http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/15/international/15letter.html
Letter From Europe: A Continent Watching Anxiously Over the Melting Pot
December 15, 2004
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
BERLIN, Dec. 14 - Imagine a former American president
publicly grumbling that it was a mistake for a certain
group to have been allowed to immigrate to the United
States - the Irish, say, or Jews, or Pakistanis. The
outrage would be justifiably loud.
But a former German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, now 85,
recently declared that Germany should never have invited in
all those Turkish guest workers in the 1950's and 60's,
because, he suggested, multiculturalism can work only in an
authoritarian society.
The comment was not widely regarded as brilliant or wise,
but it caused no uproar; indeed, it was consistent with
many statements coming from German leaders lately on the
subject of ethnic and cultural minorities.
"Multiculturalism has failed, big time," Angela Merkel, the
almost certain conservative candidate for chancellor in the
next national elections, said recently. Many political
figures and commentators have been saying that immigrants
should accept what the Germans call the leitkultur, the
dominant culture, as their own, or they should leave.
"We cannot allow foreigners to destroy this common basis,"
warned Jörg Schönbohm, the interior minister of the state
of Brandenburg.
And so the question: why are Germans - and not just Germans
but other Europeans as well - in such a state of anxiety
and uncertainty about matters that have been more or less
settled in the world's biggest country of immigration, the
United States, for years? Why this discomfort with
multiculturalism, this belief that assimilation, accepting
the leitkultur, is the only way?
One reason clearly has to do with a dread of terrorism and
Muslim fundamentalism. A great deal of the current heated
discussion was prompted by the killing of the Dutch
filmmaker Theo van Gogh, allegedly by a Muslim militant.
The killing has had a galvanizing effect in this country,
where the feeling was strong that the conditions were in
place for something like it to happen here.
But, of course, the Americans suffered a vastly greater
attack than the Dutch did, and that has not led to strong
anti-diversity sentiment. In the immediate aftermath of
9/11, there were deep new suspicions, and widespread
roundups of Muslims suspected of connections to terrorism.
About the only area where the United States approaches the
European debate on assimilation is in bilingual education,
an issue that waxes and wanes. But there is no
anti-immigrant political party in America, not even the
constituency for one.
The difference, many here say, is that the United States
was basically created by immigrants, and Europe was not.
Therefore, especially after the civil rights movement,
diversity in the United States has come to be seen as a
value in itself, while Europe sees it as threatening.
But this explanation, too, only goes so far. European
countries have experienced large migrations for much of
their history - the Poles in Germany, for example. What
many people are saying, and certainly what many more people
believe, is that the problem for Europe is less the
traditions of the majority population than the nature of
the immigrants themselves.
Specifically, in Europe the immigration is largely Muslim,
and that has brought into the heart of the Continent a
large population that resists integration and includes a
proportion of people who are like the suspect in the Van
Gogh killing: angry religious militants carrying on a war
to the death with the West.
"The cultural problem is the crucial one," said Heinrich
August Winkler, one of Germany's best-known historians,
"because the political culture of many Muslims is very
different from the political culture of Europe."
Europeans often emphasize the backwardness of the
immigrants. "Our immigration was mostly from the Rif
Mountains of Morocco, which is a poor, illiterate area with
no jobs and no future," said Leon de Winter, a Dutch writer
and a columnist for the German newspaper Die Welt. They
came, moreover, in the late 1950's and 60's, Mr. de Winter
said, just at the time when the Dutch were undergoing the
60's revolution, elebrating sexual liberation,
experimenting with drugs, flaunting a colorfully
libertarian lifestyle that was especially alien to the
newcomers.
In Germany, the largest immigration is Turkish, tens of
thousands of people having been lured to Germany by
labor-short businesses in the 1950's and 60's. They came
from eastern Anatolia, which is conservative and
religiously observant by the standards of the majority
culture in Turkey, not just in Germany.
The German press often brings this point home with reports
of such events as honor killings among the Turks or the
forcing of girls into marriage against their will. Because
these things do happen, they give credibility to the view
that the Turks in general constitute what is being called a
"parallel society." And so the political discourse
generally rejects multiculturalism and diversity,
emphasizing instead the duty to adopt the leitkultur, to
learn German, to accept Germany's Judeo-Christian heritage
as well as its Constitution, with its guarantees of
equality for women.
And yet, most Turks, certainly of the second and third
generations, do speak German, and nobody seems to be
demanding that Shariah, Islamic law, be instituted in
Germany.
To some spokesmen for Germany's 2.2 million Turks, the
political discourse misses the point. True, they say,
Europe's immigration was poor and traditional, especially
compared with that of the United States, but Germany wanted
it that way. To insist on assimilation and to repudiate
diversity is to fail to accept responsibility for that.
Moreover, they say, people cannot be forced to assimilate.
"I was on a television discussion program," remembers
Mustafa Yoldas, a physician from Hamburg, the son of a
guest worker, and now the vice chairman of the Islamic
Association of North Germany. "After it, there was a poll
about whether Muslims were a threat to Germany or an
enrichment. Two-thirds said a threat, one-third said an
enrichment."
The view that Muslims are a threat seems to lie behind one
of the most discussed of the recent statements made after
the van Gogh killing, by Annette Schavan, minister for
culture in the state of Baden-Württemberg, who called for a
law requiring all sermons in mosques to be in German.
"In America," Mr. Yoldas said, referring not just to
proposals like that but to what he feels is the broad
attitude underlying it, "immigrants are proud to be
immigrants, but in Germany we are being endured."
I'm making a Low Budget HDV Filipino Horror Movie in NYC
![]](/images/header/rt_edge3.gif){kind=small}
![[XML]](/images/rssblue.gif){kind=small}
![[P]](/images/print3.gif){kind=small}
