Angela Merkel: German multiculturalism has 'utterly failed' - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

roachboy · 10-17-2010, 12:21 PM

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.

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.

Daniel_ · 10-17-2010, 12:50 PM

Last time Germany tried to solve "the immigrant problem" it didn't turn out well for the rest of Europe!

(a new record - Godwinned in post 2!)

Craven Morehead · 10-17-2010, 12:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Daniel_

(a new record - Godwinned in post 2!)

But unlike other Godwin responses, yours was relevant to the topic.

Daniel_ · 10-17-2010, 01:21 PM

That's a good point - and in fact didn't Godwin include a caveat that in a discussion where it was relevant you can't do it?

Bugger.

Anyway - this is an interesting area. I'm not sure if it shows that Germans have grown up enough to see past the 30's, or have slipped back into an old paradigm.

Overall, the issue of how we come to terms with the poor of the world wanting to come to the rich nations is going to shape 21st century politics in the same way that the issue of rich people going to poor countries shaped the 19th and rich people wanting the land of their neighbours shaped the 20th.

Baraka_Guru · 10-17-2010, 02:04 PM

Well, the problem is that this isn't an inherently German problem. It's a problem with any state with a strong sense of nationalism. I think roachboy's OP is a good foundation to explaining this phenomenon, and it happens elsewhere.

Take Japan for instance:

Quote:

A black sun rises in a declining Japan
MARK MacKINNON
The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, Oct. 05, 2010

Until recently, it was the likes of Mitsuhiro Kimura that worried Japan's political mainstream. The leader of the far-right Issuikai movement, he counted Saddam Hussein and French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen among his allies, and created friction with Japan's neighbours by loudly denying the country's Second World War crimes.

But now Mr. Kimura is among those concerned about a new breed of extremists, who are capitalizing on the bruised pride and swelling anger in Japan with a brand of politics that makes even a friend of the former Iraqi dictator uncomfortable. As this country staggers through a second decade of economic stagnation, and suffers the indignation of being eclipsed by historic rival China, there's a common refrain coming from the growing ranks of this country's young and angry: Japan must stand up for itself - and that foreigners are to blame for the country's ills.

Take the past week alone. Infuriated by a perceived Japanese climbdown in a dispute with China over an island chain that both nations claim, right-wingers tossed smoke bombs at the Chinese consulates in the cities of Fukuoka and Nagasaki. Another man was arrested with a knife in his bag outside the Tokyo residence of Prime Minister Naoto Kan. On Friday, a motorcade of 60 cars organized by a right-wing group briefly surrounded a bus carrying Chinese tourists in Fukuoka, prompting Beijing to issue a warning to its citizens about the dangers of visiting Japan.

No one was hurt in any of the incidents. But they highlight a tide of rising nationalism that is just one of the new social ills afflicting a country that 20 years ago was the richest and most stable on the planet. Two consecutive "lost decades" and a dearth of political leadership - five prime ministers in the past four years - have unmoored Japan.

[...]

With unemployment at a historic high of over 5 per cent - a number that understates the problem since many Japanese have given up looking for work altogether - the newly homeless now fill the country's parks and Internet cafés. Twenty-three per cent of Tokyo schoolchildren will rely on government aid for things such as school supplies this year. Depression stalks the country and 26,500 people committed suicide in 2009, the highest rate in the world. If the Great Recession is over, it doesn't feel like the recovery has started yet in Japan.

As in Europe 80 years ago, blame for the country's troubles has fallen on foreigners. The No. 1 target is ethnic Koreans who live in Japan (Zaitokukai is the Japanese acronym for the group's unwieldy formal title, Citizens' Group That Will Not Forgive Special Privileges for Koreans in Japan), followed by the Chinese. A liberalized immigration system, which pundits across the spectrum agree is desperately needed to help deal with a rapidly aging population, is considered too sensitive to touch for any politician concerned about keeping his job in the next election.

"There are of course some similarities with the fascist and Nazi movements. Those who join Zaitokukai are the jobless and the underemployed, those on the periphery of the established society. They're disheartened, and they have a lot of frustration," said Gemki Fujii, a right-wing intellectual and author. However, he said that Zaitokukai is doomed to remain a fringe group because few Japanese admire the group's abrasive tactics.

But the xenophobia that Zaitokukai helps spread via the Internet and its street demonstrations appears to be taking hold in Japan, which has a long tradition of isolating itself from the world. Racist comments about the country's ethnic Korean and Chinese citizens are startlingly common, while other foreigners - including some long-term residents of Japan - say they also feel increasingly unwelcome, and complain of police harassment and rules that prevent non-Japanese from renting homes or gaining professional tenure.

While many of Japan's neighbours - including China and both North and South Korea - say Tokyo still needs to do more to atone for its wartime misdeeds, academics say the country is moving in the opposite direction.

"There's been a re-emergence of a right-wing, nationalistic discourse and reinterpretation of history," said Koichi Nakano, an associate professor of political science at Sophia University in Tokyo. "Go into a Tokyo bookstore and you're bound to run into piles of books that would not be acceptable in Western society - Holocaust denials and the such. If it were Germany, there would be a big scandal in the international community. But because it's Japan and [the books are] in Japanese, it makes it kind of invisible."

[...]

A black sun rises in a declining Japan - The Globe and Mail

Essentially the patterns are there for you to see in any nation state when things turn sour. People like to look for scapegoats. The easiest scapegoats are those who exist outside of the mainstream: the abject, the poor, foreigners, basically anyone viewed as outside the "norm"---the norm being what is desirable, or what is considered "real" according to the nationalistic mindset: a "real" German, or a "real" American for instance.

When things turn really bad, people turn against ruling powers. Of course, it's in the best interests of ruling powers to ensure that doesn't happen, and so they deflect the issue elsewhere. Sometimes they deflect it to where the real problem is, which is often a systemic thing, either the economic system or the social/political system, but these things are difficult to manage or change. The alternative to that is focusing on what people are (or can be) convinced is the problem: and now we're back to the easiest scapegoats.

hiredgun · 10-22-2010, 07:18 AM

roach, I'm not expert on Germany, but my impression is that multi-kulti in the German context means something quite different from what [the perpetually besieged concept of] 'multi-culturalism' signifies in the US.

In my understanding, multi-kulti was an arrangement designed to keep guest workers socially and politically separate from 'Germans'. So a retreat from multi-kulti might not have the xenophobic implications one might think - many opponents of the guest worker policy actually argue for greater integration and inclusion of immigrant populations in mainstream German life.

Admittedly this is all sort of hypothetical for me and entirely information-free - sorry about that. Maybe I just find it really hard to conceive that this move could mean what critics think it means; naked anti-immigrant rhetoric from the top seems so out of character for Germany.

I'd be curious whether the debate in Germany is framed the same way as in these English sources (is this seen as a 'rightward lurch', is Merkel really saying that 'more is required' of immigrants in the sense that they're [in US-right parlance] not pulling their weight, or is she simply restating the case for integration?)

Baraka_Guru · 10-22-2010, 07:32 AM

To be fair, if you look at "multikulti" compared to what we view as "multiculturalism" in Canada, the former is a bit of a misnomer. It's true, hiredgun, the guest workers in Germany weren't expected to integrate. I think there were even measures barring/hindering them from doing so. They were guests. They were expected to leave when their contracts expired, but since they were filling jobs that Germans wouldn't, Germans lobbied to keep them.

The segment of Turks in particular became indifferent to the whole process of integration even when, more recently, it became a possibility. Of course they're not integrated.

On the other hand, in Canada, over 80% of immigrants become citizens every year. We also have an emphasis on learning English or French. However, we also encourage people to maintain their cultural heritage. Multikulti and Canadian multiculturalism are two different things. So-called "multikulti" was basically "we need workers, so lets bring some in."

10-17-2010, 12:50 PM	#2 (permalink)
Daniel_ Evil Priest: The Devil Made Me Do It! Location: Southern England	Last time Germany tried to solve "the immigrant problem" it didn't turn out well for the rest of Europe! (a new record - Godwinned in post 2!) __________________ ╔═════════════════════════════════════════╗ Overhead, the Albatross hangs motionless upon the air, And deep beneath the rolling waves, In labyrinths of Coral Caves, The Echo of a distant time Comes willowing across the sand; And everthing is Green and Submarine ╚═════════════════════════════════════════╝

10-17-2010, 01:21 PM	#4 (permalink)
Daniel_ Evil Priest: The Devil Made Me Do It! Location: Southern England	That's a good point - and in fact didn't Godwin include a caveat that in a discussion where it was relevant you can't do it? Bugger. Anyway - this is an interesting area. I'm not sure if it shows that Germans have grown up enough to see past the 30's, or have slipped back into an old paradigm. Overall, the issue of how we come to terms with the poor of the world wanting to come to the rich nations is going to shape 21st century politics in the same way that the issue of rich people going to poor countries shaped the 19th and rich people wanting the land of their neighbours shaped the 20th. __________________ ╔═════════════════════════════════════════╗ Overhead, the Albatross hangs motionless upon the air, And deep beneath the rolling waves, In labyrinths of Coral Caves, The Echo of a distant time Comes willowing across the sand; And everthing is Green and Submarine ╚═════════════════════════════════════════╝

10-22-2010, 07:32 AM	#7 (permalink)
Baraka_Guru warrior bodhisattva Super Moderator Location: East-central Canada	To be fair, if you look at "multikulti" compared to what we view as "multiculturalism" in Canada, the former is a bit of a misnomer. It's true, hiredgun, the guest workers in Germany weren't expected to integrate. I think there were even measures barring/hindering them from doing so. They were guests. They were expected to leave when their contracts expired, but since they were filling jobs that Germans wouldn't, Germans lobbied to keep them. The segment of Turks in particular became indifferent to the whole process of integration even when, more recently, it became a possibility. Of course they're not integrated. On the other hand, in Canada, over 80% of immigrants become citizens every year. We also have an emphasis on learning English or French. However, we also encourage people to maintain their cultural heritage. Multikulti and Canadian multiculturalism are two different things. So-called "multikulti" was basically "we need workers, so lets bring some in." __________________ Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing? —Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön Humankind cannot bear very much reality. —From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot Last edited by Baraka_Guru; 10-22-2010 at 07:39 AM..

10-22-2010, 07:18 AM	#6 (permalink)
hiredgun Addict	roach, I'm not expert on Germany, but my impression is that multi-kulti in the German context means something quite different from what [the perpetually besieged concept of] 'multi-culturalism' signifies in the US. In my understanding, multi-kulti was an arrangement designed to keep guest workers socially and politically separate from 'Germans'. So a retreat from multi-kulti might not have the xenophobic implications one might think - many opponents of the guest worker policy actually argue for greater integration and inclusion of immigrant populations in mainstream German life. Admittedly this is all sort of hypothetical for me and entirely information-free - sorry about that. Maybe I just find it really hard to conceive that this move could mean what critics think it means; naked anti-immigrant rhetoric from the top seems so out of character for Germany. I'd be curious whether the debate in Germany is framed the same way as in these English sources (is this seen as a 'rightward lurch', is Merkel really saying that 'more is required' of immigrants in the sense that they're [in US-right parlance] not pulling their weight, or is she simply restating the case for integration?)