The paper deals with the concept of intercultural paternalism and its discursive realization in the multi-cultural context of modern migration societies (on the communicative-linguistic material of the German-speaking area).

On the basis of theoretical generalizations and collected empirical data the author considers the possibility of classifying the discursive practices of paternalism in correlation with institutional and non-institutional spheres of its existence, pragmatics of intercultural situations and differentiation of the communicants’ role positions. The study reveals the essence of discourse processing of the paternalistic actions and, on the example of the author’s cases, the means of discourse processing in the situations of interaction of the actants with different cultural conventionality are described in detail. The attention is focused on the need to change the behavioral patterns in power structures, migration services, educational and social organizations in the conditions of new social realities.

The main methods of the conducted mini-research are overt observation, interview, case-method, study of the specialized scientific literature and German-language press publications, media space monitoring.