The German Debate over Multicultural Society: Climax or Test of Organized Capitalism?

Abstract

Abstract. Until 1993, Germany represented the European country to which more refugees came than to any other country of comparable size and economic potential. This was due not only to the events in former Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe and to political upheavals and economic hardships in developing countries but also to the fact that Germany is in need of immigrants for economic reasons. Hence, the idea of Germany being factually, though not officially, an immigrant society triggered heated debates in both public arenas and intellectual circles. While most conservatives, especially among politicians, reject the idea of Germany as a land of immigrants, most liberals, especially among intellectuals, prefer to link (im)migration to the changing world order and its consequences for both developing and developed countries. After elaborating upon the demographic and economic consequences of migration to Germany, the social consequences of immigration will be discussed by focusing on the idea that immigrants are seen both as strangers and competitors for societal resources. Moreover, it is shown that German unification has fundamentally changed the conditions under which the European nations will push forward their integration in the future. Europe will no longer unite under the old post-war conditions but rather under the new conditions of German hegemony. Germany has become the new centre of attraction for people willing to leave their homelands. Under these auspices, the concept of multiculturalism has naturally taken on a specific meaning in Germany today. In the concluding section the idea of multicultural society is discussed as both a programmatic concept of political struggle and an empirical concept of how to deal with a variety of ethnic groups in modern German society. The current debate over the political, social, economic, and cultural consequences of a multicultural society as well as the causes and consequences of recent right-wing radicalism in Germany provides good reasons for both scenarios that multicultural society may eventually turn out to be the climax or the testing ground for organized capitalism. Introduction: The Problem Germany is indeed an immigration country, not officially but factually. Until the end of 1993 more refugees came to Germany than to any other nation with comparable population size and economic potential. In 1990 four times as many came to Germany than to France and eight times as many to Germany than to Great Britain. On average, migration into (West) Germany had quadrupled since the 1960's. Until 1992 -- the year before the new, restrictive asylum law went into effect -- the number of those seeking asylum had been four times higher than 1988. Germany had then accommodated more immigrants than the classic immigration countries Canada and Australia together. Two out of three seeking asylum in the former European Community did so in Germany: in 1991 a total number of 256,000 and in 1992 almost twice as many. In the United States, by comparison, some 100,000 people apply for asylum at the moment, while the immigration quota stands for 700,000. Gross immigration (including realistic estimates of the unauthorized immigrants) increased from 2.5 million in the 1950's to 10 million in the 1980's. The current level of 1.1 million per year matches the historical record of the first decade of the twentieth century (Fix and Passel 1994: 20), although unofficial estimates of the number of legal and illegal immigrants run as high as two million per year. By 1994, the number of people applying for asylum in Germany has dropped sharply to 130,000, in 1996 to 116,000. Consequently, the focus of public attention changed from how many asylum seekers the country could tolerate to how many and what kind of immigrants it needed. Hence, politicians no longer talk about the asylum law but about a new immigration law. According to official statistics, there are some six million aliens with a residence permit in Germany at this time. …