Turks in Germany are no longer transitory gastarbeiter (guestworker) people, but de facto settlers in Germany, despite the dominant official political discourse which constantly reiterates that Germany is not a country of immigration. The parameters of this political discourse are based on an ethnocentric interpretation of citizenship and nationhood in Germany, which emphasises ‘volknation’, a cultural nation, and leads to the political exclusion of ethnic minorities.
The official construction of immigrants as ‘cultural others’ and the growing racism and xenophobia in various sections of society are important obstacles to establishing social harmony in contemporary Germany. More importantly, depriving the de facto settled immigrant communities from citizenship and political participation through the strict rules and tests contradicts the ideals of a pluralistic democratic socio-political system. As the well known German philosopher Jürgen Habermas rightly observes today we live in pluralistic societies that are moving further and further away from a model of a nation-state based on a culturally homogenous population. The diversity of cultural forms of life, ethnic groups, religions and worldviews is constantly growing.
It is important to recognise this reality and to draw new policies that avoid the social, cultural and political exclusion of ethnic minorities. This will not only help ease the social transformation in a globalising world, but will also reduce the tension between different ethnic groups by allowing them to become full and equal members of a political community.
Germany hosts a larger absolute number of immigrants than any other country in Western Europe today. According various reports, there were more than 5.2 million foreigners living in Germany in 1990, rising to 6.8 million in 1993. By the end of 2000, the Federal Interior Ministry announced that 7.37 million foreigners were living in Germany. This constitutes 9 per cent of the total population. The largest group of foreigners is the Turks, with 2.11 million people, comprising the largest group of foreigners living in Germany today which account for 28.0 percent of all resident foreigners.
Although it has been repeatedly stated by the German authorities during the early phases of immigration and in their aftermath that ‘Deutschland ist kein Einwanderungsland’ (Germany is not a country of immigration), by the beginning of the 1980s it had become obvious that the guestworker population was not decreasing as had been hoped by the policy makers. Since German policy makers regarded guestworkers as a transitional workforce, they did not bother to develop a coherent immigration policy. This has led to the emergence of a guestworker population living in Germany as a true immigrant minority without a true immigration perspective.
In defiance of the official statement that Germany is not a country of Einwanderungsland, the propensity to stay in Germany signalled the guestworkers’ intention that they were not in Germany to work for a couple years in order to save and then return to their country of origin as had been planned, but were rather there permanently or ‘for good’. A survey result in 1980 found out that more than 40 per cent of the Turks living in Germany wanted to settle down in this country. According to a later study carried out by the Centre for Turkish Studies in Germany, 39.4 per cent of the respondents said that they did not intend to return Turkey and 21 per cent expressed that they had no intention of going back in less than ten years. These data suggest that at least 60 per cent of those interviewed expressed a clear intention to stay in Germany, either permanently or for a long period of time. In 1992, the number of those who wanted to stay permanently increased to 83 per cent and only 17 per cent of those interviewed expressed their intention to return to Turkey. The establishment of Turkish-owned businesses is yet another indication of permanent settlement. Currently there are more than fifty thousand small, medium or large-scale Turkish workplaces, generating jobs for more than 140,000 employees.
Since labour migration was seen as a temporary phenomenon, as reflected by the term ‘gastarbeiter’, social and cultural issues were not taken to be important matters in formulating migratory policies concerning the foreign workers from Turkey during the early immigration period. The unification of the two Germanys, The Federal Republic of Germany and The German Democratic Republic, raised further cultural issues as to the identity, nationhood, Germanness and citizenship of immigrants. The unification had boundary raising and ethnic marking effects. As the German sociologist Thomas Faist argues German unification spurred the discourse of cultural difference. Among other things, it raised the issue of collective identity as national identity. In the aftermath of German unification, the rhetoric of national and ethnic identity, ‘we’ versus ‘them’, has resurfaced’.
With the unification of the two Germanys, a new phase started in the gastarbeiter phenomenon with renewed significance. Since the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989 thousands of people from the East entered into the West. This flood into the West German labour market posed a threat to the already fragile position of the Turks and other non-German migrants in Germany. The process of unification also had a weakening effect on the position of foreigners and heightened their feelings of insecurity. After the unification in 1990, there was an increase in aggressive xenophobia and violence against immigrant communities. First in the Eastern and than in the Western parts of the Germany, attacks on foreigners became very overt and foreigners were hunted down in the streets with racist slogans, such as ‘foreigners out’ and ‘Germany for Germans’.
In relation to integration, segregation in housing has had a further hindering effect on the establishment of social contacts between Turks and Germans. It is well documented that foreign workers and their families in Germany are disadvantaged in housing. In the 1950s and 1960s guestworkers were accommodated in camps previously inhabited by exiles and refugees. Even today, foreign workers and their families live in those run-down and cheap apartments that were once called ‘refugee flats’.
The number of young Turks in European countries is steadily increasing. They are receiving their education in countries where most of them were born and eventually they look for employment in the same country. The position of the young generation of Turks is evidently creating problems in access to equal education, training and employment with the native young population. The gravity of the problem becomes even more alarming when the settlement intentions of the young generation are taken into account. Germany has the largest population of younger generation Turks, between the ages of 15-20, numbering more than 670,000. The estimated number of young Turks in Europe, on the other hand, is about 800,000.
Turks will stay in Germany. However, they will stay on or near the bottom for at least the next generation if positive and constructive policies are not introduced. It seems that even after nearly two decades the immigrants are only accepted into the social and political structures in Germany in a very limited way. This is true at least for the Turks, as they are not able to participate fully in civic life due to restrictions stemming from not holding German citizenship, because its underlying character is still ethnocultural. As long as the perception of German citizenship remains to preserve its project of 'the community of descent' and it does not open up to overcome cultural boundaries, immigrant ethnic minorities in Germany are bound to stay on the periphery of the political community. This will of course lead to alienation, radicalization and social conflicts in Germany.
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