themselves used the fear of a socialist revolution to promote their own concerns. The consequence of this was that such fears did not diminish, but rather increased. When previous state measures to combat social democracy fell away or appeared to be failing in 1890, a process of negotiation was set in motion throughout society about the right way to deal with the labor movement. In fact, the result was a de-securitization of social democracy; it was no longer perceived as a consensual threat, which also facilitated its increasing integration into imperial German society. At the turn of the century - understood as a transitional phase lasting several years - the biologized nation became the central security-cultural referent object instead. Accompanying and interacting with the security-cultural negotiation process of the 1890s, an initially subliminal increase in the significance of the nation as a referent object began at the same time. Through the common reference to the nation by almost all social actors - not least the social democrats themselves - a new security-cultural referent object emerged that overarched and transcended the revolution-related negotiation process. The nation was primarily accessed via the figure of the population as a shared projection surface for nation-related threat perceptions. On the one hand, these were qualitative in nature, which was expressed in the idea of an ongoing process of degeneration and the popularization of eugenics. However, qualitative demographic threat scenarios took a back seat to quantitative ones. In the decade and a half after the turn of the century, concerns about population decline became increasingly prevalent as a threatening factor in the social Darwinist competition between nations. The exact manifestation of this biologization of the social could be quite diverse, was in principle open to interpretation and represented a way of including a wide variety of actors, including previously securitized actors, in the nation. From a security-historical perspective, it is possible to identify a political and social democratization process, as an ever larger part of society was integrated into the security-cultural negotiation process and at the same time the state was increasingly restricted in its sovereignty of interpretation and autonomy of action. However, this democratization process took place under illiberal conditions, which can be explained on the one hand by the peculiarities of securitization, but also by the rise of the referent object of the biologized nation. The latter also made certain exclusionary notions of threat compatible in terms of security culture. Although by no means intentional, social democrats, left-wing liberals and feminists helped radical nationalists, anti-Semites and racial hygienists to plausibilize threat scenarios targeting certain minorities - such as Jews, Poles and homosexuals - by using population-political threat communication. During the period of the German Empire, this had only minor consequences on a practical and legislative level. However, as a result of the First World War, which acted as a catalyst for existing dynamics, the November Revolution and finally the Great Depression, the established biologistic threat concepts became increasingly radicalized. This process was also initially open to interpretation, but ultimately favored the enemies of the Weimar Republic, not least the National Socialists.