Four Dimensions of Membership in Germany

Abstract

Four Dimensions of Membership in Germany Douglas Klusmeyer* (bio) [E]ffective citizenship establishes the frame for fierce contention over rights and obligations of different categories within populations subject to the same governmental institution. Given substantial citizenship at a national scale, inequalities based on gender, race, national origin, recency of arrival in the territory, employment, income, and welfare become issues of citizenship. In practice, all states compromise citizenship significantly in two ways: (1) by distinguishing among categories and degrees of citizenship that imply different rights, obligations, and relations to authorities; and (2) by advertising as general rights and obligations arrangements that actually differ significantly in their applicability to various segments of the state’s subject population. 1 Despite the reception of many millions of migrants since the end of the Second World War, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) has long officially declared itself not to be an immigration society. 2 In reality, between 1950 and 1994, approximately 80 percent of the increase in the West German population resulted from migration. This proportion amounts to 12.9 million persons. 3 From 1960 to 1998, the share of the foreign population in the FRG rose approximately from 1.2 percent to 9 percent. 4 Recognizing this trend, most serious scholars of migration have flatly rejected the FRG official self-characterization, and routinely describe the FRG as a de facto immigration land. 5 As Christian Joppke has recently observed, the most striking feature of the government’s response to the FRG’s migration [End Page 1] experience has not been its persistent reluctance to acknowledge the reality of large-scale immigration, but rather its continual insistence on grounding its policy in a self-conception of national identity defined by a perceived counter-model: the immigration land. 6 Why articulate a primary policy rationale on the basis of what is not the putative case rather than on what is—in terms of the consequences to be feared, rather than in terms of the benefits to be gained? Why insist on a simplistic dichotomy between cases rather than distinguish the particular elements of each case according to their individual relevance? The government’s perception that managing migration poses significant policy challenges is hardly unusual, but its arch-defensiveness in response to these challenges has crippled its ability to chart a positive policy agenda and to build public support for that agenda. 7 As a result, major government policy initiatives in this area have too often been reactive rather than proactive. During the 1990s, for example, the government liberalized its highly restrictive naturalization rules only after all other perceived alternatives had failed and continued inaction seemed untenable. The rapid pace of reunification understandably caught the government by surprise but it also offered an unprecedented opportunity to reassess its post-war migration experience and to chart a new direction for the future. Beginning with the asylum issue in the late 1980s that Chancellor Helmut Kohl likened to a “state of emergency,” 8 German government policy remained reactive. The massive rise in the number of asylum seekers entering the FRG in the late 1980s and early 1990s certainly was a serious policy challenge, but Kohl’s response—casting the issue as if the fate of the German constitutional order was at stake—was extreme. Although the number of asylum seekers had plummeted by the mid-1990s, the government proved no more willing than it had been earlier to rethink the fundamental assumptions and goals behind its migration policy. As the decade draws to a close, the narrow controversy over the legal permissibility of dual citizenship has distracted attention from the broader context surrounding important new legislative reforms. The issue of persons holding binding affiliations to more than one state has significant and far-reaching implications for questions concerning the meaning and status of membership in a state. But grappling seriously with these implications requires directly addressing the questions themselves rather than using dual citizenship as a proxy or convenient wedge issue to divide the [End Page 2] public. There is no better place to start exploring such questions than by re-examining the formulation of membership in the German constitutional order. Membership and the Constitution The Basic Law...