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October 28, 2010

Leadership and Leitkultur

By JÜRGEN HABERMAS
Frankfurt

SINCE the end of August Germany has been roiled by waves of political turmoil over
integration, multiculturalism and the role of the “Leitkultur,” or guiding national culture.
This discourse is in turn reinforcing trends toward increasing xenophobia among the
broader population.

These trends have been apparent for many years in studies and survey data that show a
quiet but growing hostility to immigrants. Yet it is as though they have only now found a
voice: the usual stereotypes are being flushed out of the bars and onto the talk shows, and
they are echoed by mainstream politicians who want to capture potential voters who are
otherwise drifting off toward the right. Two events have given rise to a mixture of emotions
that are no longer easy to locate on the scale from left to right — a book by a board member
of Germany’s central bank and a recent speech by the German president.

It all began with the advance release of provocative excerpts from “Germany Does Away
With Itself,” a book that argues that the future of Germany is threatened by the wrong kind
of immigrants, especially from Muslim countries. In the book, Thilo Sarrazin, a politician
from the Social Democratic Party who sat on the Bundesbank board, develops proposals for
demographic policies aimed at the Muslim population in Germany. He fuels discrimination
against this minority with intelligence research from which he draws false biological
conclusions that have gained unusually wide publicity.

In sharp contrast to the initial spontaneous objections from major politicians, these theses
have gained popular support. One poll found that more than a third of Germans agreed
with Mr. Sarrazin’s prognosis that Germany was becoming “naturally more stupid on
average” as a result of immigration from Muslim countries.

After half-hearted responses in the press by a handful of psychologists who left the
impression that there might be something to these claims after all, there was a certain shift
in mood in the news media and among politicians toward Mr. Sarrazin. It took several
weeks for Armin Nassehi, a respected sociologist, to take the pseudoscientific
interpretation of the relevant statistics apart in a newspaper article. He demonstrated that
Mr. Sarrazin adopted the kind of “naturalizing” interpretation of measured differences in
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intelligence that had already been scientifically discredited in the United States decades
ago.

But this de-emotionalizing introduction of objectivity into the discussion came too late. The
poison that Mr. Sarrazin had released by reinforcing cultural hostility to immigrants with
genetic arguments seemed to have taken root in popular prejudices. When Mr. Nassehi and
Mr. Sarrazin appeared at the House of Literature in Munich, a mob atmosphere developed,
with an educated middle-class audience refusing even to listen to objections to Mr.
Sarrazin’s arguments.

Amid the controversy, Mr. Sarrazin was forced to resign from the Bundesbank board. But
his ouster, combined with the campaign against political correctness started by the right,
only helped to strip his controversial arguments of their odious character. Criticism against
him was perceived as an overreaction. Hadn’t the outraged chancellor, Angela Merkel,
denounced the book without having read it? Wasn’t she now doing an about-face, by telling
young members of her Christian Democratic Union party that multiculturalism was dead in
Germany? And hadn’t the chairman of the Social Democrats, Sigmar Gabriel, the only
prominent politician to counter the substance of Mr. Sarrazin’s claims with astute
arguments, met with resistance from within his own party when he proposed expelling the
unloved comrade?

The second disturbing media event in recent weeks was the reaction to a speech by the
newly elected German president, Christian Wulff. As the premier of Lower Saxony, Mr.
Wulff had been the first to appoint a German woman of Turkish origin as a member of his
cabinet.

In his speech earlier this month on the anniversary of German unification, he took the
liberty of reaffirming the commonplace notion, which former presidents had already
affirmed, that not only Christianity and Judaism but “Islam also belongs in Germany.”

After the speech the president received a standing ovation in the Bundestag from the
assembled political notables. But the next day the conservative press homed in on his
assertion about Islam’s place in Germany. The issue has since prompted a split within his
own party, the Christian Democratic Union. It is true that, although the social integration
of Turkish guest workers and their descendants has generally been a success in Germany,
in some economically depressed areas there continue to be problematic immigrant
neighborhoods that seal themselves off from mainstream society. But these problems have
been acknowledged and addressed by the German government. The real cause for concern
is that, as the Sarrazin and Wulff incidents show, cool-headed politicians are discovering
that they can divert the social anxieties of their voters into ethnic aggression against still
weaker social groups.

The best example is Bavaria’s premier, Horst Seehofer, who has declared “immigrants from
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other cultures” to be detrimental and has called for a halt to immigration “from Turkey and
Arab countries.” Although statistics show a net outflow of people of Turkish origin, Mr.
Seehofer invokes the phobic image of unregulated masses of social parasites crowding into
our welfare state networks as a way of building support for his own political aims.

To be sure, the bad habit of stirring up political prejudices is a phenomenon reaching far
beyond Germany. In Germany, at least, our government doesn’t, as in the Netherlands,
have to rely on the support of a right-wing populist like Geert Wilders. Unlike Switzerland,
we don’t have a ban on building minarets. And the comparative European survey data on
hostility toward immigrants do not show extreme numbers for Germany.

But social and political developments in Germany, given its ghastly history, do not
necessarily have the same significance as in other countries. So, are there grounds for
concern that the “old” mindsets could undergo a revival?

It depends on what we mean by “old.” What we are seeing is not a revival of the mentalities
of the 1930s. Instead, it is a rekindling of controversies of the early 1990s, when thousands
of refugees arrived from the former Yugoslavia, setting off a debate on asylum seekers. The
Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, then
endorsed the position that Germany was “not a country of immigration.” At that time
hostels for refugees went up in flames and even the Social Democrats gave ground,
agreeing in Parliament to a shabby compromise on asylum law.

That dispute was already stimulated by the feeling of an endangered national culture,
which had to assert itself as the leitkultur that all newcomers must follow. Yet the
controversy of the 1990s was also driven by the fact that Germany had recently reunited
and had reached the final stage in an arduous path toward a mentality that provides the
necessary underpinning of a liberal understanding of the Constitution.

To the present day, the idea of the leitkultur depends on the misconception that the liberal
state should demand more of its immigrants than learning the language of the country and
accepting the principles of the Constitution. We had, and apparently still have, to overcome
the view that immigrants are supposed to assimilate the “values” of the majority culture
and to adopt its “customs.”

That we are experiencing a relapse into this ethnic understanding of our liberal
constitution is bad enough. It doesn’t make things any better that today leitkultur is
defined not by “German culture” but by religion. With an arrogant appropriation of
Judaism — and an incredible disregard for the fate the Jews suffered in Germany — the
apologists of the leitkultur now appeal to the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which
distinguishes “us” from the foreigners.

Nevertheless I do not have the impression that the appeals to the leitkultur signal anything
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more than a rearguard action or that the lapse of an author into the snares of the
controversy over nature versus nurture has given enduring and widespread impetus to the
more noxious mixture of xenophobia, racist feelings of superiority and social Darwinism.
The problems of today have set off the reactions of yesterday — but not those of the day
before.

I don’t underestimate the scale of the accumulated nationalistic sentiment, a phenomenon

not confined to Germany. But in the light of current events, another trend is of greater
concern: the growing preference for unpolitical figures on the political scene, which recalls
a dubious trait of German political culture, the rejection of political parties and party
politics.

During the parliamentary election of the federal president last summer, Joachim Gauck,
the politically inexperienced and non-party-affiliated civil rights campaigner, stood as the
opposing candidate to Mr. Wulff, the career politician. Against the majority in the electoral
college, Mr. Gauck, a Protestant minister with a history of opposition to the old East
German regime, won the hearts of the broader population, and almost won the election.

The same yearning for charismatic figures who stand above the political infighting can be
seen in the puzzling popularity of the aristocratic defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu
Guttenberg, who, with not much more than his family background, polished manners and a
judicious wardrobe, has managed to overshadow Ms. Merkel’s reputation.

Of even greater concern is the sort of street protests we are now witnessing in Stuttgart,
where tens of thousands of people have come out against the federal railway corporation’s
plan to demolish the old central train station. The protests that have been continuing for
months are reminiscent of the spontaneity of the extraparliamentary opposition of the
1960s. Unlike then, though, today people from all age groups and sectors of the population
are taking to the streets. The immediate aim is a conservative one: preserving a familiar
world in which politics intervenes as the executive arm of supposed economic progress.

In the background, however, there is a deeper conflict brewing over our country’s
understanding of democracy. The state government of Baden-Württemberg, where
Stuttgart is located, sees the protests narrowly, as simply a question of whether
government is legally permitted to plan such long-term megaprojects. In the midst of the
turmoil the president of the Federal Constitutional Court rushed to the project’s defense by
arguing that the public had already voted to approve it 15 years ago, and thus had no more
say in its execution.

But it has since emerged that the authorities did not, in fact, provide sufficient information
at the time, and thus citizens did not have an opportunity to develop an informed opinion
on which they could have based their votes. To insist that they should have no further say
in the development is to rely on a formalistic understanding of democracy. The question is
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this: Does participation in democratic procedures have only the functional meaning of
silencing a defeated minority, or does it have the deliberative meaning of including the
arguments of citizens in the democratic process of opinion- and will-formation?

The motivations underlying each of the three phenomena — the fear of immigrants,
attraction to charismatic nonpoliticians and the grass-roots rebellion in Stuttgart — are
different. But they meet in the cumulative effect of a growing uneasiness when faced with a
self-enclosed and ever more helpless political system. The more the scope for action by
national governments shrinks and the more meekly politics submits to what appear to be
inevitable economic imperatives, the more people’s trust in a resigned political class
diminishes.

The United States has a president with a clear-headed political vision, even if he is
embattled and now meets with mixed feelings. What is needed in Europe is a revitalized
political class that overcomes its own defeatism with a bit more perspective, resoluteness
and cooperative spirit. Democracy depends on the belief of the people that there is some
scope left for collectively shaping a challenging future.

Jürgen Habermas, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Goethe University in Frankfurt, is the

author, most recently, of “Europe: The Faltering Project.” This essay was translated by Ciaran
Cronin from the German.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 31, 2010

A biographical note accompanying an article on Friday, about German politics, misstated the
name of the translator. He is Ciaran Cronin, not Cornin.