Merkel: Multiculturalism has "utterly failed"

German Chancellor came under fire today for declaring that multi-culturalism had utterly failed in Germany, calling upon immigrants to learn German and to do more to integrate into wider German society, such as learning German. Her comments have met something of a national mood as well as a broader European concern over immigration from the middle east and Africa particularly.

Germany's "guest workers" first came in the 1960s when Turks and others were invited to work in the FDR to meet manpower shortages in what was West Germany. However, given Germany's then-strict jus sanguinis rules governing German citizenship, many of these immigrants had no direct route to German citizenship and as such grew apart from much of the rest of German society.

It is therefore a little disingenuous to say that multi-culturalism has failed in Germany, in that sense, because the parameters set for it were too narrow. This does not ignore genuine held concerns over immigration in many parts of the EU and in Germany in particular. And anti-multiculturalism should not be seen simply as "racism", but rather as a concern over how different cultures can work together particularly in tough times. There are now 16 million foreign works in Germany with some popular sentiment being that many are only in the country so as to exploit the generous welfare state (an argument expressed in many different parts of the EU to foreigners). Indeed the increasing of EU membership has made the case even more difficult given that under the terms of free movement within the schengen region gives people from most parts of the EU the freedom to live and work elsewhere within the Union irrespective of how well they can fit in to an existing culture.

Angela Merkel does of course face elections in the spring, so these comments are undoubtedly for her political powerbase who have expressed such fears over immigration. There is an old truism that in difficult times, foreigners are the easiest to blame. Germany is still dealing socially and economically with the re-integration of East and West German and has also been touched by the ongoing financial crisis afflicting the European Union as a whole. In these extreme circumstances it is easy to look to those outsiders, those with different customs such as styles of dress and see them as adversaries for increasingly scarce resources, but those are arguments that need to be properly addressed.

As is so often the case, immigrants are often those most willing to undertake the difficult or unpleasant work that unemployment resident citizens would turn away (and often in terms of jobs where they would be far away from local citizens). The guestworker programme also made it easy for a government, rightly or wrongly, to recruit large numbers of workers from abroad during the good economic times only to be able to deport them when times turned for the worse. In that situation, it is understandable why one would cling to older traditions and values because you knew you could not rely on the state in which you were a 'guest' to support you in those difficult periods.

So, are there any answers? I think "multiculturalism" is something of a boogeyman in modern parlance; culture is always something in flux, even within countries or cities, and the notion of multiculturalism is in itself subjective. The key, I believe, lies in giving people a stake in the country they are resident within as well as responsibilities to work within existing structures.