The 50th anniversary of labour migration to Germany

As Turkey integrates with the world and opens up, it is becoming increasingly impossible to postpone or ignore its problems of democratization and freedoms. The internal problems of a Turkey that is growing and opening up are both becoming more visible and their solution is becoming inevitable under the pressure of this growth and opening. Wherever an opening Turkey goes, it in a sense encounters its own internal problems. The world has perhaps shrunk most of all for the Turks.

Even in a talk on the problems of Turks in Germany that we attended after stepping away for two days from the environment in which issues straining the country, such as bilingualism or multilingualism and democratic autonomy, are being debated in Turkey, Turkey's problems of the Kurds, Alevism, religion classes and approaches to minorities line up one by one and press for a reasonable approach. Because as Turkish authorities voice to the German government the demands of the Turks living here regarding mother-tongue education, the contradiction concerning the mother-tongue education of the Kurds in Turkey automatically emerges.

At the "On the Occasion of the 50th Year of Migration: Muslims in Germany and Integration Symposium," organized by the Cologne Branch of the Union of European Turkish Democrats (UETD), the representation, organization and integration problems of Muslims in Germany were put on the table in about 20 papers in total, presented in six sessions. The intense interest and participation in a symposium held on a winter day of the kind that none of those who have lived in Cologne for a very long time could recall a harsher one, and moreover on a Sunday coinciding with Christmas Eve of the Christian world, are remarkable.

When the Turks were brought to Germany as workers 50 years ago, there was initially no agenda such as their integration into society. As the stay of the Turks, who had been brought in to be sent back when their work was finished, grew longer, they were somehow articulated into society. But the Turkish-specific style of this articulation did not much please the Germans. At best they were wanted to integrate culturally with Germany, and from recent times all calculations began to be made on how Turks, who are no longer expected to leave, can integrate into Germany.

Dr. M. Murat Erdoğan, who organized a symposium of the same title in Ankara last year, summarizes the process by referring to the Swiss writer Max Fritz's saying, "We asked for workers, but human beings came!" But Erdoğan expresses that today the fact that Turks are human beings and not workers for Germany as well has come sufficiently to the fore, and that beyond even the concept of integration, the concepts of "participation and mutual adaptation" should come to the fore. In the meantime he draws attention to the "new middle class" that the Turks have created from within, and emphasizes the importance of the "two-way transfer of mentality" created by migrants and its contribution to the process. Just as Turks adapt to Germany, Germany too will inevitably adapt to the Turkish reality. But there is also resistance within the country to this inevitable reality.

Apart from the notion of nation on which Germany relies as a way of meeting the problem of multiculturalism that emerged with the Turks, some economic and political conditions are also decisive. These problems make Germany similar in its way of meeting the problem of different cultures that confronts not only Germany but Europe and all societies receiving migration. For philosophers like Charles Taylor, who try to produce the philosophical foundations of multiculturalism and develop a mode of social organization suited to it for the whole world, it is considered necessary for countries to be prepared for the reality of migration and to accept meeting its humane conditions.

Yet Jürgen Habermas, one of the famous German sociologist-philosophers, asks what "the right of a country to defend itself against the destructive effect that a possible mass of migrants" would create is, in the face of a sudden entry into the harmonious-educated mass of citizens that the social and cultural order, which Germany barely managed to establish as a nation-state, requires. Because according to him, with migration "the ethical-political self-definition of a nation" is seriously affected; the influx of migrants changes the composition of the population in ethical-cultural respects. Speaking of a country's defending itself against a threat that migration could erode its national identity and self-definition, Habermas continues his words as follows:

"Thus the question arises whether the desire to migrate reaches the limits of a political community's right to preserve its political-cultural form of life undisturbed. If we assume that the autonomously developed state order is in fact shaped by ethics, does not the right to self-determination include a nation's right to defend its identity against migrants who could recast this historically developed political-cultural form of life into a different mold?"

This is indeed a question that is hard to answer once it has been pronounced. It is hard for countries or people with claims such as democracy, human rights or multiculturalism to develop a suitable answer without falling into a thousand contradictions. In the actual situation, Habermas does accept that after each influx of migration the inevitable exchange between the settled culture and the migrant culture is bound to create new cultural horizons, and that a democratic country can gain much from this expanding horizon. But even in his answer there is greater emphasis on the "right to defend themselves" of countries receiving migration.

So how, do you think, can we adapt this search for a solution by Germany against those who come to Germany by migrating from outside to cultures that have not come from anywhere by migrating but are the thousand-year reality of a country itself?