Third: Regulate to Build Trust
In Germany, trust is created almost exclusively through legislation. Therefore an immigration law is unavoidable. It is the only way to counter the population’s fears that the floodgates are open and an invasion of Germany is imminent.
Four: Increase Sex Appeal
Germany has to become more attractive. This country has a lot to offer in the way of things that attract people of different origins and forge long-term bonds. Businesses play a key role in this. Over the past decades, the German economy has integrated millions of people of the most diverse backgrounds into the labor process. A tremendous achievement – one that nobody mentions today, but one from which all participants profited.
Five: From a State Based on Ancestry to a Civil Society
The integration of foreigners can only succeed if the mythical force of a feeling of community derived solely from common ancestry is countered with institutional alternatives. Institutions can offer possibilities for identification. In contrast to myths, they appeal to the rational side of people. A civil society cannot exist without strong institutions. And in the long run only a civil society can bring together people of diverse backgrounds in a polity. Membership in German society can no longer be determined solely on ethnic grounds. A state based on ancestry has no future. It is based on myths. And no intercultural competence can be acquired though myths alone.
These steps, of course, also present challenges for the immigrants. Up to now, they have concentrated on demands, above all on those pertaining to citizenship and, to a lesser extent, cultural and educational policies. These demands need to be accompanied more by conceptional considerations, by well-thought-out and lived intentions of integration. The umbilical cord connecting German Turks to Turkey has yet to be cut.
Here, Turkish patriotism increasingly serves as an obstacle to integration. Instead of a diffuse Turkish or Kurdish patriotism on German soil, Turks in Germany would be well-advised to develop a cosmopolitanism with universal aspirations, a cosmopolitanism that could turn them into an avant-garde within civil society in Germany. The prerequisites for this definitely exist.
German Turks who belong to the generation born and raised here live primarily in Germany’s major cities. Cities such as Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, and Berlin are cultural centers that offer their residents all kinds of possibilities to partake of global culture and develop a cosmopolitan lease on life.
As expected, the cosmopolitan urban elite has intercultural competence. It is well educated and economically successful. Such a German-Turkish elite does indeed exist in Germany. But it is largely ignored when discussion turns to Turks in Germany. Then the focus shifts above all to the losers, the so-called Kanaks.
The German-Turkish elite needs to express itself more clearly; it needs to engage with Germany and German issues and form its own organizations – ones that do not swim in the wake of Turkish patriotism.
Questions of national identity are complex in Germany and cannot be discussed calmly. There are fears, feelings of guilt, and repressed aggressions that have grown over the course of history, and they cannot be ignored if we want to resolve the problems of the present. In Germany the concept of the past is overshadowed by the experience of the Holocaust.
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