Germany - No Quarter Given

I have asked if Britain agrees with Nick, but events seems to be conspiring to make Mr Clegg's opinion of a 'mature' Europe to aspire to (Clegg, 2002) a touch fanciful.

Back in August an immigration based row kicked off in Germany, courtesy of the opinions of SPD politician and boardmember of the Bundesbank, Mr Thilo Sarrazin (Hewitt, 2010). The issue having been provoked, Mr Sarrazin quit under pressure from many including Chancellor Angela Merkel (BBC, 2010).

A month later, however, Chancellor Merkel added her own opinion to the debate, offering that multi-culturalism had 'failed, utterly failed' (Evans, 2010). There is something inconsistent about this view point to me.

The issue at hand is integration. The issue at hand is breaking down the walls of cultural segregation. But these have never been the point of multi-culturalism. The point of multi-culturalism has always been tolerance.

Multi-culturalism did precisely what it would be expected to do. It created a situation where separate cultures were side-by-side with one another, co-existing. The evidence suggests that problems arise between distinct cultural, linguistic and even ethnic groups when times are hard. And times are hard everywhere these days.

Extremism is something we ought to be familiar with by now. It has sprung up many times in our history and usually centred on eras & places of intensive crisis, social & economic; and when it does it connects powerfully to perceived similarity. The hardships provoke tension and factionalism as people withdraw into their identity redoubts.

My concerns are:

+ Firstly that focusing the blame upon multi-culturalism simply concedes ground to intolerance, rather than seeking to overcome it. It avoids dealing with the true, usually economic, difficulties that force people to seek the shelter of a familiar, often idealised, community.

+ Secondly, that such scapegoating risks providing fodder to those who wish to build up walls around national identity as a way of imposing anachronistic, simplistic and stereotypical national characters upon the people; usually in  the name of their safety, usually at the expense of their liberty.

+ And thirdly, that these comments are designed to play to the notion of the nation-state and national identity as indivisible. That if you should reject your state in order to search for a better life elsewhere, you are also rejecting your history, your heritage and your culture.

As we seek to the respect the wishes of those native nations that wish for representation of their cultural identity, so too do I feel we ought to respect the rights of those who seek our aid & shelter without demanding they renounce everything they are in return for it.

Germany and Britain are already living testament to our ability to live peacefully in multi-cultural societies. Pan-national entities, like the German Federal Republic or the United Kingdom, are already conglomerates made up of many separate nations, with distinct identities.

Cultural, linguistic and ethnic differences are but are few of the plurality of more personalised issues gracing political voices in those states. The future of those states can not be about a suppression of what heritage has made us, but of what commonality and the contributions of diverse knowledge and experiences might make us.

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References:
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+ Nick Clegg's 'Don't mention the war. Grow up'

+ Stephen Evans' 'Germany's charged immigration debate'; [17/10/10]

+ BBC's 'Race-row German banker quits post' [09/09/10]

+ Gavin Hewitt's 'German angst over immigration'; [31/08/10]