Multicultural integration in Germany: Race, religion, and the Mesut Özil controversy

ABSTRACT This article scrutinizes shifts in media coverage of soccer player Mesut Özil during the 2018 World Cup and his subsequent resignation from the German national team. Our analysis highlights the dominance of a multicultural integration discourse that connotes a particularly German understanding of multicultural diversity as only valuable when it is subordinate to an individual’s integration into German culture. Multicultural integration implicitly constructs Germanness as white through dubious claims of the “civilizational superiority” of Western/Christian secularism and a rejection of non-Western/Islamic religiosity as fundamentally “inferior” or “un-democratic.” The shifting treatment of Özil from an exemplar of multicultural integration to a symbol of its failure illustrates the underlying racialized-religious foundation of the discourse and Germany’s remaining attachments to whiteness vis-à-vis Christianity.