Narrating Crisis, Governing Migration: On the Politics of Interpretation

Political events do not speak for themselves. Their meaning, urgency, and the range of responses they seem to demand are shaped discursively. Incidents like the knife attack in Solingen in 2024 or the far-right Alternative for Germany’s electoral win in Thuringia the same year are never monocausal. Their political significance emerges not from the events alone, but from the interpretive frameworks that render them legible. Within these frameworks, migration is not treated as a complex policy domain or social process, but as a threat to public safety, cultural cohesion, and democratic stability. This dominant perspective – what I call the irregular migration paradigm – frames migration primarily as a disruption of order, an irregularity to be corrected. The issue, then, is not whether migration is significant, but how its significance is constructed.

To understand this, we must shift away from focusing only on what happened and toward understanding how meaning is made. A long-standing body of interpretive and discourse-oriented research argues that social reality is not objectively given, but constructed through language, narrative, and institutional practice. The framing of migration as inherently exceptional – central to the irregular migration paradigm – has become deeply institutionalized in German public discourse. Crisis, in this view, is not a response to migration but a political logic through which it is governed, narrowing the field of legitimate debate and foreclosing alternatives.

More than Stories

This is not just a matter of rhetoric. Meanings are constitutive of action: people act not on facts alone, but through interpretations of those facts. [Mainstream media](https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/pdfy-NekqfnoWIEuYgdZl/Manufacturing Consent %5BThe Political Economy Of The Mass Media%5D.pdf), such as public service broadcasting and daily national newspapers, play a central role in shaping how political events are interpreted and made meaningful. While much scholarly and public concern has rightly focused on digital disinformation and partisan media, less attention has been paid to how authoritative outlets contribute to the framing of migration as crisis. In my research, I show how mainstream media actors sustain this framing through implicit causal constructions, appeals to a presumed national consensus, and affective registers that foster moral exclusion.

Events become intelligible through narratives, which are more than stories; they are moral-political structures that link causes to consequences, assign responsibility, and suggest appropriate responses. Events only exist through such representations, shaped by the impulse to impose coherence and closure on the ambiguity of real life. As a result, critical junctures – moments of apparent rupture – are not defined by the material consequences of an event, but by the interpretive struggles that follow and often come to overshadow them.

The media response to the 2015/16 sexual assaults in Cologne illustrates this dynamic. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), one of Germany’s largest national newspaper, framed the assaults as a consequence of liberal migration policies, which it linked to a broader “official policy of silence and cover-up” regarding foreign-related crime. This framing constructed a causal chain connecting ideological constraints to national security failures. The narrative was echoed in the reporting of Tagesschau, Germany’s public service broadcaster, which shifted from initially cautious coverage of the perpetrators’ foreign backgrounds to emphasizing claims that political correctness may have delayed accurate reporting. By foregrounding the foreign backgrounds as causally significant – and simultaneously emphasizing the alleged suppression of this information – both FAZ and Tagesschau reinforced an interpretation that framed migration as the root cause of the assaults, while amplifying a crisis narrative centered on national security and political credibility.

This shows that certain narratives come to dominate not because they are necessarily more accurate, but because they may be more institutionally resonant, more emotionally compelling, or more easily absorbed into existing political agendas. Repeated over time, such narratives do not simply inform but shape the very boundaries of what is considered a reasonable narrative, and therewith, of what can be politically imagined.

How ‘Common Sense’ Shuts Down Political Imagination

The effects of such processes are subtle but far-reaching. As certain narratives become dominant, they form discursive paradigms, akin to what Foucault termed epistemes: deep, background structures that define the limits of intelligibility. When the narrative of migration as crisis becomes paradigmatic, it no longer appears as one interpretation among many but as common sense. This eliminates political alternatives before they can be articulated because they are foreclosed as outside the realm of reason. Under such conditions, migration becomes depoliticized: no longer a question of democratic choice or political vision but instead treated as a technical imperative and moral necessity. The consequences of these narrative dynamics extend beyond migration policy, they shape the very possibilities of democratic debate. Rather than exposing bias or measuring public opinion, my research engages with these dynamics by examining how discourse serves as the infrastructure for political meaning-making. By tracing how diverse political events are routinely attributed to migration, I explore how this process neutralizes the disruptive and egalitarian potential of public discourse – privileging consensus over contestation, reducing politics to technocratic management, and narrowing the space for democratic choice.

In times of perceived crisis, the temptation to close down debate can be strong. Yet, as this line of inquiry suggests, depoliticization is not merely a retreat from disagreement – it is narratively achieved, through seemingly rational and moral framings that pre-structure intelligibility and narrow the range of possible discourse. Understanding how narratives of crisis and migration are constructed sheds light on the frameworks that define the limits of political imagination. Rather than reflecting empirical reality, these narratives structure what becomes visible, debatable, and actionable in public life. Examining their construction shows not just how events are understood, but how political possibility itself is organized.