Varieties of Leitkultur Debates in North-Western Europe

This article discusses national variations of the notion of common culture, i.e. the German concept of Leitkultur, and related concepts across four north-western European countries: Denmark, the Netherlands, Britain and Germany. Similar debates have taken place in these countries, with face much the same integration challenges concerning the need to integrate migrants into society and to balance cultural diversity on the one hand with cohesion or forms of unity - variously conceived - on the other. Within this common trend, however, remains significant national variation. The conceptual vocabulary as well as the very structure, semantic content, and perceived functions of what should be ‘common’ differs significantly, e.g. as regards versions of civic-liberal, religious, and ethno-cultural culture; the degree of assumed comprehensiveness or ‘thickness’ of how culture is shared or common; and what emerges as the very point of sharing it. A condensed analytical reading of some main arguments from social and political theory about common culture as an element of good, cohesive and integrated national societies is employed to produce simple heuristic conceptual taxonomies, which are then used in the empirical analysis of the countries covered.