BY IBRAHIM KALIN
TODAY'S ZAMAN- German Chancellor Angela Merkel's statement last week that "attempts at integration have failed" came as no surprise and probably expressed a common feeling felt by many Germans and Europeans.
Her comments came only days after German President Christian Wulff said Islam has become part of German society and Germans should get used to seeing mosques in German cities. While some suspect that Merkel was seeking to score political points with conservatives, the debate is real and shows that the multiculturalism debate is again on the rise in Europe.
The recent controversy about the virtues and misdeeds of multiculturalism in Europe is sustained by a complex set of factors. Politics is certainly an important component. It is no secret that anti-immigration and anti-Muslim attitudes have become powerful political tools in European politics. They pay off in countries such as Germany, France, Holland and Austria where right-wing political parties have made significant gains in local and national elections. Beyond the borders of European countries, even Turkey's EU membership has become part of domestic politics in Europe. Both Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy oppose Turkey's EU membership with a clear domestic political agenda.
The Tageszeitung newspaper had a point when it said recently that "the dated buzz word (multiculturalism or `multikulti' in German), which originated with Green politicians like Heiner Geissler or Daniel Cohn-Bendit to fight xenophobia, is now firmly out of fashion. Today `multikulti' is nothing more than a bogeyman for conservative politicians, who routinely criticize the concept when they are looking to generate a round of applause."
While anti-immigration rhetoric works for short-term political maneuvering in European countries, it also creates a dilemma for the future of Europe. Many Europeans economies are still struggling with the impact of the global financial crisis and all need a strong labor force for recovery. Europeans societies cannot provide this labor force by themselves. Just like the US, they ought to import labor from outside. This is increasingly becoming a reality for the emerging economies of the world as well.
Furthermore, social cohesion in European countries with major immigrant and minority communities is possible only when these communities are invited to be equal partners of the host societies in which they live. Presenting them as a danger, as a failure and/or as a burden only exacerbates the problem.
The irony is that the current wave of right-wing anti-immigration, anti-minority politics provides no real alternative to the integration debate other than starting a blame game. A recent example again from Germany is the Bavarian Governor Horst Seehofer. Echoing Merkel's pessimism about failed policies of integration, Seehofer said "multiculturalism is dead" and declared that his Christian Social Union (CSU) party would seek to preserve German "Leitkultur," or the dominant German culture. Nobody can give an exact definition of this "dominant culture" but it is clear that an element of cultural sympathy is lost in communication.
This is where we go beyond petty politics and economics. No society can give an exact definition of what constitutes its dominant or mainstream cultural traits. By its nature, culture does not lend itself to any mathematical demarcations. Culture means many things: traditions, attitudes, feelings, language, shared memory and so on. When we invite a minority community to integrate, we're inviting them to a cultural milieu whose boundaries are never fixed. Culture is dynamic, and the mistake of cultural purists is to treat it as a static and fixed entity.
Immigrant and minority communities in Europe, particularly Turks and Muslims, should make an effort to claim their agency in society and move away from the periphery to the center. They should (in fact many of them do) speak the language of their host countries and know something about the cultural traditions and sensitivities of the people with whom they share their lives.
But immigrant and minority communities can do that only with a genuine and authentic identity claim. Asking them to shed themselves of their core values and who they are would only generate a sense of further isolation and alienation. This may be exactly what right-wing European parties and political pundits want. But this is not the way to integrate them.