Refugees Welcome?

Difference and Diversity in a Changing Germany

Jan-Jonathan Bock, Sharon Macdonald, Jan-Jonathan Bock, Sharon Macdonald

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781789201352
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789201291
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

The arrival in 2015 and 2016 of over one million asylum seekers and refugees in Germany had major social consequences and gave rise to extensive debates about the nature of cultural diversity and collective life. This volume examines the responses and implications of what was widely seen as the most significant and contested social change since German reunification in 1990. It combines in-depth studies based on anthropological fieldwork with analyses of the longer trajectories of migration and social change. Its original conclusions have significance not only for Germany but also for the understanding of diversity and difference more widely.

Part I

Making Germans and Non-Germans

Chapter 1

Language as Battleground

‘Speaking’ the Nation, Lingual Citizenship and Diversity Management in Post-unification Germany

Uli Linke

Over the past three decades, the powerful matrix of globalization has deeply affected European nation forms and political systems. Socialist state ideologies crumbled in an era embattled by popular demands for change. Following the opening of the Berlin Wall, with the corresponding dismantling of the spatial fixity of borders and the successful push against the carceral immobility of subjects, German unification became a plausible reality (Stone 2014). By the end of the Cold War, new possibilities for envisioning society had energized public discourse, impelling major transformations in the fabric of Europe’s ethno-national landscape (Linke 1999, 2010; Partridge 2012; Smith 2006). The formation of the European Union further promoted the creation of open borders and ‘market liquidity’ (Gotham 2009). The subsequent entanglement of state and corporate interests not only changed the political contours of Europe but also altered the conditions under which imaginaries of national belonging were brought to public visibility (Fenner and Linke 2014). How have conceptions of nationality and citizenship been affected in this globally transformed political space?

In the European Union, the realities of ethnic diversity, cultural pluralism and multilingualism have unravelled the idea of nationals as a homogeneous or undifferentiated group (Geraghty and Conacher 2016; Gogolin 2002; Rindler Schjerve and Vetter 2012; Studer and Werlen 2012). Yet as Europe struggles to retain political and economic unity by coming to terms with secessionist challenges and exit strategies pursued by some Member States, we see a concurrent push towards inequality, cultural exclusion and linguistic marginalization (Linke 2002, 2010). The legacies of colonialism and fascist nationalism not only continue to imprint the privilege of whiteness onto the new map of Europe, but also sustain the fortification of Europe as a hegemonic ‘white’ space (Gilroy 2004; Hall 2000; Linke 2011, 2014). From this perspective, the focus on belonging in Europe requires a critical reassessment. In efforts to both accommodate and repel the tension-fraught effects of a globalizing Europe, local reassertions of national distinction have given rise to new measures of exclusion, framed by anti-immigrant sentiments and ethnoracial solidarities.

In this chapter, I examine how such commitments to nationhood have regained prominence in EU countries. My analysis of the shifting parameters of national belonging proceeds by a focus on post-unification Germany. While specific concerns about border security or nationalist history might not be applicable to all EU Member States, there has been a coordinated push towards national distinction and forms of lingual citizenship across all sovereignties (Barát et al. 2013; Kamusella 2012). Since the late 1990s, the projected frontiers of European nation states are increasingly mapped through the medium of language. In Germany, as in France or Denmark, national identity politics have become language politics, a terrain marked by fears of linguistic estrangement and a public preoccupation with preserving an authentic national interior (Barbour and Carmichael 2000). The German nation is configured as a speech community of ethnic Germans. Such a performative vision of nationhood draws on quasi-mythic notions of the German political community as a language-body, a closed linguistic corpus, which is sustained by a phantasmatic landscape of intensely charged concepts: nation, nature and race.

Building on these insights, my reflections on language politics in contemporary Germany rely on a montage of data from multiple sources. Informed by earlier studies of ethnoracial machinations in Europe (Carter 2010; Goldberg 2006; Hine et al. 2009; Hintjens 2007; Linke 1999, 2014; Wacquant 2008), my project draws on long-term fieldwork in Germany. During a four-year residence as a faculty member at the University of Tübingen from 1997 to 2001, I had the opportunity to become an observing participant of the problematic formation of the European Union, the shared currency of the eurozone and the subsequent implementation of Europeanizing initiatives, such as language reform and the rearticulation of immigration policies. Living and working in Germany provided me with access to diverse forms of community and modalities of research. In addition to follow-up study trips, my insights about German nationalism and ethnic diversity were further enhanced by an extensive scrutiny of media images, news reports and political discourse, as well as EU documents.

Guided by the expansive scholarship on global racial formations in the twenty-first century (Appadurai 2003; Gilroy 2003; Goldberg 2009; Thomas and Clarke 2006; Winant 2001), the presentation of my research findings follows a critical approach to contemporary forms of national belonging. My chapter begins with a brief sketch of the broader context of transborder politics in Europe. I draw on Germany’s visual self-presentation to the world, central to which is the trope of the nation as a white female icon, whose promotional allure propagates open borders for global investors. This gendered fantasy of nationhood coexists with national discourses about the entry of immigrants and Muslim refugees into Europe, which is perceived by some segments of the German population as a threat to sovereignty and culture. It is noteworthy that in 2015–16, a multitude of responses crystallized in public discourse. When Angela Merkel’s government showed its willingness to accommodate around one million refugees from the war-torn Middle East, this decision was conveyed to voters by an appeal to Germany’s historical obligation to atone for its past and by suggesting that to offer protection to the victims of war was both a Christian ideal as well as a humanitarian act (Gauck 2015). When thousands of refugees from Iraq and Syria entered Europe to seek asylum in Germany, the news media observed a nationwide compliance with these state directives. By promoting a ‘culture of welcome’ (Willkommenskultur), a display of hospitality and integration assistance, Germans initially participated in a government policy of ‘diversity management’, a policy put in place several years earlier to support the short-term recruitment of high-tech professionals from Asia (Amrute 2016; BAMF 2011; The Economist 2015; Merx et al. 2013). In 2014, this national action plan was expanded to include refugees (Ulrich 2015). According to one observer, ‘thousands of Germans have pitched in; they take food and clothes to the camps, take refugees to meetings with the authorities in their own cars, pay their fares, foot their medical bills, teach German, translate forms, share couches and bikes, act as nannies, open up soccer clubs, schools and kindergartens for refugee kids, and go on demonstrations against rightwing attacks across the country’ (Akrap 2015). This affective participation in Germany’s ‘culture of welcome’ turned into fear in 2016, when the national media began to report mass sexual assaults of women by North African and Middle Eastern men in Cologne, Hamburg and other metropolitan centres (Noack 2016). As rumours of the attacks circulated on social media, the public resentment against border-crossers intensified. When government officials linked the sexual assaults to the influx of refugees, the welcoming sentiments towards asylum seekers diminished. Muslim men were depicted as sexual predators, whose uncontrolled presence posed a danger to German society (see also Kosnick, Chapter 7 in this volume). This was the context for the formation of anti-immigrant movements and a growing resistance to ethnic diversity.

In aligning these shifting approaches to German experiences of national and cultural insecurity, my aim is first to offer an overview of European racializing practices before analysing the emergent phenomenon of linguistic nationalism. In subsequent sections of this chapter, my discussion turns to German citizenship debates and the push for border fortification via the instrument of a national language. My evidence derives from a diversity of intersecting sociopolitical fields that render visible the phantasms of language purity and fears of linguistic difference. In this chapter, I interrogate the role of language as a battleground for contested notions of immigrant presence and national belonging in post-unification Germany. Central to my analysis is the German experience of cultural difference and its implications for immigration and refugee policies.

Whiteness as a National Emblem: Branding Distinctions

What resources are mobilized by European nation states to reclaim their sovereignty under globalization? In the twenty-first century, the manufacture of European national distinction has increasingly shifted to the marketplace, the terrain of advertising, fashion and media. Culture industries manufacture nationalist longing by means of commodity desire and consumption. When circulated across political borders to attract foreign investment and international consumer attention, such promotional discourses rely on familiar motifs: gender, sex and race. Consider the following example, a worldwide marketing campaign co-sponsored by the German government, which provides a glimpse of the nationality project that has buttressed the lingual citizenship debates in Germany: in London, New York and Tokyo, gigantic billboards in subway stations and airports promote financial investment opportunities in Germany by featuring supermodel Claudia Schiffer (Land of Ideas 2018; see Figure 1.1). Seductively posed, her pale white body is stretched horizontally across the visual frame: an endless space of whiteness. She is casually positioned, reclined on her side. The silky fabric of the German national flag, which is tenderly draped across her torso, accentuates her body’s nudity, revealing the immaculate smoothness of her legs and arms. She is facing the camera, her head slightly propped up, framed by her arms and cascading blond hair. Posed against a white screen, she extends an invitation as part of the global marketing campaign. This advocacy of German business ventures is further articulated by a series of suggestive slogans: ‘Discover the beauty of the deal’; ‘Invest in Germany, boys’; ‘Interested in a serious relationship?’; ‘Want to get down to business?’; ‘Come on over to my place’; ‘Follow your instincts’.

Figure 1.1 Invest-in-Germany campaign poster in New York 2008. Photo credit: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images, used with permission.

In these spaces of transborder capitalism, the German marketing initiative is infused with erotic messages. The campaign toys with the seductive image of the goddess Europa and her political counterpart Germania, a female personification of the German nation, thereby not only calling upon myth, history and ancestry, but also shifting attention to the lure of the ‘white woman’ to evoke gendered fantasies of sexual conquest and erotic capture. The campaign designers envision international investors as male, as business-men, whose economic desires can be fulfilled by intimacy with the German nation as a female plaything. In this promotional fantasy, transnational financial endeavours are staged as intimate erotic encounters. Capital investment in Germany is presented as a sexual adventure. The white female body/nation is offered up as a consumable commodity in global capitalist space. Although the white female figure inhabits this imaginary terrain, she is branded as a political subject: the German flag envelops her body; she is marked as a national icon. Like a ventriloquist’s doll, she gives corporal form and voice to the nation’s desires.

Yet the work of neoliberal economies, with their seductive promise of unlimited possibilities, is simultaneously defended as a state-protected privilege, a concession of citizenship reserved for German nationals. The political spaces of capitalism are closely guarded. Law-makers, politicians and media industries call upon imaginaries of language, gender and race to authorize or deny participation in the dreamworlds of prosperity. The formation of the security state after 9/11 has intensified this process, giving rise to new border regimes that have fundamentally altered the possibilities of negotiating matters of national belonging (Linke 2010, 2014). My research across Europe’s multinational spaces reveals that the collusion of global economic restructuring and entrenched local commitments propagates old as well as new disparities.

This trajectory is evident in various domains of social experience, including gender politics. The European Union takes a protective stance to women, such as codifying their reproductive/maternal agency, while at the same time conjuring foreign masculinities as a security risk. In turn, as I suggest in the subsequent sections, national discourses of diversity normalize white womanhood while ignoring differences in sexual or ethnic subjectivities.

Modalities of Difference: Gender, Race and Immigration

As a reformist entity, the European Union has positioned itself as a legal order against the unprecedented fluidity and instability of global power relations: the judicial system, according to Clare McGlynn (2006), has become the ‘Union’s genetic code’. Although founded on a political order sensitive to difference and inequality, the quest for unity and uniformity has tended to erode the acceptance of otherness. In other words, Europe’s preoccupation with judicial matters, which seeks to neutralize legal pluralism and minimize the incoherence of rights in local political practice, produces unforeseen results. Following McGlynn (2006: 9), ‘[t]here is a tendency for the presence of rights to somehow construct the ideal rights-bearing citizen. This assertion of “ideal citizen” models, with its consequent marginalization and exclusion of the non-ideal, carries a particular resonance for feminists’, and for civil rights advocates.

European family policy reforms provide an instructive example: by a focus on protecting women’s reproductive capacity, the figure of the single, childless or lesbian woman is rendered invisible (Griffin and Braidotti 2002). While granting generous provision for maternity leave and maternal healthcare, such policy measures confirm prevailing gender expectations. In the family reform documents, ‘women are presented as a homogeneous category without race, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, ability or any other life dimension’ (Lombardo and Meier 2002: 157–8). Women’s distinguishing feature is defined as the ability to produce children. Europe’s legal intervention in the family aims to protect female procreativity as a matter of equal opportunity, thereby reifying women’s traditional roles as mothers and caregivers. Although focused on enabling women’s participation in the marketplace without infringing upon maternal responsibilities, Europe’s legal rights discourse does not prioritize gender equality. The reforms and provisions speak to political concerns about a demographic crisis, a shrinking European and German population, which is attributed to decreasing fertility rates among white women (Linke 2011: 132–34, 2014). If white women, as in Germany, are both idealized as alluring national icons and as vulnerable subjects in need of state protection, then white womanhood can be culturally reimagined as a critical issue in the terrain of national security. According to this logic, white motherhood and female reproduction require defensive measures against racialized minorities.

Negotiating Europeanness: The Muslim-Arab-Other

Seen through the affective resonance of a global security lockdown, transborder migration in Europe is linked to an intrusive, negative presence that needs to be diminished or controlled. Under such conditions, marked by a politics of fear...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Making, Experiencing and Managing Difference in a Changing Germany
• Part I. Making Germans and Non-Germans
• Part II. Potential for Change
• Part III. Refugee Encounters
• Part IV. New Initiatives and Directions
• Index