Don’t Be Fooled: Integration in Germany Is Making Progress
You wouldn’t expect it in light of the resurgent German debate about the willingness of young Muslims to integrate into mainstream society, but integration in Germany is actually faring better than expected.
Jonathan Laurence is associate professor of political science at Boston College and nonresident senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of “The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims” (Princeton University Press, 2012).
With his highly selective summary of a 700- page integration report - focusing on the one in four “non-German Muslims” who resist majority society - Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich confirmed his pattern of expressing skepticism about Muslim integration in Germany.
From the moment Friedrich took office, he updated the 1990s conservatives mantra that “Germany is not a country of immigration” for the post-citizenship reform era by arguing that Islam did not truly “belong” to Germany. He thereby inserted himself in a decades-long tradition of conservative politicians in denial of the country’s ethno-religious diversity.
Germany is lacking the mainstream political leaders who can take away the punchbowl of nationalism and assume the adult role of informing the German public that they are now a diverse society. The new nationality law may mean that most Turkish-Germans would be born with German citizenship from 2000 onwards, but German politicians have still not fully digested the implications of cultural diversity that follow from that reform.
Diversity deniers
Friedrich is the latest in a line of diversity deniers who have preferred to wear blinders rather than break the news to the German electorate. These politicians share a basic refusal to accept that the categories of Muslims and German might not be mutually exclusive.
The views of Hans-Peter Friedrich have a long pedigree that crosses partisan lines. They don’t appear so different from those of Thilo Sarrazin, the former federal banker who argued that migrant stock was “dumbing down” the country, and who said he felt justified by the recent study.
Sarrrazin, in turn, had significant overlap with former CSU Interior Minister Günther Beckstein in Bavaria, who was an ideological successor to the former Berlin/Brandenburg Interior Minister Jörg Schönbohm.
This national kabuki surrounding the place of Islam in German identity, however, is increasingly belied by a number of encouraging trends in German Muslims’ citizenship and institutional integration.
Positive development
Oddly, the transfer of a Turkish-German prisoner to Düsseldorf last month may turn out to be a far more meaningful event for the future of Turkish-Germans in the Federal Republic. The family of Murat Kaya, a Turkish German sentenced to four years in a Serbian prison, sought the aid of German authorities to allow him to serve his term at home in Germany - and against expectations, their wishes were granted.
The Kaya family had reason to despair. Germany’s track record of offering diplomatic protection and claiming “ownership” of Turkish-Germans in the pre-citizenship era had been mixed.
The 1998 Bavarian deportation of “Mehmet,” a 14-year-old juvenile delinquent raised in Germany, who spoke only German and who was sent “home” to Turkey, seemed to illustrate perfectly the country’s ambivalence toward this minority.