this from the morning's guardian:
Quote:
Angela Merkel: German multiculturalism has 'utterly failed'
Chancellor's assertion that onus is on new arrivals to do more to integrate into German society stirs anti-immigration debate
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has courted growing anti-immigrant opinion in Germany by claiming the country's attempts to create a multicultural society have "utterly failed".
Speaking to a meeting of young members of her Christian Democratic Union party, Merkel said the idea of people from different cultural backgrounds living happily "side by side" did not work.
She said the onus was on immigrants to do more to integrate into German society.
"This [multicultural] approach has failed, utterly failed," Merkel told the meeting in Potsdam, south of Berlin, yesterday.
Her remarks will stir a debate about immigration in a country which is home to around 4 million Muslims.
Last week, Horst Seehofer, the premier of Bavaria and a member of the Christian Social Union – part of Merkel's ruling coalition – called for a halt to Turkish and Arabic immigration.
In the past, Merkel has tried to straddle both sides of the argument by talking tough on integration but also calling for an acceptance of mosques.
But she faces pressure from within the CDU to take a harder line on immigrants who show resistance to being integrated into German society.
Yesterday's speech is widely seen as a lurch to the right designed to placate that element in her party.
Merkel said too little had been required of immigrants in the past and repeated her argument that they should learn German in order to cope in school and take advantage of opportunities in the labour market.
The row over foreigners in Germany has shifted since former central banker Thilo Sarrazin published a highly-controversial book in which he accused Muslim immigrants of lowering the intelligence of German society.
Sarrazin was censured for his views and dismissed from the Bundesbank, but his book proved popular and polls showed Germans were sympathetic with the thrust of his arguments.
One recent poll showed one-third of Germans believed the country was "overrun by foreigners".
It also found 55% of Germans believed that Arabs are "unpleasant people", compared with the 44% who held the opinion seven years ago.
In her speech, Merkel said the education of unemployed Germans should take priority over recruiting workers from abroad, while noting that Germany could not get by without skilled foreign workers.
The chancellor's remarks appear to confirm a suspicion that she has sympathy with Sarrazin's anti-immigrant rhetoric. On Friday, he declared: "Multiculturalism is dead".
Other members of Merkel's government disagree. In a weekend newspaper interview, her labour minister, Ursula von der Leyen (CDU), raised the possibility of lowering barriers to entry for some foreign workers in order to fight the lack of skilled workers in Europe's largest economy.
"For a few years, more people have been leaving our country than entering it," she told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
"Wherever it is possible, we must lower the entry hurdles for those who bring the country forward."
The German Chamber of Industry and Commerce (DIHK) has said Germany lacks about 400,000 skilled workers.
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Angela Merkel: German multiculturalism has 'utterly failed' | World news | guardian.co.uk
what do you make of this?
on the surface, it seems a patently absurd position to adopt because it deploys "muliculturalism" as a meme, so as close to meaningless, in order to announce it's ""utter failure"---it's absurd because it doesn't correlate to anything on the ground--no sudden breakdowns, no events in the world.
but it is a shift to the right, and is a political calculation. the article outlines this pretty well, so there's no reason to repeat it.
it seems to me that conservative politics in western europe and the united states are coming to resemble each other in that there's an assimilation and normalization of neo-fascist themes. and anti-immigration, anti-diversity, anti-islamic memes are all regular currency in those far-right climates.
this seems to enable a massive displacement of economic anxieties, social position anxieties and the consequences for nation-states of the dominance of trans-national capital flows and the institutional frameworks that enable them--control given away over how manufacturing is organized geographically for example which amounts to a giving-away of an entire conception of what sort of politics are required to counter the tendency of capitalist activity to destroy social solidarity even as that activity presupposes that solidarity. another way: nation-states confront the consequences of the transnationalization of economic activity in terms of, say, unemployment and without coherent ways to address them, without traditional social-democratic full-employment policy options (because the empirical geography of capitalism has changed) and hobbled by a politics that actively obstructs thinking of stuff like full employment because measures of the "well-being" of capital have replaced them.
so because this is the case, you have conservative politics resorting over and over to manipulating some notion of national identity by positing some Other which endangers it. merkel is speaking in conservative code against what she apparently takes as a critical relation to that illusion of national identity, the idea that a nation is really just a geographical space in which lots of different types of people from lots of different backgrounds who hold lots of different types of belief can an do coexist.
this seems to me a dangerous game for all kinds of reasons.
but what do you think?
do you agree with the above or not? why or why not?
what do you think is going on with merkel's statement?
btw feel free to post information about or comment on the social situation in parts of germany. we can go that way. but i thought it might be simplest to set this up as a mirror-image of stuff that's happening in the u.s. in particular and see what develops.