Habermas on a German "Bell Curve" anti-immigrant probe

NY Times October 28, 2010
Leadership and Leitkultur
By JÜRGEN HABERMAS

Frankfurt

SINCE the end of August Germany has been roiled by waves of
political turmoil over integration, multiculturalism and the role
of the “Leitkultur,” or guiding national culture. This discourse
is in turn reinforcing trends toward increasing xenophobia among
the broader population.

These trends have been apparent for many years in studies and
survey data that show a quiet but growing hostility to immigrants.
Yet it is as though they have only now found a voice: the usual
stereotypes are being flushed out of the bars and onto the talk
shows, and they are echoed by mainstream politicians who want to
capture potential voters who are otherwise drifting off toward the
right. Two events have given rise to a mixture of emotions that
are no longer easy to locate on the scale from left to right — a
book by a board member of Germany’s central bank and a recent
speech by the German president.

It all began with the advance release of provocative excerpts from
“Germany Does Away With Itself,” a book that argues that the
future of Germany is threatened by the wrong kind of immigrants,
especially from Muslim countries. In the book, Thilo Sarrazin, a
politician from the Social Democratic Party who sat on the
Bundesbank board, develops proposals for demographic policies
aimed at the Muslim population in Germany. He fuels discrimination
against this minority with intelligence research from which he
draws false biological conclusions that have gained unusually wide
publicity.

In sharp contrast to the initial spontaneous objections from major
politicians, these theses have gained popular support. One poll
found that more than a third of Germans agreed with Mr. Sarrazin’s
prognosis that Germany was becoming “naturally more stupid on
average” as a result of immigration from Muslim countries.

After half-hearted responses in the press by a handful of
psychologists who left the impression that there might be
something to these claims after all, there was a certain shift in
mood in the news media and among politicians toward Mr. Sarrazin.
It took several weeks for Armin Nassehi, a respected sociologist,
to take the pseudoscientific interpretation of the relevant
statistics apart in a newspaper article. He demonstrated that Mr.
Sarrazin adopted the kind of “naturalizing” interpretation of
measured differences in intelligence that had already been
scientifically discredited in the United States decades ago.

But this de-emotionalizing introduction of objectivity into the
discussion came too late. The poison that Mr. Sarrazin had
released by reinforcing cultural hostility to immigrants with
genetic arguments seemed to have taken root in popular prejudices.
When Mr. Nassehi and Mr. Sarrazin appeared at the House of
Literature in Munich, a mob atmosphere developed, with an educated
middle-class audience refusing even to listen to objections to Mr.
Sarrazin’s arguments.

Amid the controversy, Mr. Sarrazin was forced to resign from the
Bundesbank board. But his ouster, combined with the campaign
against political correctness started by the right, only helped to
strip his controversial arguments of their odious character.
Criticism against him was perceived as an overreaction. Hadn’t the
outraged chancellor, Angela Merkel, denounced the book without
having read it? Wasn’t she now doing an about-face, by telling
young members of her Christian Democratic Union party that
multiculturalism was dead in Germany? And hadn’t the chairman of
the Social Democrats, Sigmar Gabriel, the only prominent
politician to counter the substance of Mr. Sarrazin’s claims with
astute arguments, met with resistance from within his own party
when he proposed expelling the unloved comrade?

The second disturbing media event in recent weeks was the reaction
to a speech by the newly elected German president, Christian
Wulff. As the premier of Lower Saxony, Mr. Wulff had been the
first to appoint a German woman of Turkish origin as a member of
his cabinet.

In his speech earlier this month on the anniversary of German
unification, he took the liberty of reaffirming the commonplace
notion, which former presidents had already affirmed, that not
only Christianity and Judaism but “Islam also belongs in Germany.”

After the speech the president received a standing ovation in the
Bundestag from the assembled political notables. But the next day
the conservative press homed in on his assertion about Islam’s
place in Germany. The issue has since prompted a split within his
own party, the Christian Democratic Union. It is true that,
although the social integration of Turkish guest workers and their
descendants has generally been a success in Germany, in some
economically depressed areas there continue to be problematic
immigrant neighborhoods that seal themselves off from mainstream
society. But these problems have been acknowledged and addressed
by the German government. The real cause for concern is that, as
the Sarrazin and Wulff incidents show, cool-headed politicians are
discovering that they can divert the social anxieties of their
voters into ethnic aggression against still weaker social groups.

The best example is Bavaria’s premier, Horst Seehofer, who has
declared “immigrants from other cultures” to be detrimental and
has called for a halt to immigration “from Turkey and Arab
countries.” Although statistics show a net outflow of people of
Turkish origin, Mr. Seehofer invokes the phobic image of
unregulated masses of social parasites crowding into our welfare
state networks as a way of building support for his own political
aims.

To be sure, the bad habit of stirring up political prejudices is a
phenomenon reaching far beyond Germany. In Germany, at least, our
government doesn’t, as in the Netherlands, have to rely on the
support of a right-wing populist like Geert Wilders. Unlike
Switzerland, we don’t have a ban on building minarets. And the
comparative European survey data on hostility toward immigrants do
not show extreme numbers for Germany.

But social and political developments in Germany, given its
ghastly history, do not necessarily have the same significance as
in other countries. So, are there grounds for concern that the
“old” mindsets could undergo a revival?

It depends on what we mean by “old.” What we are seeing is not a
revival of the mentalities of the 1930s. Instead, it is a
rekindling of controversies of the early 1990s, when thousands of
refugees arrived from the former Yugoslavia, setting off a debate
on asylum seekers. The Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian
sister party, the Christian Social Union, then endorsed the
position that Germany was “not a country of immigration.” At that
time hostels for refugees went up in flames and even the Social
Democrats gave ground, agreeing in Parliament to a shabby
compromise on asylum law.

That dispute was already stimulated by the feeling of an
endangered national culture, which had to assert itself as the
leitkultur that all newcomers must follow. Yet the controversy of
the 1990s was also driven by the fact that Germany had recently
reunited and had reached the final stage in an arduous path toward
a mentality that provides the necessary underpinning of a liberal
understanding of the Constitution.

To the present day, the idea of the leitkultur depends on the
misconception that the liberal state should demand more of its
immigrants than learning the language of the country and accepting
the principles of the Constitution. We had, and apparently still
have, to overcome the view that immigrants are supposed to
assimilate the “values” of the majority culture and to adopt its
“customs.”

That we are experiencing a relapse into this ethnic understanding
of our liberal constitution is bad enough. It doesn’t make things
any better that today leitkultur is defined not by “German
culture” but by religion. With an arrogant appropriation of
Judaism — and an incredible disregard for the fate the Jews
suffered in Germany — the apologists of the leitkultur now appeal
to the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which distinguishes “us” from
the foreigners.

Nevertheless I do not have the impression that the appeals to the
leitkultur signal anything more than a rearguard action or that
the lapse of an author into the snares of the controversy over
nature versus nurture has given enduring and widespread impetus to
the more noxious mixture of xenophobia, racist feelings of
superiority and social Darwinism. The problems of today have set
off the reactions of yesterday — but not those of the day before.

I don’t underestimate the scale of the accumulated nationalistic
sentiment, a phenomenon not confined to Germany. But in the light
of current events, another trend is of greater concern: the
growing preference for unpolitical figures on the political scene,
which recalls a dubious trait of German political culture, the
rejection of political parties and party politics.

During the parliamentary election of the federal president last
summer, Joachim Gauck, the politically inexperienced and
non-party-affiliated civil rights campaigner, stood as the
opposing candidate to Mr. Wulff, the career politician. Against
the majority in the electoral college, Mr. Gauck, a Protestant
minister with a history of opposition to the old East German
regime, won the hearts of the broader population, and almost won
the election.

The same yearning for charismatic figures who stand above the
political infighting can be seen in the puzzling popularity of the
aristocratic defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who,
with not much more than his family background, polished manners
and a judicious wardrobe, has managed to overshadow Ms. Merkel’s
reputation.

Of even greater concern is the sort of street protests we are now
witnessing in Stuttgart, where tens of thousands of people have
come out against the federal railway corporation’s plan to
demolish the old central train station. The protests that have
been continuing for months are reminiscent of the spontaneity of
the extraparliamentary opposition of the 1960s. Unlike then,
though, today people from all age groups and sectors of the
population are taking to the streets. The immediate aim is a
conservative one: preserving a familiar world in which politics
intervenes as the executive arm of supposed economic progress.

In the background, however, there is a deeper conflict brewing
over our country’s understanding of democracy. The state
government of Baden-Württemberg, where Stuttgart is located, sees
the protests narrowly, as simply a question of whether government
is legally permitted to plan such long-term megaprojects. In the
midst of the turmoil the president of the Federal Constitutional
Court rushed to the project’s defense by arguing that the public
had already voted to approve it 15 years ago, and thus had no more
say in its execution.

But it has since emerged that the authorities did not, in fact,
provide sufficient information at the time, and thus citizens did
not have an opportunity to develop an informed opinion on which
they could have based their votes. To insist that they should have
no further say in the development is to rely on a formalistic
understanding of democracy. The question is this: Does
participation in democratic procedures have only the functional
meaning of silencing a defeated minority, or does it have the
deliberative meaning of including the arguments of citizens in the
democratic process of opinion- and will-formation?

The motivations underlying each of the three phenomena — the fear
of immigrants, attraction to charismatic nonpoliticians and the
grass-roots rebellion in Stuttgart — are different. But they meet
in the cumulative effect of a growing uneasiness when faced with a
self-enclosed and ever more helpless political system. The more
the scope for action by national governments shrinks and the more
meekly politics submits to what appear to be inevitable economic
imperatives, the more people’s trust in a resigned political class
diminishes.

The United States has a president with a clear-headed political
vision, even if he is embattled and now meets with mixed feelings.
What is needed in Europe is a revitalized political class that
overcomes its own defeatism with a bit more perspective,
resoluteness and cooperative spirit. Democracy depends on the
belief of the people that there is some scope left for
collectively shaping a challenging future.

Jürgen Habermas, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Goethe
University in Frankfurt, is the author, most recently, of “Europe:
The Faltering Project.” This essay was translated by Ciaran Cronin
from the German.