The Exhaustion of Merkelism: A Conjunctural Analysis (original) (raw)
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State Failure, Polarisation, and Minority Engagement in Germany's Refugee Crisis
International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 2018
Talk about a 'refugee crisis' dominated Germany's political discourse in 2015/2016. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of foreigners desiring protection shaped public and private debates. However, rather than taking the term refugee crisis for granted, this article suggests that critical experiences in Germany, and responses to them, were shaped by the failure of state institutions. In the same year, as further austerity measures were imposed on Greece, German citizens questioned the state of their own public infrastructure. Following privatisation and cuts to social services, national, regional, and local authorities lacked the capacity to respond adequately to newcomers' needs. The sight of failing state institutions contributed to a sense of crisis. Simultaneously, however, the apparent state incapacity— particularly also in Berlin, the focus of this article—opened up spaces for emergent civil society actors, including minority groups. Muslims organised in associations could perform relevance as reliable citizens and raise their public profile. Different groups also put forward alternative visions of society. At the same time, government support for asylum seekers and the greater visibility of actors in a pluralist society pushed some conservatives towards a new far-right force: the Alternative for Germany party (AfD). The gaps in public administration that were revealed in 2015/2016 resulted in social polarisation left and right of centrist politics: nationalist conservatives rejected an increasingly multicultural country and found a new political home in the AfD, whereas left wingers and minority groups challenged austerity and claimed greater political representation for their views.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2020
This paper brings memory and migration studies together. It focuses on the way the past was used in the context of the "refugee crisis" in Germany in 2015/2016. The analysis concentrates on how politicians and journalists used the memory of Germans' own migrations to legitimise rhetorically the political decision to open the borders and let more than a million people into the country, as well as to call for a welcoming attitude (Willkommenskultur) towards the refugees. It shows how, by doing so, they have contributed to the reframing of one of the founding identity narratives of the FRG, namely the one about "flight and expulsion", and thus helped to redraw Germany's identity boundaries in a more inclusive way.
Anthropology Matters
's volume Refugees Welcome? Difference and Diversity in a Changing Germany offers a contextualization and challenge of common narratives concerning the so-called 'refugee crisis' in Germany-a moment in contemporary German history which is not only characterized by a large influx of displaced people, but also by a sudden rise in sociopolitical tensions. In an effort to address these transformations, the volume asks a crucial question: in spite of political declarations of openness, are refugees actually welcome in Germany? To tackle this, it assesses public discourses regarding pro-and anti-refugee sentiments and challenges common modes of thinking which are held as self-evident by a politically divided public. As explained by Macdonald in her conclusion to the volume, the book follows a clear direction of thought-from fact to affect, from large-scale, universal differentiation to patterns of connectedness, and from past reality to contemporary transformations. Refugees Welcome? offers depth of focus on unaddressed perspectives in public discourse by acknowledging that the root of the crisis is its very categorization as such. Relating
Abstract: During the last three years the various Refugee Protests have, for the first time in Germany, formed into a social movement which moves beyond singular protests and campaigns and in many ways is challenging the current order of the German society and also the order of the European Union. Many of its activists came to Europe because of the Arab Spring revolutions and the following conflicts and armed interventions. From the edges of the EU, where countries are most severely hit by the crisis, or more accurately a new wave of neoliberal re-adjustment, they made their way into the core of the EU. In this center especially Germany and France are presenting themselves as the successful economic powers and are now openly claiming a hegemonic position in the EU. Political forces in Europe seeking to avoid further exclusion and segregation and using democratic tools such as the Greek Referendum or the Italian life saving operations (Mare Nostrum Operation) on the Meditarranean, are openly renounced by the new hegemonic powers. Other states on the European periphery, for example in Eastern Europe, are following and perpetuating this politics of exclusion (e.g. Hungary and Romania). On the level of the nation states, the common cutback of the welfare state and its replacement with comprehensive 'control and constraint measures' (Butterwege 2013: 16ff.) is aggravating social segregation and exclusion, which affects foremost migrants and refugees. By this means migration and asylum politics are like a laboratory in which the assertiveness of this neoliberalization offensive can be tested with the (missing) indignation and solidarity with them . It is an indicator for what can be enforced – discursively and practically. According to Immanuel Wallerstein, there is currently a deadlock between “the Spirit of Davos” and “the Spirit of Porto Alegre” (see Wallerstein 2014:) and while the crisis in this way can be interpreted as the approach to break the resistance of those political forces seeking to build a more inclusive and democratic society. As especially vulnerable victims of neoliberal globalization politics and the depletion of remaining subsistence and welfare state structures, the fate of refugees and migrants at the borders of the Schengen area is a showcase for what a neoliberal restructuring is offering to 'the 99%' in the Schengen area. In this way their resistance against isolation and for equal access (social and political participation) is corresponding with the aims of other contemporary protest movements. The question has to be asked whether a conduction of austerity programs at the cost of the edges and for the benefit of the core of the EU, thereby at the expense of the majority of the population can be upheld and conveyed by pointing fingers at the 'migrants who want to plunder the German social system' or on the 'Pleitegriechen using up the savings of the German middle class?" Will the culture of constraint and exclusion which is gradually being established through various circles of neoliberal readjustment and a possibly evolving new social order, persist and even lead to violent schisms in society? Or can an alliance of the Global Justice Movements of this current protest cycle, in alliance with local Justice Movements, which I believe includes the Refugees and Migrants Justice Movement, overcome divisions in society and on the global level gain influence and develop into serious antipodes (see Brand 2012)?
The European Border Regime in Crisis. Theory, Methods and Analyses in Critical European Studies
Rosa Luxemburg Studien, 2017
Between 2009 and 2013, the research group known as ‘State Project Europe’ based at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and at Marburg University investigated the Europeanisation of migration policies.1 The inquiry focused on the Federal Republic of Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain as key examples of EU member states. The following paper summarises the central theoretical and methodological results of this study. The first section develops and unpacks the theoretical premises of a historical materialist theory of the state. The section that follows presents the historical materialist policy analysis (HMPA) approach which has been developed within this context and that allowed us to operationalise the theoretical premises for our empirical studies. The last section analyses the social forces at play in the field of European migration policy in order to show that the project of migration management became hegemonic in Europe and how, since late summer 2015, it has entered into a state of crisis. The study identifies five ‘hegemony projects’ that fought over the mode of European integration: a neoliberal, a conservative, two social projects and a left-liberal alternative one. In the field of migration policy, the conflicts between these projects condensed into the hegemonic political project of ‘migration management’. This project, driven by demands of corporations, certain capital fractions and neoliberal ‘experts’, aimed at making increased and flexible immigration of workers into and within the EU politically feasible by integrating certain migration policy demands from other hegemony projects – key among them were repressive border controls, protection of genuine refugees and national-social privileges. The concluding section analyses current dynamics. It focusses on Germany and Austria because these countries are at the forefront of a major conflict about the European migration regime, starting with the ‘Summer of Migration’ of 2015. As a result, the migration management project has entered a period of crisis and readjustment, leading, first, to a partial opening of European borders and then to a temporary renationalisation and extensive expansion of the repressive elements of the border regime. When the refugees had made it over the borders with self-confidence and found support from a large ‘welcome movement’, which can be attributed to a discursive alliance of the left-liberal alternative and the pro-European social hegemony project, it was possible to shift discourses and practices to the left. On the basis of decades of mobilisation and not least of self-organised refugee protests, these actors were able to strengthen their position in the migration-political relations of force in Germany and Austria, the main receiving countries in the Summer of Migration. This was ultimately also mirrored in the attitude of the German federal government. The latter can only be grasped in its complexity and inconsistency by concluding that the strategies of the progressive hegemony projects coincided with those of the neoliberal hegemony project: both strategies were linked. The Merkel government was able to rely on influential actors that can be seen as part of the neoliberal hegemony project, including economists, representatives of capital and the neoliberal press. The conservative and national-social hegemony project, on the other hand, fell behind. The temporary revocation of the asymmetrical compromise of ‘migration management’ by the actors associated with the progressive and neoliberal hegemony projects, triggered a major chauvinistic counter-movement, especially on the part of the racist (völkische) fraction of the conservative project. The growing influence of these forces intensified until March 2016, when the Aegean and Balkan routes were effectively closed and significant restrictions to asylum laws were introduced in Germany and Austria. The coming years will show whether neoliberal forces will succeed in overcoming their prevalent crisis of hegemony and can re-stabilise the project of migration management by pushing back racist (völkische) actors and by reintegrating other actors of the conservative project. Such integration efforts are already apparent, for example in the support neoliberal actors give to the externalisation of the European border regime. The further direction of European migration policy, however, very much depends on whether there are forces that are able to develop a counter-hegemonic project of transnational solidarity.
The article historicizes the German 'refugee crisis' of 2015 in the context of post-World War II politics of migration and asylum in the country, focusing particularly on the reactions to the 'crisis' of 1992. That time, government reacted to more than 400,000 refugees from the Balkan wars with severe restrictions of the right to asylum, framed also within the ‘Dublin Regulation’ of the European Union. It is argued that German politics of immigration was mostly a kind of Realpolitik that subordinated humanitarian considerations to closed-border politics geared at keeping migrants out. Summer 2015, however, saw elements of humanitarianism in German refugee politics, understood, following Didier Fassin, as the introduction of moral sentiments into politics. This ‘humanitarianism’ was mostly accredited to Chancellor Angela Merkel. Yet the commitment of thousands of members of the German public ensured the sustainability of a ‘welcome culture’ intended to accommodate refugees, government politics quickly reverted to new restrictions that keep immigrants for many months or even years in a limbo of waiting. While to some extent government’s humanitarian discourse continues it becomes apparent that humanitarian politics is often a cover up for ulterior political motives. It is concluded that marking the events of 2015 as a refugee crisis enables in the first place the legitimization of politics of restriction like the externalization of EU borders into North African countries.
Securitisation of the Refugee Issue in Germany: The Far Right Challenge to Government Policies
Malaysian Journal of International Relations, 2021
The refugee crisis in Germany began as the Syrian Civil war soared into a large-scale conflict. Germany adopted the Open Door Policy and allowed over a million Syrian refugees to enter. This paper focuses on the implication of this refugee crisis on German national politics. In this paper, Barry Buzan and Ole Weaver's theory of securitisation and de-securitisation is used, they describe Securitisation as an extreme version of politicisation and de-securitisation is the process of normalising the issue. Through a case study, we assess the role of securitising actors and desecuritising actors in Germany. The securitising actors include mainly Alternative for Germany (AfD), Pegida movement, Christian Social Union (CSU), whereby they focus on securitising the refugee and migrant issue by treating it as an existential threat to Germany. As a counter narrative the desecuritising actors include the ruling party and their coalition such as the Christian Democratic Union, the Social Democratic Party, the Green Party, and the Left Party which focus on desecuritising the issue. The paper concludes, the process of securitisation has been more effective as compared to the process of desecuritisation in German national politics.