‘A name was banned. Nothing more!’: identity, democracy and banning white supremacists in Germany

Calls for governments to proscribe white supremacist actors as ‘terrorists’ have increased in recent years, yet little attention has been paid to whether proscription of such actors ‘works’ and what consequences may arise from expanding counterterrorism apparatuses in this way. What happens when states bring violent white supremacist organisations under the counterterrorism umbrella? Using original data on Germany’s 70-year practice of banning white supremacists as ‘anti-constitutional’, this article uses the vehicle of terrorist proscription to explore the political work done by treating white supremacists as ‘terrorists’ in a legal, not only a discursive, sense. I argue that placing security efforts against white supremacists alongside questions of constitutionality and democracy invokes larger debates about German values and identity, rendering visible the role of white supremacy in constructing the German nation. Banning white supremacist organisations, then, becomes a policy instrument that provides a veneer of combating violence without confronting the embedded nature of the ideology underlying that violence. My findings that bans are overwhelmingly symbolic and offer little in the way of deeper political change have implications not only for German security policy, but also for cross-national studies of terrorist proscription and combating white supremacy in all of its manifestations.