During the American half of her life, Arendt worked variously as an editor, a journalist, a writer and a university teacher. She became known as one of the most formidable intellectuals of the twentieth century. Her books — The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) foremost among them — became hugely influential and have aged well. Her essays and published correspondence with key individuals in her life — including her lover Martin Heidegger, her mentor and friend Karl Jaspers, her first husband Günther Anders and her second husband Heinrich Blücher — provide yet more fascinating insights into a brilliant mind.

But it has never been easy to categorise Arendt. A famous interview she gave on West German television in 1964 began with a disagreement. “I think you are a philosopher,” the interviewer Günter Gaus said to her. “Well, I can’t do anything about that,” Arendt interrupted, “but I’m of the view that I’m not a philosopher. I think I’ve finally said farewell to philosophy. I studied philosophy, as you know, but that’s not to say that I stuck with it.”

The biographer is expected to fill in blanks, eliminate uncertainties, fit episodes into a cohesive story, and provide historical context. An intellectual biography should also relate a writer’s life to the texts she left behind and construct a narrative that makes sense of the trajectory of her thinking.

Thomas Meyer’s Hannah Arendt: Die Biografie, published last year in Germany to much acclaim and forthcoming in an English translation in October, does all that. He claims his is the first book about Arendt based on archival research, but even if it weren’t he has obviously done more than others to track down written sources. For many years, he has served as editor of Arendt’s collected writings in German. His understanding of her ideas and his extensive sleuthing has produced a comprehensive picture.

May 1941 also marked Arendt’s entry into an English-language universe. Until that point she had written in German, though she was also at home in French — from 1933 until 1941 she lived in exile in France — and read classical Greek and Latin as fluently as her mother tongue. English hadn’t been part of her world until she began lessons in 1940, but it didn’t take her long to write and publish in that language. She immersed herself in an Anglophone world in the second half of her life, though she never abandoned German; in the 1964 interview she told Gaus she knew a lot of German poetry by heart and the lines kept circling at the back of her mind.

Much to his credit, Meyer is interested in Arendt’s entire oeuvre. She wrote almost all her books twice, usually first in English and then in German (sometimes based on a text prepared by a translator). These aren’t German and English versions of the same text. It’s easier to express philosophical ideas in German than in English, Arendt once remarked, while the English language is better suited to thinking politically. When she imagined her German reader, she assumed some philosophical concepts needed little explanation; her American audience was better versed in a tradition of political thought.

Meyer is a diligent chronicler who avoids anachronisms. He discusses Arendt’s life and intellectual journey against the backdrop of the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, rarely filtering it through the lens of his own times. Only when he writes about the men in Arendt’s life does he become judgemental. He disapproves of her relationship with Heidegger (as do many Arendt admirers), is critical of Jaspers, and seems to consider Blücher, the love of her life and her husband for more than half of it, a philanderer who couldn’t hold a candle to her intellectually.

Meyer is thorough. It’s only after a twenty-two-page family history that readers learn Hannah Arendt was born at 9:15 pm, weighing 3.695 kilograms. I can empathise with him: of course he wants to share all the detail he has been able to unearth. And since Arendt’s life was complex and complicated, why not document all its twists and turns?

It’s time to come clean: I found Meyer’s book unwieldy and unnecessarily slow and his curiosity somewhat antiquarian. But I am being unfair, and I know why: I began reading Meyer’s book at the same time as I started on Lyndsey Stonebridge’s biography of Hannah Arendt, We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love & Disobedience. The plan was to consider these books in tandem, life chapter by life chapter. I soon abandoned that idea. Not because Meyer’s book is boring, but because Stonebridge’s is riveting. I was able to return to Meyer’s text sooner than expected simply because I couldn’t put down Stonebridge’s fast-paced narrative.

Her approach is as anti-antiquarian as could be. She is interested in Hannah Arendt as a companion in today’s dark times. And thus her narrative has two protagonists: the biographer and her subject. “I’ve tried to think my own thoughts in the place of Hannah Arendt,” Stonebridge writes, before conceding that “there may be moments [when she] also thinks her thoughts in my place.”

The two seem to have much in common: both come across as passionate, generous and at times opinionated. They complement each other: Stonebridge is not only Arendt’s interpreter but also the one who knows about the world almost half a century after Arendt’s death. It’s different from the one Arendt inhabited, but no less out of joint. Stonebridge convinces her readers that Arendt would have much to say about a world that “seems to be in the grip of a relentlessly awful plot.”

Stonebridge’s frequent references to her own times help the reader to understand why Hannah Arendt and her writings still resonate. The fact that she is read perhaps at least as much now as in the year she died may seem surprising. After all, Arendt hadn’t gathered followers around her who would take responsibility for her posthumous reputation. Her intellectual taste might be considered old-fashioned: with a few notable exceptions, she was not much interested in contemporary political theorists and philosophers, but instead engaged with Plato and Kant. She was one of the very few women in her line of work, but did not consider herself a feminist. Her writing doesn’t support the kind of identity politics that are so fashionable these days. She could come across as arrogant, if only because she often deemed it unnecessary to translate quotes from other languages.

Besides, Hannah Arendt didn’t leave a grand theory behind. It’s not possible to draw on an overarching “Arendtian” framework in the way some people purport to explain things from a Marxian or Freudian perspective. She is not somebody on whose writings we could comfortably lean. But we can take courage from her highly original attempts to understand the world. “What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing,” she wrote in the prologue to The Human Condition. Is there anything less simple than that? Thinking, though, was something Hannah Arendt was particularly good at.

“She wanted to think exactly like Rahel Varnhagen, to shadow her thought and experience as closely as she could so that she might better understand her own emotional, intellectual and at the time often perplexing life,” Stonebridge says about Arendt’s relationship with the German-Jewish writer and salonnière whose biography Arendt finished writing in Paris. Arendt once called Varnhagen her closest friend, although by then that friend had been dead for about a hundred years. Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka occupied similar roles in Arendt’s life.

Stonebridge’s relationship with Arendt is evidently also close, which makes hers a particularly personal book. Shadowing her biographical subject’s thought and experience, she followed literally in Arendt’s footsteps. Visiting Montauban in the southwest of France, the town where Arendt stayed in the summer of 1940 after her escape from the Gurs internment camp, Stonebridge “carefully counted the sixty steps across the square that it would have taken Arendt to get from her stuffy room to the cool companionship of the library.”

“Perplexing” is an attribute that appears more than once in Stonebridge’s book. For good reason: it characterises the twists and turns not only of Arendt’s life but also in her way of thinking. Stonebridge quotes Arendt quoting Plato’s rendering of a Socratic dialogue: “It isn’t that, knowing the answers myself I perplex other people,” Socrates reportedly said to Meno. “The truth is rather that I infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself.” Whereupon Arendt adds: “Which, of course, sums up neatly the only way thinking can be taught.”

Of course? Arendt was an accomplished teacher who often performed her thinking in front of an audience — in fact the text Stonebridge uses here was labelled “a lecture” when first published in 1971 — but having been a teacher I know that many students resent being infected with perplexity. It requires skill not to lose them.

Skill is also on display when Stonebridge confronts her reader with the perplexities of Arendt’s ideas and life without trying to dissolve them. Arendt would have appreciated that. “I am often captured by the sense that there exists something she will not give up; something precious, mysterious even to herself, but very strongly present,” Stonebridge writes.

But isn’t that just the point of all of this? she might say now, chin resting in her smoking hand from her place in the bar in the underworld where the lost angels of the last century gather at dusk. That we are unknowable even to ourselves, maybe especially to ourselves, and yet capable of collective miracles? Isn’t that what you must fight for again now?

The subtitle of Stonebridge’s biography promises lessons. Arendt may have much to teach us: about indifference, about plurality and about racism, to name but three of the topics she wrote about. Stonebridge avoids turning Arendt into a Vordenker, somebody who does the thinking on others’ behalf. Arendt did not see herself in such a role either. She was principally interested in Nach-denken, in the exercise of chasing and thinking through issues that she found difficult. Such Nach-denken required close attention, patience, imagination and the willingness to leave well-trodden paths.

Without compromising her intellectual independence, Arendt relied on at least one Vordenker herself. Immanuel Kant taught her that our ability to think makes freedom possible and that how we think has moral consequences. From him she learned much else, including the idea that to think politically and critically required an “erweiterte Denkungsart,” which Arendt translated as “enlarged mentality.”

For Arendt, Kant was a familiar figure, and not just because she had read his Critique of Pure Reason when she was sixteen. Arendt grew up in Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad), where Kant had spent almost his entire life. After having lived for more than twenty years in New York she admitted to a German journalist: “In the way I think and form judgements, I’m still from Königsberg.”

Perhaps the most important lesson provided by Arendt via Stonebridge is a challenge: Think! How not to think is also a key lesson of We Are Free to Change the World, and here the focus is on Arendt’s essay about Elizabeth Eckford and the other children known as the Little Rock Nine, who in 1957 dared to attend a racially segregated high school in Arkansas’s capital city. “As for the children, forced integration means a very serious conflict between home and school, between their private and and their social life, and… children cannot be expected to handle them and therefore should not be exposed to them,” Arendt wrote.

Here she was not mindful of the need for an “enlarged mentality.” She didn’t travel to Little Rock, she didn’t talk to Eckford and, most importantly, she didn’t take seriously the girl’s experience. Arendt didn’t to think empathetically about Eckford’s situation because she considered empathy an apolitical and therefore inadequate response. But she also failed to think critically about it. It says much about Arendt, however, that after her essay “Reflections of Little Rock” had been published she realised that she had been wrong and admitted as much in writing.

Although Arendt was a public intellectual par excellence in the second half of her life (and one who expertly used the media), she didn’t think it was her role to shape public opinion. Do you want to make an impact with your work, Gaus asked her in 1964. “To be honest with you, I have to tell you: when I’m working, I’m not interested in impact,” she replied. “And when the work has been completed?” he persisted. “Well, then I’ve finished it.” She explained that her main aim was to understand, and that writing helped her to do that. And anyway, asking her about her impact was something only a man would do: “Men are always so concerned about making an impression.”

I loved reading Stonebridge’s book because I felt that in at least four key respects she does justice to Arendt. For one, her biography is exceptionally well written. That matters because Arendt herself wrote well (in German more so than in English) and because she valued good writing. She frequently quoted poetry in her writings — and poets also appreciated reading her. The final passages of The Origins of Totalitarianism, the poet Randall Jarrell told her in 1950, “seem a sort of crushing unbearable poem, quite homogeneous, something the reader feels and understands at the same time… I feel as if I’d seen the other side of the moon.” She is well-served by a biographer whose prose is sharp, elegant and captivating.

Gaus was incredulous when Arendt insisted that she was not a philosopher. Stonebridge understands why she said “goodbye to philosophy for good.” Arendt might not have endorsed Marx’s dictum — “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it” — but she distinguished between philosophising, on the one hand, and thinking politically and critically, on the other.

Arendt was prompted to think not because of an abstract conundrum but because the world was out of joint. Her thinking was informed by her experience as a refugee and as a Jewish woman who had been lucky to escape the fate of the millions of other Jews murdered in the Shoah. All this provides her thinking and writing with a sense of urgency.

Stonebridge shares that sense of urgency. “Hers was not a call for a return to political reason (such as you often hear today),” Stonebridge writes, “but for a kind of emergency thinking that may, she said, in the end, be all we have.” Our world is in much need of the kind of emergency thinking that Arendt practised and Stonebridge advocates.

Yet even while thinking and writing about a world out of joint, Arendt was committed to living well. Friendship and love were important to her, a fact that we might easily lose sight of when reading Eichmann in Jerusalem or The Origins of Totalitarianism. Stonebridge’s biography keeps the loving and much-loved author of these books in focus. It ends with a call to her readers, which would, I am sure, have met with Arendt’s wholehearted approval: “Now pay attention and get on with the work of resisting the sorry reality that you find yourselves in. And for goodness’ sake — a puff of smoke, raising a glass of Campari — have some fun!” •

Hannah Arendt: Die Biografie
By Thomas Meyer │ Piper │ €28.00 │ 521 pages

We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love & Disobedience
By Lyndsey Stonebridge │ Jonathan Cape │£22.00 │290 pages

The post Emergency thinking appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s been like that for more than three weeks since investigative journalists from the independent newsroom Correctiv revealed a “secret plan” hatched at a “secret meeting” in November last year. According to the report, twenty-two far-right politicians and businesspeople met in a hotel outside Berlin to talk about expelling millions of people living in Germany, among them “non-assimilated” German citizens. The attendees included office holders of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and members of the Werteunion, an organisation set up in 2017 by ultraconservative Christian Democrats unhappy about the refugee policies of then chancellor Angela Merkel.

A few hours after news of the meeting broke, eighty people protested in front of Hamburg’s local AfD headquarters. Two days later, 2000 took to the city’s streets. All over the country, the protests quickly gathered momentum. When a Turkish-born member of the Hamburg state parliament called for another protest on 19 January, he expected 4000 to join him. According to the police, 50,000 turned up, and the rally had to be cut short because the riverside venue was so overcrowded it was a miracle nobody ended up in the icy water. The following weekend around 100,000 people rallied in Hamburg.

Protests have continued every day in all parts of the country. Many of those taking part haven’t been to a demonstration in many years or are protesting for the first time in their lives. Altogether, millions have taken to the streets. The protests give no sign of fizzling out.

What exactly has prompted such outrage? The proposal to deport asylum seekers, other non-citizens and “non-assimilated” Germans to North Africa came as part of a master plan presented by Martin Sellner, a prominent far-right activist from Austria, at the November meeting. Sellner is known for propagating French writer Renaud Camus’s Great Replacement myth, which claims that Western elites are trying to replace white European populations using mass immigration, particularly from Africa and the Middle East.

The term “great replacement,” first used in Camus’s 2010 book L’Abécédaire de l’in-nocence, is a reference to an ironic poem by Bertolt Brecht. After the 1953 popular uprising in East Germany, Brecht asked in his poem “The Solution” whether, as the people had seemingly forfeited the confidence of their government, it might not be easier “for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?”

It was the proposed deportation of German citizens that may have startled many Germans most. But Camus and others from the European and North American far right have long advocated a Great Repatriation, or “remigration,” as a response to the Great Replacement. The concept of “remigration” shouldn’t have been news in Germany: Dresden’s Pegida movement and other far-right activists have long called for a cleansing of the nation by means of “remigration.” Nor was it a surprise that prominent members of the AfD want to turn Germany into a country only for ethnic Germans. Björn Höcke, the most influential AfD politician — a leader of its Thuringia state branch and occasional speaker at Pegida rallies — has made no secret of his intention to rid Germany of many of its current residents should he ever be in a position to do so.

The idea of Höcke as Thuringia’s state premier, let alone in power in Berlin, has long seemed fanciful. No more. It seems almost certain that the AfD will emerge as the strongest party in three forthcoming state elections in East Germany. In Saxony, it’s possible that only the Christian Democrats and the AfD will reach the 5 per cent threshold required to enter parliament. Provided the latter polled more votes than the former, the far right would command an absolute majority in parliament and form government. In Thuringia, where the left-wing Die Linke is particularly strong, the Christian Democrats could be tempted to strike a deal with the AfD rather than allow Die Linke’s Bodo Ramelow to remain as state premier.

The AfD’s performance is particularly alarming in East Germany, where the pollsters have the party at between 28 per cent (in Brandenburg) and 35 per cent (in Saxony). News of November’s “secret meeting” was just the trigger needed to prompt millions of people to protest.

At the Hamburg rallies I attended, the main focus was squarely on the AfD. “Ganz Hamburg hasst die AfD” (All of Hamburg hates the AfD) was the most popular battle cry, “FCK AFD” the most common slogan on placards. Judging by their hand-painted signs, many of the demonstrators equate the current mood with that of the early 1930s, before the Nazi party’s electoral success prompted the German president to appoint Adolf Hitler chancellor. “It’s five to ’33,” some demonstrators claimed. Although many explicitly rejected “remigration,” other elements of the AfD’s program attracted comparatively little critical attention.

Besides, the focus on the AfD is not entirely justified. In Saxony, a party even more extremist than the AfD, the Freie Sachsen (Free Saxonians), is gaining ground. It may well win seats at the local elections in June. At the other end of the spectrum, the left-wing Die Linke, the successor of the East German communists, split last year. A group led by the charismatic Sahra Wagenknecht has since established their own party, the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht, or BSW. It is as populist as the AfD and its migration and asylum policies hardly differ from those of the far-right party. The Werteunion too has decided to form a party ahead of the three state elections in East Germany in September. Some of its policies are likely to mirror those of the AfD.

Germany’s intake of refugees has been the number one political issue for the past six months or so, with most public commentators and politicians claiming that the country’s capacity to take in refugees has been exhausted. They say the number of asylum seekers arriving in Germany needs to be drastically reduced, despite the fact that the overall number of refugees arriving in Germany was much lower in 2023 than the year before. The authorities in Hamburg, for instance, registered 23,000 new arrivals in 2023, compared with 54,000 in 2022, the year Germany accommodated approximately one million Ukrainian refugees.

In response to Russia’s attack, the European Union invoked the European Council’s 2001 mass influx directive “to establish minimum standards for giving temporary protection in the event of a mass influx of displaced persons from third countries who are unable to return to their country of origin.” More than 4.2 million Ukrainians currently benefit from the EU’s temporary protection mechanism. On a per capita basis, most have been taken in by the three Baltic states and by Poland, Czechia, Slovakia und Bulgaria.

About 1.2 million of those Ukrainians are living in Germany. They are not required to apply for asylum, have immediate access to the labour market and receive the same social benefits available to Germans. Overall, their arrival has been surprisingly uncontroversial, not just in Germany but also in the other EU member states.

It’s not the Ukrainians who have prompted the current panic about new arrivals but refugees from elsewhere, who must go through the standard asylum process. Last year, about 330,000 new protection claims were lodged in Germany, compared with about 218,000 in 2022. Ordinarily, Germany should be able to cope with such numbers. But federal funding hasn’t kept pace with the rise, giving local authorities good reason to complain. Of course, capacities would be freed up if Syrian and Afghan refugees, who still make up almost half of all asylum seekers, were treated like the Ukrainians: if they too were granted temporary protection with immediate work rights and access to social benefits.

The AfD, whose success is linked to its vilification of asylum seekers, has tried hard to create a moral panic about the number of new arrivals. That it was successful has been due in no small part to the fact that other parties jumped on the bandwagon in the hope that they too would benefit from scare-mongering.

Michael Kretschmer, the Christian Democrat premier of Saxony, was among them. He demanded that Germany establish stationary controls at its borders with Poland and the Czech Republic, abolish the last remnants of the constitutionally guaranteed individual right to asylum, transfer asylum seekers to third countries, set an upper limit on the annual number of asylum applications, and cut benefits paid to refugees. His proposals were either unfeasible or would have little effect, but they added to the sense of a situation spiralling out of control. The much-evoked “firewall” against the AfD may still work when it comes to forming coalitions, but it’s permeable as far as political rhetoric is concerned.

Kretschmer was backed by his party leader Friedrich Merz, who last September said of asylum seekers: “They go to the doctor and have their teeth done, while Germans can’t even get an appointment.” Members of Germany’s hapless Ampel coalition — the Social Democrats, Free Democrats and Greens — have also talked of emergencies and crises rather than trying to steer the public conversation towards a rational debate about Germany’s responsibilities and its record of meeting them.

Ampel politicians have endorsed the idea that all those whose asylum claims were rejected need to leave Germany. In October, the cover of the news magazine Spiegel depicted a serious-looking Olaf Scholz demanding ramped-up deportations. It is true that about 300,000 people living in Germany are technically supposed to leave the country, mainly because their protection claims were rejected. But four out of five are not — indeed must not be — deported, because (for example) the country they hail from is not safe.

New legislative measures in Germany aim to reduce asylum seeker numbers, as do new EU-wide changes to the Common European Asylum System, or CEAS. The EU wants to set up Australian-style centres at Europe’s external borders to detain applicants while they’re being screened. Unsuccessful applicants would be swiftly removed. Several EU governments — and some prominent German Christian Democrats — want to go further by transferring protection claimants to third countries such as Rwanda.

Germany last experienced a comparable momentum — albeit with far fewer street protesters — in 2018 and 2019, when many cities and towns hosted demonstrations in support of search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean. Since then, relatively few protests have been held in support of migrant and refugee rights. When the European Commission and the European Council agreed on the CEAS reforms last year, dozens rather than hundreds of protesters rallied in Hamburg.

For the last movement of a similar size we need to go back to the early 1990s. Between 1990 and 1993, Germany experienced a wave of racist violence. Asylum seeker hostels were torched, and many “foreigners” assaulted. According to an investigation by journalists, fourteen people died as a result of racist violence in the first two years after German reunification on 3 October 1990 alone. On 23 November 1992, two men associated with the far right firebombed a house in the small town of Mölln in northern Germany. A woman and two children of Turkish descent died. The murders startled Germans as much as the revelations about the “secret” deportation plans startled them more than three decades later. Large spontaneous demonstrations took place all over the country. In Munich alone, 400,000 people attended a candlelight protest.

Then, as now, the protests were triggered by an attack on long-term residents of Germany. Then, previous murders of asylum seekers had not prompted similar demonstrations of solidarity. Now, too, calls for the deportation of everybody whose asylum claim has been rejected have prompted little opposition. Then, the protests followed the opposition Social Democrats’ agreement to restrict the constitutionally guaranteed right to asylum. Now, the protests followed the Scholz government’s introduction of a harsh new law to expedite deportations and backing for the far-reaching CEAS reforms.

There are also key differences between the events of late 1992 and early 2024. When the Social Democrats met for an extraordinary party congress to decide whether to change the constitution and restrict the right to asylum, hundreds of thousands of people protested against the proposed reform; when parliament voted on the change in May 1993 large numbers of people once more descended on the German capital. And some Social Democrats and Free Democrats did actually vote against the changes.

This year’s protests against the CEAS reforms have been insignificant by comparison. And while some Greens and Social Democrats have publicly grumbled, their opposition is not as principled as that on display in 1993.

Millions of people have rallied over the past few weeks and railed against the AfD. But have they also expressed solidarity with asylum seekers threatened with deportation under the Scholz government’s new regime? Have they spared a thought for the refugees pushed back at the Polish and Croatian borders or in the Aegean? For those who drowned in the Mediterranean? Or have the demonstrations rather been an exercise in self-reassurance?

The postwar architects of the Federal Republic’s constitution were convinced that the Weimar Republic failed because it gave its enemies too much leeway. They thought that those out to undermine or destroy democracy must not abuse democratic rights and freedoms to achieve their aims.

Thus, the constitution makes this provision: “Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behaviour of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional.” The High Court has twice deemed a party to be unconstitutional: in 1952 a party of the far right, and in 1956 the Communist Party. More recently, in 2017, the High Court ruled that the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany aimed to abolish democracy but that its influence was not substantial enough to warrant its prohibition.

The AfD has been monitored by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency to gauge whether it is seeking “to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order.” In three East German states, including Saxony, the state intelligence agencies have already ruled the AfD’s respective state branches to be “without doubt extremist.”

Since the revelations about the “secret meeting” in November, calls for the government to make use of the constitutional provisions and initiate a High Court ruling about the AfD’s unconstitutionality have become louder. A petition signed by 1.69 million people is requesting that the government make use of another constitutional provision. According to Article 18, a person who abuses civil and political rights (such as the freedom of expression) “to combat the free democratic basic order shall forfeit these basic rights.” In this instance, too, only the High Court can order such a forfeiture and the proceeding needs to be initiated by the federal government, a state government or federal parliament.

It’s tricky, to say the least, to declare a party unconstitutional when it’s supported by a third of the electorate, or to target one of its most influential leaders. As the attempt to ban the National Democratic Party demonstrated, the High Court case would take a very long time and its outcome would not be a foregone conclusion. Using the constitution to restrict Höcke’s democratic rights and outlaw the AfD would also allow him and his party to portray themselves as victims of “the system” and “the elites.”

The constitution is, however, an asset in the fight against the AfD. Thus far, its opponents have tended to focus on the alleged similarities between the AfD and Hitler’s Nazi party and to suggest the AfD’s leaders aim for a return to the dark days of the Third Reich. But politicians like Höcke aren’t unreconstituted Nazis. They even claim that the German army officer who unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944 is their role model.

Their critics’ focus ought instead to be on how they deny the constitution’s most important principle, expressed in the first sentence of Article 1: “Human dignity shall be inviolable.” But that may get some of those currently applauding the demonstrators into trouble, because AfD politicians aren’t the only ones who disregard that line or pretend it applies only to German citizens.

Will the demonstrations against the AfD have any impact on its electoral performance at the local and European elections in June and the three state elections in September? Italian researchers have shown that Italy’s anti-far-right Sardines movement in late 2019 and early 2020 muted the electoral showing of Matteo Salvini’s Lega. But if such an effect resulted only in a better-than-expected performance of politicians such as Michael Kretschmer, who have tried to deprive the AfD of oxygen by endorsing key concerns of the party’s followers, then little would have been gained.

“Nie wieder Faschismus, nie wieder Zweite Liga!” proclaimed a speaker at the rally in St Pauli on Saturday. It was a double-headed hope: never again should Germany experience fascism, and never again would the St Pauli Football Club play in the second division. For many St Pauli supporters the club has returned to Germany’s first division in all but fact, but in reality, more often than not, the Zweite Liga has been where St Pauli has played its football.

While “Never again second division!” gives the impression that the St Pauli Football Club has already left its past behind, “Never again fascism!” suggests that fascism was buried on 8 May 1945 and must not be resurrected now. But the break with the past was never complete. Elements of Nazi Germany survived well beyond the end of the second world war. The AfD would not have thrived in the past ten years if it hadn’t been able to exploit the widespread acceptance of — or even longing for — authoritarian structures. Racism was not only alive in the early 1990s when asylum seeker hostels burned, but has been an enduring feature of postwar German society.

From Lörrach to Kappeln, the admonition “Never again!” defines the current protests. Often the protesters don’t name the past that must not reappear, because to them it is obvious they are referring to the twelve years from 1933 to 1945. It’s highly unlikely that Germany will experience a repeat of that time. But an unholy alliance of the AfD on the one hand and Christian Democrats and Ampel politicians on the other could pave the way for a re-run not of Nazi Germany but of the early 1990s, when fear-mongering engendered racist violence.

For the current movement to have a lasting impact, the protesters will need to identify what exactly they do not want. There is more to the AfD’s wishlist than “remigration.” A close reading of the party’s program could prompt more startlement.

I also wish the protesters were less preoccupied with the past. Germany is in crisis not because it is moving backwards but because it lacks a positive, widely shared vision for the future. Surely the St Pauli supporters won’t be content with avoiding relegation once the club has been promoted to the Bundesliga. What comes after “Nie wieder Faschismus!”? It’s easy to understand what those millions who rallied in recent weeks do not want. But it’s unclear what they are hoping for. •

The post “Never again”? appeared first on Inside Story.

That attitude was by no means universal. Others in Germany had no interest in smooth management of the influx. Some even took to the streets to demand Germany’s borders be closed and asylum seekers already in the country expelled. When it comes to accommodating people seeking Germany’s protection, we in Germany have remained bitterly divided.

Politicians, particularly those on the right, frequently decry a division that extends well beyond attitudes towards refugees and call for policies to reunite Germany. Often, they simply mean that the government ought to give in to their demands: by closing Germany’s borders to migrants (at least to those who hail from outside Europe or are Muslims), for example, or by indefinitely allowing Germans to drive petrol-fuelled cars and rely on oil and gas heaters, or by discontinuing the official use of gender-neutral language, or by appeasing Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The Scholz government has been sufficiently concerned about the electoral impact of the little that’s left of its reformist agenda that it too has vowed to heal the rift bemoaned by the naysayers, whose mantra seems to be: “Wir schaffen das nicht.”

Much less attention has been paid to another fault line that is both imagined and very real: between residents who consider themselves genuine Germans, on the one hand, and those who are, or descend from, migrants, on the other. Even those who said “Wir schaffen das” with Merkel rarely imagined an inclusive “we” that encompassed migrants and non-migrants. The “we” Merkel conjured in her famous line would have included the Germans flocking to railway stations to hand out teddy bears to Syrian children, but not those children and their parents.

In fact, “we” often doesn’t even include migrants who settled in Germany many years ago. They supposedly don’t belong, because they aren’t German citizens, don’t speak “proper” German, are of the wrong faith or don’t look the part.

Or because they don’t share “our” history. At least that perceived shortcoming can be easily remedied. Whether migrants are an integral part of Germany’s history and have played a crucial role in shaping today’s society is a matter of interpretation. All that’s required for a shared history is a persuasive narrative.

Jan Plamper, who previously wrote mainly about twentieth-century Russia — his doctoral dissertation examined Stalin’s personality cult — and the history of emotions, has offered such a narrative. Four years ago he published a book about postwar Germany as a country of immigration, and he has now translated that book into English.

The German edition was titled Das neue Wir: Warum Migration dazugehört — Eine andere Geschichte der Deutschen (“The New We: Why Migration Is Part of It — An Alternative History of the Germans”). His English publisher opted for a very different title, which is no less provocative but in my view misses the point of the book: We Are All Migrants: A History of Multicultural Germany.

No, we in Germany are not all migrants, although many of us emigrated, particularly in the nineteenth century, and although close to one in four of us has at least one parent who wasn’t born a German citizen. Plamper opens with a prologue of sorts about German emigration, but other than that his book begins at the end of the second world war. Was Germany already a multicultural nation in the 1950s? Hardly. Even today, large swathes of rural and regional East Germany are arguably not part of “multicultural Germany.”

We Are All Migrants is not a history of postwar Germany with a particular focus on its migration history. Nor is it a comprehensive chronological account of immigration and of migrants in Germany. Plamper decided to focus on some aspects: the resettlement of ethnic Germans fleeing or expelled from Eastern Europe, including Germany’s former eastern provinces, in the aftermath of the war; labour migration to West Germany; labour migrants in East Germany; the so-called Aussiedler and Spätaussiedler, ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and Central Asia (in the last two decades of the twentieth century alone, more than three million Aussiedler and their families settled in the Federal Republic); Jewish migrants from the Soviet Union and its successor states; and the so-called refugee crisis of 2015–16. Two additional chapters provide snapshots of Germany in 1945 and 1989 respectively.

Other possible chapters could have featured the Romanians and Bulgarians who accounted for one out of five new immigrants before the intensification of Russia’s war against Ukraine in February 2022, or the 3.8 million citizens of the German Democratic Republic who settled in the Federal Republic between 1949 and 1990, or the Indochinese “boat people” resettled in Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s, or the Bosnian nurses who helped to keep the German hospitals afloat during the Covid-19 pandemic.

But I’m not taking issue with Plamper’s selection of cases. That it partly reflects his earlier specialisation as a historian of the Soviet Union is appropriate, because We Are All Migrants is also a highly personal book. It mentions Plamper’s father, an ethnic German who was expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1946 and later, after he retired in 2011, taught German to refugees. Plamper’s daughter Olga, who grew up speaking Russian and moved to Germany when she was eleven, features too. When once, while the family was living in Berlin, asked by her father what nationality she identifies with, she replied “Ausländerin natürlich,” meaning “of course” she considered herself a foreigner living in Germany.

We Are All Migrants is also a personal book in the sense that it features the lives of individual migrants. Among them are Hassan Ali Djan, who fled Afghanistan aged sixteen, Ibraimo Alberto, a Mozambique-born former labour migrant in East Germany, and the Spanish “guest worker” Carlos Pérez. Their stories, as well as the author’s own, contribute to the book’s readability. So does its prose.

Often non-fiction suffers when it is rendered into English because long sentences that read well in German can appear convoluted. Not in this case, because Plamper’s German is that of somebody who for many years has worked in an English-speaking environment. His writing is economical and engaging. Both the German original and the English translation are a pleasure to read.

Plamper is optimistic about the viability of what he calls a “New We” made up of both migrants (“PlusGermans”) and non-migrants. I suspect two factors contribute to his optimism: the impression left by the Willkommenskultur, Germany’s welcoming culture of 2015, was still fresh when he completed Das neue Wir, and he wrote as an outsider who hadn’t lived in Germany for many years and was teaching in Britain. I found his optimism endearing and the vision of a new Germany informed by it appealing.

In the English edition, too, Plamper lets his history end in 2018. I suppose the past five years would have provided him with more grounds for optimism. Since February 2022, Germany has accommodated more than a million refugees from Ukraine without much fuss. Optimism helps us to envision alternative futures, and that may be reason enough to focus on success stories. Yet I don’t entirely share Plamper’s optimism — for four reasons.

First, he may underestimate the disillusionment of “PlusGermans” about the willingness of non-migrant Germans and government institutions to respect and protect migrants. True, hundreds of thousands of people attended the candle-lit demonstrations against xenophobia held in 1992 and 1993 after migrants had died in arson attacks, but these rallies weren’t able to stop the racist violence. Nor were they accompanied by legislation to allow all long-term residents to vote and make it easier for migrants to become citizens.

When the terrorist group National Socialist Underground, or NSU, murdered a policewoman and nine migrants between 2000 and 2006, the police focused their suspicions on associates and family rather than far-right terrorists. Only after two of the perpetrators committed suicide did the police conclude that the murders were related and had all been motivated by racist hatred.

Only last month, in the city-state of Hamburg, the ruling Social Democrats and Greens once again decided against setting up a parliamentary inquiry into the handling of the investigation into the murder of the Hamburg greengrocer Süleyman Taşköprü by members of the NSU in 2001. The response to the NSU murders, by the state but also by society at large, has disabused many migrants of the idea that it’s easy to become part of Germany.

Second, Merkel’s departure paved the way for the return of conservative ideologues who argue that migrants need to adapt to German values. Her Christian Democrats are now led by Friedrich Merz, who in 2000 had initiated a debate about the need for migrants to adhere to a Leitkultur, a set of allegedly essential German values and principles. Merz’s resurrection marks not only a shift to the right by Germany’s largest party but also a validation of an ethno-nationalism that pretends to be culturally determined, and a return to debates about parallel societies and migrants as welfare bludgers.

Third, the demand for more rights and the discourse against racism are now too often couched in the terms of identity politics — which, incidentally, also inform far-right discourses about Germanness. Calls for social justice seem to have gone out of fashion. And the focus is too often on symbolic gestures. What’s the point of avoiding terms with racist connotations when the historical injustice they represent is not dealt with?

Fourth, migrants remain disadvantaged. It’s true that it is now easier for them to take out German citizenship than it was, say, thirty years ago. It also true that the immigration of large numbers of Syrians since 2014 and Ukrainians since 2022 has not met with the same hysterical response as the arrival of refugees from former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. And yes, migrants do play an increasingly prominent role in Germany, even in German politics. But Plamper’s “PlusGermans” tend to be poorer than non-migrant Germans and, even more concerning, second-generation migrants still typically lag behind their non-migrant peers.

In their 2015 book Strangers No More, Richard Alba and Nancy Foner compared the long-term disadvantages of people with a migrant history in Canada, the United States, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Germany. Germany’s report card was particularly poor, even when compared with the three other European countries. Alba and Foner found that “the chance of a German native obtaining some level of post-secondary education was about three times that of a youth from a Turkish immigrant family.” That’s not least because the highly stratified German school system favours children from native German-speaking families.

This is where another recent book, Betiel Berhe’s Nie mehr leise: Die neue migrantische Mittelschicht (“No Longer Quiet: The New Migrant Middle Class”), comes in. Berhe, the daughter of Eritrean refugees, grew up in West Germany. Her book is concerned with class prejudices and class-based structural inequalities as well as with racism. She knows from first-hand experience how rarely migrant children are promoted to the Gymnasium, the German high school, and how the school system reproduces inequality.

Berhe is impatient and angry. She has little time for a well-meaning white middle class unwilling to give up its privileges, and she mounts a spirited defence of identity politics. But she also concedes that the issue is not whether identity politics divides society, but what kind of identity politics produces a more just society in which everybody has the chance to participate meaningfully. Such a society, she says, would eventually make identity politics redundant.

She is sick and tired of being invited to “sit at the table,” for that table no longer fits. “True change will only happen,” she writes, “if we smash the old table that’s much too small, to make room for a new large table that can accommodate everyone.”

Nie Mehr Leise is a reality check for Plamper’s “success story.” But Berhe too is an optimist. And, like Plamper, she imagines a new “we.” Her starting point is not an imagined community of non-migrants and “PlusGermans”; it is those “who feel how I feel.” And that’s not where the story ought to end, she says: “We: that’s all those who demand that all forms of structural discrimination, repression and exploitation are abolished.”

Berhe’s book is trying to lay the groundwork for the formation of a new “we” by enabling Germans other than women of colour to empathise and extend their solidarity — and not to stop there: “True solidarity would mean that we demand a distinctly different society for everybody, us included.”

Plamper and Berhe occupy privileged positions in the knowledge economy. He holds the chair of history at the University of Limerick; she is an economist who, according to the bio in her book, “gives talks, runs workshops and provides advice about issues of migration, (anti-)racism, diversity and education.” The author of a third recent book has never attended high school, is a poet and trained mechanic, and owns a small publishing company that he subsidises by working occasionally as a forklift driver.

Dinçer Güçyeter’s book Unser Deutschlandmärchen (which means “Our Fairytale about Germany” more than “Our German Fairytale”) has just won the Leipzig Book Fair’s prize for fiction, one of Germany’s most highly regarded literary awards. And while some observers were surprised by the shortlisting of a book from a publisher hardly anybody knew about, and written by an author who thus far had only published poetry, those who have read the book have expressed nothing but praise.

“The novel… lets the words soar into the sky, but is also attentive to the humiliations on the ground,” the judges of the Leipzig award wrote. “Dinçer Güçyeter catches stories with a net that’s more finely woven than a butterfly net… and has gifted us a polyphonic novel whose poetic chorus will reverberate.“

Please note the first person plural pronoun in the title of Güçyeter’s book, too. It refers to just two people: the author and his mother Fatma, a Turkish-born woman who in 1965 joined her husband, a Turkish labour migrant, in Germany, where their son Dinçer was born fourteen years later. The book is the story of Fatma’s and Dinçer’s lives, told by an author impersonating both of his characters.

“You have always shrouded your longing in silence. You thought that way nobody could see through you, nobody could hurt you,” Dinçer tells Fatma. “You see, years later your son tries to turn your silence into literature, ponders, rages, searches, loses…” Güçyeter is generous enough to share with his readers not just the result of his searches but also the searching. And we also learn about his anger — an anger that at times appears even more deep-seated than Berhe’s.

But Unser Deutschlandmärchen is not an angry book. It is often heartbreakingly sad but told in a way that makes sometimes make the reader laugh, albeit uneasily. This contradiction is in the nature of fairytales, which often hide unspeakable violence inside an enchanted world where all live happily ever after.

Güçyeter’s novel is a story of coming to terms: with living in a strange country (in the case of Fatma); with growing up and not conforming to society’s expectations of masculinity (in the case of Dinçer). Neither the author nor his mother always copes well with the challenges thrown in their paths. But then, it’s just a fairy tale, where bad things happen and all ends well.

The book is unusual because of Güçyeter’s mastery of poetic language. It’s also unusual because of its format: a novel that’s not fiction, illustrated by — unfortunately poorly reproduced — photographs that make it resemble a family album, with the author writing in the first person, with that person being at times a guy named Dinçer and sometimes a woman named Fatma.

In his conclusion to We Are All Migrants, Jan Plamper writes that he used to assume, as “an internationalist of the Left,” that a collective national identity was unnecessary. He has since changed his mind. His book is a “plea for a collective identity.” He advocates a “national New We” because he believes it’s important to have an “effective emotional glue” and thereby meet the demand for a national German identity from non-migrants and migrants alike.

I still cringe when either of my nations’ national anthem (the German “Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit” or “Advance Australia Fair”) is played, and I am uncomfortable when I see others deeply moved by the display of national symbols. Mind you, I happily barrack for the German football team — for the women’s, not the men’s — though not because they are Germans but because they play such an attractive brand of football. And yes, I did cheer on the men’s team once, but that was when Mesut Özil and Miroslav Klose were its stars — not because they were PlusGermans but because I was seduced by their artistry, their ability to read the game and their skill in befuddling their opponents.

“What it means to be German remains a blank, is still missing something elementary — new terms, concepts, and stories,” Plamper claims. Not only do I think that shouldn’t alarm us. I’m also not sure that Plamper’s diagnosis is correct — unless of course the sense of being German is necessarily tied up with a territorially bounded nation-state.

I am emotionally attached to certain German landscapes, to some German music and, particularly, to some writing in German, including Unser Deutschlandmärchen. I was moved by Güçyeter’s book. I loved the rhythm and timbre of its language. It took me to places I had never visited. The book is part of a distinctly German universe I admire and cherish, a universe so much larger than the German nation. And wouldn’t an emotional attachment to a German nation inevitably entail an attachment to the German nation-state?

Plamper embraces what he calls the “open border position.” As a historian he also knows that there is nothing natural about what the anthropologist Liisa Malkki once referred to as the “national order of things. “One day national borders will seem like a remnant from a bygone epoch, much like slavery or the exclusion of women from general elections do in the Western world,” Plamper writes. “There will be a truly universal right, a human right, of freedom of movement.”

In the meantime, for strategic reasons, ought we nurture an emotional attachment to a German nation? To offer an alternative for the Turkish Germans who, come 14 May, may save Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s bacon because they are emotionally attached to the nationalism he offers? Or to offer a less fraught option for those following PEGIDA, the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, to stop them from shouting “Absaufen! Absaufen! Absaufen!” (“Drown! Drown! Drown!”), as happened when a speaker at one of their demonstrations in 2018 referred to the German NGO Mission Lifeline, which has operated a search-and-rescue ship in the Mediterranean?

The PEGIDA followers are hardly going to be attracted by a “New We” that includes PlusGermans like Berhe and Güçyeter. They have shown little interest in defining and periodically redefining national collective identity through democratic processes — unless of course, they are promised that these processes will reflect their idea of an ethnically, if not racially, defined, homogenous nation. But let them pontificate about “we Germans” — and let us assure the targets of their racist vitriol that we in Germany do not wish to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens, nor between native and non-native speakers of the language of Goethe and Güçyeter.

I am not so worried about the rift between those who demand that Germany close its borders and those who believe we ought to respond to new arrivals with hospitality and solidarity. I can’t think of a compromise position that would allow Germany to uphold the human rights of migrants and at the same time exclude people seeking its protection.

I expect that “we Germans” are deeply concerned about the nation’s apparent lack of a unity of purpose. “We in Germany,” I would like to think, are more concerned about the fact that migrants are left to drown in the Mediterranean.

Unlike Jan Plamper, I fail when trying to envisage a day when “national borders will seem like a remnant from a bygone epoch.” But after having read his book, and Berhe’s and Güçyeter’s, I too am cautiously optimistic.

Over to Dinçer Güçyeter for the last word: “We will combine the past with what’s still to come and write our own fairy tale, mother.” •

We Are All Migrants: A History of Multicultural Germany
By Jan Plamper | Cambridge University Press | $43.95 | 274 pages

Nie mehr leise: Die neue migrantische Mittelschicht
By Betiel Berhe | Aufbau | €22.00 | 205 pages

Unser Deutschlandmärchen
By Dinçer Güçyeter | mikrotext | €25.00 | 213 pages

The post We in Germany appeared first on Inside Story.

Over the following two years, NATO and the German government stuck to their guns, while the German peace movement kept growing. Even larger demonstrations were held in June 1982 and October 1983, but to no avail. In November 1983 the Bundestag consented to the stationing of additional nuclear missiles on West German soil.

The Greens, who earlier that year had entered federal parliament for the first time, naturally opposed the measure. So did the Social Democrats, even though their own Helmut Schmidt, toppled as chancellor by the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl in October 1982, had defied the mass protests in 1981 and 1982 and was one of the staunchest advocates of the Pershings’ deployment in Germany. After the vote, the peace movement faltered, but the Greens, whom it had nurtured and who identified as its parliamentary wing, have remained in the Bundestag ever since.

The record numbers mobilised by peace activists in the early 1980s were surpassed twenty years later, when more than half a million protesters took to the streets of Berlin in February 2003 to demand a peaceful resolution to the conflict between the United States and Iraq. Again, the protests failed to alter the resolve of the decision-makers. The following month, the United States, supported by some of its allies (but not France and Germany), invaded Iraq. But the widespread sense of outrage soon dissipated.

Another twenty years on, Germany is again said to be witnessing a massive groundswell for peace. A prominent figure in the left-wing Die Linke party, politician Sahra Wagenknecht, called “Uprising for Peace,” the rally in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate she co-organised on 25 February, “the opening salvo of a new, powerful peace movement.”

Hundreds of thousands of people did indeed demonstrate in Berlin for an end of the war in Ukraine, but that was more than a year ago, in late February 2022. According to the police, Wagenknecht’s rally attracted a mere 13,000 protesters. The media nevertheless paid as much attention to it as they had to the February 2022 crowds, perhaps in the expectation that Wagenknecht’s prediction might come true — or maybe in response to her claim that the public broadcasters and mainstream newspapers overwhelmingly supported an escalation of the war and were trying to silence the views of the majority of Germans.

Both Berlin rallies, a year apart, were calling for peace in Ukraine, but they could not have been more different. In 2022, just three days after Russia intensified its undeclared war against its neighbour by launching a large-scale invasion, the demonstrators were demanding that Russia stop its aggression. They were waving yellow-and-blue flags and professing their solidarity with the people of Ukraine. Last month, Wagenknecht and her co-organisers asked participants not to carry national symbols, but while no Ukrainian flags were on view, some of the protesters came armed with the horizontally striped white-blue-red ensign of the Russian Federation.

In 2022, the overwhelming message, directed at Russia’s Vladimir Putin, was “Stop the war!” A year later, demonstrators demanded that Germany and its NATO allies stop supplying arms to Ukraine — in the expectation that once Ukraine was left to its own devices, Volodymyr Zelenskyy would have to sue for peace. Both crowds were a diverse lot — and included veterans of the German peace movement of the 1980s — but last month’s also featured prominent representatives of the extreme right, such as Jörg Urban, the leader of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in Saxony, and the far-right publisher Jürgen Elsässer. Wagenknecht didn’t mind: everybody is welcome at our rally, she said, provided they sincerely “ehrlichen Herzens,” want to call for peace and negotiations.

Last month’s rally was prompted by a change in government policy. In late January, after months of procrastination and debate, Germany agreed to supply fourteen Leopard 2 A6 tanks to Ukraine and allow other countries to export the German-made tank to help Ukrainians repel the Russian invaders. The Leopard is considered one of the world’s best battle tanks, and Ukraine had long demanded that its allies make this particular model available.

Germany had already delivered other military hardware to Ukraine, including thirty Gepard self-propelled anti-aircraft guns, but had shied away from supplying tanks that might enable Kyiv’s forces to go on the counteroffensive and perhaps even carry the war into Russia. And the Scholz government didn’t want to be seen to make available weaponry of a kind that the United States was keeping back.

Because of a widespread wariness about German involvement in armed conflicts, it took a while for the government to supply Ukraine with any weapons at all. Even after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its support for the separatists in the Donbas, the Merkel government categorically ruled out arming Ukraine.

Visiting Eastern Ukraine in May 2021, Greens co-leader Robert Habeck suggested that Germany should enable Ukraine to defend itself against the pro-Russian separatists. He didn’t have in mind tanks or heavy artillery; at most, he was referring to weapons that could be used to shoot down drones. He was roundly criticised, not only by the Merkel government but also by prominent members of his own party. With a national poll looming, he backtracked.

After Merkel’s defeat in September 2021 the new government of Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats initially maintained its predecessor’s approach to Russia. In spite of American misgivings, Scholz and foreign minister Annalena Baerbock of the Greens pushed ahead with the construction of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline and continued to treat Vladimir Putin as if he could be trusted. In January 2022, when defence minister Christine Lambrecht, a Social Democrat, assured Ukraine that it had Germany’s full support, she proved her point by authorising the delivery of 5000 helmets to the Ukrainian army.

After Russia launched its full invasion, Scholz’s government abandoned the fifty-year-old doctrine that precluded weapons being provided to states outside NATO that are involved, or likely to be involved, in military conflicts. As Germany’s allies began talking about arming Ukraine with artillery, however, Lambrecht agreed only to dispatching bazookas to Kyiv. Much like the 5000 helmets, the offer didn’t seem overly generous: the weapons had been inherited by the Bundeswehr from its East German counterpart, the GDR’s National People’s Army, in 1990.

Over the twelve months since then, Scholz and his defence minister have appeared to be dragged kicking and screaming towards ramping up Germany’s military support, with pressure piled on by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, his outspoken ambassador to Berlin, the Polish government, the opposition Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats’ coalition partners, the Greens and the Free Democrats.

Things changed when Lambrecht was replaced by another Social Democrat, Boris Pistorius, in mid January. Once the US agreed to supply M1 Abrams tanks, which American generals consider unsuitable for the conditions in Ukraine, Germany finally decided to deliver a very limited number of battle tanks. Still, the Scholz government is committed to treading as carefully as possible, even if that’s not how its actions were perceived by those attending last month’s rally in Berlin. They were convinced that Scholz had joined the chorus of warmongers and that it might only be a matter of time until Germany crosses another red line and arms Ukraine with fighter planes, making a third world war a realistic prospect.

A couple of weeks before last month’s rally, Wagenknecht and Alice Schwarzer, a faded icon of the German women’s movement, published a manifesto on the petition website Change.org. Its opening paragraph reads:

Today (10 February 2023) is the 352nd day of the war in Ukraine. So far, more than 200,000 soldiers and 50,000 civilians have been killed. Women have been raped, children frightened, an entire people traumatised. If the fighting continues unabated, Ukraine will soon be a depopulated, ravaged country. And also in Europe many people are scared of an escalation of the war. They fear for their and their children’s future.

There are two reasons why it might be easy to dismiss the manifesto. One is its language. While the text acknowledges that the “Ukrainian population” — not “Ukraine,” nor the “Ukrainian people” — was “brutally attacked by Russia,” it fails unambiguously to identify victims and perpetrators. The grammatical passive voice in the first paragraph obscures the indisputable fact that women in Ukraine were raped by Russian soldiers. Civilians died in Ukraine rather than in Russia.

Wagenknecht and Schwarzer claim that Ukraine can’t win the war and that it therefore makes little sense to prolong the hostilities. They say that each day the war goes on costs up to a thousand lives and brings the world closer to a third world war, which would be fought with nuclear weapons.

The manifesto calls for immediate negotiations to facilitate a ceasefire — because that’s what half of Germany’s population wants. Such negotiations, Wagenknecht and Schwarzer suggest, would require compromises on both sides. It is hard to imagine what a Russian compromise would look like, or how the government in Kyiv could agree to anything but a withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory (or at least from that part occupied after 24 February 2022).

The other reason why the manifesto lacks credibility has to do with the ulterior motives of one of its authors. It’s no secret that Wagenknecht wants to leave Die Linke (as her husband and closest political ally, former Social Democrats leader Oskar Lafontaine, has already done) and form a new party. She is hoping that enough of those currently voting for either Die Linke or the AfD would support her brand of populism and push a new party over the 5 per cent threshold designed to keep minor players out of the Bundestag.

The slogan “Peace with Russia!” would appeal to many voters, particularly in East Germany, as would two other causes currently championed by the AfD but also close to Wagenknecht’s heart: “Close the Borders!” and “War on Wokeness!” The manifesto and the rally were thinly disguised means of gauging support for a new party.

The Change.org petition was endorsed by sixty-nine prominent Germans, most of them writers, academics or actors. Many of them would have written a very different text but felt strongly enough about the manifesto’s key message to sign it. They include, for example, Margot Käßmann, a former leader of Germany’s Lutheran Church. She doesn’t want Germany to provide any more arms to Ukraine because she is convinced that they would inevitably “escalate, extend and broaden the war, and that fears of a nuclear war are not completely unfounded.” When asked how she imagines negotiations would be initiated and proceed, she said that she wasn’t an expert on diplomacy.

Another signatory is the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, who suspects that the war is the result of a US ploy to shore up its global hegemony at the expense of Europe. Like many others who subscribe to the sentiments of the manifesto, he is convinced that his views have not been sufficiently aired by Germany’s public broadcasters and the press — or worse: “The government is readying the tools to unleash the police and, in particular, the security services on anyone who doubts the wisdom of pledging full-scale support to the ultranationalist government of Ukraine and the Biden administration,” he predicted in a recent interview.

But while Wagenknecht and Schwarzer’s “Manifesto for Peace” and some of the arguments put forward by its prominent supporters are unconvincing, the manifesto can’t be readily discounted. That’s not least because around three-quarters of a million people have already signed it. It has in fact attracted more signatures than any other German petition on Change.org.

The support for the manifesto also reflects widely shared views and sentiments. According to a YouGov poll conducted last month, 51 per cent of Germans believe that their country’s supply of arms to Ukraine makes it a belligerent. Another survey, in early March, found that 31 per cent of respondents think that Germany’s support for Ukraine goes too far.

I didn’t sign Wagenknecht and Schwarzer’s manifesto, nor do I believe that Germany’s support for Ukraine goes too far. But I sympathise with some of those calling for renewed diplomatic efforts to stop the killing. And I have misgivings about the hawkish rhetoric of Ukraine’s German supporters.

The demands that Germany provide more, and more sophisticated, military hardware to Ukraine is often linked to the mantra that Ukraine must win the war. That aligns with the demand that Russia must lose the war, but is quite different from the suggestion that Ukraine must be put in a position where it won’t lose the war. I cannot see why a defeat of Russia should be a necessary prerequisite for a Russian withdrawal and an acknowledgment that Ukraine’s borders must be respected. Besides, it is hard to imagine Russia, the country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, conceding outright defeat.

I am astounded by the uncritical embrace of NATO by erstwhile pacifists, particularly among the Greens, as if the US-led alliance were a peacekeeping force on a humanitarian mission. The idea that its expansion, be it eastwards or northwards, would only be in the interest of global peace or that NATO is an alliance designed to promote democracy strikes me as preposterous. The Kurdish exiles extradited from Sweden to Turkey to facilitate Sweden’s joining of the alliance could testify that NATO doesn’t have a problem with autocratic regimes among its members, let alone dictatorial regimes outside NATO. That is if they live to tell the tale.

The forgetfulness of particularly those hawks who are recent converts baffles me. There have been numerous violations of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter — namely that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations” — since 1945. The US has been a regular culprit. Past American invasions should not serve as excuses for Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity — not just since February 2022 but since 2014 — but a picture that casts the US as a defender of the UN Charter is plainly wrong.

Similarly, while moves to collect evidence in order to eventually charge the Russian leadership with crimes against humanity deserve all the support they can get, it’s worth recalling that the US is among the countries that don’t recognise the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which in an ideal world would try Putin and his generals.

The forgetfulness of Ukraine’s hawkish supporters also extends to other aspects of postwar history. They often imply that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is unprecedented. It’s not. Arguably, Russia would not have dared to invade Ukraine if the West had taken a strong stance against its invasion of Georgia, its bombing of Grozny, its occupation of the Crimea and its intervention in Syria (including the bombing of civilian targets in Aleppo).

Nor is Russia the only country that has tried to bomb a European country into submission. The Greens, in particular, ought to recall NATO’s 1999 intervention in the Kosovo war and its bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which then foreign minister Joschka Fischer defended by comparing what was happening in Kosovo to Auschwitz. At the time, many Greens quit the party in protest against the decision to endorse Fischer’s stance.

Incidentally, a closer look at what happened in 1999 might be instructive in more than one sense. At rallies against the NATO bombing, left-wing pacifists marched side by side with Serbian ultranationalists, admirers of the far-right Chetniks who fought against Nazi Germany (but also against Croats, Bosniaks and Tito’s partisans).

The amnesia that characterises the current debate between hawks and doves also extends to other recent conflicts. According to the UN Development Program, the war in Yemen had caused 377,000 deaths by the end of 2021. Last year, the German government authorised arms sales to Saudi Arabia, one of the parties to that war. So much for the claim that the decision to supply arms to Ukraine has been unparalleled.

And what about Scholz’s Zeitenwende, the turning point in German policy that he announced in the Bundestag on 27 February 2022? He used Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a pretext for a €100 billion funding boost for the armed forces.

Finally, I am wary of the expectation that support for Ukraine and its people must be accompanied by an endorsement of Ukrainian nationalism. At rallies in support of Ukraine I am uneasy when the Ukrainian national anthem is sung (which invariably happens during such events), not because I have anything against that anthem in particular, but because occasions when the Australian or German national anthems are sung make me similarly uncomfortable.

Similarly, demands that cultural events involving Russian artists ought to be cancelled or boycotted, or that the reading of Russian literature ought to be discouraged are not just plain stupid but also reek of a nationalism that is at the heart of many of the ills of today’s world, including armed conflict and forced displacement.

Some of those who signed Wagenknecht’s manifesto may have done so because they are critical of NATO, object to US foreign policy past and present, or believe that we eventually ought to overcome an international system based on nation-states. None of these beliefs is incompatible with empathy, and indeed solidarity, with a people attacked by a ruthless invader. Yet in many statements about the war by self-declared pacifists, solidarity is in short supply.

Take, for example, an open letter to Olaf Scholz by the mayor and twenty-one of thirty-four local parliamentarians of Freital, a town of 40,000 in the East German state of Saxony. “As a sovereign state, Germany, the federal government and you as chancellor have to make sovereign decisions for the benefit of the German people,” they tell Scholz, claiming that instead his government’s policies further the interests of “third parties.” Referring twice to “Leid,” meaning pain or suffering, they write that “our painful past” ought to teach Germans that the supply of weapons to Ukraine will simply produce further, indescribable suffering.

A generous interpretation would assume that unlike the historical Leid, “indescribable suffering” refers to the current and future experiences of people in Ukraine. According to a less generous reading, the latter is something likely to be experienced by “us,” once the delivery of tanks and other arms to Ukraine ignites a war fought with nuclear weapons.

Such a reading is supported by another statement in the letter. The authors claim that they are not prepared, as Germans, “to be involved in a third world war or to be made a party to belligerent acts in whatever form, either directly or indirectly.” Already, individuals and businesses are experiencing what they call “unacceptable consequences” — presumably as a result of Germany’s support for Ukraine.

Lacking any explicit reference to Ukrainian victims and Russian perpetrators, and devoid of empathy for the people in Ukraine, the Freital letter captures some of the sentiment fuelling German pacifism. It is not even an extreme example. It doesn’t spell out what many opponents of support for Ukraine are openly saying: that the sanctions against Russia are harming Germany’s economy and have been responsible for energy shortages and rising inflation, and should therefore be withdrawn immediately.

Am I being unfair by quoting a letter written by the members of a local parliament in which the AfD wields a lot of influence? True, regional Saxony is not representative of Germany. Neither is the man I am about to quote, although many Germans would like to think he is. Jürgen Habermas, the nonagenarian philosopher who is arguably Germany’s foremost public intellectual, intervened twice in the public debates about German support for Ukraine, first in May last year, and again after the publication of Wagenknecht and Schwarzer’s manifesto, on both occasions by writing an essay for the respected Munich-based broadsheet Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Habermas names perpetrators and victims. In his first contribution, he endorses Olaf Scholz’s caution rather than arguing against supporting Ukraine. More recently, he has echoed calls for a diplomatic solution and criticised the ramping up of Germany’s military aid for the government in Kyiv. His line of argument is neither simplistic nor rash. But he too seems overly concerned by what the war does to him.

He begins his first article by referring to the representation of the war in the media, which in his view has been influenced by Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “A Ukrainian president, who knows about the impact of images, is responsible for powerful messages.” He then concedes that notwithstanding this “skilful staging,” “the facts tug at our nerves.” He is concerned about our nerves, rather than about the very real death and destruction represented by such skilfully staged images?

In his second essay, he once more articulates Western sensitivities. “The West has its own legitimate interests and its own obligations,” he writes. Western governments

have legal obligations towards the security concerns of their own citizens and, irrespective of the attitudes of the people in Ukraine, they are morally co-responsible for victims and destruction caused by weapons from the West; therefore, they cannot shift the responsibility for the brutal consequences of an extension of the fighting, which becomes only possible thanks to their military support, to the Ukrainian government.

Although Habermas is ostensibly talking about Western governments, he appears to mean “us.” To use Margot Käßmann’s reading of Habermas’s words: “When we are supplying weapons — that’s something the philosopher Habermas has put very well — we are co-responsible for the dead. That’s not something where we could evade our responsibility.”

Might Käßmann and Habermas feel less strongly about the brutal consequences of a Russian occupation of Ukraine because they wouldn’t be broadcast into their living rooms (with the skilful stager, Zelenskyy, presumably one of the many victims of the Russian “liberators”)?

Habermas might object to Käßmann’s interpretation of his words, and would not want to be associated with either Wagenknecht or the Freital councillors. But he shares with them a call for negotiations and a conviction that such negotiations require the West to scale down, if not halt altogether, its military support for Ukraine. And the clamour for peace, whether in pursuit of cheap Russian gas or out of a desire not to be held morally responsible for the fighting, is informed by egotism.

No obvious middle path exists between abandoning Ukraine and arming the Kyiv government to the extent that its army can inflict a defeat on Russia. That is, if we assume that a solution will depend on what happens on the battlefield.

But the West has two other options. One is to do more to influence countries that have tacitly supported Putin, particularly China and India. The West would have to pay a high price if it wanted China and India to stop buying Russian coal and oil, but until we know the price-tag, it might be worth exploring that option in more detail.

The other option would be to impose meaningful sanctions in the hope that they lead to a coup against Putin. A couple of days ago, the Hamburg state government reported that last year the use of coal in Hamburg’s power stations increased by almost 15 per cent on 2021’s figure. That’s a result of Germany’s attempt to wean itself off Russian gas. But 35 per cent of the coal used in Hamburg last year was imported from Russia. So far, the sanctions are too selective to seriously hurt the Russian economy. In fact Russia’s revenues from selling oil and gas increased by 28 per cent last year.

The global climate might benefit from more wide-ranging sanctions targeting Russian fossil fuels. But any tightening would also hurt those imposing the sanctions, at least initially. Their impact would be grist for the mill for those who claim the price we pay for the war in Ukraine is already too high. The debate would further obscure the fact that whatever inconveniences we experience, and however much our sensitivities are offended, the war’s victims are the people of Ukraine.

German angst, which I discussed in a previous Inside Story essay, is clearly back, and with it the egotism that accompanied it. The current debate would benefit from a less blinkered view of the past, one that is mindful of what happened in Yemen and of Russia’s track record since the early 1990s, of unholy alliances against NATO’s bombing of Belgrade, and of the US’s insistence that its self-appointed role as global sheriff should not be subject to the scrutiny of the International Criminal Court.

It could also be instructive to revisit the peace movement of the 1980s, which is now upheld as exemplary by German pacifists and hawks alike. Then, too, many peace activists took sides in a global conflict pitting the US and its allies against the Soviet Union. Then, too, what mattered most to many of those gathered in Bonn in October 1981 were their own sensitivities, because they imagined themselves as (future) victims. And then, too, the allaying of Germans’ fears did nothing to enhance the safety of people in faraway places. •

The post The egotism of German pacifism appeared first on Inside Story.

A couple of days later, a nineteen-year-old from Afghanistan was reported to have badly hurt himself when he tried to climb out of a fifth-floor window of a reception centre for asylum seekers. He had panicked at around 3am when police came to his room to deport him to Croatia, where he had first entered the European Union. His fear may well have originated in experiences he had while passing through that country on the so-called Balkan route from Greece to Germany.

All three people — the two young women from Ukraine and the young man from Afghanistan — have sought refuge in Germany from countries ravaged by war. But while the women are allowed to remain in Germany until at least the end of 2023 without applying for asylum, the nineteen-year-old is prohibited even from seeking protection here. The women are employed and live in private accommodation; the young man was put up, with some 370 others, in a hostel run on behalf of the city of Hamburg.

In both cases, the European Union uses the same term, “solidarity,” to frame its response. Solidarity means that millions of Ukrainians have been allowed to settle temporarily in the twenty-seven EU member countries, and it is also the key concept underlying the EU’s common policy on asylum. But solidarity isn’t the exclusive preserve of the EU: activists campaigning against the deportation of asylum seekers have also assured the young man from Afghanistan of their solidarity.

Over the two centuries since it was first used, the English term solidarity has been “endlessly pliant,” in the words of the Swedish historian of ideas Sven-Eric Liedman. Are we perhaps talking about different kinds of solidarity here that have nothing to do with each other? Not quite. Bear with me, while I take you on a tour of European solidarity.

Solidarity is a buzzword in and around the EU’s headquarters in Brussels. A search of the European Commission’s official website, for instance, yields more than 40,000 hits for the term, and almost 4000 for the more specific “European solidarity.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise, for solidarity has long been deemed a distinguishing attribute of the European project.

The term features more than a dozen times in the Treaty on European Union, which underwrites EU law. In Article 2, the treaty refers to the EU’s foundational values of “respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.” “These values,” adds the article, “are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.”

Another key document, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, goes further. In its preamble it lists solidarity as one of four “indivisible, universal values” on which the EU has been founded (the others being human dignity, freedom and equality). The charter helps illuminate the kind of solidarity the drafters of the Treaty on European Union had in mind: the twelve articles in its “Title IV: Solidarity” deal with things like healthcare, workers’ entitlements and social security — that is, with social and economic rather than civil and political rights.

The EU also prides itself on extending its solidarity to other, less fortunate nations. In recent months, Ukraine has been a prominent recipient of European solidarity, and so too have the countries most affected by climate change. At the conclusion of COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen declared the conference to have “opened a new chapter on financing loss and damage” — a reference to Europe’s support for a fund to mitigate the impact of climate change — “and laid the foundations for a new method for solidarity between those in need and those in a position to help.”

Von der Leyen’s rhetoric was echoed by governments that strongly identify with the European project. German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said that “Team Germany” had travelled to Egypt to campaign “for more solidarity with the most vulnerable states.” The EU would like to be seen internationally as a “normative superpower,” a major player whose actions are informed by ethical considerations. Affording solidarity to the weak and poor is as much the result of these considerations as are criticism, censorship and punishment of nation-states whose performance runs counter to the norms and values embraced by the EU.

More important for the EU’s identity than solidarity of, among or for its residents — or solidarity with climate-affected nations or war-torn Ukraine — is the solidarity EU member states extend towards each other. Here the EU’s rhetoric has been more innovative, applying to nation-states a concept that has been more commonly used, as it is in Title V of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, to characterise relationships involving individuals.

References to such intra-EU solidarity appear in foundational texts from the 1950s. One of them — the May 1950 Schuman Declaration, incidentally published on the EU’s website under the heading “70 Years of Solidarity” — is French foreign minister Robert Schuman’s proposal for the EU’s earliest forerunner, a coal and steel community comprising France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Europe, Schumann said, would be “built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.”

Schuman’s idea was picked up the following year in the preamble of the treaty establishing that community, which recognises that “Europe can be built only through practical achievements which will first of all create real solidarity.”

One apparent expression of the solidarity principle is the EU’s system of transfer payments from affluent to poor members. Croatia and Lithuania receive payments amounting to more than 4 per cent of their respective gross domestic products, and Hungary, Greece and Latvia each receive the equivalent of around 3.5 per cent of GDP. Political figures in Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands and elsewhere might complain that tens of billions of euros are lavished each year on poor cousins in eastern and southeastern Europe — conveniently ignoring the fact that the payments amount to less than half a per cent of the GDP of wealthy member countries — but the system is nevertheless working well.

But those payments don’t prove that the solidarity principle governs relations between member states. To understand how much heed is paid to the principle, we need to look beyond the EU’s routine budget negotiations to what happens in times of crisis.

When Greece was facing national bankruptcy during the eurozone crisis, it expected countries like Germany to cancel its debts (in much the same way as German debts had been cancelled in 1953). But the Tsipras government’s understanding of solidarity couldn’t easily be reconciled with the kind of solidarity promoted by the governments in Berlin, Paris or The Hague. Where the Greeks saw European solidarity as tantamount to debt reduction, the governments of affluent European countries insisted that solidarity involved a corresponding duty — namely, substantial cuts to the Greek budget. German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble famously declared that solidarity was not a one-way street.

When Schäuble’s views eventually prevailed, I wrote in Inside Story that the outcome was “appallingly bad” not just for Greece but also for Europe. I stand by that assessment, not least because the eurozone crisis demonstrated that any aspiration the EU’s leaders may have had for the “real solidarity” envisaged by its founders remained just that: an aspiration. It did not translate into action. Schuman had a valid point when he suggested that inter-state solidarity doesn’t miraculously materialise but rather is created by means of “concrete achievements.”

Solidarity among member states is not just about money. It is also about sharing other resources — medicines and intensive care beds during the Covid pandemic, for example. Here, too, member states’ performance has rarely matched their lofty rhetoric. During the early days of the pandemic, Germany and France were roundly and for good reason condemned for imposing export bans rather than sharing their (admittedly meagre) supplies of masks and ventilators.

Sharing electricity or fossil fuels during the current energy crisis could also be evidence of solidarity among member states. But will they really be prepared to help each other out during winter rather than reserve resources for their own use? In Germany, the Scholz government recently created a national €200 billion rescue shield to protect businesses and households from rising energy costs. It could have pushed instead for a European emergency fund that would have extended benefits much more widely (though not as generously as the German subsidies). Its decision indicates how national governments will react if freezing temperatures stretch Europe’s capacity to avoid power cuts, keep industries running, and heat residential and public buildings.

The most controversial aspect of European solidarity comes in Title V of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, headed “Area of Freedom, Security and Justice.” Article 67(2) stipulates that the EU “shall ensure the absence of internal border controls for persons and shall frame a common policy on asylum, immigration and external border control, based on solidarity between Member States, which is fair towards third-country nationals.” The role of solidarity is further emphasised in Article 80: “The policies of the Union… and their implementation shall be governed by the principle of solidarity and fair sharing of responsibility, including its financial implications, between the Member States.”

Burden-sharing of this kind is not a new idea. Back in 1950 France suggested that the UN Refugee Convention should include the following provision: “In a spirit of international solidarity, the High Contracting Parties shall take into consideration the burden assumed by the countries having first admitted or granted temporary asylum to refugees, and facilitate the permanent settlement of the latter, more especially by relaxation of the procedure for admission.” The proposal was rejected not so much because other delegations objected to burden-sharing but because they weren’t convinced that a reference to the spirit of international solidarity was necessary. One delegate argued that the convention’s effectiveness would obviously “depend on the good will and the spirit of solidarity of the signatory States.”

Solidarity eventually appeared in the 1967 UN Declaration on Territorial Asylum (which unfortunately is barely remembered today). Article 2(2) reads: “Where a State finds difficulty in granting or continuing to grant asylum, States… shall consider, in a spirit of international solidarity, appropriate measures to lighten the burden on that State.” Subsequent references to solidarity appear in statements issued by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees as well as in the 2018 Global Compacts on Refugees and for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.

UN-level attempts to lighten the burden of countries that host a disproportionately high number of asylum seekers have largely failed, at least in the past forty years. Despite its continuing emphasis on the principle of solidarity, the EU hasn’t done any better. In fact, it could be argued that its common policy on asylum has flown in the face of its rhetorical commitment to that principle.

The cornerstone of the EU’s asylum policy from 2003 to 2013 was the Dublin II Regulation. It provided for protection claims to be assessed in the first EU member state an asylum seeker entered. When the EU adopted the regulation, asylum numbers not only appeared manageable but were also on a downward trajectory. When irregular arrivals picked up again in 2008, EU members that served as entry points for asylum seekers — particularly if they bordered the Mediterranean — began complaining about a system that made them responsible for the majority of new arrivals. The criticism intensified as the number of protection claims skyrocketed in the early 2010s.

The EU tinkered with its asylum policy in 2013, replacing the existing legal framework with the Dublin III Regulation. The principle underlying its predecessor remained untouched. But the regulation became increasingly dysfunctional. Italy and Greece, for example, routinely allowed asylum seekers to pass through without registering their identities. Countries in the north of Europe were compelled to stop transferring asylum seekers back to Greece, even if it could be proven that they had entered the EU via that country, because refugees, particularly children, were not afforded adequate protection there.

During the influx of refugees in 2015–16, some central and northern European members — particularly Germany, Austria, Sweden and Finland — relieved the pressure on Greece and Italy by welcoming asylum seekers who had entered the EU from the Turkish mainland (via Greek islands in the northern Aegean) or from North Africa. Germany probably did so because Angela Merkel’s government naively expected that other countries, impressed by its example, would extend their solidarity in turn to Germany.

At the same time, some countries that had benefited from the Dublin regulations acknowledged that Italy, Malta and Greece were barely able — and couldn’t be expected — to cope with the large number of arrivals from across the sea. They advocated a new mechanism whereby asylum seekers would be distributed across the EU. But the so-called Visegrád group — Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic — supported at times by other EU members in eastern and southeastern Europe, demanded “flexible solidarity” and successfully objected to mandatory relocation.

Even the equitable distribution of relatively small numbers of people from Italy and Greece largely failed. Some member states simply refused to accommodate any asylum seekers who had first entered the EU elsewhere.

Since then the two EU heavyweights, France and Germany, have led a push for a mechanism to share the burden of processing and caring for asylum seekers equitably. This would involve either allocating each country a share of irregular arrivals depending on its capacity and size, or directing compensatory payments from countries unwilling to accommodate asylum seekers to those that are. Schemes that would have enabled relocations from countries of first asylum were welcomed, naturally enough, by the “Med 5” (Italy, Malta, Cyprus, Greece and Spain).

Because the Visegrád 4, among others, wouldn’t budge, France and Germany resorted to promoting voluntary arrangements. Finland brokered an agreement between Malta, Italy, France and Germany in 2019 covering migrants rescued by private search-and-rescue missions in the central Mediterranean. In their joint declaration of intent, the four countries pledged to set up a “more predictable and efficient temporary solidarity mechanism.” But that mechanism has not functioned well: each time migrants are rescued in the Mediterranean, the EU member states still argue over who will take responsibility for them.

In 2020, the European Commission proposed a new Pact on Migration and Asylum designed to effect a “fair sharing of responsibility and solidarity.” Rather than replacing the Dublin Regulation with a bold new scheme, the pact envisages a series of incremental steps. Implementation once again relied on the goodwill of all member states, and when Poland and Hungary, in particular, strongly resisted any moves towards enforced solidarity the French government once more proposed a voluntary mechanism.

In June this year, the end of its presidency approaching, France brokered an agreement signed by eighteen of the twenty-three EU member states, as well as Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, which committed signatories to a “voluntary, simple and predictable solidarity mechanism” that would provide the Med 5 “with needs-based assistance” from other member countries “complementary to European support, by offering relocations (the preferred method of solidarity) and financial contributions.” While some of the signatories accepted asylum seekers who landed in Italy, others simply ignored the pledge they made.

The latest move by the European Commission has been a twenty-point Action Plan for the Central Mediterranean. It is largely the result of lobbying, if not blackmail, by the new Italian government, which would like to prevent any irregularised migrants from making landfall in Italy (and deport many of those already living in Italy). This plan is unlikely, though, to lead to a new common policy on asylum to replace the Dublin Regulation.

In the meantime, irregularised migrants keep breaching the EU’s external borders, with more than 90,000 having arrived in Italy alone so far this year. National immigration authorities keep trying to deport asylum seekers like the nineteen-year-old from Afghanistan to where they first set foot in the EU. According to the Hamburg state government, twenty-nine people were deported from Hamburg to other EU countries in the third quarter of this year, in line with the Dublin Regulation. These deportations tie up scarce resources and cause much anguish.

As more asylum seekers have breached Europe’s southern maritime borders it has become all too obvious that the Dublin Regulation is not “based on solidarity between Member States” but privileges the interests of some EU members over those of others. In other words, it shields central and northern European member states from irregularised migration. Because the likes of Poland and Hungary rejected a mandatory distribution mechanism — advocated by the European Commission, the Med 5 and some EU members in central and northern Europe — the EU’s response has been to try to prevent asylum seekers from reaching Europe in the first place.

In the course of making its external borders increasingly impenetrable, the EU has disregarded the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union’s stipulation that a common asylum policy must be fair towards third-country nationals. Not only has the much-evoked principle of solidarity among member states proven to be little more than a rhetorical gesture, but the violence of its border regime has made a mockery of the EU’s self-declared ambition to stand up for human rights worldwide. There is no greater hypocrite than the winner of the 2012 Nobel peace prize.

In some cases, the EU is paying third parties to keep irregularised migrants away from Europe. Thus Italy and the EU have funded Libyan militias to operate a “coastguard” charged with intercepting migrants and confining them to Libya’s notorious detention centres, which German diplomats once likened to concentration camps.

In other cases, the EU turns a blind eye when its members flout national and EU laws by pushing migrants back across the border, as has been happening in at least half a dozen EU countries. In June, for example, when hundreds of migrants tried to climb over the border fortifications separating the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco, at least twenty-seven died and many of those who had managed to enter Spanish territory were returned to Morocco without being allowed to lodge a protection claim.

Or, to give another example, Latvia declared a state of emergency at its border with Belarus in August, allowing the government to restrict the movement of journalists and NGO representatives. Erik Marquardt, a Greens member of the European parliament, explains why the Latvian authorities don’t welcome monitors:

A typical horror trip in the limbo of the border region looks like this: The asylum seekers try to cross the green border through the forest to Latvian territory to apply for asylum. On Latvian territory they are picked up by border guards and taken to unregistered tent camps somewhere in the forest, far away from civil society, press and NGOs. Here… commandos harass, beat and abuse the detainees. They use batons and stun guns — sometimes even on their genitals. Their cell phones and valuables are taken from them. The shelter seekers have to sleep overnight in a tent in the middle of the forest, sometimes outdoors, at up to –20 degrees. The commandos also take away their lighters, the only way to make a fire to warm themselves against the cold temperatures and to protect themselves against wolves and bears. Often in the early morning hours, the refugees are bussed back to the border with Belarus and have to walk the rest of the way back through the forest.

Similar incidents have taken place at the borders between Croatia and Bosnia, and between Poland and Belarus. In the Turkish–Bulgarian borderlands — the setting of Haider Rashid’s haunting feature film Europa, which premiered to much acclaim last year at Cannes — migrants have to contend not only with zealous border guards but also with vigilantes.

But the Greek coastguard is probably most notorious for violating the rights of irregularised migrants. Over a two-year period from February 2020 until February 2022, a Forensic Architecture research team documented 1018 “drift-backs” in the Aegean Sea involving 27,464 people. Migrants were prevented from landing in Greece and then towed out to sea to a spot from where currents, waves and winds are likely to take them back to Turkish territorial waters. According to the researchers, this sometimes-lethal method is designed to “provide a measure of deniability for those perpetrators, shielding them from accountability.”

The EU has regularly condoned practices that are illegal under international human rights and refugee law. In its defence, it often maintains that it is merely protecting itself against acts of hybrid warfare perpetrated by the likes of the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. Try telling that to migrants who are drowning or freezing to death at the European border.

But intra-EU solidarity on asylum is working in one sense: member states cover for each other when they violate the Charter of Fundamental Rights in their “defence” of the EU’s external border. The European Commission, while supposedly still committed to its 2020 Pact on Migration and Asylum, has in some instances been turning a blind eye and in others actively encouraging violators — as happened in March 2020, when von der Leyen praised Greece for “being our European ασπίδα,” or shield.

It should be some consolation that the securitisation of the EU’s external borders, and the violence this entails, is contested by other European institutions. The European parliament — and particularly the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, led by the indomitable Juan Fernando López Aguilar — has frequently spoken out against human rights violations at the borders and often put itself on a collision course with the European Commission and Frontex, the European border agency. But the parliament’s powers are limited.

The European courts have also ruled against the likes of Hungary on many occasions and upheld the rights of asylum seekers. Yet, as a recent study by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee has shown, EU member states often fail to implement judgements by the European Court of Human Rights and other bodies.

In one respect, European solidarity has functioned reasonably well. Since the Russian invasion on 24 February, the EU has provided substantial financial and material assistance to Ukraine. Its response to the war hasn’t been entirely united — Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s support for the government in Kyiv is lukewarm at best — but that hasn’t stopped it from also unanimously imposing sanctions on Russia, Belarus and Iran (which supplies drones to Russia), and on numerous individuals and entities in those countries.

The EU has also welcomed people fleeing Ukraine (though citizens of Ukraine more happily than others caught up in the war). In early March it invoked its Temporary Protection Directive, adopted in 2001 but never used, which gives refugees from Ukraine a residence permit for up to three years without the need to apply for asylum. The permit provides the right to work, gives access to social security payments and healthcare, and allows its holders to move freely between countries.

Because of that free movement, and because citizens of Ukraine can enter the EU for ninety days without a visa, the exact number of refugees in EU countries is anyone’s guess. The figure is probably around 4.5 million, with Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic between them accounting for well over half.

The length of residence permits and other benefits for Ukrainian refugees vary greatly. As of June, Germany paid each Ukrainian refugee living in government-provided accommodation €449 (A$690) per month, France less than half that amount, and Poland, the country that has accommodated by far the most refugees, just over €15. In some countries, Ukrainian refugees have access to free language courses, in others they don’t. Their chances of finding employment and the extent to which Ukrainian qualifications are recognised also vary greatly.

In the early weeks of the war, EU leaders demanded that refugees be spread across the twenty-three member countries. They argued that Portugal and Ireland, for example, although a long way from Ukraine, ought to help relieve the burden placed on Ukraine’s immediate neighbours. Some refugees were indeed relocated — but only from Moldova, which had received more Ukrainian refugees on a per capita basis than any other country.

In practice, relative proximity to Ukraine and existing diasporic networks have proved more important than local assistance in Ukrainians’ decisions about where to stay. Calls for a redistribution of refugees have become much less frequent, not least because countries hosting a large number of refugees receive additional EU funding. Besides, a compulsory mechanism to distribute Ukrainians across the EU would probably be unworkable under the Temporary Protection Directive. It has also proved unnecessary, and is in fact undesirable because it might prevent refugees from living in places where they can rely on diasporic support networks.

What is true for the EU is also true for individual member states. Germany ordinarily places asylum seekers across its sixteen states according to the so-called Königstein formula, which takes account of a state’s economic strength and population. Within states, asylum seekers are then allocated to districts, usually according to a similar formula.

An informed estimate puts the number of Ukrainian refugees in Germany at between 630,000 and 750,000, of which approximately 100,000 are in Berlin, a city of 3.8 million people. If Ukrainian refugees had been distributed according to the Königstein formula, Berlin would have received around a third of that number. Berlin authorities have certainly been complaining loudly about the challenges posed by large numbers, but only about 3000 Ukrainian refugees actually live in government-provided accommodation.

In parts of the country where the Ukrainian diaspora is smaller and Germans are less willing to share their apartments, most refugees allocated according to the Königstein formula would have needed accommodation in hostels, sports halls and container villages. Conflicts with the locals might have ensued, much like during 2015–16.

The situation may change, of course, not just in Germany but also elsewhere in Europe, if Russia succeeds in forcing more Ukrainians to flee. So far, predictions that the bombing of Ukrainian power stations would lead to a mass exodus have proven as wrong as the assumption that Poland would quickly buckle under the influx of refugees.

The reception of Ukrainian refugees suggests that efforts to distribute asylum seekers equitably across EU member states may not be what’s needed. On the contrary: rather than deporting asylum seekers back to the European country where their fingerprints were first taken, the EU may prefer to let them move to wherever they are supported by diasporic communities or civil society networks. The Ukrainian case suggests that one aspect of Article 67(2) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union is achievable, namely “a common policy on asylum… which is fair towards third-country nationals.”

The Ukrainian case doesn’t prove or disprove the idea that a common system could be “based on solidarity between Member States.” It doesn’t allow any inferences to be drawn about the validity of the claim that nation-states can behave as if they were individuals extending solidarity towards each other.

But the EU’s undeclared war on irregular migrants, including those seeking its protection, has had the unintended consequence of encouraging individual acts of solidarity of the kind referred to in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union. They are not directed towards fellow EU residents, however, as envisaged in that article, but towards people the EU wants to keep out or expel.

As a consequence, activists have repeatedly intervened when authorities across Europe have tried to deport asylum seekers to places of danger or to where they had entered the EU. Even more significant than the anti-deportation campaigns, though, is the work of activists who assist refugees as they cross borders and who document unlawful attempts by the EU and national governments to prevent them from doing so.

In the central Mediterranean, where at least 25,000 irregularised migrants have died over the past eight years, private search-and-rescue operations have saved the lives of thousands of migrants. They enjoy considerable support not just in northern and western Europe but also in Italy and Spain.

In Poland, Grupa Granica has provided life-saving humanitarian assistance to migrants stranded in the forests at the Polish–Belarusian border, and monitored the human rights situation there. In Greece, volunteers have been assisting irregularised migrants who have made it to the islands of the northern Aegean, as well as refugees who have been left to fend for themselves in Athens. Much like the search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean, these volunteers have also tried to hold Frontex and the Greek coastguard accountable.

In all these cases, activism is not just the result of an affective response to suffering, and the sufferers are not regarded only as suppliants. We are indeed seeing solidarity in action.

With member states using the EU’s Facilitation Directive of 2002 to criminalise such acts of solidarity, activists have often paid a high price. Since 2016, according to the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands and Spain have between them initiated sixty administrative or criminal proceedings against private organisations involved in search-and-rescue operations.

To make matters worse, the twenty-point action plan recently announced by the European Commission includes the following: “17. Promote discussions in the International Maritime Organization on the need for a specific framework and guidelines for vessels having a particular focus on search and rescue activities, particularly in view of developments in the European context.” These ominous lines suggest the European Commission, goaded by Italy’s racist Meloni government, is intent on further hindering the work of Sea-Watch, SOS Mediterranée and other private search-and-rescue organisations.

Prosecutions of this kind are worrying, and the prospects of further criminalisations dire. But if Robert Schuman was right in observing that solidarity is created by a process of practical achievements, then the solidarity targeted by governments such as Meloni’s and Orbán’s, as well as by the European Commission, has become a force to reckon with. Activists have thwarted attempts to turn Europe into an impenetrable fortress. Compare their efficacy with that of the inter-state solidarity of EU member states, which often exists only in the increasingly hollow appeals of the European Commission.

Acts by the likes of French farmer Cédric Herrou and seafarer Carola Rackete have captured the imagination of Europeans and inspired others to act in solidarity. Herrou was convicted of a délit de solidarité, a “solidarity offence,” for ferrying migrants from Italy to France and inviting them to camp at his property; Rackete, who captained the Sea-Watch 3, defied the Italian government’s order not to disembark irregularised migrants rescued in the Mediterranean.

Such acts have also inspired municipal governments to take action. Some of them have challenged the national authorities to allocate more asylum seekers to them than they are required to accommodate according to the official quota.

There is another reason why I am optimistic regarding the prospects for solidarity à la Herrou — as opposed to the European shield advocated by Ursula von der Leyen and others — and that’s to do with motivation. The intra-EU solidarity so frequently conjured by the European Commission is perhaps too easy a target. Because it isn’t practised (and may in fact not be necessary, at least in the context of a common policy of asylum), the solidarity of Articles 67 and 80 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union remains a weasel word.

The solidarity offered by the EU to others needs to be taken more seriously, not least because climate change will require countries of the global north to reposition themselves in relation to the global south. In her statement at COP27, von der Leyen said that solidarity means those in a position to help should assist those in need. She didn’t say why Tuvalu islanders or Bangladeshi farmers were in dire straits, or why the EU is in a position to help, but talked as if the EU were a charitable organisation that happened to be able to do good. Solidarity, to be successful and sustainable, needs to be grounded in notions of justice. That is something Herrou and Rackete know but von der Leyen, if she knows it, prefers not to acknowledge. •

The post European solidarity appeared first on Inside Story.

It is clearly more than that. That’s because Boochani’s journalistic pieces, which first appeared mainly in the Guardian and the Saturday Paper, are accompanied by essays written by his translators and other “invited researchers, writers and confidants.” It’s also because Boochani’s journalism — a frightening and detailed view of what was officially called the Manus Regional Processing Centre — deserves to be republished. At the same time, the journalism allows the reader to understand why it was possible to survive detention on Manus: namely because of “love, friendship and brotherhood.”

Some five or six years ago, Boochani’s dispatches would have been read mainly for the information they contained about what went on in the Manus detention centre at a particular moment in time. Now that’s of interest mainly for historians. But it’s possible to appreciate these texts for their careful, indeed delicate and poetic, portrayals of other detainees.

My favourite is “The Man Who Loves Ducks,” an article about Boochani’s animal-loving fellow prisoner Mansour Shoushtari that first appeared in the Guardian in 2017. “Getting to know Shoushtari has been a blessing and an inspiration,” Boochani writes, and such is the power of his writing that I too feel privileged to have met Shoushtari. Shoushtari — and, I guess, writing about Shoushtari — helped Boochani to survive:

For the short time I was in his presence I forgot about all the violence and hardship associated with this prison; my love for life increased after I spent time with him. I was reassured by the fact that there were warm people like Shoushtari in our close company. I think I’ll keep these memories of him with me for years to come.

Some of the book’s other essays help the reader to contextualise Boochani’s texts. Among them are articles by Moones Mansoubi, who arrived in Sydney as a student from Iran the same year Boochani was deported from Christmas Island to Manus, and went on to become one of his translators, and by Ben Doherty, who has reported on Australia’s detention archipelago for the Guardian. For Doherty, Boochani morphed from a source into a fellow journalist who filed articles from inside the Manus camp, written on his mobile phone and transmitted to the Guardian in WhatsApp messages. This process took a while: it was only in late 2015 that Doherty published one of Boochani’s poems, and it took another three months for his first article to appear in the Guardian.

For Doherty, Boochani’s ability to survive had less to do with his relationships with fellow detainees and more to do with his professional ethos. He “was, and saw himself as, a working journalist on Manus,” Doherty writes. “He was a man with a mission, every day, a reason and a rationale in that place. Journalism kept him busy, kept him focused, gave him a resolution and a cause… [J]ournalism — a sense of mission to bear witness, an unshakeable belief in his ‘duty to history’ — gave him a purpose that many others held in that place were denied.”

I was puzzled by the inclusion of some of the other essays, particularly those written by academics. Their affirmation of Boochani’s views seemed to me to be unwarranted, and I found the at times gushing tone embarrassing. If the editors were afraid that a republication of Boochani’s journalistic pieces on their own could not have been justified, then their concerns were groundless. If the intention was to invite authors to critically engage with Boochani’s ideas and prose, then some of the invitees were not up to the task. Maybe they thought that critique necessarily amounted to criticism?

A critical engagement with Boochani’s writings, rather than hero worshipping, could be for another book project. Its editors ought to draw not only on fellow refugees, forced migration scholars and refugee activists, but also on writers who could give voice to the people of Manus.

In Australia, too often, their voices haven’t been heard. On the few occasions when they were, they weren’t properly listened to. Note to future editors: if you found it difficult to identify somebody able to give voice to Manus Islanders, you could do worse than to republish Michelle Nayahamui Rooney’s wonderful 2018 essay “The Chauka Bird and Morality on Our Manus Island Home.”

The pieces by Boochani assembled in Freedom, Only Freedom were written for publication. They were designed to let the public, particularly in Australia, know about the Australian government’s disregard for the human rights of those whose imprisonment on Manus it had authorised. The diary of Uwe Radok, which has now been edited by his daughter Jacquie Houlden and the historian Seumas Spark, was not meant for publication. In fact, it was probably not meant to be read by anybody except its writer.

What links Freedom, Only Freedom with Houlden and Spark’s Shadowline is the fact that Boochani and Radok were refugees held prisoner indefinitely without having been charged with a crime. Only the historical circumstances were different: one was detained by Australian authorities and imprisoned in Papua New Guinea, the other detained by British authorities and held captive in Australia.

Uwe Radok, born in 1916 in Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad) to a non-Jewish mother and Jewish father, left Germany in 1938 for Britain, where he worked as a mechanical engineer. On the direction of MI5, he and his brothers Jobst and Rainer were arrested in September 1939. Unlike the majority of German refugees living in Britain at the time, the three brothers were considered threats — not on account of their political views (they had no sympathy for Nazi Germany) but presumably because their brother Christoph was serving in the German airforce.

On 30 June 1940, together with more than 1200 other internees and some German POWs, the three brothers were put on the SS Arandora Star, which was to take them to Canada to be interned there. On 2 July, a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the ship. Some 800 of those on board died.

The brothers survived and were taken back to Britain by their rescuers, and on 10 July 1940, together with more than 2000 other internees, embarked on the HMT Dunera. This time the destination was Australia. On arrival there, the Radoks were interned in Tatura in northern Victoria and, unlike the majority of the Dunera internees, who had not been regarded as an immediate threat to Britain, they were only released in May 1942.

The published diary covers the period from Uwe Radok’s embarkation on the Arandora Star until 12 February 1943. Half of it is about his time as an internee, the other half deals with his life as a member of the Australian army’s 8th Employment Company. It’s not made clear why the published text ends several months before Radok stopped writing a diary. It’s also not evident to me why it has been necessary to omit Radok’s notes on books he read — they might have told us more about him.

The two books also have in common that Boochani’s texts and some of Radok’s were translated, and that all were copyedited. We can only wonder how much of Boochani’s voice got lost or altered when his WhatsApp messages were turned into English and then attended to by a Guardian subeditor. I am curious to see the first book written by him in English.

Radok wrote some of his diary in English, some of it in German, and some of it in a mixture of both languages. The editors opted for a smooth English text, with some German expressions and misspellings deliberately left in place “to retain the ring of the original.” It’s to their credit that they illustrated the text with images of parts of the original diary. But rather than mere illustrations, they actually show how many liberties were taken with the original.

Radok’s diary says much about one man’s experience of internment (and more about his infatuation with a fellow internee) but much less about camp life. It is hard to warm to its author, who comes across as self-obsessed and arrogant. While Boochani’s portraits of his fellow detainees are remarkably generous, Radok’s depictions of others (including the man with whom he was infatuated and even more so the woman who was to become his wife) are often mean-spirited. Unlike Boochani, Radok didn’t assume the role of a witness. But since he probably didn’t intend others to read his diary, he can’t be blamed for that.

In their introduction, Spark and his Monash colleague Christina Twomey write that “The stereotypes that now envelop the Dunera boys and their place in the history of post-war Australia have conflated individual stories into an increasingly homogenous narrative, a singular triumph of good citizenship and material success.” They cite films and a book from the 1970s and 1980s in support of their argument. But Spark himself was involved in two recent books about the Dunera that attempted to open up that narrative, and Uwe Radok’s diary shouldn’t have been needed to warn us “against the comforts and conceits of generalisation and mythology.”

At least as problematic as the conventional narrative about the contribution of the “Dunera boys” to postwar Australia is the idea that their internment experience was somehow emblematic of civilian internment in wartime Australia. More than half of those interned in what were sometimes labelled, at least initially, as “concentration camps” by the Australian authorities were interned by Australia (rather than by Britain, as in this case) and not just in Australia. They included German and Austrian refugees who, unlike the Radok brothers, were sometimes interned with committed Nazis, and sometimes for far longer than most of the Dunera internees.

Also unlike the Dunera internees who were in a position to talk publicly after the war about the injustices suffered at the hands of the British (particularly aboard the Dunera), the refugees interned by Australia had no ready audience for their stories. Their postwar lives, which were sometimes marked by the traumas of internment, were not the subject of celebratory books and films.

Boochani’s experience wasn’t typical either. There were no women and children in the Manus camp when he was there. He was eventually able to leave and has since been granted refugee status in New Zealand. Others who were with him on Manus weren’t so lucky.

We must also keep in mind that Boochani’s dispatches don’t describe a phenomenon that’s now in the past. The current Labor government has been as wedded as previous Coalition and Labor governments to the punitive treatment of refugees and the wretched system of preventing people seeking Australia’s protection from submitting their claims in Australia. In fact, the recent federal budget included a $150 million increase in funding for off-shore processing. And the British government is determined to emulate the Australian example by deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. But I am confident Behrouz Boochani will keep reminding Australians from his exile in Aotearoa New Zealand that he was describing unfinished business. •

Freedom, Only Freedom: The Prison Writings of Behrouz Boochani
Edited by Omid Tofighian and Moones Mansoubi | Bloomsbury | $32.99 | 344 pages

Shadowline: The Dunera Diaries of Uwe Radok
Edited by Jacquie Houlden and Seumas Spark | Monash University Publishing | $34.99 | 181 pages

The post Inside the wire appeared first on Inside Story.

The anniversary well-wishers included German foreign minister Heiko Maas, who said the convention “was drawn up in view of the immeasurable suffering that millions of people were forced to endure during and after the second world war. Its clear aim was to ensure that this could never happen again.” He also reminded us that more than eighty million people are currency displaced — a fact that made the convention “indispensable today.”

With these words, Maas conjured two sets of images. His “never again” was clearly a reference to the Holocaust, perhaps evoking the black-and-white photographs of emaciated survivors taken by the Allies immediately upon the liberation of the concentration camps. And his mention of today’s displaced people would have reminded his audience of televised footage showing thousands of predominantly Syrian refugees making their way through Hungary and Austria in the summer of 2015, or masses of people living in squalid conditions in refugee camps in Africa or Asia.

Neither of these sets of images has much to do with the origins of the Refugee Convention. Yes, two major refugee crises in the second half of the 1940s produced images akin to those that we might see today depicting refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo or Venezuela. But neither of those early postwar crises — the Nakba, which displaced some 700,000 Palestinians, and the Partition of India, when more than ten million people fled or were driven from their homes — were much discussed among those negotiating the Refugee Convention.

Instead, their attention was focused on what were known as “DPs,” or displaced persons. Millions of people had found themselves outside their country of origin at the end of the war. Most of them had been swiftly repatriated — some, against their will, to the Soviet Union. But by 1946, about a million DPs were still stuck, most of them in the French, British and American zones of occupied Germany.

Despite the war still being fresh in their minds, the drafters of the convention had set out to tackle the consequences rather than the causes of mass displacement. They wanted a convention that defined the status of displaced people rather than dealt with their “immeasurable suffering.” Resettlement wasn’t even designed solely for their benefit. When Eleanor Roosevelt warned the UN General Assembly in December 1946 that the DPs’ presence was delaying “the restoration of peace and order in the world,” her chief concern may well have been to prevent a potentially volatile situation in the DPs’ host societies, particularly in Germany and Austria.

Most of the DPs were from Poland, Yugoslavia, the Baltic states, the Ukraine and other countries in Eastern Europe. Most were stranded in Germany and Austria because that’s where they had been taken as prisoners of war or forced labourers during the war. Some were in Italy, the Middle East, East Africa, India and China, and some were Jewish survivors of the concentration camps.

In other words, today’s international refugee regime originated not in the refugee crises in the Middle East and on the Indian subcontinent in the second half of the 1940s, and not in the Holocaust (or in the earlier failure of nation-states to provide a refuge for European Jews). It lay in the anxiety provoked by DPs in the second half of the 1940s and the early 1950s, and in the effort to resettle the “last million” — initially to countries in Western Europe, but soon to Israel, Australia and the Americas.

The role of the “last million” in international discussions about the attributes and rights of refugees and in the making of international law is a key reason why studies of the DPs are so relevant to today’s debates. Much has already been written about the International Refugee Organization, or IRO, which was given the job of facilitating the resettlement of DPs, and much about the resettlement of DPs in Australia and other countries. Ruth Balint’s immensely readable and highly original book Destination Elsewhere adds to that scholarship. What makes her contribution particularly valuable is her concern not so much with the IRO or the reception of DPs in Australia and elsewhere, but with the DP experience.

Most importantly, Balint shows how the question of who ought to be counted as a refugee played out not just in the conferences where diplomats and international lawyers haggled over the definition used by the IRO and the terms of the draft Refugee Convention, but also in submissions by DPs, in interviews with DPs and, more generally, in the autobiographical narratives DPs fashioned to bolster their identity as refugees. The question, what were the grounds for a DP’s eligibility as a refugee?, runs like a thread through the book’s seven chapters.

Balint is less interested in the content of policies than in how they were implemented and how much wriggle room they provided. Drawing on dozens of cases, she explores not only how policies and practices affected the lives of individuals, but also how individuals negotiated their way around existing rules.

The cases featured in Destination Elsewhere are complex. Among them is that of Arthur W., a non-Jewish German married to a Jewish woman who had survived the Holocaust — not least, I imagine, because she was protected by his having resisted the pressure to divorce her. Arthur himself had been imprisoned in a concentration camp from 1944 until the end of the war, and was initially classified as a refugee, which would have allowed the couple to emigrate to join their son, who had left Germany ahead of them. But just as they were about to embark to the United States, the IRO realised it had made a mistake. Like other non-Jewish husbands of refugees, and unlike the wives of eligible refugees, Arthur was deemed ineligible for IRO assistance.

Also ineligible, but for very different reasons, was a couple whose son Gabor had a disability. Their application to settle in Australia was rejected, according to their emigration file, “because the child is a mongolian idiot.” The IRO advised the parents to leave Gabor behind. They separated over the issue, with the father emigrating after their divorce and the mother remaining with their son. A year later, the mother changed her mind and consented to separate from Gabor permanently.

Or consider the case of Gregor L., aka Michael Kolossov, a Red Army officer who defected in 1945 and was then advised by an official in the American zone to conceal his Russian identity. Changing his name, date of birth and nationality (and now claiming to be of Polish Ukrainian origin), he, his wife and their two children lived for four years as DPs in the city of Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt, until they were accepted for resettlement in Australia. There, Gregor came clean, telling the authorities of his former identity, because, he said later, “I wanted to show that I was honest and loyal.”

A 1946 cartoon illustrating the obstacles impeding the emigration of displaced persons to the United States. The DP camp depicted in the background is identified as Wentdorf. Gedenkstaette Bergen-Belsen

The Australian authorities were “less interested in protecting Communist defectors than they were in sheltering Nazi ones,” as Balint dryly notes, and promptly declared him a security threat. His case received sympathetic attention in the Australian press, but he was deported back to Germany. Because the Australians told the IRO that they suspected him of having worked for Stalin’s secret police, the Americans kept him under close surveillance in Germany as a possible Soviet agent while inviting him to participate in the Harvard Project, an attempt to gather intelligence about the Soviet Union by interviewing refugees. The researchers much valued Kolossov’s assistance, with one of them later praising his “sincerity” and “objectivity.”

Concerning this last case, Balint tells us that the family may have lived in Germany until 1955 and then emigrated to Canada, but concedes that “even this is unclear.” In most other cases, we don’t learn what eventually happened to her protagonists. As a reader, I found the fragmentary nature of these accounts of DPs’ lives intensely frustrating. What became of Arthur W.’s family? Were they eventually resettled? If they weren’t, how did they fare in the country where they had been persecuted? Did their son return to Germany? And what about Gabor? Were his parents able to make a new start?

Arthur W.’s story also raises the question of whether he provided the IRO with a truthful account. Had he really been imprisoned in a concentration camp? If so, on what grounds? Such questions suggest themselves even more so in Gregor L.’s case. Was he also “sincere” and “objective” when it came to retelling his life? Was he identical with Michael Kolossov, or was L., as the Australians claimed, someone else altogether?

Of course this was not meant to be a book about the life histories of refugees. And the effort involved in comprehensively researching that many lives would have been considerable and, given the focus of the book, unreasonable. In fact — on second thoughts — I suspect that it may be the individual stories’ open-endedness that makes the text strangely intriguing and prompted me to read on. At the same time, the lack of closure focused my attention on the issues that the cases were meant to illustrate.

Historians trying to turn the past into a narrative tend to be influenced by at least three factors: their own present, the availability of sources, and what I would like to call the course of history. No historian is immune from these influences. But how they shape a historical narrative depends also on how much the historian is aware of, and able to respond to, them.

As Balint has demonstrated in her other books (most recently in Smuggled, which she co-wrote with Julie Kalman and which also came out this year), she is what the French call an écrivaine engagée, a writer who is perturbed and at the same time motivated by her own present, not least by its injustices. She is troubled by the categorical and seemingly unproblematic distinction between political refugees and economic migrants today, and aware of how much a person’s recognition as a legitimate refugee depends on their ability to offer a convincing narrative about their life. She knows that the more truthful the narrative the more convincing it is — but that here “truth” is in the eyes of the beholder, and depends on what seems credible to somebody else: for example, a person working for the UNHCR, an immigration officer or a judge.

Balint is appalled by the fact that the response of her own country, Australia, to people seeking its protection often doesn’t reflect the international treaties it has ratified, be it the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, or the Convention on the Rights of the Child. “Australia’s immigration laws still require all migrants to be screened for medical conditions, so as to prove they will not be an economic burden on the community,” she writes. “This affects children most of all.” In October, Australian Paralympic athlete Jaryd Clifford recalled the case of Pakistani refugee Shiraz Kiane, who twenty years ago set himself on fire outside Parliament House because the immigration department objected to his family’s joining him in Australia on the grounds that his daughter’s medical treatment would be too expensive.

“The book is a work of history concerned with the present,” Balint writes. Because she, like Clifford, is troubled by the present, she is particularly sensitive to instances in the past in which the present is prefigured. As she avoids any moralising, this honing in on historical issues to which she is particularly attuned adds a degree of passion to her text that contributes to its readability.

Balint is acutely aware of the second factor shaping her narrative, the limitations of her archive. Her book “began with a chance visit” to the International Tracing Services archives in Germany, which holds records relating to seventeen million people and had only recently been opened to researchers. This visit appears to have prompted her to consult the IRO’s records, which are held at the National Archives in Paris. And there she discovered the decisions of the IRO Review Board, which became a main source for her project.

Because of the richness of the review board’s files, the cases featured in her book tend to be complex and were contested at the time. But the majority of refugee status determinations involving DPs were presumably comparatively straightforward, which means that they didn’t leave an extensive paper trail. Balint’s reliance on the records of the review board partly explains why she was rarely able to say what eventually happened to people like Arthur W. and Gregor L.; for obvious reasons, the review board took no further interest in the fates of individuals once it had arrived at a decision.

The fact that archives are not merely repositories that can be mined to answer the historian’s questions is not peculiar to Balint’s project, but I wish she had taken her reflections about the peculiar archival further —that may be a suggestion for another text, however, one that engages with the peculiar challenges posed by archival research about refugees. In Destination Elsewhere, Balint seems to take shelter behind fellow historians Carolyn Steedman and Natalie Zemon Davis, who have both reflected on the historian’s reliance on and engagement with archival sources. “Nothing starts in the Archive, nothing, ever at all, though things certainly end up there,” Steedman writes. “You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught halfway through: the middle of things; discontinuities.”

Finally, the narratives produced by historians are informed by a presumed course of history. When looked at it with the benefit of hindsight, the so-called DP problem seems to have come about because many Eastern European DPs could not or did not want to be repatriated, and it was largely solved when a handful of countries of immigration — most prominent among them the United States, Australia and Israel — offered to resettle hundreds of thousands of people stuck in Central Europe. That outcome was in the interests of the Allies, who were responsible for looking after the DPs; of the IRO, naturally; of host countries Germany, Austria and Italy, much of whose infrastructure was in ruins and some of whose people were starving; of countries of resettlement, like Australia, that were experiencing a labour shortage; and of the DPs themselves, who often wanted to get away from Europe.

But it was by no means self-evident that resettlement would be the answer to displacement. I can think of only two other instances in which people who were displaced because they fled, or otherwise found themselves outside, their home, were swiftly resettled. One concerns refugees who fled Hungary to Austria or Yugoslavia after the failed 1956 uprising and ended up in pretty much the same countries that had accommodated DPs in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The other relates to concerted international efforts to resettle Indochinese “boat people” stranded in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

But both before, during and after the second half of the 1940s, comprehensive resettlement schemes were the exception. Think of the Armenians in the early twentieth century, for example, or of the Palestinians in the late 1940s, or of Eritreans, Afghans and Syrians today, not to mention Jews desperate to leave Central Europe in the late 1930s. Resettlement was rarely an option for them. And when Polish or Latvian DPs first decided that they did not want to return home, they could not yet know that resettlement outside Europe would be the alternative to repatriation. Initially at least, they had to assume that they would have to remain in Europe, if not in Germany.

Only the course of history encourages us to think of the DPs’ lives in postwar Germany in the context of a trajectory that culminates in a country of resettlement. The course of history encourages us to focus on the DPs’ “quest to leave postwar Europe,” to quote the subtitle of Balint’s book. But not knowing that they might soon settle in the United States or Australia, DPs busily created social networks unrelated to their emigration.

Adam Seipp’s Strangers in the Wild Place, which I reviewed for Inside Story some years ago, illustrates the varied contacts of residents of the Wildflecken DP camp. Outside the camps, DPs interacted not only with members of the Allied occupation authorities but also with locals. In the camps, they carved out spaces where they could be in charge of their own affairs. In some camps, they elected representatives and staffed administrative bodies. They supported a vibrant cultural life. Most important, they created formal and informal networks of compatriots-in-exile and strengthened such networks and associated multiple identities through the publication of periodicals. In Germany’s American zone alone, twenty-nine newspapers and thirty-nine magazines published by and for DPs were counted in December 1947.

The course of history encourages us to think of resettlement as the norm for DPs. In places like Australia, history evidently continued. The arrival of a large number of DPs changed Australian society and helped to prepare it for a multicultural future. By contrast, the fact that a sizeable number of DPs could not be resettled and had to remain in Germany and Austria appears as a dead end. But these remaining DPs too made history. Categorised as heimatlose Ausländer (“homeless foreigners”) in West Germany and generally referred to as the “hard core” by the UNHCR and aid agencies, they acquired many of the rights usually reserved for German citizens but were nevertheless relegated to the margins of society.

From the perspective of 2021, the heimatlose Ausländer seem at least as representative of the modern refugee as Arthur Calwell’s “beautiful Balts.” And much like the experience of the “last million” tells us something about the origins of the 1951 Refugee Convention and the modern refugee regime, the lives and narratives of their “hard core” remnant, and their interactions within German society, ought to be indispensable reference points for a history of the Federal Republic.

Ruth Balint’s book is about the making of history by DPs in the sense that the period in the late 1940s and early 1950s that saw the resettlement of most of them “had a lasting impact on the definition of the refugee, the development of international law, and the creation of a modern, bureaucratic refugee regime.”

Her book is also about the crafting of histories by people who realised that the IRO and prospective resettlement countries were less interested in their wartime suffering, and more in a perceived Red menace, which led DPs to “[articulate] a narrative of persecution and [to valorise] their predicament in line with Western anti-communism.” That narrative established their credentials as refugees. Whether or not the histories that emerged in submissions and interviews were factually true is often impossible to establish. But that’s beside the point, at least as far as the argument in this excellent book is concerned. •

The post Becoming refugees appeared first on Inside Story.

This and similar claims are based on five enduring myths:

Myth #1: The Australian government’s response to the Tampa determined the outcome of the November 2001 federal election.

No doubt, the government’s handling of the Tampa’s arrival persuaded many of those who three years earlier had voted for Pauline Hanson to return to the Liberal–National fold. But pre-election polls and analyses of the 2001 Australian Election Study strongly suggest that the 9/11 terrorist attacks played a greater role in the re-election of the Howard government.

Myth #2: The Pacific Solution and Operation Relex constituted a radical departure from Australia’s established asylum seeker policies.

The introduction of extraterritorial incarceration and processing as part of the Pacific Solution and of pushbacks during Operation Relex were indeed new. But they followed a long succession of ever more draconian measures to punish people who had sought Australia’s protection, including the introduction of temporary protection visas and the isolation of asylum seekers in remote camps. Extraterritorial incarceration and pushbacks were simply the logical extension of policies of exclusion and deterrence that went back at least to the Keating government’s introduction of mandatory detention nine years earlier, if not to the Whitlam government’s resolve in 1975 to disembark Vietnamese boat arrivals into custody to be able to return them to their boat “for the purpose of departing them from Australia.”

Myth #3: The Pacific Solution and Operation Relex were innovative responses to irregularised migrants, in Australia and internationally.

The government’s response was not unprecedented. Other states had tried, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to prevent refugees and other irregularised migrants from entering their territory by deporting them to places where they were out of sight and beyond the reach of supporters and domestic courts. In 1940, Britain deported more than 1500 Jewish refugees who had tried to settle in Palestine to the British colony of Mauritius, where they were detained for several years at the Beau Bassin prison. The British government toyed with a similar approach in 1972, when it briefly considered deporting people of South Asian ancestry, who had been expelled by Uganda’s Idi Amin, to the Solomon Islands.

But Australian policymakers in 2001 probably looked for inspiration not to Britain but to the United States, and to its policy of interdiction, in the 1980s, and then of interdiction and offshore detention, in the early 1990s. This policy was mainly directed at Haitians trying to reach the American mainland. From 1991, those interdicted by the US authorities in the Caribbean were incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay naval base.

Myth #4: Australia’s response to asylum seekers in the wake of the Tampa’s arrival has served as a blueprint for European asylum seeker policies.

Over the past twenty years, the Australian government has promoted its “solution” in Europe, with senior bureaucrats regularly trying to convince their European counterparts of its advantages. In some instances, the arguments were well received.

Some European politicians have tried to persuade their governments and the European Union to establish processing and detention facilities in other countries. Advocates of policies reminiscent of the Australian approach have included, among others, the German interior minister Otto Schily, a Social Democrat who in 2004 proposed to establish extraterritorial camps for asylum seekers, and the Danish Social Democrats, who since 2018 have sought to introduce laws to transfer all asylum seekers arriving in Denmark to a third country.

Pushbacks, too, have occurred at the European Union’s external borders, most recently in Poland, Croatia and Greece. And on 1 December, the European Commission put forward proposals for a temporary suspension of established asylum procedures at the borders of Lithuania, Latvia and Poland.

But although currently all European governments bar three —Germany’s, Portugal’s and Luxembourg’s — would like the European Union to adopt harsher measures to stop prospective asylum seekers from reaching Europe, Australia’s response has thus far not been emulated. This is because European governments are bound by domestic and European refugee and human rights law that prevents them from copying outright Australia’s flouting of international law. Or at least, it means that when European governments do violate the rights of irregularised migrants, they risk being called to account, if not in domestic courts, then in the European Court of Human Rights. In 2012, for example, the court found in the landmark Hirsi case that Italy had violated European law by turning back some 200 Somali and Eritrean irregularised migrants to Libya.

In Australia, by contrast, the absence of constitutionally enshrined human rights has allowed the government to introduce legislative changes whenever domestic courts, including the High Court, have objected to the country’s punitive asylum regime.

It’s worth noting that those who want European governments to follow the Australian example all the way tend to belong to the far right. Katie Hopkins, rather than Otto Schily, is representative of those suggesting that the Australian “solution” ought to be copied. From a European perspective, the Australian government’s response to irregularised migrants arriving by boat is extremist — and baffling even for many of those on the political right.

Myth #5: The cruel treatment of asylum seekers in Nauru and on Manus effectively deterred potential sea-borne arrivals.

The policies of deterrence caused great harm to the detained asylum seekers, were extremely costly — and were largely ineffectual in terms of their ostensible aim. Boats with asylum seekers continued to arrive after those rescued by the Tampa had been deported to Nauru. But the Howard government must have known that deterrence on its own does not work, since it had tried for several years and without much success to deter prospective asylum seekers by turning detention centres on the Australian mainland into veritable hell-holes. It was only when customs and navy ships physically prevented asylum seekers from reaching Australia that the boats stopped coming. Similarly, it was the Abbott government’s Operation Sovereign Borders, rather than the reopening of Nauru and Manus, that persuaded irregularised migrants of the futility of boarding a boat bound for Australia.

But the policies of deterrence were also successful in that they served to appease an anxious Australian public. And arguably that has been their main rationale all along.

The Tampa affair is nevertheless extraordinarily significant — not because it represented a turning point back then, twenty years ago, but because of how it has been remembered — indeed because it has been remembered as a turning point.

Turning points in history — the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, for example, or the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914 — are seemingly singular events. In the most extreme case, that event is reduced to a single shot, as if the broader context were a distraction that needed to be blotted out. Thus the fact that Gavrilo Princip killed not only the Austrian heir presumptive, but also his wife Sophie, has been largely erased from collective memory. Even more important, what happened before becomes part of an amorphous pre-history that cannot compete with the era heralded by such pivotal events.

The focus on a singular event is problematic when we try to understand what caused the first world war, for instance. But it is even more problematic when the significance of a particular event is overstated.

Because we remember the moment the Tampa sailed into Australian waters as a new beginning that delineated a pre-historical past from our present, we tend to forget that pre-2001 policies of exclusion reach back to the early days of the Australian nation-state. We also tend to pay too little attention to the history of mandatory and potentially indefinite immigration detention that began under the Labor government in the early 1990s.

We don’t remember that in the 1960s Australia pushed back refugees from Indonesian-controlled West Papua across the border of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea without allowing them to lodge an application for protection, and that those who were permitted to remain in the Australian territory were only given temporary protection visas. We don’t remember that some of those permissive residents were isolated in a camp on Manus in the late 1960s.

We don’t remember that the mantra “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come,” far from being invented by John Howard, consistently accompanied twentieth-century Australian politics. In 1934, for example, Robert Menzies, then attorney-general in the Lyons government, declared in parliament: “We have, as an independent country, a perfect right to indicate whether an alien shall or shall not be admitted within these shores.”

We don’t remember that the 2001 election campaign was not the first in which a major party tried to appeal to, and stoke, Australian fears of seaborne arrivals. In 1977, the Labor Party tried to use the spectre of Vietnamese “boat people” to gain an electoral advantage. It was then that the term “queue jumper” made its first appearance, employed by none other than Gough Whitlam. Labor’s scare campaign was unsuccessful — but who is to say that Howard would have been successful in 2001 if it hadn’t been for the threat of terrorism?

The Howard government’s response to the Tampa is widely considered a cynical ploy to win the November 2001 election. The decision to board the Norwegian container ship may indeed have been informed by the government’s poor performance in the polls. But there is more to the Tampa affair’s historical context than the Newspoll results of July and August 2001.

That context also includes the screening of the Four Corners documentary “The Inside Story” on 8 August. It showed footage shot with a camera smuggled into the Villawood detention centre. The footage, which featured Shayan Badraie, a deeply traumatised Iranian child, had a huge impact at the time, and immigration minister Philip Ruddock was initially unable to say anything that would counter it. The government risked losing control of the narrative about asylum seekers and border protection. The response to the Tampa — and, even more so, the children overboard affair — were also attempts to regain that control.

The Tampa affair has been significant because the five myths that surround it have been so enduring. The idea that the Tampa’s arrival decided the 2001 election has served as an excuse for Labor to go along with the Coalition’s policies for most of the past twenty years. Maybe key Labor leaders really have been convinced that asylum seekers are always foremost on voters’ minds when they cast their vote; certainly this “myth that grips a nation” has allowed Labor leaders who are comfortable with the Coalition’s border policies to say that they would have adopted a different stance but could not because it would have resulted in electoral suicide.

If the boarding of the Tampa by Australian special forces on 29 August 2001 was not as significant an event as is commonly assumed, then it makes sense to ask: was there anything else, in terms of Australian responses to migrants in general and refugees and asylum seekers in particular, that was more significant?

Yes, there was. Here is my selection of six days that shaped the nation.

The most pivotal date is 1 January 1901, the day the Australian Constitution entered into force — not because of what the Constitution says, but because of what it does not include: a bill of rights. Australia’s lack of such an instrument has determined not only refugee and asylum seeker policies but also the public discourse about these policies.

Australia embarked on a particular trajectory right after Federation, with the passage of two pieces of legislation on 12 December 1901: the Pacific Island Labourers Bill, which provided for the deportation of Pacific Islanders who had been brought to Queensland as indentured labourers to work on the cane fields, and the Immigration Restriction Bill, designed to ensure that only Europeans would migrate to Australia, which became the legal cornerstone of the White Australia Policy.

These were not the only pieces of legislation intended to deport certain Australian residents and exclude particular groups of prospective immigrants. The Labor Party’s first major contribution was the Wartime Refugee Removal Act 1949, which provided for the deportation of non-European refugees brought to Australia during the second world war, regardless of whether they had Australian families. And then, of course, came the numerous amendments to the Migration Act under Labor and Liberal prime ministers over the past thirty years.

The introduction of mandatory detention was another key moment. But the Migration Amendment Act 1992 was but one of many legislative changes designed to ensure that unwanted arrivals could be detained and then deported. So let me opt for another, less well-known piece of legislation that predated the introduction of mandatory detention: on 21 June 1991 parliament passed the Migration Amendment Bill 1991, which allowed the authorities, among other things, to indefinitely detain one particular individual: a Cuban refugee it had deported earlier that year but had to accept back into Australia because no other country was willing to take him.

But Australia’s response to forced migrants has been contradictory — and that too is often forgotten when we imagine Australian history as going one way until August 2001 and another way thereafter. Here are three dates that could anchor an alternative narrative: On 22 August 1945 Arthur Calwell — the same Calwell who was later responsible for the Wartime Refugee Removal Act and who in 1972 objected to Australia’s accepting a handful of refugees from Uganda because they had the wrong skin colour — decided that Jews who had survived the Holocaust and who had relatives in Australia were welcome to settle there even if they did not meet the usual entry requirements.

On 19 June 1975 Gough Whitlam — the same Whitlam who did not want Vietnamese “boat people” to enter Australia because they were supposedly jumping a queue — announced that Australia had selected Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong for resettlement. What he did not say was that this selection represented a new beginning because for the first time Australia took in refugees foremost on humanitarian grounds.

On 29 July 2008 then immigration minister Chris Evans gave a talk at the ANU in which he outlined the Rudd government’s far-reaching changes to the way it would respond to asylum seekers. Admittedly, these changes were shortlived. But they are worth mentioning, not least to debunk the idea that our present began in August 2001 and has seamlessly continued since the day the Tampa appeared off Christmas Island. •

This is an extended version of a talk delivered on 2 December at the 2021 Australian Historical Association conference.

The post Fake history appeared first on Inside Story.

Ritter argued that the Morrison government needed to come up with more ambitious climate change policies to avoid ruining Australia’s international reputation. His suggestion that in the eyes of outside observers Australia had gone “rogue” responded to Australians’ growing concerns about their country’s image overseas. It was also designed to generate maximum attention by scandalising his audience.

If Australia were indeed widely regarded as a rogue state, it would be in select but dubious company. Probably the first country that comes to mind when we hear the term “rogue state” is North Korea. It was the first Clinton administration that designated as rogue states those regimes that were considered to flout international rules and agreements, support terrorism, develop weapons of mass destruction and suppress human rights. At the time they also included Libya, Iraq, Iran and Cuba. Clinton’s Republican predecessors Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior had similarly singled out “renegade” or “outlaw” states that should live in fear of an American sheriff intent on restoring order.

Although the State Department temporarily dropped the designation “rogue state” in favour of “state of concern” in 2000, the idea remained that the behaviour of certain regimes justified the United States’ ostracising and punishing them. Punishment could mean imposing economic sanctions, as in the case of Iran. It could also involve military action by the United States, ostensibly on behalf of an international community.

When the Greenpeace CEO suggested that outside observers were regarding Australia as a rogue state, he may not have had the origins of that designation in mind. But he was probably aware of precedents for turning the term back on the very governments that had taken the moral high ground vis-à-vis the likes of Kim Il-sung, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milošević.

Perhaps the most famous example is William Blum’s book Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, published in 2000, which describes the United States as a “Mecca of hypocrisy” that harbours terrorists, bankrolls human rights violators and pays little heed to international rules and norms. American hypocrisy has also inspired books by Noam Chomsky and Jacques Derrida. Similarly, two well-regarded economic journalists have argued that Switzerland ought to be regarded as a Schurkenstaat, or rogue state, for facilitating tax evasion on a global scale.

Even if Ritter didn’t think of the United States or Switzerland, he would have known that he wasn’t being particularly original when suggesting that Australia’s stance on climate change might qualify it for rogue state status. As early as 2002, in a paper delivered at the Melbourne Institute’s Economic and Social Outlook Conference, the Griffith University environmental scientist Ian Lowe referred to Australia as a rogue nation when arguing that the Howard government ought to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Three years later, one of Ritter’s predecessors at the helm of Greenpeace Australia Pacific, Steve Shallhorn, said that “Australia is a rogue government when it comes to the Kyoto Protocol… because on that question they are outside the norm of industrialised countries.”

Australia did belatedly ratify the Kyoto Protocol — in 2007, after a Labor election win ended John Howard’s long reign. But when the Coalition government — and thus a Howard-era approach to climate change — returned in 2013, the charge that Australia was behaving like a rogue nation resurfaced. During 2013, for example, the Marshall Islands’ climate change minister Tony deBrum said Australia, Canada and Japan, which had argued against tougher measures at COP19 in Warsaw, were acting like rogues. Two years ago, Adam Bandt, the Greens member for Melbourne, told parliament, “Increasingly in Europe and many other countries, Australia is seen as a rogue state… drunk on our fossil fuels that we peddle to the rest of the world.”

But the federal government’s support for fossil fuels is not the only, and not even the main, reason why Australia has often been likened to a rogue nation. It is in relation to the government’s migration policy that the epithet “rogue state” has been most often applied.

Earlier this year, for example, Golriz Ghahraman, the foreign affairs spokesperson of the Greens in Aotearoa New Zealand, said Australia was an “outlier” and a “rogue nation” and should be referred to the United Nations. He was outraged after the deportation of a fifteen-year-old permanent resident of Australia.

In 2014, then Greens leader Christine Milne told the Senate that she was opposed to the Migration Amendment (Protection and other Measures) Bill because “it confirms what many other countries around the world are saying — that is, that Australia, as a state party in the United Nations, has gone rogue on human rights, on international law and torture.” That same year on Lateline, Alastair Nicholson, the former chief justice of the Family Court, likened the government’s plans to send asylum seekers to Cambodia to “behaving, I think, as a rogue nation.”

The same year, Greg Barns, a former chief of staff of Liberal Party politician and federal finance minister John Fahey, wrote in the Hobart Mercury that Australia “is the newest member of the infamous rogue state club” — both on account of the government’s asylum seeker policy and because of its response to global warming.

When Greg Barns, Christine Milne, Alastair Nicholson and David Ritter said that Australia might be considered a rogue nation or rogue state, they used the term in a loose sense, ignoring some of the specific attributes identified by US State Department officials in the 1990s. They were suggesting that Australia was acting outside internationally agreed rules and norms, and/or that its actions were jeopardising the wellbeing of other nations, if not imperilling the global commons.

Such accusations have been well founded. International lawyers, Australian and international human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, various UN rapporteurs and committees, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights have repeatedly and justifiably condemned Australia’s response to asylum seekers, including pushbacks, mandatory and potentially indefinite immigration detention, and the deportation of asylum seekers to former colonies. Here is not the place to revisit these arguments.

When it comes to climate change, Australia has long been one of the world’s prime greenhouse gas emitters on a per capita basis, as well as a leading exporter of fossil fuels. It has also long been a prominent naysayer at a succession of international meetings, and one of those slowing down progress on global action against climate change. Australian intransigence and recalcitrance were particularly evident at COP25 in Madrid, when the Australian delegation was reportedly instrumental in thwarting progress at the negotiating table.

Ritter had good reason to sound the alarm in August, a couple of months before the COP26 negotiations. The Australian government committed to a zero emissions target by 2050 but without revealing a roadmap to show how that target could be reached. And the government refused to revise its target for 2030, instead lauding the “Australian way,” which includes a “gas-fired recovery” and a continuation of coalmining “for decades to come.” It was not surprising that a survey by media monitoring company Meltwater Australia found Australia’s international reputation took a hit in the lead-up to COP26.

Nevertheless, Australia’s role was less controversial in Glasgow than it had been two years earlier in Madrid. That was because the Morrison government was but one of many that proved reluctant to agree to meaningful measures to slow down climate change. And because India took on the role of the principal villain, there was no need for Australia to be a prominent naysayer (it was nevertheless firmly in the camp of nations who showed little interest in substantial progress). Thus, those critical of Australia didn’t resort to calling Australia a “rogue nation,” but instead employed more moderate language, such as “laggard.”

But whether or not a negotiator is obstructing proceedings can also be a matter of perceptions. Unlike in Warsaw and Madrid, Australia tried to fly under the radar at COP26. Its delegation even agreed to a text asking governments to provide updated targets next year; only after the conference had concluded did the Morrison government admit that it had no intention of meeting this request.

The point made by Australian critics of government policy, as well as by Tony deBrum, Golriz Ghahraman and other outside observers, is not usually to argue that Australia meets any accepted criteria of a rogue nation. It is to suggest that others might well regard Australia’s behaviour as befitting that of a rogue nation. In other words, the critics have been talking about Australia’s reputation more so than its actions.

Whether or not Australia is considered a rogue nation on account of its climate change policies does matter. Here, the North Korean analogy is instructive. Because North Korea is considered to have gone rogue (by threatening to harm others rather than causing harm to people other than North Korean citizens), it has been punished with sanctions. There is no talk yet of imposing sanctions on Australia, but nations taking costly measures to slow down climate change don’t want nations that refuse to take such measures to gain an unfair advantage. The European Union, for one, will impose tariffs on products exported from countries, including Australia, that don’t do their fair share in tackling global warming.

Has Australia’s reputation been affected by its actions or policies? The answer would certainly be “yes” among those whose job it is to evaluate those actions and policies: international human rights and refugee law experts, and climate scientists.

But what about overseas publics, whose knowledge of Australia is largely mediated by journalists and other opinion-makers? Here, let me first debunk the myth that Australia’s reputation has only suffered in the past twenty years, in the wake of the Tampa affair and Australia’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol.

Some of Australia’s Asian neighbours held highly unfavourable views of Australia during the 1950s and 1960s, well before the term “rogue state” was first officially used, because of the racist White Australia policy. Memories of that policy persisted long after it was officially abandoned in 1973. In the Philippines, for example, echoes of White Australia and the infamous Gamboa case of the late 1940s reverberated in 2005 when it was discovered that Vivian Alvarez Solon, an Australian citizen born in the Philippines, had been unlawfully deported from Australia four years earlier.

Immigration policy wasn’t the only problem. Australia attracted criticism in the United Nations in the 1960s because it held on to Papua New Guinea long after most British and French colonies in Africa and Asia had become independent, though such criticism did not extend much beyond the UN Trusteeship Council.

In Europe, concerns about Australia being an outlier, at least among First World democracies, initially arose over Indigenous rights issues in the 1990s, including the government’s native title legislation in the wake of the Wik judgement, the Howard government’s refusal to apologise to the stolen generations, and the disproportionate number of Indigenous people who died in custody.

These concerns related to the treatment of Australian citizens, in Australia, by Australian authorities. Those voicing them shared the belief that human rights violations are not just a matter for the country where they occur and that Australia’s conduct domestically represented a flouting of international human rights law, including treaties Australia had signed. The apology issued by the Rudd government did little to dampen these concerns, not least because it was accompanied by the Northern Territory intervention, carried over from the Howard government, and because endemic injustices remained.

While Australia’s international reputation was diminished among activists championing Indigenous rights causes, it took an issue affecting asylum seekers — that is, non-Australian citizens — both in and outside Australia further to tarnish the country’s reputation.

But it is Australia’s stance on climate change, especially since the 2019–20 bushfires, that has had the biggest impact on its image overseas. In 2020 Austrade published the Global Sentiment Monitor, the results of a survey about Australia’s reputation in five Asian countries, Britain and the United States. It found that Australia’s global reputation remains strong. Reading between the lines, though, it also suggests that there is much room for improvement:

To grow our reputation, we need to demonstrate the high quality of our products and services, our clean, green produce, effective climate policies, fair immigration policies, and positive contribution to global issues.

True, Australia’s self-perception as a model international citizen, on the one hand, and international perceptions of Australia, on the other, have often been at odds. And not everybody in Europe thinks first of reefs, beaches and the outback, or the Sydney Olympics, when Australia comes up in conversation. But let’s keep this in perspective. The evidence from the Global Sentiment Monitor and other surveys suggests that most people in East Asia, North America and Europe still associate Australia far more closely with an enviable lifestyle than with the poor life expectancy of Indigenous Australians, the incarceration of asylum seekers or the volume of coal shipped from the Port of Newcastle. Even New Zealanders, who tend to know more about their trans-Tasman neighbours than people in faraway Europe, would probably point to underarm bowling before mentioning the detention and deportation of fellow citizens.

Successive Australian governments, notoriously beholden to the fossil fuel industry, have argued that Australia’s share of greenhouse gas emissions is negligible. Of course, Australia isn’t on its own responsible for global warming. In fact, whether or not Australia becomes carbon-neutral doesn’t really matter in the global context. Other countries would be able to compensate if the Morrison government continued to drag its heels.

Given that global warming is indeed a global issue, Australian inaction would not even be decisive when it comes to the effects of that warming on the Australian continent. The risk of Australian bushfires does not only, or even mainly, increase because of Australian CO2 and methane emissions.

That is not to say, however, that a nation’s obligation to reduce emissions ought to depend on the size of its population. Rather, I’d suggest it should depend on its contribution to global warming historically, its emissions on a per capita basis, and its capacity to take effective measures to reduce emissions — and to assist others taking such measures.

Australia’s stance on climate change is arguably more extreme than that of other industrialised countries. Much like in the debate about the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, which the Morrison government refused to sign, Australia has been an outlier. It may be instructive to consider whether Australia’s approach, both in relation to irregularised migrants and in relation to climate change, amounts to “rogue” conduct. But the value of characterising Australia’s conduct as “rogue” for heuristic purposes ought to be decoupled from the question of whether it is productive to label Australia a “rogue nation” in public debates about climate change.

A focus on Australia’s “rogue” status is, I think, unhelpful both overseas and in Australian domestic public debate. In other industrialised countries, a focus on the Morrison government’s stance detracts from the fact that most governments are not effectively addressing climate change. In the global north, there is hardly a nation that has not gone rogue. Even where I currently live, in Germany, a country that likes to think of itself as an exemplary international citizen, none of the parties currently represented in federal parliament took policies to the 2021 election that, even if fully implemented, would allow Germany to meet the 2015 Paris agreement’s target of keeping global warming to below 1.5°C.

I’m all in favour of adopting climate change policies that don’t stop at the border, such as a ban on investments in fossil fuel industries, wherever they are, and additional import duties on products from countries that refuse to transform their economies to slow down global warming. But I also believe it is more appropriate to demand action where I live, in my neighbourhood and in my city, rather than in faraway countries. That action could well have an impact in faraway countries — if, for example, it involves lobbying a German company to withdraw from a coalmining venture outside Germany (as happened, albeit unsuccessfully, in early 2020 when Siemens was put under enormous pressure to withdraw from the Adani project in Queensland).

But people overseas may not need much convincing that they should focus their attention on what’s close to home. In fact, as far as I can tell, the overwhelming majority of references to Australia’s being considered a rogue nation have originated in Australia. My sense is that Europeans, for example, tend to be puzzled, rather than outraged, by Australia’s response to asylum seekers and by its stance on climate change.

Australians often overestimate the critical attention their country attracts. That has been the case in relation to asylum seeker policies: both the government and refugee advocates exaggerated how much these policies repulsed, or appealed to, publics overseas, particularly in Europe, and the extent to which other countries were prepared to emulate them.

Such overestimation could also be the result of a misconception about the originality of Australia’s rogue behaviour. Australia is not the only country that has ignored calls by scientists to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Canada under prime minister Jean Chrétien, for example, was singled out as a “rogue state” on climate before that term first appeared in the Australian discussion. And of course Australia didn’t invent the extraterritorial processing and detention of asylum seekers; they were already practised in the 1980s by the United States in the Caribbean.

The claim that others might regard Australia as a rogue nation could be intended to prompt the government to change tack lest the nation’s reputation be tarnished. If that’s the case, I don’t think it will work. Some Australian governments have prided themselves on snubbing their international partners, and Morrison and his crew may fall into that category; they might simply consider the information that their actions upset some people overseas a feather in their cap. Most Australian governments, however, have paid close attention to how Australia has been perceived overseas, and don’t need reminding by members of the public. It was not least such international attention that contributed to the demise of the White Australia policy, well before it became a major issue domestically.

If references to Australia’s poor reputation overseas are at all useful, then that’s because they may temper Australians’ view that their government’s approach to international relations is informed by a commitment to human rights, humanitarianism and the rule of (international) law. No, Australia is not a model international citizen, and could do well with the occasional reminder that self-perceptions can be deceptive.

In Australia, statements such as Christine Milne’s and Adam Bandt’s appeal to the audience’s nationalism (which sometimes manifests as a reverse pride in the nation’s flaws). Such an appeal is questionable for two reasons: first, because it could also work the other way, as the Howard government’s popular bashing of international organisations showed; and second, and more important, because a focus on the national interest is at the heart of the predicament that we are currently facing.

This has also been true in the debate about asylum seekers: rather than referring to Australia’s reputation, or to economic losses or gains for Australia, that debate ought to focus on Australia’s capacity to assist people in need of a new home, its responsibility as a regional power, its legal obligations as a member of the international community and, not least, the precarious circumstances of the men, women and children who are seeking Australia’s protection.

Similarly, rather than focusing on Australia’s reputation or the economic gains involved in a transformation of the Australian economy, we may instead want to foreground arguments that explain why such measures are desirable: because all countries need to deal with climate change to the best of their ability, and because Australia has specific obligations as a wealthy industrialised country that produces a comparatively large amount of greenhouse gases on a per capita basis and has also done so in the past. •

This is the extended version of a talk delivered on 22 November at a symposium to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

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Hamburg’s Polish Jews were part of a larger group of long-term German residents deported during what was called the Polenaktion. The Nazi authorities were responding to a law passed in Poland in March 1938 — and brought into force in October — that cancelled the citizenship of Polish nationals who had been living abroad continuously for five years or more. While it didn’t specify who those Polish citizens were and where they lived, it was clearly directed at Polish Jews living in Germany and Austria who, the Polish government feared, would move to Poland if their persecution by the Nazis intensified.

About 18,000 Polish Jews were expelled from Germany in late October 1938. Because the German authorities reasoned that the breadwinners’ deportation would compel their families to follow, the majority of them were men. Most deportees were taken to the Neu-Bentschen railway station, a few kilometres from the border, and then forced to walk to the Polish border town of Zbąszyń. “We were warned not to look back, but we heard the rattling of machine guns in the rear. The SS men threatened to shoot if anyone tried to stay behind,” a woman from Hamburg told a New York Times correspondent a couple of days after her deportation.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, rifle shots broke the silence. The people ran or dropped to the ground, where they were beaten and trod on by guards. Many were injured during the stampede. I lost my baggage, as did many others. There was no time to recover it.

The worst happened when we came to a ditch right on the frontier. There was a barbed-wire fence on the other side. We were pushed across it carrying children and those who could not move.

Far from welcoming its citizens, the Polish government protested against their expulsion and initially refused to accommodate them. Thousands of them, variously referred to as deportees or refugees, remained stuck in Zbąszyń, a town of fewer than 5000 people ill-equipped to handle such a large number of arrivals. Some were put up in barns and stables, others slept in open fields. A month after the expulsions, the New York Times correspondent observed their “strange, comfortless existence at Poland’s front gate and Germany’s back door — unable to move in either direction.”

Polish Jews after their arrival in Zbaszyn on 29 October 1938. Alamy

The Zbąszyń refugee camp stayed open until August 1939. A couple of weeks after that, the German army invaded Poland. Some of those deported in October 1938 were lucky, because they had been able to leave Poland before the war. They included a handful of unaccompanied minors who were allowed to migrate to Australia. Most of the deportees who remained in Poland were murdered during the Holocaust.

The German government of 1938 wasn’t the last to try to inconvenience, if not destabilise, a neighbour by swamping it with refugees. Think, for example, of the incident in 1980 that became known as the Mariel boatlift, when Fidel Castro’s government encouraged — and in some cases compelled — about 125,000 Cubans unhappy with its rule and their own circumstances to leave for the United States. They included people considered to be socially undesirable —because they were gay, for example, or lived in psychiatric institutions or had been convicted of criminal offences.

The Mariel boatlift was designed to create problems for US president Jimmy Carter, who was committed to rescuing people from the clutches of communism but unprepared to accommodate such a large number of arrivals in a relatively short time and unwilling to resettle people who were considered socially undesirable from a US perspective.

Or think of Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s attempt in February and March 2020 to put pressure on the European Union by bussing thousands of refugees living in Turkey to the Turkish–Greek border, where border guards told them to cross over into Greece. His ploy largely failed because the Greeks temporarily suspended the country’s asylum regime and deployed their military at the border to prevent refugees from crossing. The Greek government had the backing of the European Union, with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen declaring that Greece was Europe’s ασπίδα, or shield, gesturing towards its efforts to resist an Asian invasion of Europe 2500 years earlier.

Erdoğan’s use of irregular migrants to unsettle and blackmail a more powerful opponent — namely the European Union, for Greece was just the incidental target — was soon identified as an instance of “hybrid warfare.” For the US military analyst Frank G. Hoffman, who coined the term in 2007, hybrid warfare means the “blurring of modes of war, the blurring of who fights, and what technologies are brought to bear,” which “produces a wide range of variety and complexity.”

Vladimir Putin is a master of hybrid warfare. Employing mercenaries in one conflict, unleashing hackers or spreading fake news in another, the Russian government has become expert in using an array of non-conventional means to make life difficult for its adversaries. It, too, has used irregular migrants to put pressure on the West: in 2015 and early 2016 it encouraged refugees to enter the European Union via the Russian–Norwegian and Russian–Finnish borders, prompting US general Philip Breedlove, supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, to tell the US Senate’s Armed Services Committee: “Together Russia and the Assad regime are deliberately weaponizing migration in an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve.”

The Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, a Russian vassal, has emulated some of Putin’s tactics. Responding to sanctions imposed on members of his regime by the European Union, his government has opened up a route for irregular migrants to enter the EU via Belarus. Iraqis who had arrived in Minsk by plane from Baghdad began turning up at the Lithuanian border in June, ferried there by Belarusian authorities. By early August, some 4000 refugees had crossed the border. In mid August, Lithuanian border guards caught red-handed twelve members of the Belarusian security forces in riot gear who had crossed over into Lithuanian territory while they were pushing migrants across the border. When Lithuania fortified the crossing, Belarus began targeting Latvia and Poland.

People smugglers were quick to see the business opportunities created by the Belarusian government, and offered their services to desperate people hoping to be able to seek protection in the European Union. Those entering the EU via Belarus now include irregular migrants from Afghanistan, Syria, the Republic of Congo and other refugee-producing countries.

Passing by the memorial for Hamburg’s Polish Jews a couple of days ago, I was reminded that Lukashenko’s hybrid warfare hasn’t just had geopolitical repercussions but has also had an impact on the migrants he has “weaponised,” just as Germany’s actions had on the migrants forced to live in squalid conditions in Zbąszyń in 1938 and 1939. “The situation is undoubtedly complex, but it is hard to forget about the group of human beings stuck in no-man’s land,” Justyna Kajta wrote recently about the situation at the Polish–Belarusian border. “The unanswered question is: what will happen to them, and when?”

Hamburg’s monument to the 800 Polish Jews deported on 28 October 1938. Klaus Neumann

Much like Poland in 1938, the three EU member states that share a border with Belarus have resisted admitting people pushed across the border by the Belarusian authorities. All three have declared states of emergency, erected fences and deployed additional security forces at the border. Lithuanian and Polish border guards have also been accused of forcing irregular migrants back to Belarus before they can make asylum claims.

The focus in recent weeks has been on the border between Poland and Belarus. With police and border guards from both countries stopping people from leaving the immediate area, groups of migrants have been stuck in no-man’s land, without access to shelter, food, clean water or medical aid. At least four people have died, presumably from hypothermia.

In 1938 the world soon found out what was going on at Zbąszyń; in 2021, although we live in the age of mobile phones and citizen journalists, we know little about what’s happening at the Polish border. That’s because Poland has declared a three-kilometre exclusion zone around its border with Belarus, preventing journalists, lawyers and the representatives of refugee advocacy groups from talking to the people stuck there. We have only a sketchy impression of how many people have managed to slip into Poland, the circumstances of those caught between Poland and Belarus, and the means used by the security forces of the two countries to stop migrants crossing into Poland or going back to Belarus.

On 30 September, Amnesty International said that it had used “spatial reconstruction techniques” to track a group of thirty-two people from Afghanistan — twenty-seven men, four women and a fifteen-year-old girl — who crossed the Polish border on 8 August. Its analysis suggests that the group had camped on the Polish side of the border but been illegally pushed back to the Belarusian side. In each case, while they were technically in Poland or Belarus, they remained in no-man’s land.

The case of the thirty-two Afghan nationals had been brought to the attention of the European Court of Human Rights on 20 August. Five days later, in an exceptional interim ruling, the court told the Polish government to provide them with food, water, clothing, adequate medical care and, if possible, temporary shelter. But although the court told the Polish government that failure to comply with its interim measures might constitute a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, Poland has so far stuck to its guns, quite literally.

Poland has just extended its state of emergency — the first since the end of state socialism — for another sixty days. Defending the decision, the Polish government claimed that it had evidence of terrorists masquerading as refugees and had found a video stored on a migrant’s phone that depicted a sexual act involving a naked man and a cow. It subsequently transpired that the video has been circulating online for years.

The governments of all three EU member states have boasted of their ability to keep out potential asylum seekers. The Latvian authorities claim that they have turned back some 1400 migrants since 10 August and allowed only thirty-eight to enter. The Lithuanian authorities pride themselves on having repelled twice as many. On 28 and 29 September alone, Poland recorded 786 attempts to enter the country from Belarus, all of them unsuccessful.

The term “no-man’s land” acquired its prominence and much of its present-day meaning during the first world war, when it denoted the stretch of land between enemy trench lines. Having been shelled repeatedly, it was devoid of trees and buildings, making attempts to cross it hazardous. But it could also be a space where the war was temporarily suspended; at night, the warring sides occasionally allowed each other to retrieve the bodies of the wounded and dead. It could even, as in Victor Trivas’s 1931 film Niemandsland, be imagined as a utopian space where peace becomes possible.

But the no-man’s land occupied by the thirty-two migrants from Afghanistan tracked by Amnesty International has little in common with the space between the trenches in wartime:

In peace, No-man’s Lands are strips of field between the frontiers of the European countries, haunted by the living. No one crawls to the barbed wire at night, to fetch a dead comrade back. There is no comradeship among the survivors of this peace.

In this peace, Europe traces its lines of barbed wire through fields and hearts. Into this land between the frontiers the continent pushes the men it has no use for.

These are lines from Renée Brand’s novel Niemandsland, published in the original German in Switzerland in 1940 and then, a year later, as Short Days Ago in New York. Brand acknowledges no-man’s land’s connotations at the time while highlighting how different her Niemandsland — a literal rendering of “no-man’s land” — is from the wasteland between the trenches of the first world war.

Brand’s novel is set in the late 1930s, not long before the outbreak of the second world war. It features a motley group of people — “ministers and physicians, teachers and engineers, painters, writers, mothers, people in love, children” — stranded on a field between Germany and an unnamed European country. “This field is No-man’s Land,” the narrator explains; it is “outside.” The people inhabiting the Niemandsland are referred to as Niemandsleute — “No-man’s people” in the published English translation.

The group includes seven men, four women and eight children, one of them born in the no-man’s land. Some of them have been deported to this piece of land, others have made their own way there. Some have been persecuted as Jews, others have left or been deported from Germany for other reasons. Some were “simply men with some responsibility, the kind of men who were what we had always thought men should be.” They have in common that the unnamed European country outside whose borders they are camped refuses to admit them, and that they can’t or don’t want to return to Germany.

While Niemandsland’s protagonists don’t yearn for a lost home, they are not projecting all their hopes onto life in a country of refuge either. They simply want to be somewhere (rather than in the nowhere of no-man’s land), and don’t harbour any particular expectations about life on the other side of the border.

Brand drew on her own experience of being a refugee. Born in 1900 in Berlin, she studied in that city and in Freiburg but quit her studies when she married in 1922. When the Nazi party assumed power in Germany, Brand and her seven-year-old son emigrated to France. They moved to Switzerland in 1934, and from there, in 1941, to the United States. While in Switzerland, Brand returned to university, and completed a doctorate in German literature. In the United States, she reinvented herself, studying psychology and eventually practising as a Jungian psychoanalyst.

Niemandsland is Brand’s only published work of fiction. Its Swiss publisher thought the novel’s literary qualities raised it above most of the literature produced by émigré writers at the time, and it was well received when it first appeared in 1940. But in the mid 1940 the Swiss censorship authorities banned any displaying, advertising or reviewing of the book, presumably out of concern that Germany might consider it provocative. The ban was only lifted in August 1945. The novel’s English-language edition attracted favourable reviews — a reviewer in the Los Angeles Times marvelled that “Wonder is aroused that such lyrical intensity, such universal passion and pity and beauty could be encompassed in so brief a tale” — but has long since been forgotten.

The widely reported deportation of Polish Jews in late October 1938 may well have informed Brand’s narrative, if not prompted her fiction. But other groups of Jews, expelled from one country but unable to enter the country they were deported to, also found themselves stuck in no-man’s land. In late 1938, about 2000 Jews expelled from Slovakia to Hungary became marooned at the Slovakian–Hungarian border for several months. Earlier in 1938, sixty-eight Jews expelled from Austria’s Burgenland to Czechoslovakia had been confined for several months on a tugboat on the Hungarian side of the Danube River — an episode that inspired the 1938 play Das Schiff auf der Donau by the German writer Friedrich Wolf, who at the time was living in exile in France.

Both because of its literary qualities and because it hasn’t dated, Brand’s novel is in a different league from Wolf’s rather didactic play. It also brilliantly analyses the essential qualities of the kind of no-man’s land inhabited by forced migrants: it is no terra nullius, it isn’t fiercely contested (as in war) and its status is not fixed. It is a no-man’s land only for the Niemandsleute: only they are confined there.

As three examples show, refugees and stateless people are often stuck in no-man’s land. In an infamous case in 1992, Israel deported 415 Palestinians from the Occupied Territories to a no-man’s land at the Israeli–Lebanese border. In 2001, authorities in Uzbekistan deported more than one hundred ethnic Uzbeks who had fled their native Tajikistan in the course of that country’s 1992 civil war; when Tajikistan refused to admit them, in the words of reporter Bruce Pannier, they became “trapped in a small stretch of land between the two countries.” In 2016, Amnesty International drew attention to the plight of 75,000 Syrians who were said to be stranded at the Syrian–Jordanian border.

The space that housed Palestinian deportees at the border between Israel and Lebanon, or the ships adrift in the Andaman Sea in 2015 because no country wanted to accommodate their Rohingya passengers became no-man’s land because their inhabitants had been deprived of rights. No-man’s land isn’t sitting waiting: it only comes into being once people are abandoned to it and enclosed on it.

Brand puts it like this: “Between [Germany’s] far-flung frontiers it has become narrow, so that one has had to invent a No-man’s Land for those who have no room in there.” She highlights the transformation of refugees and deportees into Niemandsleute. “Only former people here,” one of her characters says, “Former ministerial counsellor, former judge. Former mothers, fiancées, sweethearts. And look: our former children are running along to get their soup. Former all of them. Former human beings.”

Brand’s novel was directed at a specific audience: “Americans and Europeans of the twentieth century.” She suggests that the book’s readers have been compromised, if only because they are unable to imagine what is happening to those banished from Germany, and are unwilling to raise their voices. Addressing the reader directly, she writes: “This face at the window, behind the curtain, doesn’t it strike you as familiar? Do you not recognise your own face, well hidden behind curtains, prying through panes as yet unbroken?”

Brand doesn’t allow her readers to be distant observers. Instead she implicates them in the novel’s events and thereby encourages them to take sides. As soon as they identify the predicament of the novel’s characters with that faced by forcibly displaced people today, today’s readers are similarly called to account. They too are prompted to ask themselves: am I not hiding behind my curtain, witnessing injustices without intervening? And if so, is it not my responsibility to act?

At the Belarusian–Polish border, some bystanders have been quick to lambast the Lukashenko regime for ferrying refugees to that no-man’s land. Individual European governments and the European Commission blame the government in Minsk for the migrants’ plight. On 29 September, the commission published a communication about a “renewed EU action plan against migrant smuggling,” and used it to condemn the role of “State actors in artificially creating and facilitating irregular migration, using migratory flows as a tool for political purposes.”

But there is little the European Commission can do to stop Belarus’s weaponisation of irregular migration. On 30 September, the EU partially suspended the visa facilitation agreement with Belarus, yet it’s doubtful that this will hurt a regime whose key members are already barred from entering the European Union.

Rather than demonstrating their outrage at Lukashenko’s hybrid warfare, the European Commission ought to concern itself with the illegal practices of its member states, including Poland. Von der Leyen and her fellow commissioners may be reluctant to do so not because of a likely backlash from the Polish government but, first, because other EU members have not done nearly enough to provide credible assurances to Lithuania, Latvia and Poland that the three countries won’t be left alone to deal with any migrants seeking asylum, and, second, because Poland is by no means the only EU member state accused of pushing back irregular migrants and violating human rights.

EU member countries that don’t share a land border with a non-EU country and can’t be easily accessed by sea from outside the EU have shown no sign of being prepared to accommodate people entering Lithuania, Latvia or Poland in search of protection. If they had, then those three Eastern European countries would have had little incentive to violate international and EU law and force migrants back across the Belarusian border, confine them in no-man’s land at the border, and restrict access to them.

Any condemnation of Polish practices would be hypocritical if it did not imply a condemnation of such practices in principle. Other EU member states too have been guilty of pushbacks and of violating the human rights of people trying to seek asylum. They include Croatia, Greece and Italy, not to mention the sordid saga of the EU’s collaboration with the Libyan “coast guard” to stop migrants from crossing the Mediterranean.

It’s little wonder that the European Commission has reserved its outrage for Lukashenko and approached the governments in Warsaw and Vilnius with kid gloves. Asked repeatedly during a press conference on 29 September how the commission viewed Poland’s pushbacks, EU home affairs commissioner Ylva Johansson was only prepared to say that “the commission has several question marks.”

The following day, Johansson met with Polish foreign minister Mariusz Kamiński. If her tweets after the meeting are any guide, then the two sides agreed to disagree. He did not seem to be troubled by whatever question the commissioner put to him. “We agreed that Belarus’s actions must meet with a firm response from the member states,” he tweeted after the meeting. He assured Johansson that “Poland grants international protection to people whose life and health are at risk.”

“Europe… is this field here Europe? Or what continent is it?” asks one of Renée Brand’s protagonists, whereupon another responds: “There is no Europe any more. It has become a lie. Could it be true that men live as we live in the heart of Europe?”

No matter how you look at the Niemandsland, it is outside, Brand explains in the opening pages of her book. “Outside of moon and earth: in the sphere of total indifference.” Later, she seemingly allows her readers to object to the charges of indifference, of hiding their face behind the curtains, only to expose their hypocrisy:

You protest. No, you say, this is not your face. You intervened wherever it was possible. How did you intervene?

With both hands you have reinforced the boundaries against which the waves of despair were surging. You appointed committees to confer on how to relieve the stricken. Honorable men and women exerted themselves. Conferences were in session for days and days. Misery is in session for nights and nights.

And maybe fifty years from now, there’ll be a memorial for those who froze to death at the European Union’s eastern border. •

The post In no-man’s land appeared first on Inside Story.

Scholz nevertheless presents himself as the contest’s clear winner. His claim rests partly on the fact that his party’s share of the vote, at 25.7 per cent, exceeded the combined 24.1 per cent achieved by the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, or CSU. This is only the fourth time in twenty national elections that the Social Democrats have come out ahead. More importantly, though, Scholz points to his party’s gains, and the conservatives’ losses, since the 2017 election, when the Social Democrats won just 20.5 per cent of the vote while the Christian Democrats and CSU attracted a combined 32.9 per cent. Sunday’s result was the worst ever for the two conservative parties.

If gains or losses since 2017 were the only criterion, though, the Greens would be considered Sunday’s undisputed winners, having increased their share by 5.9 percentage points. But as recently as May they were the frontrunners, with the conservatives a close second and the Social Democrats a distant third on 15 per cent. And that was before the devastating July floods in the southwest and west of the country, which reminded voters of the urgent need to deal with climate change, and before the government’s scandalous mismanagement of Germany’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Greens’ candidate for the office of chancellor (and the party’s co-leader), Annalena Baerbock, could partly be blamed for its disappointing 14.8 per cent. Early in the campaign it was revealed that she had failed to declare income she had received in addition to her salary and had made inaccurate claims in her CV. As if these self-inflicted troubles weren’t enough, she released a book containing more than a hundred plagiarised passages (including some taken from a book by her Greens co-leader, Robert Habeck). Baerbock’s popularity — and with it the Greens’ position in the polls — dropped sharply.

Baerbock had good reason to feel hard done by. Her mistakes might well have been written off as oversights, and Armin Laschet of the Christian Democrats — initially her main competitor — had himself published a book containing passages copied from others without proper attribution. A few years ago, what’s more, Laschet resigned as lecturer at Aachen University after he lost his students’ exam papers and botched an attempt to award them marks said to be based on his notes. Baerbock may have exaggerated some of her achievements, but Laschet’s CV entirely omits his fifteen-year period at Aachen University. Voters nevertheless seemed to care more about Baerbock’s transgressions.

Laschet’s downfall came soon enough. He was captured on camera sharing a laugh while listening to German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier extending his condolences to the victims of the July floods. The twenty-second scene — combined with persistent sniping from the sidelines by the CSU’s Markus Söder, who considered himself the better option as the conservative parties’ joint candidate for chancellor — ruined Laschet’s chances of matching Angela Merkel’s 2017 results. Less than a month before the election, the Social Democrats overtook the conservatives in the polls.

Laschet, too, was entitled to feel aggrieved. That’s because his opponent Olaf Scholz seemed immune to criticism. The Social Democrat, who is sometimes referred to as Teflon-Scholz, was not troubled by credible claims that he condoned the Warburg Bank’s failure to pay a €47 million tax debt in 2017 when he was premier of Hamburg. Or, more recently, that he failed to act in a timely manner as finance minister after the financial services company Wirecard admitted it had cooked its books to the tune of €1.9 billion. And during the election campaign, he was barely troubled when his ministry was raided by investigators probing an anti–money laundering unit he oversees.

When the election result became clear on Sunday night, both Laschet and Baerbock put on a brave face. Baerbock pointed to the fact that the result was her party’s best ever in a national election. Laschet stressed that his party had almost caught up with Scholz’s during the final week of the campaign.

In fact, many more parties declared themselves winners than losers. The Free Democrats claimed victory despite increasing their vote by a meagre 0.8 percentage points. Politicians of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, said they were pleased by its 10.3 per cent, a fall from 12.6 per cent, with co-leader Alice Weidel arguing that if the vote for other, smaller parties with similar agendas was taken into account then the AfD increased its share of the vote.

Of course, some parties failed to reach the 5 per cent threshold necessary to gain a seat, a rule designed to keep minor parties out of the Bundestag. None of them would have been surprised by the fact. They include Die Basis, a newly formed party that tried to attract those opposed to masks and vaccinations to protect against Covid-19, which scored 1.4 per cent. The Freie Wähler, a party currently represented in two of sixteen state parliaments and led by Bavarian deputy premier Hubert Aiwanger (who also refuses to be vaccinated), won a respectable 2.4 per cent. Another 1.5 per cent of voters opted for the larger of two animal rights parties. And 1 per cent chose Die Partei, a party founded by the editors of the satirical magazine Titanic, which pokes fun at the programs and politics of traditional parties. Altogether, more than four million Germans voted for parties that failed to reach the 5 per cent threshold.

Of the parties represented in federal parliament, only the left-wing Linke openly admitted defeat. Its vote fell by almost half, from 9.2 per cent in 2017 to 4.9 per cent. But it snuck into the Bundestag thanks to a clause in the electoral laws that allows a party to circumvent the 5 per cent threshold if it wins at least three electorates. By holding three of the five electorates it won in 2017, it just survived as a political force — as it had in 1994, when it scored only 4.4 per cent but won four seats directly.

Another peculiarity of Germany’s electoral laws made it possible for a party that won no direct seat and attracted only 55,330 votes to be represented in the Bundestag. That’s the centre-left Südschleswigsche Wählerverband — a party appealing to ethnic Friesians and the Danish minority in Germany’s far north — to whom the 5 per cent rule does not apply. It won its first seat in federal parliament since 1953.

Stefan Seidler, the politician representing Germany’s Danish speakers, will be one of 735 members occupying a chamber designed to accommodate a parliament of 598 — 299 of them directly elected, 299 nominated by the parties. Germans have two votes: one to elect their local member and one to determine the overall composition of the Bundestag. If the number of direct seats won by a party surpasses the number of seats it has been allocated according to that party’s overall share of the vote, then all other parties need to be compensated for those extra seats. This topping-up has become routine because the number of seats directly won by the CSU regularly surpasses the number of seats calculated according to its percentage of the overall vote. In this election, the CSU won all but one of Bavaria’s forty-five electorates (the Greens won the other) but attracted only 31.7 per cent of the vote.

A focus on the overall election outcome obscures sharp geographical and demographic differences. In electorate #19, which comprises Hamburg’s western suburbs, the Greens won about 30 per cent of the vote and the Social Democrats about 25 per cent, with the AfD managing only about 3 per cent. In the East German state of Saxony, by contrast, the AfD came first on about 25 per cent, despite a fall from its result four years ago. No other party reached 20 per cent.

Among the 260,000 young people who took part in a national under-eighteen straw poll, the Greens came first overall. The AfD came sixth, with about the same number of votes as one of the animal rights splinter parties. In the two East German states of Saxony and Thuringia, however, the AfD won that poll.

According to an exit poll, two-thirds of over-sixty-year-olds voted for either the conservatives or the Social Democrats (with the vote being roughly evenly split). About half of those under twenty-two voted for either the Free Democrats or Greens, again with the vote evenly split. Only a quarter of young people for whom the 2021 poll was their first opportunity to vote chose either of the two major parties.

Further complicating the picture is the fact that neither of the two major parties can claim to speak for a sizeable proportion of the population. In fact, claims by Christian Democrats and Free Democrats on Sunday night that only a quarter of the electorate voted for Scholz actually overstate his support.

The 14.4 million Germans who chose not to vote won’t be represented in the Bundestag, and nor will the four million voters who opted for parties that didn’t reach the 5 per cent threshold. Of the 83.1 million people living in Germany, about 69.4 million are eighteen or older, but only 61.2 million are eligible to vote. More than eight million adult residents are barred from voting in national and state elections because German law makes it difficult even for second-generation migrants to take out citizenship and acquire the right to vote.

While Free Democrats and Greens don’t share many policy positions, both are committed to making it easier for migrants to become German citizens, not least by allowing them to retain the citizenship of their or their parents’ countries of origin. Both parties would also allow sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to vote, which could again increase the legitimacy of future governments.

Whoever forms the new government will need to try to represent the interests of East Germans and West Germans, young and old, whether they live in rural and regional Germany or in the cities. The new government will need to introduce far-ranging policies with an enormous impact on Germans’ day-to-day lives, and it needs to attempt to win over a majority of the population, young and old, people in the East and in the West, migrants and non-migrants, for those policies. That’s a huge ask.

The task might be slightly more manageable after this election because the new government will itself be diverse. As things stand, it will be made up of Greens and Free Democrats, plus either the Social Democrats or the conservatives. Hypothetically, the results would also allow for a continuation of the grand coalition between the conservatives and the Social Democrats, but both sides have ruled that out.

A coalition of three partners would be a first in postwar German history. Also unprecedented is the fact that the Greens and the Free Democrats have commenced negotiations rather than letting either of the two major parties (which are no longer that “major” after all) take the lead. That makes sense: whatever the final outcome — Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats; or conservatives, Greens and Free Democrats — the differences between the left-leaning Greens and the free-market Free Democrats are the most difficult to bridge.

Taking the initiative also means, once they have identified some common ground, the two parties can play off Christian Democrats against Social Democrats. The result could be that their major coalition partner, whichever that is, will have much less say in the personnel and program of the new government.

The current German government was formed over a tortuous 172 days, drawn out when the Free Democrats decided belatedly that they didn’t want to be part of a Jamaica coalition after all. The only option in that case was for the Social Democrats, who had initially been unwilling to continue their alliance with the Christian Democrats and CSU, to come to the party. Both the Greens and the Free Democrats say they have learned from the mistakes of those failed negotiations four years ago.

This time, all political leaders are committed to taking fewer than ninety-six days — the time from election day until New Year’s Eve. Nobody wants this New Year’s address, traditionally delivered by the chancellor, to be given once again by Angela Merkel.

I’m not holding my breath. After a dispiriting campaign we are probably in for drawn-out and extremely difficult negotiations. Unlike in 2017, neither Greens nor Free Democrats have the option of abandoning such negotiations (as the Free Democrats’ Christian Lindner did four years ago, when he declared that it is better not to govern than to abandon one’s principles).

There is more at stake now than in 2017. This is Germany’s last chance to change course if it wants to meet its Paris Agreement targets. With none of the parties that will sit in the Bundestag offering policies strong enough, the challenge will be far bigger than the task of reconciling ideological preferences and personal egos. •

The post Germany’s arithmetic appeared first on Inside Story.

After the second world war, Germans often cared a lot about how they were perceived by others. They worried a great deal, for example, about the reputational damage caused by the pogrom-like riots in Rostock and Hoyerswerda in the early 1990s. Many were proud when commentators adopted Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy’s description of Germans as “world champions of dealing with the past.” They liked the fact that Angela Merkel was perceived as the only Western leader willing and able to stand up to Donald Trump. Some were even proud when Merkel was praised abroad for her decision in September 2015 not to close Germany’s borders, and for her refusal to flinch when Germany admitted close to 900,000 asylum seekers that year, although they might have had misgivings about Merkel’s policy when talking to fellow Germans.

Given this history, it’s surprising that the attention paid by people outside Germany to the election that will determine Merkel’s successor has not been matched by the contestants’ references to the world beyond their borders. True, both Christian Democrat Armin Laschet and the current frontrunner, Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, recently paid visits to French president Emmanuel Macron. But those encounters were hardly noticed, and weren’t in any case used by either candidate to talk in any detail about Germany’s crucial relationship with France or the Berlin republic’s future role in the European Union.

The candidates’ apparent blind spot was in evidence on Sunday night, when more than eleven million viewers watched a televised debate between Laschet, Scholz and Annalena Baerbock of the Greens. As the only one of the three pre-election debates aired by both the public broadcasters during this campaign, it was widely seen to be the most crucial event in the lead-up to the election. During its ninety minutes the candidates made brief comments about the foreign policy credentials of the left-wing Linke, but otherwise didn’t mention Germany’s role in the world and their own ideas for the European Union, for Germany’s relationship with China, Russia and the United States, and for the country’s relations with the developing world. Not once.

The absence is also reflected elsewhere in the campaign. The only posters I have seen that refer to foreign policy — yes, posters are still important in German election campaigns — have been Linke posters in East Germany demanding “peace with Russia.”

While correspondents for the international media have been trying to fathom what a government led by Scholz or Laschet would mean for the rest of the world, the politicians engaged in the campaign, including international law graduate Baerbock, seem oblivious to the wider world. That’s not because the world has been of no concern recently. The scandalous mismanagement of Germany’s withdrawal from Afghanistan by three senior government ministers — Social Democrat foreign minister Heiko Maas, Christian Democrat defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and the Christian Social Union interior minister Horst Seehofer — could have been one of the key issues of the campaign. It wasn’t. The fact that Germany leased planes in June to evacuate Afghans who would be in danger following a Taliban victory, but then cancelled the evacuation because Seehofer’s ministry objected to Afghan employees of the German military entering Germany before the completion of all relevant paperwork, received barely any attention.

The absence of the European Union and foreign policy from Sunday’s debate is partly the responsibility of the two journalists who chaired it. But it’s also a reflection of the stature of the three candidates. It makes even Angela Merkel, a skilful diplomat but hardly a foreign relations visionary, look farsighted.

In one sense, though, the three candidates’ failure to mention other countries comes as a pleasant surprise. All three acknowledge that Germany must do its share to meet the targets of the 2015 Paris Agreement. They might differ about how to do that, but none of them follows the lead of other world leaders by declaring that Germany’s approach relies on what China, the United States or other major emitters of greenhouse gases do. No mention was made on Sunday of Polish coal-fired power stations or Finnish and French reliance on nuclear energy. Emissions in Russia weren’t cited as an excuse for a lack of ambition by a future German government.

Part of the reason the candidates didn’t try to shift responsibility is that the country’s highest court committed the government to a comparatively ambitious German target earlier this year. The court found that Germany’s existing policy would unduly restrict the choices available to today’s young people after 2030. In a press release, the court said that:

fundamental rights are violated by the fact that the emission amounts allowed until 2030… substantially narrow the remaining options for reducing emissions after 2030, thereby jeopardising practically every type of freedom protected by fundamental rights… The legislator should have taken precautionary steps to ensure a transition to climate neutrality that respects freedom — steps that have so far been lacking.

The ruling forced Merkel’s coalition government to legislate to bring forward its climate neutrality goal to 2045 (rather than 2050, as in the legislation passed in December 2019) and its emissions-reduction goal to 65 per cent (rather than 55 per cent) by 2030.

So far, so good. The bad news is that a detailed study conducted by DIW Econ, the German Institute for Economic Research’s consulting company, has found that the 2021 climate protection legislation would not ensure Germany’s compliance with the Paris targets.

That study wasn’t concerned with the gap between the climate neutrality law and what the German government had committed to in Paris (although it identified such a gap); rather, it asked whether the election manifestos of the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats, the Greens and the Linke included measures commensurate with the revised legislation’s targets. It concluded that a government formed by any of the first three of those parties — assuming they were in a position to implement their programs — wouldn’t even come close to meeting the targets. Perhaps more surprising was the study’s finding that the measures envisaged by the Linke would also fall short. And the Greens? The study found that their measures, while more effective than those of the other four parties, would also be insufficient.

Climate change is the election campaign’s most important issue. That’s particularly the case after the floods in the west and southwest of the country in July, which claimed 180 lives and swept away houses, bridges, roads, rail tracks and other infrastructure. The repairs and rebuilding will, on current estimates, cost about €30 billion. Yet all main contestants in this election campaign pretend that climate neutrality can be achieved without any impact on consumers’ hip pockets and without changing the way we move around, eat, work or build our houses. Christian Democrats and Free Democrats even maintain that neither new taxes nor new public debt will be needed.

Angela Merkel’s departure could have been an opportunity for Germany to talk about its place in the world and how to tackle the enormous challenges of global justice and climate change. It could have been an opportunity for all contestants to agree that procrastination à la Merkel is no longer an option.

While the composition of Germany’s parliament is determined by the percentage of votes won by parties that exceed the 5 per cent threshold, 299 seats are decided in individual electorates, where the first-past-the-post system applies. Electorate #158 (Sächsische Schweiz–Osterzgebirge), in the southeast of the country, gained notoriety in the 2017 election because it was one of three electorates won by the candidate of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany, or AfD.

A debate last week between six of the candidates vying to win electorate #158 was even more dispiriting than Baerbock, Scholz and Laschet’s encounter on Sunday night. When it came to climate change, the Green and Social Democrat candidates, perhaps trying to appease the local audience, were even reluctant to endorse their own parties’ manifestos. The Greens candidate went as far as declining to rule out building new nuclear power stations to compensate for the decommissioning of coal-fired generators. (Perhaps in an attempt to reciprocate, the pro-nuclear AfD candidate then demanded more bicycle paths.)

Nearly all the questions from the audience came from local politicians or supporters of minor parties that hadn’t been invited to the forum. Towards the end of the debate, though, a seemingly unaligned audience member — a teacher in a vocational school — put up his hand. His students had instructed him to ask the candidates how they thought Germany would meet the Paris agreement’s 1.5°C target. He hadn’t come unprepared: he had read the DIW Econ study and knew that whatever the parties were offering wasn’t going to be enough. He also had first-hand experience of the frustration of young people, many of them too young to vote. The candidates acknowledged that frustration, but not one of them had a satisfactory answer to the question.

Given the reluctance of politicians to promote painful decisions, the teenagers asking hard questions and demanding answers are our best bet. Fridays for Future activists, who have already had considerable influence on German policymaking, are mobilising for nationwide demonstrations on 24 September, two days before the election. “This election provides us with a once-in-a-century choice,” the group’s Luisa Neubauer wrote. “The political decisions taken during the next four years will determine the fate of my generation.”

And while they are at it, maybe Fridays for Future activists could also raise the issue of Germany’s place in the world — not in order to provide excuses for it to sit on its hands, nor to lecture the world about a German model. Global injustice is one of the key impediments to a sustainable world, and a vision for global sustainability and justice is sorely needed.

In any case, the world may soon look towards Norway, rather than Germany, when contemplating how to tackle climate change and accelerate the transformation of economies. Yesterday, an alliance of parties led by Labour’s Jonas Gahr Støre won the Norwegian election with a mandate — and seeming resolve — to end Norway’s reliance on fossil fuel production and export, with one potential government party, the Greens, demanding an end to fossil fuel production by 2035. That should interest others whose countries rely on the production coal, oil and gas, including the people of Altona, New York and Altona, Melbourne. •

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This is the most unusual of German election campaigns. Angela Merkel’s announcement nearly three years ago that she would step down at the end of her fourth term is one of many firsts. Her predecessors were either compelled to resign (Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard and Willy Brandt) or voted out of office (Kurt Georg Kiesinger, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder).

This is also the first time that three parties rather than two have nominated a candidate for the chancellorship. Laschet’s selection as joint candidate of the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, on 20 April, marked the real beginning of the campaign, and at times each of the three candidates has looked likely to lead his or her party to victory. In April and May, the Greens were narrowly ahead of the Christian Democrats, and Baerbock seemed to be on track to become the second woman to lead Germany. In June and July, the Christian Democrats moved well ahead of the Greens. In August, the Social Democrats, whose hopes had seemed to rest on wishful thinking alone, relegated the Greens to third place and caught up with the front-runner.

It’s the first time, too, that each of the candidates for chancellor is widely considered to be weak — which partly explains why the parties’ fortunes in the polls have shifted as much as they have in the past three months.

The Greens picked Annalena Baerbock, a forty-year-old with a master’s degree in international law from the London School of Economics, in what appeared to be a unanimous decision that was also supported by the party’s other co-leader, Robert Habeck. To begin with, the Greens’ selection of a young woman who has never held a position in government over the more experienced Habeck was widely applauded, and her approval ratings seemed to confirm the choice. But her popularity soon took a dive, first because she had failed to report income to federal parliament (which she is obliged to do as an MP), then because she was found to have embellished her CV, and finally because passages in a book she wrote, rushed into print to support her candidature, turned out to have been plagiarised (from sources that included Wikipedia and a book written by Habeck).

Unlike Baerbock, sixty-year-old Armin Laschet has run a government. He has been the premier of North Rhine-Westphalia — its population of eighteen million making it Germany’s most populous state — for the past four years. He fought hard to be anointed as candidate of the Christian Democrats and its Bavarian sister party. First he saw off a challenge from his party colleague Friedrich Merz, a corporate lawyer who has long been the darling of the Christian Democrats’ conservative wing and might well have been a more popular choice. Then he prevailed against Markus Söder, the Bavarian premier and leader of the Christian Social Union, although polls were giving Söder a far better chance of winning the election. Laschet, who is also prone to put his foot in his mouth, never really recovered from these bruising contests.

The Social Democrats picked sixty-three-year-old finance minister Olaf Scholz, a former state premier of Hamburg, as early as August last year — much to the merriment of political observers, given that at the time the pollsters ranked his party a distant third, only just ahead of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and the Free Democrats. As recently as 7 June this year, the Social Democrats won a paltry 8.4 per cent of the vote in the Saxony-Anhalt state election. Scholz carries the nickname Scholzomat; those who wrote off his chances assumed that his automaton-like persona and inability to show emotions wouldn’t endear him to the electorate.

Scholz’s claim to be a viable candidate for chancellor also seemed absurd because he didn’t appear to have much backing in his own party. He had failed in his bid to become co-leader of the Social Democrats in 2019, not least because his comparatively conservative views didn’t chime with those of the majority of his party. Surprisingly, he now has the party’s full support — presumably many members sense that he is the only chance the party has to avoid the fate of the French socialists, whose candidate finished fifth in the 2017 presidential election.

Scholz’s approval ratings are now far ahead of Laschet’s and Baerbock’s. But rather than impressing voters with his own strengths, he has benefited from the mistakes of his competitors. Worryingly, his relative popularity may also reflect the fact that he has positioned himself as Merkel’s most obvious heir. Unkind commentators have called him a Merkel clone; a recent Spiegel article was titled “The Merkelisation of Olaf Scholz.”

Like Merkel, Scholz is overly cautious, prone to prevaricating rather than acting decisively. Like her, he lacks charisma. And since Merkel too has embraced traditional Social Democratic policies, it’s not hard to imagine him following in her footsteps. Even more than the Merkel loyalist Laschet, he appears to guarantee that nothing will change, irrespective of which parties make up the governing coalition.

This is the other first: the abundance of possible coalitions. An average of the last six polls, conducted between 24 and 28 August, has the combined Christian Democrats and Christian Social Union neck and neck with the Social Democrats on 23 per cent, followed by the Greens on 18, the centre-right Free Democrats on 12, the AfD on 11, and the left-wing Linke on 7 per cent. According to the pollsters, no other small party will manage to get anywhere close to the 5 per cent needed for a representation in the Bundestag, the Federal Republic’s parliament.

If these polls mirror the distribution of votes on election day — and taking account of the fact that no other party will deal with the AfD — five different coalitions are possible: a government comprised of the parties that traditionally made up the Bundestag before the arrival of the Greens in 1983: that is, the Christian Democrats (black), the Social Democrats (red) and the Free Democrats (yellow). Because the colours associated with these parties resemble those of the German flag, this coalition is also referred to as the Deutschlandkoalition, or German coalition. The other options have been labelled “Jamaica,” after the colours of the Jamaican flag (black, green and yellow); “Kenya” (black, red and green); Ampel (traffic light) comprised of Social Democrats, Free Democrats and Greens; and “R2G” (Social Democrats, Linke and Greens).

Some of these options are more likely than others. Both the Free Democrats and the Greens are desperate to be back in government and will negotiate accordingly; this seems to make Jamaica and the Ampel more likely than Kenya or a Deutschlandkoalition. Either of the latter would also be less likely if the Christian Democrats had to be the minor partner in such an arrangement. In terms of a programmatic fit, R2G would be a good option, and would have the support of the majority of members of the Social Democrats, the Linke and the Greens. But neither the Greens leadership nor Scholz fancy a coalition with the Linke, because they consider the party to be too unreliable, particularly on foreign policy.

But it’s another four weeks until election day, and if the volatility of the past three months continues then last week’s polls will mean little. A government led by the Greens, which seemed a realistic option only a couple of months ago, now appears only a remote possibility — but who knows, we could still end up with a chancellor Baerbock.

In trying to gauge the mood of the electorate, I rely on the pollsters. The alternative would be to take notice of the unabashedly unscientific polls I conduct among my friends, whose response to the current offering, like my own, is despairing. That’s not just because the three main contenders to inherit Merkel’s mantle are unconvincing, but also because Germany faces the prospect of a government trying to pretend that no significant changes are necessary — or rather, a majority of voters preferring a continuation of the status quo.

That preference would make sense if the current government’s recent performance couldn’t be faulted. Yet its response to Covid-19 was mired in miscalculation and hesitation. Germany is experiencing the pandemic’s fourth wave not least because too few people have been vaccinated (even though Germany has so much vaccine it has been giving it away to other countries). The government’s other main embarrassment lately has been its failure to evacuate people who have worked for the German military in Afghanistan — not because it was unaware of the danger but because charter flights organised to evacuate local staff were cancelled at the last minute because the ministry of the interior had concerns that its bureaucratic processes would be compromised by the arrival of people who had not yet been issued visas.

But the Merkel government’s biggest failure has been its dilatory response to climate change. It wasted valuable time trying to please all possible constituencies, including the owners of coal-fired power stations and the car industry. Merkel’s achievements — most notably her decision to phase out nuclear reactors after Fukushima and her initial response to refugees in 2015 — are undeniable, but the former environment minister’s reluctance to accelerate the transformation of Germany’s economy is likely to be remembered as an ugly blot that may well define her sixteen years in office.

The fact that more of the same ought not be an option was brought home by the recent floods in the west of the country. More than 180 people died in July when small rivers turned into raging torrents, sweeping away bridges, roads and entire houses. AfD politicians aside, nobody doubts that torrential rains like the ones that hit Germany last month are largely a result of climate change. All parties, again with the exception of the AfD, say they would like Germany to do its part to combat climate change. In fact, since 29 April this year there has been no alternative: this was the day the Bundesverfassungsgericht, Germany’s highest court, ruled that the government is doing too little to ensure that today’s young people inherit a world that is still worth living in.

Yet not only the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats but also the Greens seem to favour a continuation of Merkel’s “don’t rock the boat” approach. In the current campaign, the Greens’ timidity may reflect their low self-confidence in the wake of Baerbock’s stuff-ups. But you need only look at Baden-Württemberg, the state that has had a Greens premier for the past ten years, to be disabused of the idea that the Greens would insist on radical changes if they were part of a governing coalition.

So, is Germany in for more of Merkel? That would be disastrous. At a time when a radical rethink of how we live and how we engage with the world around us is sorely needed, Germany can hardly afford another four years of a government sitting on its hands lest too much action upset one or the other voter.

Perhaps this is also a question of leadership. On Saturday night, some media streamed what the news magazine Spiegel termed “the only true debate”: between Söder of the Christian Social Union and Habeck of the Greens, both of them wannabe contenders who lost out to Laschet and Baerbock respectively. The relative sophistication of the debate — and both leaders’ conceding that far-reaching changes, however unpopular they may be, are necessary — suggested that a government led by Habeck, with Söder as his deputy (or the other way around), may have been a more attractive option than any of those on offer. That’s also because the pair might have pulled enough votes between them to avoid having to offer ministries to the free marketeers from the Free Democratic Party.

Such a scenario is perhaps not as far-fetched as it may seem. I don’t necessarily have in mind the Greens supporters who have been clamouring for a last-minute swap, Habeck for Baerbock, or the Christian Democrats who fear that their party might lose more than a quarter of its vote from the last election, and are imploring Söder to come to the rescue. Rather, I am thinking of a scenario sketched by the Spiegel columnist Sascha Lobo, who pointed out that Laschet might fail to win a seat in parliament, which could then open the door for Söder.

In any case, four weeks is a very long time, particularly in this turbulent period. Maybe there is hope yet. If the matter weren’t quite so serious, it would even be fun to watch the complex saga of how Europe’s largest democracy chooses its next government continuing to unfold. •

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On the mainland, though, the departure of Japanese forces had allowed the civil war to resume between Chinese Communist Party forces and the army of the Republic of China, led by the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party. When Communist troops captured Nanjing, the Chinese capital, in April 1949, the Nationalist forces retreated initially to Guangzhou and eventually to Taiwan. During the months after Mao Zedong announced the creation of the People’s Republic of China on 21 September, hundreds of thousands of refugees and defeated Kuomintang soldiers arrived on Daishan and other Zhoushan islands. They made the islanders work for them, confiscated their food and assaulted islander women.

By May 1950, with the islands no longer safe from the forces of the People’s Republic, the Kuomintang prepared to leave. On that fateful day, the fifteenth of the month, Jiang and two of his classmates were abducted by a group of Kuomintang soldiers. The three boys were among 13,521 male Zhoushan islanders press-ganged into military service and taken to Taiwan.

Jiang had little choice but to serve in the Kuomintang army. He would later remember his service as a form of slavery. When he tried to escape, he was caught and sentenced to three years in prison. It was not until 1982, inspired by the 1977 American television miniseries Roots, that he sneaked back into China. He was reunited with his parents on Daishan Island, but only as a visitor, and never returned permanently to his native island.

The title of Jiang Sizhang’s memoir, published in 2008, translates as “Nostalgia: Diasporic Displacement, Memory and Grief of a ‘Mainlander.’” The quote marks around “mainlander” are significant. Jiang, the abducted Daishan Islander who now considers himself at home in Taiwan, is one of the protagonists of Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang’s outstanding book The Great Exodus from China, which examines what it means to be a “mainlander,” or waishengren.

“Taiwan,” in the words of Sydney University’s Salvatore Babones, “has a messy history of invasion, occupation, colonisation, refuge, and intermarriage.” The history he is talking about began in the seventeenth century, when Hokkien- and Hakka-speaking Hoklo and Hakka settlers from coastal southeastern China began displacing the island’s Indigenous population, and Taiwan became part of the Chinese empire. After the Japanese replaced the Qing emperors as Taiwan’s colonial masters in the late nineteenth century, they set about Japanising the island and its inhabitants. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese moved to Taiwan; rebellions, by both Indigenous and Chinese Taiwanese, were brutally put down.

After the Japanese were defeated at the end of the second world war, the Kuomintang took over control of Taiwan. As far as most Hoklo and Hakka were concerned, the departure of one coloniser meant only the arrival of another. When the local population revolted against the Kuomintang government in 1947, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the director-general of the Kuomintang and the undisputed leader of the Republic of China, despatched troops to Taiwan. Thousands of Taiwanese were killed in the “228 Incident” (so-named because the massacre took place on 28 February).

Two years later, the Kuomintang were defeated by the Chinese Communists on the mainland. About a million mainlanders then either fled, were evacuated or were forcibly taken to Taiwan. They joined tens of thousands of refugees and Kuomintang personnel who had moved to Taiwan before 1949. Chiang Kai-shek’s government set up shop in Taipei, declaring it the “provisional capital” of the Republic of China. The Nationalist government’s imposition of martial law on 19 May 1949 initiated the “White Terror,” thirty-eight years of Kuomintang dictatorship. The island’s Nationalist rulers also embarked on the (re)Sinicisation of the islands and its inhabitants.

The influx of Chinese in the late 1940s left Taiwan with four distinct ethnic groups: the island’s Indigenous inhabitants (the yuanzhumin), who today comprise about 2 per cent of the population; the Hoklo and Hakka (referred to jointly as benshengren, meaning “people of the local province”), who between them make up about 85 per cent of islanders; and waishengren (“people from outside of the province”), the mainlanders who arrived after the Kuomintang was driven from the mainland, and their descendants. As long as Chiang Kai-shek was alive, waishengren ruled supreme. After his son Chiang Ching-kuo took over in 1975, the Kuomintang slowly relinquished some of its power and the waishengren’s supremacy gradually eroded.

Once martial law was lifted in July 1987, a process of democratisation began alongside a “localisation” of politics and society. A greater emphasis on a distinct Taiwanese identity naturally privileged the ethnic groups with longer ties to the island. Taiwan’s first direct presidential elections were held in 1996. Four years later, the Taiwanese elected their first non-Kuomintang president. In 2016, the Democratic Progressive Party’s Tsai Ing-wen, of Hakka and yuanzhumin descent, won the presidential race, and her party won a majority of seats in parliamentary elections — the first time that the Kuomintang had lost the majority in the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s legislature.

Taiwan, once the country notorious for spending the longest period under martial law, had become a model representative democracy. In the Economist Intelligence Unit’s most recent Democracy Index, it ranks first in Asia, and eleventh globally, ahead of longstanding democracies including Britain, the United States and Switzerland.

For many of Taiwan’s waishengren, democratisation also meant the loss of the privileges they had enjoyed under the Kuomintang dictatorship. Taiwanese-born Canadian historian Yang traces a series of traumas experienced by waishengren in and on their way to Taiwan, and explores the malleability of their social memories and identities. Drawing on interviews, published memoirs and archival sources, he shows how people who once thought of themselves as exiles — and who were convinced that they would soon be able to return to mainland China — became Taiwanese. “[W]hat we are witnessing in contemporary Taiwan,” he writes, “is a paradoxical case of diasporic narratives/memories being used for an anti-diaspora purpose to claim a local identity — turning the concept of diaspora on its head.”

The Great Exodus from China begins with the arrival of waishengren in Taiwan, in itself a complex story. Some of the newcomers were military and government officials who were ordered to move to Taiwan with their families when the island became the last Nationalist stronghold. Some were civilian refugees who anticipated retribution at the hands of the victorious Communists. Others, like Jiang Sizhang, ended up in Taiwan against their will.

For some, the exodus out of China was an orderly and well-prepared departure; for others it was a risky escape. In January 1949, the ocean liner Pacific sailed from Shanghai towards the Taiwanese port of Keelung. It carried about a thousand refugees and was dangerously overloaded. A few hours out of Shanghai, it collided with a cargo ship. Only thirty-six of its passengers and crew survived, rescued by an Australian warship, the Warramunga, that happened to be in the area.

While the departure from mainland China was traumatic for many of the refugees and exiles, their arrival was no less traumatic for those already in Taiwan. “The great exodus disrupted normal social life and transformed living conditions on the island,” Yang writes. “A floating male population, many of them defeated soldiers and traumatised army abductees, contributed to a rise in the frequency of robberies, rapes, and other violent crimes — crimes that terrified the native Taiwanese.” The refugees were at once invaders and colonisers, taking what wasn’t theirs because they had the support of the Nationalist regime. “Displaced people from China with political clout forcibly displaced local people in Taiwan with little clout,” Yang notes.

But the mainlanders hadn’t come to stay. Taiwan was meant to be merely a temporary refuge. After all, the civil war hadn’t ended in 1949 (skirmishes would indeed continue for many years); soon, they thought, the Nationalist army would launch a successful counteroffensive, and then they would all return to mainland China.

It was only in 1958, after the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, that waishengren began to doubt that they would ever go home. In return for US assistance, the Americans had forced Chiang Kai-shek to publicly renounce the use of military force as the primary means of reconquering mainland China.

Yang calls the effect of those doubts the “social trauma of the diminishing hope (for return)”: “When the displaced waishengren thought they might not be able to return home in their lifetimes — and never again see the parents, grandparents, spouses, siblings, and children they had left behind, let alone resume the lives they once knew or be buried in a communal graveyard with their ancestors — intense feelings of loss, disorientation, and depression began to set in.” They had thought of themselves as sojourners, but now they became “reluctant migrants.”

From the 1980s, though, mainlanders were at least able to visit their home towns and villages. Jiang Sizhang, for example, entered China via Hong Kong with the help of a fake identity in 1982. Afterwards, he and other former soldiers formed the Veterans’ Homebound Movement to lobby for an opening of the border. Their efforts effectively forced the hand of the generalissimo’s successor, Chiang Ching-kuo, who in October 1987 “lifted the ban on residents in ‘Free China’ traveling to the ‘communist bandit territory’ of mainland China.” This decision, which was not the “logical corollary to the larger democratisation process” but the outcome of pressure on the regime by disenfranchised veterans, was perhaps as momentous for the future of Taiwan as the lifting of martial law had been three months earlier.

The government’s announcement resulted in what the Taiwanese media called the “visiting relatives fever.” Hundreds of thousands of waishengren travelled to the mainland, Yang reports, seeking to “rekindle old feelings of home: warmth, affection, and a sense of belonging.” For most of them, though, visits “home” turned out to be hugely disappointing. They couldn’t reconcile what they saw with their memories, and were confronted by greedy kin who expected the long-lost relatives from comparatively affluent Taiwan to shower them with gifts. They returned to Taiwan “physically exhausted and emotionally drained — many of [them] only with the clothes on their back,” Yang writes. “It was a déjà vu all over à la 1949. In a seemingly bizarre historical coincidence, elderly former exiles arrived back in Taiwan not too differently from how they first set foot on the island nearly half a century ago.”

Only a small minority decided to move back to the mainland for good, and even many of those decided to live with other former exiles rather than their own kin. As disappointed waishengren realised that their destiny lay in Taiwan rather than on the mainland, they began to remember their own past differently. Where once they had identified as people from particular home provinces and native places on the mainland, now they began to think of themselves as waishengren who had in common the traumatic experience of the great postwar exodus. They mobilised memories that had previously been publicly suppressed.

The waishengren were partly responding to how, during Taiwan’s democratisation and localisation, the formerly repressed majority of the population were increasingly treating them as remnants of the Nationalist dictatorship. “Behind the exilic/diasporic narratives is an autochthonous claim to a Taiwan-based identity,” writes Yang, “an identity that resists, negotiates, and at the same time, adapts to the rising trend of Taiwanisation and Taiwanese nationalism following democratisation.”

Would the trend of Taiwanisation necessarily pit waishengren against benshengren? As much as anything, “Taiwanese” identity had been an outcome of the Japanese occupation of the island. Hakka and Hoklo were presumably able to bury any differences they had when they found themselves at the receiving end of Japanese discrimination (before 1945) and mainlanders’ discrimination (after 1945). So far, the threat posed by Communist China seems not to have turned loyalist mainlanders against separatist islanders, as Beijing hoped; on the contrary, China’s increasingly blatant attempts to interfere in Taiwan’s affairs may have aided the Taiwanisation of the island’s entire population.

The Great Exodus from China is a carefully researched, intellectually ambitious and thoughtful history. Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang cast his net wide in terms of both source material and the academic disciplines that informed his analysis. In the process, he throws fresh light on wider issues: the meaning of diaspora and exile, and how trauma persists and is used by people — particularly those who have been forcibly displaced — to form their identities. His observations also apply to aspects of other histories and contexts, not least that of Palestine/Israel.

The book is also an empathetic, and at times moving, history of waishengren’s multiple traumas and their memory- and history-making. In the epilogue he confides that he began his research “being rather unsympathetic and sceptical of waishengren’s trauma.” Yang himself was born to Hakka and Hoklo parents; one of his grandparents had been imprisoned by the Nationalist regime for having served in the Japanese army, and a grand-uncle had been executed by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops during the 228 Incident. “[T]he traumatic experiences I am writing about are not my grandparents’ or parents’ experiences; rather they belong to people who had wronged and injured my family,” Yang notes, as if he too was surprised.

“How can we bring people with dissimilar pasts and incompatible historical memories together?” he asks. The Great Exodus from China is a plea for a “mending [of] fences between mnemonic communities wrapped in the aggrieved, self-righteous, or sublime ambience of their own historical wounds,” as well as an exemplary attempt at understanding. Mutual recognition of the strictures of identity and memory-making would go a long way towards reconciling communities at loggerheads with each other. Such recognition would entail an empathetic listening to others’ grievances and histories, but also a self-critical awareness of how one’s own narratives are used to justify injustices, lay claim to illegitimate possessions, and denigrate others.

In “a land of fantasy,” Yang writes, such a mutual listening would also be possible between those living in the People’s Republic of China and those in Taiwan. A mutual listening could help deconstruct the memories undergirding territorial claims and identities. It might acknowledge that the Chinese Communist Party’s One China Policy, according to which Taiwan is a breakaway province that needs to be reincorporated into China, is itself the outcome of China’s “powerful victim consciousness”: the existence of an independent Taiwan is a permanent reminder of the “century of humiliation” in which China was invaded and divided by foreign powers.

Back in the world we inhabit, US admiral Philip Davidson told the Senate armed services committee in March that China was poised to invade Taiwan as soon as six years from now. A couple of weeks later, John Aquilino, the US admiral who was recently appointed to lead the US Indo-Pacific Command, refused to be drawn on that time frame, but he was no less alarmist: “My opinion is this problem is much closer to us than most think.” Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton even suggested that China might act immediately after the Beijing Winter Olympic Games in February next year, in the same way that Russia invaded the Crimea four days after the conclusion of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

The United States and their allies have their own geopolitical rationales, of course, for deterring China from swallowing Taiwan (as they had their own reasons for recognising the Communist government as the only legitimate representative of the Chinese people and agreeing to Taiwan’s expulsion from the United Nations in 1971). In the world we inhabit, the fact that Taiwan is a vibrant democracy counts for little. The attempts of Taiwanese — waishengren, benshengren and yuanzhumin — to work through their messy histories of invasion, occupation, colonisation, refuge and intermarriage count for even less. •

The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan
By Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang | Cambridge University Press | £75.00 | 330 pages

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The video depicting Jana’s short speech went viral, and her reference to Scholl was widely reported — and mostly condemned. The German foreign minister Heiko Maas was among those who weighed in, accusing the young protester of playing down the Holocaust and “mocking the courage” it took for Scholl to oppose the Nazi regime. Even the state parliament of Lower Saxony was prompted to debate Jana’s choice of words.

Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans were caught on 18 February 1943 at the University of Munich distributing leaflets calling on fellow students to rise up against the Nazis. The pamphlet was the sixth written by Hans Scholl and his friends, the members of group called the Weiße Rose (White Rose), who had been circulating their leaflets — mainly anonymously to randomly selected addresses — since June 1942. The Scholls and their friend Christoph Probst were tried for high treason on 21 February, convicted and beheaded the same day. Three other members of the group were sentenced to death two months later.

For postwar Germany, the Scholl siblings, perhaps more than anybody else, represent the “good Germans” who stood up against the Nazis. Around 600 streets and 200 schools have been named after them. Their lives are depicted in an opera and in numerous books, plays and feature films, including Michael Verhoeven’s hugely popular film The White Rose (1982), Percy Adlon’s Five Last Days (1982) and the Oscar-nominated Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005).

The looming anniversary of Sophie Scholl’s birth on 9 May 1921 has prompted the release of four new biographies. Already, the weeklies Spiegel and Zeit and many daily newspapers have published lengthy articles re-evaluating her life and afterlife. German Post is issuing an 80 cent stamp — the fourth German stamp to commemorate her, after releases in 1961 in East Germany, 1964 in West Germany and 1991. The hashtag @ichbinsophiescholl enables Instagram users to follow the last ten months of her life. And 9 May itself will feature commemorative ceremonies, a church service (broadcast live on radio) and online theatre performances and readings.

The further the present is removed from Scholl’s past, in fact, the more her fame has grown. In 2003, her bust was included in the Walhalla, a hall of fame created by order of the nineteenth-century Bavarian king Ludwig I. She has arguably become the most famous woman in German history.

Jana from Kassel was not the first to invoke Sophie Scholl during the protests against the pandemic restrictions; her attempt to liken herself to Scholl was merely the first to become front-page news. In September last year, the prominent Covid-19 denier Alexandra Motschmann restaged the scene that led to Sophie and Hans Scholl’s arrest in 1943, throwing leaflets from the top floor of the University of Munich’s main building. (Thanks to cinematic representations of the Scholls, the image is easily recognisable among Germans.) Elsewhere, people protesting against the government’s policies carried white roses or placards with photos of Sophie Scholl or quotes attributed to her. Three weeks before Jana’s speech went viral, Covid-19 protesters in Munich organised a commemorative ceremony at the cemetery where the Scholl siblings are buried.

The Covid-19 protests have attracted an odd mix of people: from esotericists and anti-vaxxers to followers of the populist right-wing Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD) and others on the far right. The latter have been invoking Sophie Scholl for some time: marking her ninety-fifth birthday, for example, leading AfD politician Beatrix von Storch quoted her in a tweet: “Many are thinking what we said and wrote. But they don’t dare to articulate it.” In 2017, a few months before the national elections saw the AfD win more than 12 per cent of the vote and enter federal parliament for the first time, the party’s South Nuremberg branch posted an image of Sophie Scholl on its Facebook page with a quote taken from the first leaflet of the White Rose: “Nothing is as unbecoming for a civilised nation as to let itself be ‘governed’ willingly by a ruling clique that acts irresponsibly and is driven by dark instincts.” This was accompanied by the line “Sophie Scholl would have voted AfD.”

At the other end of the political spectrum, too, Scholl has her admirers. When asked recently to name her heroes, Greens leader Annalena Baerbock, potentially Angela Merkel’s successor after the national elections in September, listed Scholl first. Carola Rackete, the Seawatch captain who rose to fame in 2019 when she defied Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini’s order not to enter Italian territorial waters with rescued refugees, tweeted in February: “If #SophieScholl was alive today I am pretty sure she would be part of local #Antifa organising.”

Sophie Scholl is not the only prominent member of the German resistance whose legacy has been appropriated by right-wing populists. She is not even their favourite. The figure who most interests the AfD is Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, born in 1907 into a noble family that traces its roots to the thirteenth century.

Stauffenberg had embarked on a career in the military as an eighteen-year-old. On 20 July 1944, by then a colonel in the German army, he tried to assassinate Hitler at Wolfsschanze, his military headquarters in East Prussia, by placing a bomb in a room where he was meeting with his generals. In the ensuing coup d’état coordinated by Stauffenberg, units of the German army would then have taken control of government facilities. Hitler survived, the coup failed and Stauffenberg and four other conspirators were executed on the same day. Others of the plotters were tried by Roland Freisler’s Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court), which had also convicted the Scholls; in all, about 200 of the conspirators were executed or committed suicide.

The anniversary of the attempted assassination is commemorated every year in Germany, and often the president or the chancellor gives a speech to mark the occasion. A memorial museum was established in 1968 at the site where Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators were executed by firing squad. The “men of 20 July” have featured in history textbooks no less prominently than Sophie and Hans Scholl have done. Stauffenberg, in particular, has been the subject of numerous books, documentaries and feature films, including Bryan Singer’s 2008 Valkyrie, which starred Tom Cruise as Stauffenberg.

In February this year, the AfD tabled a motion in federal parliament proposing that a memorial museum be built at the former Rangsdorf airport (about twenty-five kilometres south of Berlin) to commemorate Stauffenberg, who departed from that airport on his assassination mission. The move is designed to highlight the party’s opposition to the country’s official memories; the motion condemns a “memorial politics” that is “increasingly determined by doctrinaire positions and interests and often pursues the cultivation of a feeling of guilt.” The AfD has long claimed that all past events are now viewed from the perspective of German guilt and demands that Germans ought to focus instead on positive achievements, on heroes rather than on villains. Stauffenberg would be one such hero.

One of Stauffenberg’s admirers is Alexander Gauland, the co-leader of the AfD’s parliamentary party in the Bundestag. A lawyer by training, he fancies himself as a historian and has written books about Germany’s recent and distant pasts, including a history of Germany since the early Middle Ages. For Gauland, Stauffenberg is a reminder of German might and glory: with his attempt to kill Hitler and end the war, “one last time, the magic of the [House of] Hohenstaufen [lit] up German history.” In Gauland’s reading of Germany’s past, the age of the Hohenstaufens — emperors including the twelfth-century Frederick Barbarossa and his grandson Frederick II — was the high point of German history, when the German empire’s reach was unrivalled.

Brave, principled, young and good-looking: Tom Cruise as Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg in Bryan Singer’s 2008 film, Valkyrie. Allstar Picture Library/Alamy

At the same time, Stauffenberg was a “true conservative,” according to Gauland, and could be linked to what was termed after the war the Conservative Revolution, a group of writers and thinkers who initially sympathised with the Nazis but later distanced themselves from them. Both Gauland and Björn Höcke, who for some time have been the two most influential figures within the AfD, have drawn on representatives of the Conservative Revolution when trying to define their intellectual home.

The commitment to commemorate Stauffenberg also allows the AfD to draw a line between themselves and the “old” far right and neo-Nazis who sing the praises of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen. This has become a litmus test to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable radicalism within the AfD. Asked in a 2019 interview whether there were any red lines that an AfD member must not cross, Gauland responded: “There’s a limit to freedom of speech in the party. You can’t say that Stauffenberg was a criminal and traitor.” A former state leader of the AfD’s youth wing, who had indeed called Stauffenberg a traitor, was swiftly expelled from the party.

Finally, and here the AfD’s appropriation of Stauffenberg and the Covid-19 deniers’ instrumentalisation of Sophie Scholl converge, Stauffenberg is an attractive historical figure because he is defined by his resistance. Höcke and the more radical elements within the AfD believe that resistance (against a hegemonic “system”) is their right and duty. So do those attending the weekly Pegida demonstrations in Dresden who carry a flag once designed for a post-fascist Germany by Josef Wirmer, a lawyer involved in the 20 July plot and executed in September 1944.

The anniversary of Stauffenberg’s failed assassination attempt has been commemorated since 1946. But unlike Sophie Scholl, Stauffenberg is an often controversial figure who has not always been given full credit for his attempt to end the war. That scepticism was already evident in the Western Allies’ unenthusiastic response to the coup attempt. In early August 1944, Winston Churchill characterised the plot as a manifestation of an “internal disease.” He told the House of Commons, “The highest personalities in the German Reich are murdering one another, or trying to, while the avenging Armies of the Allies close upon the doomed and ever-narrowing circle of their power.”

In early postwar West Germany, Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators were often considered traitors. In communist East Germany, their resistance was overshadowed by that of members of the Communist Party. From the 1980s, the annual 20 July commemorations in West Germany have similarly stressed that it would be wrong to privilege the resistance within the German military, because there were many others who opposed the Nazis and paid with their lives for their acts of courage.

It probably took Tom Cruise in the role of Stauffenberg to win over non-German publics to the cause of the conspirators of 20 July 1944. By contrast, the Allies readily applauded the Scholls and their acts of resistance already during the war. A few weeks after their deaths, the New York Times reported their trial and execution on its front page. In June 1943, the Red Army distributed a leaflet behind the German lines that described Probst and the Scholls as “noble and courageous representatives of German youth.” The authors of the leaflet made no attempt to turn the Scholls into proletarian internationalists; in fact, Hans Scholl was quoted as having said, “I am not a communist. I am a German.”

In June 1943, Nobel Prize–winning German writer Thomas Mann honoured the Scholls in one of his monthly Deutsche Hörer! radio addresses, which the BBC broadcast via long-wave transmission to Germany: “Brave, marvellous people! You shall not have died in vain. In Germany, the Nazis have built monuments for dirty rascals and common killers. The true German revolution will tear them down and in their stead immortalise your names. When Germany and Europe were still covered in darkness, you knew and announced: ‘A new belief in freedom and honour is dawning.’” A month later, the Royal Air Force dropped a propaganda leaflet with the text of the sixth pamphlet, titled “Manifesto of the Munich students,” over Germany.

Thomas Mann’s prediction turned out to be accurate. The names of the Munich students were immortalised, although some names more than others. That process began immediately after the end of the war, when the German writer Ricarda Huch collected material about the students and publicised their story. Huch’s work was continued by Hans and Sophie’s elder sister Inge, who published a book about the White Rose in 1952. For decades, her interpretation of the lives of her siblings and their friends dominated the public reception of the White Rose, at least in West Germany. Her portrait of Hans and Sophie showed two people whose destiny it was to sacrifice their lives in the fight against Hitler. But their deeds were also celebrated in East Germany, as if continuing the approach taken by the authors of the Red Army leaflet dropped behind German lines in 1943.

Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg met some of the prerequisites for a hero. He was brave, principled, young and good-looking. The fact that he was unsuccessful counts for little: as is expected of heroes who fail in their quest, he sacrificed his life. But other attributes make him less suitable for the role. In communist East Germany, his being a member of the aristocracy and a high-ranking officer in the army, and holding conservative political views counted against him. In West Germany, many initially objected that Stauffenberg had not only violated his oath as a soldier but also played into the hands of Germany’s enemies at a time of war. As time went by, his status as a high-ranking professional soldier became a further liability after it became widely known that the German army had been implicated in the Holocaust.

Critical questions have been asked about the timing of the coup. Why did he and his fellow conspirators wait for so long before acting? Hadn’t they long known about Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor and other death camps and the mass killings of Jews in places such as Babi Yar? Hadn’t they seen first-hand how the German army mistreated the civilian populations of Poland and the Soviet Union? Had it not dawned on them much earlier that something was fundamentally wrong with the Nazis’ racialist ideology? Had they perhaps been hoping for a German victory, and acted only once it had become clear that the war was lost?

At least since the 1980s, the “men of 20 July” have been viewed critically also because most of them did not envisage a democracy replacing the dictatorship. Some of them had only contempt for the Weimar Republic; some were hoping for a return of the monarchy. They fought the good fight mainly because of who their enemy was, and not because of what they were fighting for.

Some also held against Stauffenberg the fact that he was afraid to sacrifice his own life — that he left the room after placing the briefcase containing the bomb under a table and immediately returned to Berlin, rather than making sure that the dictator had been killed or, even better, killing him himself. Some even considered Stauffenberg incompetent and thought he had botched the opportunity to assassinate Hitler.

But although Stauffenberg was not without his flaws, the story of 20 July has centred more on him than on the others involved in the plot, who included Social Democrats and other civilians who wanted democracy to be restored. This focus makes sense because Stauffenberg’s role was crucial. Not only was he the one who planted the bomb; more than anybody else he was responsible for the network of allies and sympathisers within the military, without whom the coup would never have succeeded even if Hitler had been killed. It fell on him to coordinate the plot — which is why it would have made little sense for him not to return to Berlin once the bomb had been put in position. Nevertheless, the spotlight on Stauffenberg has meant that the contributions of others may have received less attention than they deserved.

While it’s obvious why the story of the attempted coup has paid particular attention to Stauffenberg, it is less evident why Sophie Scholl has come to personify the resistance of a group of Munich students. The first four leaflets of the White Rose were produced in June and July 1942. They were jointly written by Hans Scholl and his close friend Alexander Schmorell, the son of a Russian mother and a German father. Both had served at the Russian front and been deeply affected by that experience. When they began writing the leaflets, they were both studying medicine at the University of Munich.

In July, Schmorell and Scholl were once more sent to the Eastern front. They returned to Munich at the end of October, committed to continuing their resistance against the Nazi regime. It was only then that they began involving others: Christoph Probst and Willi Graf, two other medical students; the musicologist Kurt Huber, who taught at their university; and Hans’s sister Sophie. The fifth and sixth leaflets, produced in January and February 1943, were written by Hans Scholl, Schmorell and Huber.

Curiously, Schmorell’s and Huber’s contributions are barely remembered today, and Hans Scholl appears to have been dwarfed by his younger sister, who is now sometimes imagined to have been the group’s driving force. When German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the failed coup of 20 July 1944, which is now used to commemorate the German anti-Nazi resistance more generally, he referred to “the group around Sophie Scholl.”

The fact that Schmorell’s contribution has been neglected could probably be attributed to Inge Scholl’s role as authoritative interpreter of the White Rose. She simply, and understandably, privileged the contributions of her siblings. The reasons why Sophie outshines her brother are more complex. I believe there are two main factors, and they are related.

The first is that she was the youngest and the only woman in the group. In postwar Germany, there has been little enthusiasm for the traditional male hero, the slayer of dragons and saviour of damsels in distress. That’s partly because Nazi propaganda created an abundance of them, and partly because, in our post-heroic times, female heroes who don’t seem to care about their status are considered less problematic than their testosterone-driven male counterparts. Think of Greta Thunberg or Malala Yousafzai or Emma Gonzalez or Loujain al-Hathloul, for example — or, in Germany, Carola Rackete. Male heroism has largely been reserved for sportsmen: for Helmut Rahn, who kicked the winning goal in the 1954 World Cup final against Hungary, or Franz Beckenbauer, who in the Game of the Century against Italy during the 1970 World Cup kept playing with an injured shoulder.

Second, Sophie Scholl also fitted the role of an innocent victim much better than her brother. When remembering Nazi Germany, Germans have preferred to focus on the fates of victims, perhaps hoping that they too could be mistaken for victims rather than perpetrators or their descendants. Nobody’s fate has prompted a greater outpouring of emotion than that of Anne Frank, but she is remembered as a Jewish rather than as a German girl. (It is often forgotten that she was born in Frankfurt.) Sophie Scholl was both an Anne Frank–like victim and a good German whose sacrifice could provide some redemption for a nation with a bad conscience. She could be a hero, but one with the attributes of a saint.

Hans and Sophie Scholl were prepared to pay the ultimate price for their acts of resistance. They did so believing that their actions would have a major impact. They also thought that the fall of Stalingrad, which happened a couple of weeks before their arrest and informed the text of the sixth leaflet, meant that the war was almost over. In the long term they were proven right, but not in the short term. Their lack of judgement betrayed their naivety.

If Stauffenberg’s bomb had killed Hitler, the coup might have succeeded and the war ended nine months earlier. Millions of lives might have been saved. But even then, the intervention of the “men of 20 July” would have come too late for many, including Jews, Sinti and Roma, and all those others murdered in the countries occupied by Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, the assassination attempt of 20 July 1944 was arguably more significant than the distribution of a few hundred leaflets seventeen months earlier, if only because of what could have been, rather than because of what eventuated.

In terms of what could have been, however, the most significant act of German resistance took place well before Stauffenberg and the Scholls recognised the full horrors of the Nazi regime. On 8 November 1939, thirty-six-year-old Georg Elser tried to assassinate Hitler and his key lieutenants by detonating a bomb in the Bürgerbräukeller, a large beer hall in Munich that had been the site of the Hitler putsch sixteen years earlier, and the venue for annual commemorations attended by the Nazi party’s leadership.

Elser was a carpenter who sympathised with the Communist Party without following its orders, or anybody else’s, for that matter. He acted alone, although others may have suspected that he was up to something but kept quiet. Over a period of several weeks, he hid in the Bürgerbräukeller after closing time to install a bomb and a timer. The bomb went off exactly as planned, killing several people. But Hitler and other leading Nazis survived because fog had prompted the cancellation of Hitler’s return flight to Berlin. He spoke half an hour earlier than scheduled to be able to leave the event, together with his entourage, to catch a train back to the German capital. Most other attendees then also left.

Elser was twice unlucky: inclement weather saved Hitler, and then he himself was apprehended as he was trying to cross the border into Switzerland. When interrogated by the Gestapo, he confessed. He was never tried but kept imprisoned first in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and then in Dachau, where the SS murdered him in April 1945.

Neglected hero: Georg Elser (right) and his brother Leonhard around 1935. Private collection

Elser has not received the kind of attention enjoyed by the Scholls or Stauffenberg. The Allies suspected that he was used by the Nazis in the same way the Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe was set up to be blamed for the German parliament building blaze in early 1933, which provided a pretext for the Nazis to get rid of their political opponents. The Nazis claimed that Elser had acted on behalf of British intelligence and Otto Strasser, a leading proponent of the Nazi party’s left faction who had quit the party in 1930 and by 1939 was living in exile in Switzerland.

After the war, German and British historians regurgitated the rumours about a Nazi conspiracy or a British secret service plot. In the absence of reliable historical sources they could do so unchallenged. Unlike Sophie Scholl, for example, Elser had not left any texts behind that could serve as evidence of his beliefs. It wasn’t until the transcripts of his interrogations by the Gestapo surfaced in 1964 that these rumours were proven baseless. The first biography of Elser appeared only in 1989.

Now Elser too is usually mentioned in the context of the German resistance against Hitler. He too has had streets named after him, at least one school carries his name, and in 2003 German Post issued a stamp to honour him. For some of his admirers, Elser, much more so than Sophie and Hans Scholl or Claus Graf Stauffenberg, is a true hero.

A few years ago, left-wing activist and historian Karl Heinz Roth concluded an essay about Elser by welcoming the fact that he had been rehabilitated and was now being recognised for his act of resistance. “Now we should take the next step and gently remove him from the pedestal where we put him,” Roth added. “For we should not let this kind of distance — the distance between us and the unreachable icon — become too wide.” Roth suggests that doing justice to Elser would involve situating him in the appropriate social, political and cultural contexts — which also means understanding his life against the background of the forces that shaped him.

Doing justice to Elser by taking his life history seriously is comparatively difficult because the most significant historical source was produced by the Gestapo agents who interrogated him. But the task is also comparatively easy because his life has not yet been completely overshadowed by the iconic figure on the pedestal.

That’s different in the case of Sophie Scholl. Apart from the transcripts of her interrogation, an abundance of written sources about her life — her letters, her diary and the testimonies of many of her contemporaries — allow the recently published biographies to highlight the complexity of her personality and her politics. They have shown that there was much more to her life than its last five days — and far more than what had been made public by her sister Inge. They have depicted her as a friend, daughter, sister and lover. They have shown her, for example, to have been an enthusiastic Hitler Youth leader, to have been deeply religious, to have a conflicted attitude towards her own sexuality, and to have been in love with another woman. They have demonstrated that her courage bordered on recklessness and that she was uncompromising in her beliefs. They also show that she was not a saintly victim.

Many of the magazine and newspaper articles marking her hundredth birthday promise to uncover the real Sophie Scholl, to show what is behind the image on the postage stamp. But the out-of-reach iconic image casts a shadow on her life that makes it difficult to see it for what it’s worth. To complicate matters further, there are two contradictory iconic images of Scholl. They are iconic not only in the metaphorical sense but also in the literal sense, because they are based on two sets of photographs.

In the first, she is depicted as a somewhat androgynous teenager — the hair cut short on one side, a quiff covering much of her face, wearing an expression suggesting an energetic, curious, stubborn, intense but also carefree person. In the second set of photos, which includes the famous shot taken by Jürgen Wittenstein in July 1942 that illustrates this essay, she has close to shoulder-length hair and appears as a committed young woman who wants to look proper and serious. While the latter’s dress, haircut and demeanour reveal her to be a historical figure, the former makes her look like a teenager of today: a Fridays for Future or Antifa activist, and queer feminist.

Over the years, the image of the young woman has been supplanted by that of the rebellious teenager, although the latter was not even contemplating any acts of resistance. Inge Scholl, who had first introduced the idea that her sister’s entire life foreshadowed its tragic ending, promoted the image of the earnest and morally rigorous young woman, which was also used for the stamps issued in the 1960s and 1990s, for her likeness at Madame Tussaud’s and for her bust in the Walhalla hall of fame.

Lena Scholze, who played Scholl in both Verhoeven’s The White Rose and Adlon’s Five Last Days, personified that historical figure. The 2021 stamp and the covers of all recent biographies depict her as a strong-willed and open-minded teenager who looks like she could be our contemporary, rather than the enthusiastic teenage member of the girls’ wing of the Hitler Youth.

Given the shadows cast by this heroic icon, attempts to convince women like Jana from Kassel that they have little in common with the “real” Sophie Scholl may be in vain. And AfD politicians who mine the leaflets distributed by her and her friends for tweetable phrases that purport to endorse right-wing populist politics are unlikely to be swayed by reading the latest Scholl biography.

But the issue is not that Jana and other confused pandemic protesters don’t know enough about Sophie Scholl. Rather, if they mistake the Merkel government for the murderous Nazi regime, they don’t seem to have a clue about the forces responsible for beheading Scholl — forces, incidentally, that were toppled by the armies of the Soviet Union and the Western Allies, and hardly troubled by a largely impotent German resistance. •

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Kaufmann had turned ninety-seven in January. Virtually anybody who reaches such a ripe old age has led a life worth making into a film — or writing about, for that matter. Kaufmann’s story, that of a refugee from Nazi Germany who became an Australian writer and then moved to the old East Germany, was particularly rich.

Any biography is shaped by the letters, diaries and other sources available to the biographer. In Kaufmann’s case, much could be made of the thick files created by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in the 1950s, and those of ASIO’s East German equivalent, the Stasi, between the 1950s and the 1980s.

Even more might be made of Kaufmann’s own writings, including at least a dozen books that could be classified as either autobiographical fiction or memoir. But the life depicted by oneself is not necessarily any more accurate than the life that can be winnowed from the observations of outsiders, who in Kaufmann’s case included spies and informers. And in a life spanning nearly ten decades, many aspects won’t have been recorded by other people or deemed worth remembering by the subject himself.

The omissions start with Kaufmann’s early life. He was born Jizchak Schmeidler (or perhaps Sally Jizchak Schmeidler) on 19 January 1924 in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel, a neighbourhood dominated by Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe. His mother Rachela, originally from Poland, was among them. Aged seventeen when Jizchak was born, she was working as a shop assistant at a department store. That’s all we know about her; when Jizchak was three, she gave him up for adoption. We can only guess why.

His new parents were a couple from far-flung Duisburg, a city in the Ruhr Valley in the west of Germany. His adoptive father, Sally Kaufmann, had fought and been decorated in the first world war and afterwards practised as a lawyer and notary. Sally’s wife Johanna had been to art school, but her dreams of becoming an artist remained unfulfilled. Jizchak had no siblings, but later in life speculated that he may have been adopted not because his adoptive parents were childless but because Sally was also his biological father. But we simply don’t know why and how young Jizchak and his mother entered the Kaufmanns’ lives.

Jizchak, who became Walter upon his adoption, grew up in a well-to-do bourgeois household. Like his biological mother, his adoptive parents were Jewish. The family observed the high holidays, young Walter was required to take Hebrew classes, and Sally for many years chaired Duisburg’s Jewish congregation. Like many German Jews, though, the Kaufmanns were not overly religious.

The anti-Semitism of the Nazis, which would have such an impact on Walter’s life, didn’t come out of nowhere. A pogrom had occurred in the Scheunenviertel only a couple of months before Walter was born there, with Jews assaulted (and one of them killed) and their businesses looted. But the systematic discrimination against Jews, and their exclusion from public life in Nazi Germany would have come as a shock to the Kaufmanns. In early November 1938, during the so-called Reichskristallnacht pogroms, Sally Kaufmann was taken for a time to the Dachau concentration camp and the Kaufmanns’ house was ransacked while Walter and his mother hid in the basement.

The violence convinced the Kaufmanns that Walter, at least, needed to be sent to safety, and in January 1939, on his fifteenth birthday, he left on a Kindertransport to England. There he attended the New Herrlingen boarding school in Faversham, Kent. In June 1940, when the Battle of Dunkirk forced the British government to prepare the country for a German invasion, sixteen-year-old Walter was among the many recently arrived “enemy aliens” to be arrested. Then, together with more than 2000 other German and Austrian refugees, he was sent to Australia on the infamous Dunera and interned in a camp in the western NSW town of Hay. Under “reason for internment,” the dossier created by the Australian military authorities stated incongruously: “Enemy Alien — Refugee from Nazi oppression.”

Released from Hay in March 1942, Kaufmann joined the Australian army — or rather, the 8th Employment Company, which provided an opportunity for “refugee aliens” to contribute to the war effort. Still with the army, he applied for an Australian entry permit for his parents; by then, however, they had been deported, first to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and then to Auschwitz, where they were killed. They shared the fate of the hundreds of Jews from Duisburg who became the victims of Nazi persecution. (The letters Johanna and Sally Kaufmann wrote to their son in England and in Australia are about to be published as a book.)

In 1944 Kaufmann married Tasmanian-born Barbara Dyer, who was eleven years older than him. They had met while she was working as an officer for army intelligence — a job she lost because of the relationship. (Kaufmann may have been in the army, but he was still an alien from Germany.) He was naturalised after the war was over, in 1946.

Kaufmann had begun to write fiction, in English, while he was still with the army, and by the end of the war was already a published author. In 1944, his short story “The Simple Things” won him the first of many literary prizes. He joined the Melbourne Realist Writers Group, a group of left-wing authors, and became friends with Frank Hardy and David Martin, the latter himself a Jewish refugee who had fled Germany in 1934. Martin in particular encouraged him to write about his experiences in Nazi Germany.

Kaufmann’s first novel, Voices in the Storm, an account of anti-fascist resistance and the coming of age of a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany, was published in 1953 by the Australasian Book Company, which had been set up by a group of like-minded authors. He later recalled that he himself sold 2000 copies of the book by hawking it at wharfs, mines and other workplaces during fifteen-minute stop-work meetings.

While he continued to write, Kaufmann worked in a wide range of jobs, including as a wedding photographer and a seaman. In 1955, the Seamen’s Union sent him to the Fifth World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw. There he met an East German publisher who convinced him that his writings, including Voices in the Storm, would find a receptive audience in communist East Germany — the German Democratic Republic, to give it its formal name, or GDR. Travelling from Warsaw to Berlin, he not only met fellow writers at a GDR writers’ congress, but also searched unsuccessfully for his biological mother.

Walter Kaufmann (third from left, standing) with other members of the Australian delegation to the World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw in 1955. National Archives of Australia

Kaufmann found himself attracted to the prospect of becoming a writer in a country where people tried to live according to the philosophy he and his Australian comrades were preaching. For the first time since 1939, a return to Germany presented itself as an option. But first he went back to Australia as an attaché with the German team that attended the Melbourne Olympic Games.

After a lecture tour in which Kaufmann talked about his European travels (which had also led him to the Soviet Union), he and his wife moved to East Germany — or, in his words, he “returned home to foreign parts.” Unlike another Australian who migrated to East Germany at around the same time, the anthropologist Fred Rose, Kaufmann didn’t leave Australia because he felt victimised for his political convictions. (All he shared with Rose was a tendency to philander.)

The secretary of the GDR writers’ association had told him that he could be more useful in the West than in the East, but a short visit to his home town on his first trip back to Europe had convinced him that he wasn’t welcome there. His parents’ house was now occupied by strangers who did not even ask him inside.

By the time he arrived in East Berlin, however, the deal that had initially attracted him to East Germany had fallen through. The East German authorities deemed parts of the plot of Voices in the Storm to be against the party line and demanded that he rewrite the book. Kaufmann refused. But he used some of the autobiographical material that informed his first novel to write another book, which was allowed to be published. And despite this early setback, he could be a professional writer in the GDR, something that would not have been possible in Australia.

Back in Australia, Kaufmann had been a member of the Communist Party, but he later recalled neither wanting nor being able to join East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party. One prerequisite would have been taking out GDR citizenship, which he declined to do. Retaining his Australian citizenship meant he could travel the world.

And he did: to Western Europe, Asia and the Americas, including several times to the United States. As a roving reporter, he covered the Cuban revolution and the court case against the American civil rights activist Angela Davis in the early 1970s. His journeying provided him with the material that helped him become arguably East Germany’s most widely read travel writer.

Much of his writing about foreign places is reportage in the tradition of the “racing reporter” of the 1920s and 1930s, Egon Erwin Kisch. Although probably not as accomplished a writer as Kisch, Kaufmann too married social critique with travelogues. And his occupation as a travel writer and foreign correspondent at large was also an opportunity to escape, albeit only temporarily, the confines of East Germany’s insularity. He let his readers share in these escapes, and they loved him for it.

He also wrote short stories, novels and books for children. By the time the Berlin Wall came down, Kaufmann had published twenty-six books in German and was part of the country’s literary establishment. His standing is evident in the fact that in 1984 he was able to publish Flucht, a book about a medical doctor who left the GDR for West Germany.

When all his publishers went out of business after reunification, the sixty-six-year-old Kaufmann began a new career, as a German, rather than an East German, writer. He must also have realised that he had to move on from the travel writing that had made him a household name; with air travel now possible and affordable, his readers no longer needed the window on the world that he had been able to provide.

Much of Kaufmann’s post-1990 writing is autobiographical. There was a market for that too, but he didn’t enjoy the same success that had marked his career in the GDR. And although he began to publish books with West German publishers, he also contributed regularly to two daily newspapers that have acted as reminders of a bygone era, and of a state that ceased to exist in 1990: the Neues Deutschland, formerly the paper of the Socialist Unity Party, and the Junge Welt, which used to be published by the Free German Youth, the GDR’s official youth organisation. Kaufmann’s last Junge Welt article, a review of a book of poems by another nonagenarian, the East German writer Gisela Steineckert, appeared about a month before his death.

Kaufmann had felt less at home in the GDR than in Australia. But, he told an interviewer, the GDR “became my home when it had gone.” He reasoned that this was because he felt he had been taken care of there, both as a person and as a writer.

A Jew in Nazi Germany, an enemy alien in wartime England, a communist in Robert Menzies’s Australia, an Australian in East Germany, and somebody with a GDR identity in the reunified Germany: throughout his life, Kaufmann didn’t quite belong. Sometimes that was because he had been excluded; at other times, it was because he cultivated the sense of detachment that also characterises some of his writing.

For most of his life in East Germany, he wasn’t a foreigner just because of his Australian passport. Initially, he even spoke German with an Australian accent. And he continued to write in English. All the books he published in his first twenty years in Germany had to be translated. The way he tells the story, he eventually taught himself to write in German after a Melbourne publisher reissued Voices in the Storm in the early 1970s. When he took the opportunity to submit the book again for publication in the GDR, the text was approved without changes — with the proviso that it be translated by the author himself. Stimmen im Sturm, published in 1977, thus became the first book he wrote in German. He recalled that it was hard work to turn his English prose into German, but by the end of it, he had graduated from a German writer of English to a writer of German.

His German writing retained an Australian touch, though. He privileged unadorned and succinct prose, and an uncomplicated syntax. “My German has become like English,” he told an interviewer.

Three of his books were published in English by an East German publisher, but Voices in the Storm remained the only one of his books to be published in Australia. He may have identified as an Australian writer for much of his life, but the Australian reading public didn’t warm to him, despite his writing frequently about Australian topics, such as the Maralinga atomic tests, and despite much of his autobiographical fiction being set in Australia. I hope that Australians will one day discover one of their own — although in order to do so, they might have to rely on translations, as he wrote some of his more interesting autobiographical prose in German.

Biographies are not only shaped by the material on which a biographer can draw; they are also informed by broader narratives. The website advertising the forthcoming film about Kaufmann, for example, says, “For us filmmakers, this is the main content of Walter Kaufmann’s life: the catastrophic consequences of National Socialism; the legendary trial of Angela Davis; the revolution in Cuba; the discussion about Stalinism; the impact of the atomic bomb in Japan; the never-ending history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; the collapse of the GDR; the return of nationalist, anti-Semitic tendencies in Germany.” It’s not hard to anticipate the film’s drift.

Often biographies try to fit the life of an individual into a national story, or relate it to the life of a more famous person. That’s what happened to Kaufmann; in Germany he will also be remembered as the man who — albeit unwittingly and indirectly — ruined the reputation of East Germany’s most famous writer, and arguably its best, Christa Wolf.

Like Fred Rose, Kaufmann was a communist and therefore a person of interest to ASIO. Unlike Rose, Kaufmann did not become a spy himself when he moved to East Germany. On the contrary, the East German Stasi was as interested in Kaufmann as ASIO had been. Although he had chosen life in the communist East over life in the capitalist West, Kaufmann was not trusted. For good reason: while he remained faithful to socialism, including the perverted variety practised in the GDR, blind conformism was not his thing.

In the 1990s, Kaufmann’s Stasi file became the subject of a German literary controversy when it was revealed that Wolf had been among those reporting to the Stasi about Kaufmann (and, to a lesser extent, others). She was pilloried in much of the German media, including in a damning piece in the magazine Spiegel, even though Kaufmann, to whom she apologised, took her side. He did that not only because her transgressions were comparatively minor, but also because he was not somebody to hold grudges. When asked eight years ago to sum up his life, he said, “Life has been good to me. I’m not a victim. And I don’t feel like a victim.”

In Australia, Kaufmann may be remembered in the context of the uplifting and decidedly patriotic Dunera story, not least because he didn’t identify as a victim there either. Like many of those who later became known as the Dunera Boys, Kaufmann was appalled by the treatment meted out to the internees aboard the British ship but remembered fondly his first encounters with Australian soldiers, who escorted him and his fellow inmates to an internment camp in Hay. (He recalled his first impressions of Australia and Australians in a piece of autobiographical fiction published in Meanjin in 1954.)

When he interviewed Kaufmann on Late Night Live in 2014, Phillip Adams marvelled at the Dunera Boys as “the most extraordinary refugees we received” and described their contribution to Australia as “beyond parallel.” Kaufmann happily played along, referring to his stint in Hay as the “formative time of my life.” •

The post The life of an exile appeared first on Inside Story.

Prior to its encounter with North Macedonia on 31 March, Germany had won eighteen World Cup qualifiers in a row. Just days earlier, it had beaten Iceland at home and Romania, the most highly rated team in its group, in Bucharest. “The most important question is not who will win this game,” read one pre-match assessment, “but by how much the winner of the 2014 World Cup will prevail.” After all, Germany had triumphed in the World Cup four times and in the European championship thrice, whereas North Macedonia had never even qualified for either tournament.

The teams played in an empty stadium, but that could hardly count as an excuse for the German loss. At least the lack of a crowd saved the home team the humiliation of being booed by its fans while North Macedonia proceeded to its well-deserved win. Germany’s only goal came courtesy of a questionable penalty decision. German coach Joachim “Jogi” Löw’s team was outfoxed, outplayed and outclassed by a disciplined but by no means outstanding opponent.

This was not the first time Löw and his men have stumbled badly. In a first for Germany, they were eliminated in the first round of the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Then, in November 2020, they went down by six goals to Spain. As the calls for Löw to be sacked became louder, he announced in early March that he would retire right after Euro 2020, the European championship postponed until June this year by the pandemic.

Löw has been Germany’s head coach since July 2006. His contract was extended for another four years in 2018, well before Germany’s dismal performance in Russia, and it seemed at the time as if he was going to be around forever. The youngest player in the current German side, Jamal Musiala of Bayern Munich, wouldn’t be able to remember a time when Löw was not in charge of Germany’s national team.

Depending on whom you ask, managing the national side is either the most important job on offer in Germany, or a close second behind the task of running Germany’s government. Angela Merkel has been in office even longer than Löw, since November 2005. Her contract was last renewed in 2017. She too is on her way out, and the parallels don’t end there.

Lately, most Germans have been as dismayed by Merkel’s team as they have been by Löw’s. That’s mostly to do with Germany’s response to Covid-19.

Germany did well in the first wave of the pandemic during last year’s northern spring. The rate of infections and the number of fatalities were much lower than in most other European countries, let alone the United States and South America. But the authorities reacted too late and not decisively enough when the second wave began building in October, even though the expert calls for a hard lockdown were hard to ignore. After shops and schools eventually had to close, the country got through that wave as well, but the price — in terms of deaths from Covid-19 — was much higher than in spring.

Early this year, virologists predicted that Germany’s caseload would once more go up because of the mutations that had emerged in Britain, South Africa and Brazil. From mid February, case numbers began climbing as the prevalence of the so-called British variant, also known as B.1.1.7, grew. On Monday, the rate of new infections per 100,000 over seven days reached 136, the highest incidence in twelve weeks. It keeps rising. The virologists’ predictions were proving accurate, but the federal and state governments still couldn’t agree on measures to stop this third wave of the pandemic, or at least flatten the curve.

Not only did the incidence figures keep rising, so did the number of Covid-19 patients in intensive care wards: from about 2800 in mid March to more than 4600 on Monday. Soon, more Covid-19 patients are likely to be in intensive care than at the height of the second wave. Because most people aged seventy-five and over have been vaccinated, hospitals are increasingly treating young people. Their chance of survival is better than that of octogenarians, but many of them will suffer what is popularly called Long Covid and referred to by scientists as post-acute Covid-19.

Meanwhile, the number of people who have been fully immunised is still too small to make a real difference. As of 11 April, about 6 per cent of the population had received both doses of any of the three available vaccines, and only about 16 per cent have been given at least one.

Behind the sluggish immunisation campaign is a shortage of vaccines. That can’t be blamed on the German authorities, because the European Commission, rather than the Merkel government, was responsible for their procurement. It’s true that Merkel lobbied her European colleagues to agree to a concerted approach rather than let each EU country buy its own supplies, but that was the right call. If the poorer EU countries had missed out, the recriminations would have damaged the European Union beyond repair. Countries such as Bulgaria, Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary and Slovenia have already suffered disproportionate human losses because their hospitals are not as well equipped as those of Germany, Denmark, Austria or the Netherlands.

But the German government could be blamed for sowing confusion about the AstraZeneca vaccine. First it deemed the vaccine unsuitable for those aged sixty-five or more; now it considers the vaccine too dangerous for the under-sixties. The message that the benefits of this vaccine far outweigh its risks didn’t get through, and now a considerable number of those due to be immunised are frightened to receive one of only three vaccines available in Germany.

Strictly speaking, Merkel and her ministers aren’t responsible for the dilatory response to the spread of the virus either. It’s up to Germany’s local and state governments to impose curfews and shutdowns of schools, childcare centres, shops and restaurants. Throughout the pandemic, the federal government has tried to convince the states to agree to uniform measures. Merkel has met regularly with the sixteen state premiers, although such heads-of-government consultations are not a formal feature of German federalism.

Usually lasting many hours, the meetings have sought to bridge the divide between Merkel, the trained scientist who tends to argue for more measures to halt the spread of the virus, and some of the state premiers, who want fewer restrictions. While these meetings have usually concluded with an agreement, individual premiers have often been quick to distance themselves from decisions and deal with the pandemic as they see fit, oblivious to expert advice and seemingly unconcerned about the consequences.

The last such consultation began on the afternoon of 22 March and lasted until 2.30 the next morning. Its only significant result was the declaration of additional public holidays on the Thursday and Saturday before Easter, thereby creating a five-day “rest period” during which schools and businesses would be closed and the pandemic, it was hoped, slowed down. Only a day later, though, Merkel had to concede that the plan wasn’t feasible. She then apologised — uncharacteristically — for announcing and then cancelling the measure. But she had no plan B. Each state has continued to prescribe its own measures, and it’s become impossible to keep abreast of the myriad different rules and sanctions.

The patchwork approach is partly explained by electoral pressures. Armin Laschet, the Christian Democrat in charge of Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Markus Söder, the premier of Bavaria and head of the Christian Democrats’ Bavarian sister party, are both vying to lead the conservatives in September’s federal election campaign and then succeed Merkel as chancellor. They have used the pandemic to sharpen their public profiles: Laschet by arguing against lockdowns and other restrictions, Söder by endorsing Merkel’s hard line. With five state elections this year, other premiers have also sought to impress voters first and deal with the pandemic second.

States with comparatively low infection rates refuse to agree to measures designed to flatten the curve in high-incidence states. And then there are the usual differences of opinion between states led by Social Democrats and those led by Christian Democrats, and between East German and West German state governments. That some premiers seem to find it difficult to understand how the virus spreads hasn’t helped.

To say that Merkel isn’t to blame for any of this would not be entirely correct. For one, her decision to relinquish the leadership of her party a few months before the end of her last term in office has undermined the authority she needs to make the state premiers act in unison. And when it became clear that individual states weren’t doing enough to contain the disease, the federal government should have stepped in.

It will try to do so, belatedly, this week. Merkel cancelled the heads-of-government meeting that had been scheduled for Monday. Parliament will debate a bill that would give the federal government the power to impose lockdowns and curfews. But such an initiative should have come much earlier.

A fortnight ago, Merkel took the unusual step of participating in a live one-hour interview with Anne Will, whose eponymous program on Sunday evenings, immediately after the latest episode of the popular crime drama Tatort, is the most-watched talk show on German television. In the interview, she reprimanded the premiers (singling out two who belong to her own party) and threatened a federal move to take control of Germany’s response to the pandemic. At last, things seemed to be moving in the right direction. But then she waited for almost two weeks. Perhaps she was hoping that such a move would prove unnecessary, or perhaps she was just dithering.

And then there was the federal health authorities’ decision to remove Spain’s Balearic Islands from the list of risk areas just in time for the Easter holidays. Maybe they thought nobody would book a trip — and it’s true that the airlines were offering hardly any flights to Mallorca, the largest of the Balearic Islands, which is Germans’ favourite holiday destination (sometimes called Germany’s seventeenth state). But around 45,000 holiday-makers descended on Mallorca over Easter, proving that the laws of supply and demand also work during a pandemic. Because of the time lag between infections and symptoms, it remains to be seen what impact this mass gathering will have.

Meanwhile, the reputation of the ruling Christian Democrats has suffered a further blow after several of its members of parliament were accused of corruption. In some cases, the politicians concerned had received large amounts of money — €660,000 in one instance — for putting the suppliers of medical masks in touch with the federal health ministry when it was desperately seeking large quantities of masks last year.

Looming above all of this is the question of why on earth the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party have been unable to nominate a successor for Merkel. It’s been more than fourteen months since her designated successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, fell on her sword after she failed to prevent collusion between her party and the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD) in the East German state of Thuringia. Since then the speculation has been endless: first about who would succeed her, and then about whether her successor Armin Laschet would be the conservatives’ candidate for chancellor. The conflict between Laschet and the Bavarian premier Markus Söder entered an extra round on Monday, with both receiving a ringing endorsement by their respective parties.

Germans, regardless of their political persuasion, age or class, are exasperated. A majority is in favour of tougher restrictions to curb the spread of the virus. A vocal minority, represented in parliament by the AfD, refuses to believe that the virus is dangerous and wants no restrictions at all. I suspect the only reason why few outside the AfD are calling for Merkel’s resignation is that there is no one in her party who would be able to replace her.

On Saturday, the front page of Hamburg tabloid Morgenpost featured just one word in lieu of the usual article: Nichts* (nothing*). The asterisk explained: “This is what the chancellor and the state premiers have implemented to alleviate the state of emergency in the hospitals.”

The bungled response to Covid-19 didn’t come as a total surprise. Germans know that the country’s bureaucracy is slow to swing into action at the best of times. The fact that crucial technological developments seem to have bypassed the public service didn’t help. It’s no secret, for example, that federal, state and local governments have only slowly come to terms with the digital revolution. German health departments still report the number of infections by fax, rather than digitally. When schools were told that students needed to be taught remotely, some teachers took that to mean that they would simply post photocopied worksheets to their students once a week. And don’t even mention German Rail and the coverage of the mobile phone network.

But now, as Covid-19’s global reach prompts comparisons not just of infection numbers, vaccination rates and fatalities but also of government responses, German inefficiency is no longer a well-kept secret. Germans can’t keep complaining that their trains are always late but then find solace in the idea that others believe Germans are naturally more efficient. It’s the realisation that German stuff-ups are now regularly reported in the New York Times that has come as a shock.

Similarly, the millions of Germans who are convinced they would do a better job than Jogi Löw have long known about the weaknesses of Germany’s national side. Löw and his team just haven’t been that good since their triumph in Brazil seven years ago. But nobody else seemed to take much notice of the slide. That’s changed: now that Germany has succumbed to North Macedonia it is no longer possible to pretend that this was the same side that beat Brazil by six goals in the 2014 semifinal and went on to win the cup.

Germans feel that they not only need to get on top of the pandemic, they also need to restore their reputation as world champions of efficiency and innovation. They need not just to win their next qualifier — given that their opponent will be Liechtenstein, that’s perhaps not such a big challenge — but also to convince others that they are still one of the heavyweights of world football.

When it comes to football, there’s a short-term remedy. Germany just ought to field its best side — which means that Jogi Löw must admit it was a terrible mistake to tell Thomas Müller, the star performer of Champions League winner Bayern Munich, that his services were no longer required. Having Müller in the side might at least prevent the embarrassment of exiting Euro 2020 at the group stage.

Then there is the pressing question of who will be Germany’s new coach. Four of the eight clubs currently competing for this year’s title in the Champions League are coached by Germans, and their names naturally came up when Löw announced his resignation. But that’s not how the German Football Association works. It won’t appoint a Thomas Tuchel (the head coach of Chelsea) or Jürgen Klopp (who’s in charge of Liverpool); they are too independent or too flamboyant. (Not that either of them would want to give up their current gig in Britain.)

Löw’s job is more likely to go to an understudy, in the same way that Sepp Herberger’s assistant Helmut Schön became head coach in 1964, Jupp Derwall followed Schön in 1978, and Löw got the job when his immediate boss, Jürgen Klinsmann, resigned. Perhaps Germans should simply transfer their attachment from the men’s to the women’s side, which has won thirteen of its last fourteen games, including, most recently, a friendly against Australia.

Unlike Jogi Löw, Angela Merkel can’t draft somebody for her cabinet whom she had previously sent packing (although there would be no shortage of potential candidates). And, to stay with the analogy, while the Christian Democratic Union might be as conservative as the German Football Association and pick an uninspiring understudy as Merkel’s designated successor, it won’t be up to the party to appoint the next chancellor.

Germany could well do with a Jürgen Klopp of politics: somebody to motivate and inspire them as they face their next big task, curbing the emission of greenhouse gases. They also need somebody to remind them that their glasses are half full rather than half empty; after all, despite the chaos surrounding the government’s handling of the pandemic, so far proportionately fewer people have died of the virus than in eight of Germany’s nine neighbouring countries. (Only Denmark has done better.)

On 19 April, the Greens will announce who will run as their candidate for the chancellorship in September. As the Christian Democrats are only five percentage points ahead of the Greens in the latest polls, Merkel’s successor might be either of the two Green contenders, Annalena Baerbock or Robert Habeck. While neither has the charisma of a Jürgen Klopp, both would be keenly aware of the need for Germany to arrive at last in the twenty-first century. Both would lead a government intent on changing the country rather than administering the status quo. Both would know that the challenge of climate change will eventually dwarf that of Covid-19.

Germans’ concern with how their country is perceived has led them to believe that their government’s lack of action is a very recent phenomenon. But when was the last time the Merkel government did what was necessary without backtracking afterwards? Some would say that this was in 2015, during the so-called refugee crisis, but it should be remembered that the image of Merkel as an activist relies on a simple narrative: she decided that Germany should open its borders. Germany didn’t do that; it just didn’t close them. When the Merkel government swung into action, it helped negotiate a deal with Turkey to halt the flow of refugees while simultaneously tightening the asylum laws. In fact, Merkel last acted decisively in 2011, following the Fukushima accident in Japan, when her government decided to phase out Germany’s nuclear reactors.

Preoccupied as Germans are with appearances and perceptions, they tend to believe that the decline of Germany’s fortunes on the football field began after the 2014 World Cup. But the team that won the cup that year was arguably not as good — and certainly not as exciting — as the team that competed in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Germany won in 2014 because the competition was not as strong as four years earlier. In other words, the defeat at the hands of North Macedonia and the government’s ponderous response to the pandemic came after a long period of wasted opportunities. The summer of welcome in 2015 and the World Cup in 2014 just felt like moments when Germans were champions of the world. •

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As recently as two years ago, the rise of right-wing populism seemed unstoppable. From India to Brazil, from Hungary to the United States, populist leaders had won political office by railing against the “elites” and purporting to speak for “the people.” In democracies across Asia, Europe and the Americas, right-wing populist parties and movements had gained political influence using ultranationalist rhetoric and vilifying minorities. We became used to the idea that the Donald Trumps and Jair Bolsonaros were here to stay.

At least in Western countries, the trend seems to have reversed. Donald Trump has been voted out of office; the right-wing populist parties that had been in government in Western Europe — Matteo Salvini’s Lega in Italy and the Freedom Party in Austria — have been sidelined. And isn’t it only a matter of time until Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ousts Bolsonaro? It is now possible to imagine that the era of right-wing populism is drawing to a close.

Often mentioned as evidence of the inexorable rise of right-wing populism was the success of the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD. Less than 200 days after it was formed at a meeting of eighteen men in a church hall in Oberursel, just outside of Frankfurt, the AfD won more than two million votes in Germany’s 2013 federal elections.

At that election, the AfD fell just short of the 5 per cent threshold designed to keep minor parties out of the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament. Four years later, in 2017, it exceeded that figure, and for the past four years it has been the largest opposition party in the Bundestag. AfD is also represented in all sixteen state parliaments, and is now the second-largest party in the five East German states of Saxony, Thuringia, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

But just as the AfD’s rise fits the pattern of a surge of right-wing populism in the 2010s, its recent fortunes could be evidence of the waning of this political phenomenon. In elections in the southwest states of Rhineland-Palatine and Baden-Württemberg, the AfD shed more votes than any other party. In Baden-Württemberg, its stronghold outside the former communist east of the country, its support slumped from 15.1 to 9.7 per cent. Has the AfD’s time already passed?

The matter is more complicated than the figures might suggest. What has definitely passed is the party born in Oberursel on 6 February 2013. Of the eighteen men present that day, most have long left. One of them, the economist Bernd Lucke, led the party until 2015, when he was deposed in favour of Frauke Petry and subsequently quit the party. Petry herself resigned from the AfD in 2017 immediately after winning a seat in the Bundestag.

The old AfD was largely made up of three sets of people: conservatives who thought Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats had veered too far left, advocates of neoliberal economics who wanted Germany to leave the eurozone, and elderly men afraid of cultural diversity and appalled by the official rebranding of Germany as a country of immigration. Since then, aggressive nativism and opposition to refugees and other migrants have become the party’s trademarks.

Not all the leaders who emerged in 2013 have resigned from the AfD. Notable among them is Björn Höcke, a high school teacher of history and physical education born in West Germany in 1972, who has led the AfD in Thuringia for the past eight years. Rather than championing economic liberalism, as the majority of the AfD’s founders did, he has identified neoliberalism and globalisation as twin evils. He is socially conservative but wants a complete overhaul of Germany’s politics and culture.

In 2015, Höcke founded the Flügel, a network that brought together the far right of the AfD. Attempts by moderate forces within the AfD leadership to expel Höcke failed in 2015 and again in 2017. In 2019, the domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, published a report arguing that the Flügel, as well as the party’s youth organisation, was advocating attitudes and policies irreconcilable with the German constitution. Of the report’s 436 pages, fifty were devoted to Höcke’s views, reflecting the fact that he is rightly seen as the AfD’s most influential proponent of extremist positions.

The Flügel’s leadership eventually dissolved the organisation last year after pressure from Jörg Meuthen, the AfD’s relatively moderate co-leader, and his allies, who argued it was tarnishing the AfD’s brand and attracting unwelcome attention from Germany’s intelligence agency.

Another survivor of the class of 2013 is Alexander Gauland, the AfD’s deputy leader from 2013 until 2017, its co-leader from 2017 until 2019, and co-leader of the AfD’s parliamentary party in the Bundestag since the last election. Born in 1941 in East Germany, he emigrated to West Germany as an eighteen-year-old, gained a doctorate in law, and also studied history. From 1977 until 1991, he worked as chief of staff of the Christian Democrat Walter Wallmann, who was in turn mayor of Frankfurt, federal environment minister and premier of Hesse.

After Wallmann’s defeat in the 1991 state elections, Gauland moved to the East German state of Brandenburg, where he became editor of a local newspaper. He joined the Berliner Kreis, a loose network of conservative Christian Democrats critical of Angela Merkel, but meetings with like-minded conservatives only exacerbated his alienation from the party that had been his political home since the 1970s. Although he is not usually considered to belong to the far right of the AfD, he has consistently taken Höcke’s side in factional struggles and signed the Erfurt Declaration, the Flügel’s foundational document.

More than anybody else, Höcke and Gauland have shaped today’s AfD: the former by attracting a sufficient number of followers, particularly in East Germany, to shift the AfD towards the far right, the latter by personifying the party’s radicalisation over the past eight years and providing cover for Höcke whenever necessary. More than anybody else, these two men can tell us where the AfD is heading.

Höcke and Gauland have each attracted more controversy than any other AfD politician. That’s partly because they habitually refer in offensive terms to people belonging to ethnic or religious minorities. In 2016, for instance, Gauland criticised the successful Berlin-born footballer Jérôme Boateng, son of a Ghanaian father and a German mother: “The people like him as a player. But they don’t want to have a Boateng as a neighbour.” A year later, he suggested it would be desirable to “dispose of [“entsorgen”] in Anatolia” the prominent Hamburg-born Social Democrat Aydan Özoğuz, whose parents had migrated from Turkey.

Even more controversial have been Höcke’s and Gauland’s demands for a reappraisal of Germany’s Nazi past. In a 2017 speech in Dresden, Höcke said that German president Richard von Weizsäcker’s famous address to the Bundestag on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the second world war, in which he acknowledged Germany’s responsibility for that catastrophe, was a speech “against his own people.” Referring to the national Holocaust memorial in Berlin, Höcke said that “we Germans are the only people in the world who have built a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,” adding that “a 180-degree turnaround of German memorial politics” was needed. In a speech in 2018, Gauland infamously remarked that “Hitler and the Nazis are only a Vogelschiss [a piece of bird shit] in more than a thousand years of successful German history.”

Gauland and Höcke have consequently been branded Nazis and fascists. But however reprehensible their views, the labels are misleading. Neither of them would like to see a return to the Third Reich, and neither has endorsed the Nazis’ policies. Ostensibly, AfD figures violate taboos to defy political correctness, but their real aim is to attract the media’s attention, to unsettle their opponents, to shift the boundaries of political discourse and to demonstrate to their supporters that the “ruling elites” are vulnerable.

“It requires a provocation to be noticed,” Gauland said in defence of his suggestion that Özoğuz ought to be “disposed of.” “Again and again, the limits of what is sayable have to be extended by means of small advances,” Höcke explained to the Dresden writer Sebastian Hennig in a book-length conversation. Too often, commentators have fallen into the trap of denouncing individual AfD leaders as Nazis or fascists without recognising the intention behind their violations of taboos.

Unlike other parties on the far right that have had an impact in postwar Germany — including the German Right Party, which was represented in the 1949 Bundestag, and the National Democratic Party, the German People’s Union and the Republicans, all of which have at some stage been represented in state parliaments — the AfD is not a party in the tradition of the (historical) Nazi party. Rather, Höcke and other Flügel stalwarts have been influenced by the New Right.

In fact, the Flügel’s Erfurt Declaration is said to have been drafted by the Höcke confidant Götz Kubitschek, a publisher and author who is one of the leading proponents of the German New Right. Kubitschek and others think of their movement as a response to the New Left, and adopt some of the latter’s strategies. They aim not just for political power but also for cultural hegemony.

The German New Right draws on ideas developed by writers associated with the Conservative Revolution in the 1920s and early 1930s, including the constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt, the philosopher Ludwig Klages, the writer Ernst Jünger and the philosopher Oswald Spengler. Martin Heidegger, while arguably not himself part of the Conservative Revolution, is another whose ideas have had an impact on the thinking of the German New Right.

Gauland and Höcke frequently cite writers associated with the Conservative Revolution. In doing so, they ignore the fact that Schmitt, Spengler and others provided intellectual ammunition for the Nazis and sympathised with them, at least during the first half of the 1930s. But then, the Third Reich, which AfD politicians often refer to only as “those twelve years,” was supposedly but a Vogelschiss in a glorious past spanning a thousand years.

Another key difference between outfits such as the German Right Party and the National Democratic Party, on the one hand, and the AfD, on the other, is that the latter is populist. It has embraced a populism that pits “das Volk” against an “elite” that supposedly dominates government and the media. The AfD’s 2016 manifesto also favours some form of direct democracy: Swiss-style referendums to approve legislation passed by parliament and opportunities for extra-parliamentary groups to put bills to a popular vote.

Volk is a central category in Höcke’s and Gauland’s universe. It is both demos, the political citizenry, and ethnos, an exclusive group defined by common ancestors, language and cultural practices. Höcke has described Volk as a “community whose members are linked by fate and across generations.” Not everybody with a German passport is a German, Gauland once told the journalist Jana Simon; they would need to have a German mother, be fluent in the German language and share “German values” (which he did not specify). According to Höcke, whether someone belongs to a particular Volk is determined not only by kinship ties but also by association (“Verbandschaft”) — that is, by a willingness to belong. Those formally belonging to a particular Volk by descent could therefore be excluded if they don’t identify with it or extend their loyalty to it.

As a historical category, Höcke’s and Gauland’s German Volk is ill-defined. For them, it becomes concrete only in the present, when it is defined in opposition to what they variously term a “globalised class,” “new elites” (Gauland), a “caste” of politicians and media professionals (Höcke), or “a transatlantic political elite” of “cosmopolitan universalists” (Höcke). They contrast this new “class,” “caste” or “elite” not only with the Volk but also with the “genuine” elites of yesteryear.

They want the Volk to have more direct political influence. But Höcke worries that, “As a Volk, we are already very fragmented, and we no longer produce a homogeneous people’s will, but rather dissonant cacophony.” Referring to the summer of 2015, when most Germans were in favour of welcoming refugees, he told Hennig that the people’s will must be tempered by “responsible politicians” who, if need be, make decisions “against current public sentiment and in favour of the Volk.” He then compared the “statesman” favourably with the populist, because in his view the latter is prone to pave the way for ochlocracy, or the rule of the mob.

Yet Höcke is also fascinated by the mob’s raw energy: “At some point the pent-up pressure will be released, clenched fists will be raised in the air, and the people, that big lout, will shake the fortified gates of power.” He regularly professes his love for the Volk, but I believe he does so from the position of somebody imagining himself in the role of the “statesman” who would be able to harness the energies of “that big lout.”

While baiting journalists and other public commentators with statements that are racist or smack of historical revisionism, and while mimicking the rhetoric of Hitler and Goebbels, Gauland and Höcke have been careful to draw a line between themselves and the Nazis. Thus they have rejected the adjective “völkisch,” which former AfD leader Frauke Petry had wanted to reanimate in 2016. Höcke said that it is associated with a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century politics whose demands he does not share. More importantly, however, unlike Volk, the connotations of the term völkisch place it firmly in the context of “those twelve years.”

The other term the pair avoid is Führer, because that is now associated only with Hitler — according to Gauland the sole “progenitor” of National Socialism and the Holocaust. That is not to say that Höcke, in particular, is unsympathetic to the concept of an authoritarian leader who knows best what the Volk needs. For him, the term “statesman” might be but a placeholder.

Following the recent state elections, Meuthen blamed two factors — the pandemic and the party’s supposed victimisation at the hands of the domestic intelligence agency — for its losses. He also tried to talk down the poor showing. Gauland and Höcke took a different approach, referring to the result as a “wake-up call” (Gauland) and a “rout” (Höcke). Höcke blamed the rout on what he perceived to be timid and lame election campaigns designed to increase the party’s appeal among moderate middle-class voters. When lambasting the desire to appease mainstream voters, he clearly had in mind Meuthen’s keynote address at the most recent party congress in November 2020, in which Meuthen famously said, with a wink to Höcke, “We won’t become more successful by presenting as increasingly uncouth, aggressive and uninhibited.”

In Höcke’s view, the AfD ought to have targeted traditional non-voters, who “are fundamentally opposed to the ruling politics” but can’t be mobilised to vote by means of policy positions that come across as half-hearted and tame. He was also concerned that the party had done poorly in working-class areas; like Gauland, he believes the AfD needs to champion the interests of the “kleine Leute” (literally: the little people). Höcke’s rather than Meuthen’s strategy seems likely to be adopted during the next campaign, ahead of state elections in June in Saxony-Anhalt, one of the Flügel’s strongholds.

Although Höcke was quick to blame the Meuthen camp for the losses in Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg, he has otherwise not been too concerned about losing or gaining a few percentage points in elections. For him, the AfD is not only a party but also a movement. It needs to pressure ruling “elites” both in parliament and by organising demonstrations outside parliament. This is a lesson the AfD might have learned from the Nazi party of the late 1920s and early 1930s, but also from Germany’s Greens of the 1980s and 1990s. In other respects too, the Greens provided a model: like them, the AfD has two leaders, one representing the moderate camp that wants to be in government and one representing the Flügel.

With the Greens having developed a taste for participating in governing coalitions, their more radical faction, the so-called Fundis, have been sidelined. It’s unlikely that something similar will happen anytime soon in the AfD. While the Greens have become a sought-after ally (they are in power in eleven out of sixteen states, and a sure bet to be part of the federal government after the national elections in September), the other established parties consider a close association with the AfD poisonous. (Inside Story reported on the turmoil that ensued last year after a Free Democrat was elected premier of Thuringia with the help of Christian Democrats and the AfD.)

The fates of Trump and Salvini are no necessary guide to what will become of the AfD. Its isolation makes its case unique among right-wing populist parties and movements. Elsewhere, the rise of right-wing populism increased the chances of populists taking power; in Germany, that is not an option. In some European countries, right-wing populists came to power indirectly because other political leaders adopted their key policies in an attempt to deprive them of oxygen. Danish Social Democrat leader Mette Frederiksen and Austrian People’s Party leader Sebastian Kurz, for example, embraced far-right positions on immigration. A similar thing happened way back in the late 1990s in Australia, when prime minister John Howard attempted to neutralise Pauline Hanson’s appeal. Thus far, the German Christian Democrats have not given in to the temptation to copy key planks of the AfD’s platform. It is unlikely they will do so any time soon.

Björn Höcke was right in his analysis of the recent election results: it doesn’t matter to the AfD who forms the next government in Rhineland-Palatinate or in Baden-Württemberg. Nor, in order to predict the party’s fortunes and future role, is it necessary to know who will win the upcoming elections in September. The AfD won’t be invited to help form a government, and it hardly matters to its leaders whether Angela Merkel’s successor will be the Christian Democrat Armin Laschet or his Bavarian colleague Markus Söder — or Annalena Baerbock or Robert Habeck from the Greens.

For the AfD, this year’s crucial elections will happen in December, when the party selects its leadership team. It may well be that its transformation will be complete by then, and there will no longer be the need for two leaders covering the party’s range of positions. The epithet “populist” may then be less relevant than that of “far right.”

Another reason the outcome of the September elections won’t matter much for the AfD is that whoever forms government will introduce policies to meet the Paris climate agreement’s targets. That will offer an opportunity to the AfD to mobilise climate change sceptics and those who believe they are personally bearing the costs of the government’s policies. Björn Höcke will be hoping that the people, “that big lout,” will then rise up. •

The post Waiting for “that big lout” to rise up appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s not hard to see why Germany’s leaders opted for a new hard lockdown. The “lockdown light” that has been in place since 2 November has failed to reduce the number of daily infections. On Friday, the Robert Koch Institute, the agency that tracks infectious diseases, reported 29,875 new infections and 598 new fatalities, the highest daily figures since the pandemic began. According to the DIVI register, which monitors hospital capacity, more than 4500 Covid-19 patients are in intensive care and some hospitals can no longer accept new patients. Most alarmingly, perhaps, the number of clusters of cases in aged care homes is rising rapidly.

“After a temporary stabilisation of case numbers at a higher level in late August and early September, a steep increase in case numbers ensued in October in all federal states,” the Koch Institute reported last Friday. Measures introduced at the beginning of November had failed to cut new cases significantly, with numbers “sharply increasing” over the previous week.

Until recently, Germany had managed the pandemic reasonably well — not as well as East Asian countries but certainly better than its European neighbours. Even as late as the end of September, after infections started to climb again, Germany’s numbers were not particularly alarming compared with those elsewhere in Europe.

On 30 September, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Germany’s cumulative number of cases per 100,000 people over fourteen days was just over thirty, better than each of Germany’s eight neighbouring fellow EU members. Apart from Poland, all had recorded figures in excess of 120.

A month later, Germany’s figure had risen to 195.6 — but even then the country was still doing better than all of its neighbours except Denmark, with the rates in three of them (the Czech Republic, Belgium and Luxembourg) exceeding 1000, and France and the Netherlands both recording a fourteen-day cumulative total of about 750 per 100,000.

By Sunday, though, Germany’s figure had climbed to 334.9, significantly worse than the equivalent figures for France and Belgium. Immunologists agree about the success of the far-reaching restrictions introduced by France and Belgium, like those of other European countries that experienced exponential rises of infections in September and October. By contrast, Germany’s restrictions during November were too weak: while bars and restaurants, and cinemas and theatres were closed, shops remained open, as did schools and childcare centres.

Angela Merkel can’t be blamed for those half-hearted measures. She has long argued that the coronavirus needs to be taken seriously and reportedly wanted stricter restrictions as soon as it became clear that the “lockdown light” hadn’t had the desired effect. She was uncharacteristically emotional last Wednesday when she warned in parliament that too many contacts over the following fortnight might make the coming festive season “the last Christmas with the grandparents.”

Part of the explanation for the slow response to the latest surge lies in the country’s federal system of government. Although Merkel wanted tougher measures, she had failed to convince all of the state premiers. It is their governments that are responsible for imposing and, with local councils, implementing such measures, and they preside over different infection rates and intensive care capacities. The fact that the premiers of the most populous states, Markus Söder of Bavaria and Armin Laschet of North-Rhine Westphalia, have championed diverging approaches throughout the pandemic — not least because they are both vying to succeed Merkel as chancellor — hasn’t helped.

But state–state and federal–state rivalries don’t entirely explain the dithering. The state governments’ fear has been that stricter measures would be met with popular anger.

At first sight, such an explanation seems counterintuitive. Most Germans have long supported a decisive response to the pandemic and have endorsed the government’s handling of the crisis, including the imposition of a strict lockdown earlier in the year. An opinion poll conducted last Thursday, three days before the announcement of tougher measures, showed that 49 per cent of those surveyed wanted more restrictions while only 13 per cent considered existing restrictions excessive. And Merkel’s popularity, and the approval rate for her Christian Democrats, has been exceptionally high since the beginning of the pandemic.

At the same time, polls suggest that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, which has opposed all measures to contain the virus, would fall short of its performance in the 2017 federal election (when it scored 12.6 per cent of the national vote), never mind attract the kind of support it enjoyed a year ago, when one in five surveyed Germans said they would vote for it.

To understand why federal and state governments didn’t heed the almost unanimous advice of the medical experts and impose more drastic measures earlier, we need to go back to the Merkel government’s response to the influx of refugees from Syria in 2015. Or rather, we need to look at how that crisis is remembered, particularly within Merkel’s party, but also among other German politicians outside the AfD.

A powerful narrative says that it was a mistake to open the country’s borders that year, thereby alienating a sizeable minority of Germans opposed to an ethnically and culturally diverse Germany while irritating a majority who didn’t think that the loosening of border controls was justified. For those who have embraced this narrative, polarisation and the rise of the AfD — which in 2017 became the first party of the far right since 1953 to be represented in the Bundestag — have been more traumatic than any other event in reunified Germany’s short history.

This account tends to overlook three facts. First, the government didn’t open Germany’s borders in 2015; rather, it decided not to close them (and not to defend them in any way that echoed the pre-1989 German Democratic Republic’s defence of its border with West Germany by shooting people trying to cross it). Second, polls at the time revealed that a majority of Germans approved of the Merkel government’s response to the refugees. Many may later have changed their minds, but a clear majority still agrees that Germany has an obligation to provide sanctuary for people fleeing war or persecution. Finally, those who voted for the AfD in 2017 hadn’t suddenly become opposed to migration, or to living in a multicultural society, and hadn’t suddenly developed a longing for an authoritarian political leader. Rather, in 2017, it made sense to them to vote for a party that seemed to represent their views.

But whether the facts get in the way of the story is irrelevant. The key thing is that it is held to be true. For many of those who believe the narrative, a repeat or prolongation of the trauma associated with the rise of the AfD must be avoided.

You might imagine that Christian Democrats would want to solve this dilemma by adopting the policy positions of the AfD to try to make it disappear. But Germany’s post-Auschwitz identity works against a rapprochement between centre-right conservatives and the AfD because large sections of the latter are considered ideologically close to the Nazis. This contrasts with countries like Denmark, Austria and the Netherlands, where centre-right or centre-left politicians have espoused positions on refugees and migration that were previously owned by the far right.

Also working against any rapprochement is the fact that past attempts by the Christian Democrats to neutralise a far-right party by adopting its vocabulary or policies have backfired. Ahead of the 1992 state election in Baden-Württemberg, for example, the Christian Democrats moved to the right to attract potential voters from the extremist Republikaner, a precursor of the AfD. The strategy failed miserably: the Republikaner won 10.9 per cent of the vote and the Christian Democrats shed 9.4 percentage points of support compared with the previous state election.

More recently, ahead of the Bavarian state elections in 2018, the Bavarian sister party of the Christian Democrats, the Markus Söder–led Christian Social Union, or CSU, attempted to mimic the AfD’s rhetoric, particularly in relation to asylum seekers. But Söder soon realised that he risked losing more votes to the Greens (because many Christian conservatives were appalled by that kind of rhetoric) than could be gained from potential AfD voters. He changed tack, won the election, and is now a good bet to be the next chancellor, leading a coalition of Christian Democrats and Greens.

This leaves Christian Democrats, in particular, in a quandary. They would like to keep the AfD small (or ideally make it disappear altogether) by wooing potential AfD voters, but without appearing to embrace AfD positions. So they have made do with telling AfD supporters that their concerns are legitimate and are being taken seriously, hoping to thereby avoid provoking the anger of the people who responded so strongly to the refugees.

For the AfD, the pandemic has been disastrous in the sense that it has pushed asylum seekers, who were no longer front-page news anyway, further into the background. But the current crisis has also provided an opportunity for the party. Having initially criticised the government for doing too little, too late, the AfD proceeded to lambast the government for doing too much.

The change of heart had much to do with the emergence during spring of a motley bunch of groups — New Agers, anti-vaxxers and others — that considered the government’s measures an overreaction and didn’t accept the science that informed them. The AfD and other groups on the far right tried, often very successfully, to harness this growing movement. AfD politicians ridiculed face masks, argued against closing schools and businesses, suggested Covid-19 was no worse than the flu, alleged that the government would force the entire population to vaccinate, claimed that restrictions to halt the disease amounted to a suspension of civil liberties and a breach of privacy, and organised demonstrations to channel fear and anger.

The government was taken by surprise when thousands — and sometimes tens of thousands — protested. Because the anger was reminiscent of the anger of people decrying the accommodation of asylum seekers in their neighbourhoods, federal and state governments generally handled the protesters with kid gloves, bending over backwards to convince them that their concerns — which often turned out to be based on anti-Semitic conspiracy theories — were being taken seriously.

Although a largely silent majority of Germans would have supported earlier and tougher measures to keep infections low, it was this loud, even shrill, minority whose views informed decision-making. That was particularly the case in the East German states, where the far right is comparatively strong — and perhaps nowhere more so than in Saxony, where the AfD won 27 per cent of the vote in the 2017 Bundestag elections and a shade more in the state elections two years later. Saxony’s premier, Michael Kretschmer, repeatedly met with protesters and listened to their concerns, no matter how absurd they were. He also criticised harsher measures adopted in other states, saying that Saxonians could be trusted to behave responsibly without threats of sanctions.

In rural and regional Saxony, in particular, discontent about the federal government’s handling of Covid-19 was widespread and conspiracy theories gathered followers. People often refused to wear masks, even on public transport. But the East German states generally did well during the pandemic’s first wave, with the number of reported infections lower than in West Germany.

During the second wave, though, East Germany has been particularly hard-hit, and Saxony worst of all. Although the state was hardly touched in spring, it now has the highest number of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants nationally. On Sunday, its infection rate was twice as high as the national average and more than four times higher than in the West German states of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein.

But the state government’s hesitant approach and the influence of the AfD can’t be blamed entirely for Saxony’s catastrophic numbers. The state shares borders with the Czech Republic and Poland, both of which were hit hard, and early, by the pandemic’s second wave. Unlike in spring, the borders remained open, and Poles and Czechs continued to commute to Saxony for work, shopping and leisure. (But they were able to do so also because Saxony’s government was reluctant to resort to border controls, lest its own people grow even more restless.)

The influence of the popular movement against coronavirus restrictions, fostered if not orchestrated by AfD politicians, can’t be discounted either. Rural Saxony has been for Germany what the Dakotas have been for the United States. It’s no accident that the districts where the AfD enjoys particularly strong support have been hardest-hit by the virus, while the city of Leipzig, where the AfD does comparatively badly, has an infection rate of about a third of the state average.

One other recent example of the impact of the 2015 refugee narrative is worth mentioning.

Germany’s public broadcasters are funded by a monthly fee payable by households. Last set in 2015, it amounts to €17.50 (A$28) per month for households with a television set. Earlier this year, the sixteen state premiers agreed to a moderate fee rise, to €18.36, effective from January 2021.

The plan attracted some opposition. The AfD in particular has long claimed that journalists with the public broadcasters tend to be left-wingers who use publicly funded programs to promote their views, and the fee is thus misspent. Much like Donald Trump has done in the United States, Germany’s far-right politicians have targeted journalists as “enemies of the people.” At rallies organised by far-right organisations, including protests against coronavirus restrictions, journalists are frequently abused and sometimes assaulted. But the protesters represent but a very small minority; most Germans trust the public broadcasters and value their programs.

The fee rise must be ratified by all sixteen state parliaments. Ordinarily, this would be a formality when the premiers have already reached unanimous agreement. But in the small East German state of Saxony-Anhalt, which is governed by a coalition of Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Greens, Christian Democrat parliamentarians defied their own party’s state premier and declared they would vote against the rise. With the AfD, which also opposes the rise, the Christian Democrats command a majority of seats; the government’s motion would therefore have been lost.

That vote would have been the end of the governing coalition. Neither Greens nor Social Democrats would continue to work with a party that makes common cause with the far right. In the end, the state premier, himself a Christian Democrat, averted the fall of his government by sacking his interior minister, the ringleader of the revolt, and then electing not to put the fee rise to a vote, which means that it won’t go ahead as planned, either in Saxony-Anhalt or in the rest of Germany.

When it comes to the funding of Germany’s public broadcasters, the Christian Democrats’ fears about provoking extremists in Saxony-Anhalt will probably be inconsequential in the long run. The public broadcasters will take their case for a funding increase to the High Court, and they are confident of winning the case. The rise will come, albeit with a slight delay.

The dithering about new measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus is a far more serious matter. I concluded an earlier Inside Story article, in May this year, by declaring that “it would be wrong to make extensive concessions to the protesters — and in the process perhaps risk Germany’s exposure to the virus increasing exponentially — in the hope of ending the discontent.” The government might not have made concessions as such, but its approach has been unduly influenced by the protests and the exponential rise in infections is one of the results.

Premier Michael Kretschmer seems to have realised that his earlier decision to trust all Saxonians to act responsibly was wrong. Even before Sunday’s emergency meeting his government opted for a full lockdown starting on 14 December. Blaming a minority of Saxonians for the catastrophically high incidence of Covid-19 infections, he opted for an uncompromising stance. People have had long discussions about this issue, he told Spiegel, but now “we’re done with that… Anyone who wants to can still have a different opinion and question our measures, that’s the way it is in a free country. But that’s no longer crucial, these people now have to step aside… After all, opinions aren’t facts.” Elsewhere, he said that what was now required were “authoritarian measures by the state.”

Not only do these statements smack of a spurned lover’s revenge, the vocabulary is also grist to the mill for the AfD, which claims that the state is hell-bent on eroding personal freedoms. But it’s good to hear even Kretschmer now telling conspiracy theorists to get lost.

By resisting both the €0.86 fee rise and measures to curb the coronavirus, a small minority has exercised undue influence by being loud and, even more importantly, because the noise is reminiscent of the anti-refugee protests of the recent past. Members of the German majority have received less consideration because they have behaved meekly and their support is taken for granted.

It would be disastrous if the government paid too much attention to loudmouths orchestrated by the far right when it formulates its polices in other key areas — climate change, a challenge that dwarfs Covid-19, chief among them. When Germans are again able to focus their attention on that issue, the majority needs to make itself heard, and “these people” might then again be asked “to step aside.” •

The post Enemies of the people appeared first on Inside Story.

Born Salama bint Said in 1844 in Zanzibar, she was the daughter of Said bin Sultan Al-Said, the Sultan of Zanzibar and Oman, and Jilfidan, a Circassian woman who had been abducted by slave traders as a child and bought by the sultan to join his harem. Although her mother was not the sultan’s principal wife, Salama benefited from being part of the island’s ruling family. As one of her father’s thirty-six children, she inherited a plantation and residence upon his death, and a further three plantations when her mother died.

In her early twenties, Sayyida Salme (Princess Salama), as she was later known, was living in the Zanzibar capital, Stone Town. A love affair with her neighbour, the German merchant Rudolph Heinrich Ruete, resulted in her falling pregnant. Conscious that her relatives wouldn’t countenance marriage to an infidel, she fled to Aden aboard HMS Highflyer with the help of the wife of a British consular official. There she converted, took the name Emily and married Ruete, who had followed her under less dramatic circumstances. The couple moved to Rudolf Heinrich’s native Hamburg, where they had three more children (her first child had died in Aden). The marriage was short-lived, however; in 1870, aged thirty-one, Rudolph Heinrich was killed in a tram accident.

Although Hamburg law prevented Emily Ruete from claiming her late husband’s estate, she and her children initially remained in Germany — not least because her return to Zanzibar was vetoed by her half-brother, the then sultan. Occasionally she taught Arabic to make ends meet. In 1886 she published a part memoir, part ethnography of Zanzibar, Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin, that would be reprinted numerous times and translated into English (under the title Memoirs of an Arabian Princess), French, Arabic and other languages. In 1889 she left Germany and settled in Beirut. When the first world war broke out, she returned to Germany to live with one of her daughters in Jena, where she died in 1924.

“Model immigrant”: Emily Ruete (Sayyida Salme), Princess of Zanzibar. Undated photo by unknown photographer/Alamy

Emily Ruete was buried in her husband’s family plot in Ohlsdorf, Hamburg’s main cemetery. The grave is considered historically significant and has been preserved. In 2007, during the European Year of Equal Opportunities for All, her life was commemorated with a memorial in the cemetery’s Garden of Women. Two years later, her story featured in an exhibition at Hamburg’s town hall. Over the past twelve years, her life has also been the subject of three works of fiction: the rather conventional biographical novels Sterne über Sansibar (2011) by Nicole Vosseler and Abschied von Sansibar (2013) by Lukas Hartmann, and Sansibar Blues (2008), a piece of postcolonial metafiction by acclaimed writer Hans Christoph Buch.

Given this background, it’s not surprising that a local resident suggested naming a park in Hamburg-Nord, one of Hamburg’s seven districts, after Emily Ruete. In a submission to the district assembly five years ago, he argued that the park, adjacent to a waterway and not far from a mosque and the Ruetes’ former residence, was reminiscent of Zanzibar. The idea was again on the assembly’s agenda in 2017, this time supported by the argument that present-day refugee movements made it appropriate to honour “Emily Ruete aka Princess Salme” as a “model immigrant of her time.” On neither occasion did the idea attract sufficient backing.

Events started to move more quickly in February last year. A newly created square needed a name, and this time the Social Democrats and the Greens, who together hold the majority of seats in the assembly, proposed memorialising Ruete, with the Greens arguing that she was a “strong and intriguing” historical figure. Local residents attending the meeting at which the plan was considered commented that the name didn’t matter to them; they were more concerned that street furniture be installed to make the square more inviting. When the motion was put to a vote, the Christian Democrats opposed it — not because they objected to memorialising Ruete, but because they believed the process of naming the square lacked transparency.

Later last year, Hamburg-Nord Council advised the district assembly that the square’s name had been gazetted and street signs delivered. The council suggested that an information panel about Ruete’s life be erected and her descendants invited to attend its unveiling, and in February 2020 €4400 (A$7200) was allocated to commissioning a local history workshop to create the panel.

Here, the story took its controversial turn. The workshop’s research found that Ruete had not only defended slavery during her lifetime but also made racist remarks in her 1886 memoir. The workshop’s findings drew on an intervention by a member of Hamburg Postkolonial, a network of individuals interested in Hamburg’s colonial legacy, who may well have been the first person to take an interest in the naming of the square and read Ruete’s 1886 book closely.

In September this year the Greens and the Social Democrats moved successfully to reverse the assembly’s earlier decision. “In 2020, to name a square after Emily Ruete is not an option,” the minutes of the meeting record a Greens representative saying. “It would be inconsistent with the [two parties’] stance against exclusion and inhumanity.” Rather than naming the square after someone else, the district assembly decided to leave it nameless for the time being, presumably to avoid having Ruete’s name remain in place during the search for a substitute. Immediately after the assembly’s decision, council workers removed the offending street signs.

Matthias Iken and others who criticised the change of heart bemoaned the fact that a nineteenth-century woman was being judged against the standards of the twenty-first century. A representative of the Free Democratic Party, who voted against the unnaming of the square, argued that Ruete’s book was “an authentic non-European source” about the history of East Africa, which had otherwise been told from a “colonial point of view.” Ruete had commented on the Germany of the time from a non-European perspective, he pointed out, and had exposed the hypocrisy of her European contemporaries in Zanzibar, who decried the institution of slavery but were themselves slave owners.

By the time Ruete’s book was published, slavery had long been formally abolished in Europe and North America: in Britain, for instance, in 1834; in France in 1848; and in the United States in 1865. But Emily Ruete, herself the daughter of a former slave, had known Zanzibar only as a place where slavery was largely uncontested. In the mid nineteenth century, the island had been a hub of the Arab slave trade, with possibly as many as 50,000 slaves passing through its port annually. The political clout of Emily Ruete’s father, the sultan, was based not least on his prominent involvement in that trade. Slavery was formally abolished in Zanzibar in the 1870s but continued until the early twentieth century, despite the island’s becoming a British protectorate in 1890.

The September 2020 backflip was not the first time Hamburg politicians have had second thoughts about streets named after people whose views or deeds are now considered repugnant. In recent years, Hamburg’s state government has become particularly concerned by the possibility that some streets and public buildings might be named after people who were Nazis, supported the Nazis or advocated anti-Semitic or racist ideas.

In several instances, streets have been renamed; on two occasions their names were retained but the reference changed. Weygandt Street, for example, was originally named after the Hamburg psychiatrist Wilhelm Weygandt (1870–1939), who was interested in eugenics and sympathised with the Nazis. Now it is named after somebody with no connection to Hamburg: Friedrich Weygandt, a public official in Mainz who was executed because he had been a vocal critic of the local archbishop during the peasants’ war of 1525. New proposals for street names are now routinely vetted by the Hamburg State Archives.

In 2017, the archives commissioned historian David Templin to investigate fifty-eight historical figures whose names featured on street signs, or were likely to do so sometime soon, and develop criteria for deciding whether to rename particular streets. One person on the list was Gustav Gründgens, a famous actor and director whose life is explored in Klaus Mann’s controversial novel Mephisto and the acclaimed István Szabó film of the same name, winner of the 1981 Oscar for the best foreign-language film. So far Gründgens, who was the protégé of Nazi strongman Hermann Göring and played a prominent role in Nazi Germany’s cultural life, has not been deemed sufficiently compromised to warrant a renaming of the street carrying his name.

Compromised? Gustav Gründgens as Hamlet in January 1936. Wikimedia

While until very recently the archives’ vetting process focused on links to the Nazi regime or ideology, Nazism is but one of at least two dark chapters in Germany’s past whose legacies endure. Another is colonialism. Because Hamburg has long been Germany’s most important port, many of the city’s businesses and individuals played a significant role in colonial endeavours, including during the short period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Germany had colonies in Africa and the Pacific.

Demands to engage critically with Hamburg’s colonial past go back a long way. In 1967, and again in 1968, student protesters toppled a bronze statue of Hermann von Wissmann, a former commander of German colonial troops and governor of German East Africa, resulting in that memorial’s permanent removal. But it was only in 2014, after sustained pressure from civil society groups, that the state government agreed to tackle the city’s colonial legacy.

Compared with efforts to draw attention to the Nazi past and remove references to Nazi perpetrators and their accomplices from public view, official moves to expose Hamburg’s colonial links have been slow. (This was partly because, as Thomas Laqueur noted when recently comparing German Vergangenheitsbewältigung and American attempts to come to terms with slavery, the Nazi past was “brief and circumscribed.”) In fact, when the state archives looked into the naming of Emily Ruete Square last year in the course of its routine vetting procedure, the proposal didn’t raise any concerns. Yes, a memorial for prominent merchant — and notorious slave trader — Heinrich Carl von Schimmelmann (1724–82) was removed in 2008, but demands to rename three Hamburg streets that carry his name — Schimmelmannstraße, Schimmelmannallee and Schimmelmannstieg — have so far been unsuccessful.

Besides, the government’s decision in 2014 focused on how the city’s colonial past was being represented publicly, and how Hamburg could distance itself symbolically from that past. The decision made no reference to demands for reparations to tackle historic injustices. In the past twenty years, such demands have focused on Germany’s genocidal 1904–08 war against the Herero and Nama in what was then German South West Africa (today’s Namibia); most recently, Namibia rejected Germany’s offer of a one-off €10 million compensation payment and an unreserved apology as inadequate. But the issue of symbolic and material reparations is not limited to Namibia, and given the extent to which Hamburg has been a beneficiary of colonialism, this issue should not only be a matter for the federal government.

Also absent from the state government’s decision were references to present-day injustices. German colonialism did not end when Germany lost its colonies after the first world war, nor when German attempts to colonise Eastern Europe came to a crushing halt in the course of the second world war. Hamburg businesses and Hamburg consumers continue to be implicated in colonial practices — something that is easily forgotten when the focus is on a past that is seemingly over and done with.

Hamburg-Nord’s decision to rescind the honouring of Emily Ruete didn’t, however, reflect a gradually growing awareness of wider historical injustices. It came about suddenly — in fact, it’s possible to pinpoint a specific day on which the wheels were set in motion: 25 May 2020, the day a white police officer killed George Floyd, an African-American man, in Minneapolis.

The death, and the consequent surge in the Black Lives Matter movement, provoked a rethink of the memorialisation of individuals implicated in slavery, or in colonialism more generally. In the United States, numerous monuments commemorating the Confederacy, for example, were toppled or, having been targeted by protesters, removed by the authorities. In the British city of Bristol, protesters toppled the bronze statue of English slave trader and Tory member of parliament Edward Colston (1636–1721) and dumped it into the harbour. Having recovered the statue, the authorities took it to a “secure location.”

In this context, the dispute over Emily Ruete Square was a small skirmish. Public interest died down quickly. Ruete was, after all, a minor historical figure — and there have been more obvious and prominent targets in Hamburg.

None has been more prominent than Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), the preeminent political leader of nineteenth-century Germany. As prime minister of the militarily and politically dominant German state of Prussia, he engineered the unification of Germany in 1871 and served as its first chancellor. An ardent defender of the monarchy, he had the support of Prussia’s landed gentry; in turn he ensured that their privileges remained untouched.

Bismarck’s time as chancellor was marked by two momentous conflicts. They pitted Bismarck first against the Catholic Church and then against the socialist labour movement, both of which he believed posed threats to the status quo. Having largely lost the Kulturkampf (culture war) against the Catholic Church, he formed an alliance with the party representing Catholics in parliament to take on the socialists. He had more success on that front, not least by introducing compulsory sickness, disability, accident and retirement insurance schemes, making imperial Germany something of a pioneer of welfare capitalism and at the same time reminding the socialists’ prospective supporters that their interests were well served by the government.

Unlike Ruete, Bismarck was no slave owner. Nor did he defend the institution of slavery. That he nevertheless became a target was because, as German chancellor, he hosted the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 that eventually led to the divvying up of most of Africa among the European colonial powers. He also oversaw Germany’s acquisition of colonies in west, southwest and east Africa and in the Pacific, including New Guinea, Samoa and Micronesia. Although he initially opposed Germany’s becoming a colonial power, he later took a hands-on approach to furthering its interests in Africa and the Pacific. He even enlisted Emily Ruete in diplomatic manoeuvres to secure Germany’s influence over Zanzibar (which Germany later traded with Britain for Helgoland, a small island off the German coast).

Making the case for German colonial rule in Africa, Bismarck’s government drew on arguments provided by Christian abolitionists. Germany’s late nineteenth-century colonial ventures thus became precursors of the Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq in 1991, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and other modern-day humanitarian interventions. But although Bismarck’s government tried to justify German colonialism on humanitarian grounds, it condoned slavery and forced labour in its African colonies.

After his resignation in 1890, Bismarck was venerated as unified Germany’s founding father, not only during the remaining twenty-eight years of the monarchy but also, albeit less emphatically, in the Weimar Republic, in Nazi Germany and in the Federal Republic. Throughout Germany, numerous Bismarck statues are testament to the admiration. Hamburg has three. His memorialisation even went beyond Germany; the capital of the US state of North Dakota, for example, is named after him.

Contested: another of Hamburg’s Bismarck memorials, after cleaning. Klaus Neumann

By far the largest of Hamburg’s Bismarck statues, and the best known nationally, sits on the edge of the red light district of St Pauli and overlooks the river Elbe. Made of one hundred blocks of granite, it is more than thirty-four metres high and weighs more than 600 tonnes. Unveiled in 1906 after three years’ construction, it depicts Bismarck as a medieval knight holding a sword. It was listed on the cultural heritage register in 1960.

The monument has long been the focus of protests. It attracted controversy even during the planning phase. Sculptor Hugo Lederer and architect Johann Emil Schaudt’s design was criticised for portraying a seemingly unapproachable leader, prompting art historian Aby Warburg to deride its critics as anti-modernists. In the latter years of the Weimar Republic, German nationalists who celebrated Bismarck’s birthday at the memorial regularly clashed with left-wing demonstrators. In 1990, on the day of German reunification, unknown climbers covered Bismarck’s head with a Helmut Kohl mask, which inspired Stephanie Bart’s 2009 novel Goodbye Bismarck. In 2015, the monument was repurposed for another ephemeral work of art, “Capricorn Two,” when an ibex was mounted on Bismarck’s head.

When the Black Lives Matter movement took hold in Germany, Bismarck memorials were among its first targets. On 14 June, a week after Colston’s statue was dumped in Bristol Harbour, activists daubed one of the smaller Bismarck statues in Hamburg with red paint. The larger statue was spared the same fate only because it was concealed behind fences and scaffolding. In 2014, the federal government budgeted €6.5 million to restore the crumbling memorial, with the proviso that the state government match that amount to rebuild the surrounding park. Later, the overall amount budgeted for memorial and park was increased to €15.4 million. It was ironic that work on the monument began shortly before the repercussions of George Floyd’s killing reached Germany.

The decision to spend so much on restoring the Bismarck monument attracted criticism well before May 2020. Since January, a group that calls itself Intervention Bismarck-Denkmal has demanded via Twitter that the renovation work stop immediately. But the criticism was amplified following Floyd’s death, with new groups, such as Bismarck’s Critical Neighbours, adding their voice. When demonstrators demanded a halt to the project on 28 June, the Social Democrats and Greens, who have been in power in Hamburg since 2015, found themselves in a quandary. They were committed to restoring the monument but didn’t want to be seen defending what it was increasingly associated with: colonialism and racism. The state government therefore proposed to hold consultations to determine how the site could be repurposed without removing the monument. (They will kick off this Thursday, 19 November, with an online panel discussion, “Recontextualising Bismarck.”)

Proposals advanced thus far include a memorial museum inside the base of the monument to document Hamburg’s colonial past, and a counter-memorial adjacent to the statue. A Hamburg precedent exists for the latter: in 1982, rather than removing a controversial war memorial in the centre of the city, the state government commissioned the Austrian artist Alfred Hrdlicka to create a counter-memorial right next to it. Ideas less likely to be adopted include turning Bismarck on his head or replacing his granite sword with an illuminated Star Wars–type lightsabre.

Are the unnaming of Emily Ruete Square and demands for the removal of Bismarck statues evidence that Germany is heading towards an Orwellian dystopia where anything not deemed politically correct will be suppressed? No — if only because the “cancel culture” has been accompanied by loud protests (such as Iken’s) and authorities haven’t rushed to get rid of street names honouring the slave trader Schimmelmann or the opportunist Gründgens.

Prominent in the debate about what to do with the hundreds of Bismarck memorials in Germany is opposition to any form of Black Lives Matter–inspired iconoclasm. More often than not, the defenders of the monuments have spoken out against iconoclasm as such, rather than in defence of Bismarck as a historical figure. But that is likely to reflect strategic choices rather than any kind of censorship.

Iken and others nevertheless have a point. During the district assembly committee’s debate, Free Democrat Lars Jessen said he was “astonished” by the proposal to unname Emily Ruete Square because it was “incomprehensible” that Ruete’s views had only now become known. But the issue is not so much that the Greens and Social Democrats belatedly discovered Ruete’s racism; it’s that they didn’t care to engage with her life before suggesting a square be named after her.

Ruete’s 1886 memoir was reissued in 1989, accompanied by an editorial essay that contextualises her text, and republished by different publishers in 1998, 2007 and 2013. It is still in print and is available in several Hamburg libraries. I suspect the fact that Ruete was a woman of colour in nineteenth-century Germany was considered sufficient grounds for honouring her — in the same way that, a year later, her comments about slavery were sufficient grounds to withdraw the honour.

The complexity that makes Ruete such an intriguing historical figure has been in plain view, but was recognised only briefly during the discussions about the square. This complexity has not yet received the attention it warrants. Once the history workshop had produced evidence of her views about slavery and Black Africans, other aspects of her persona no longer mattered. Yes, she was an apologist for slavery. But she was also an astute observer of the hypocritical stance of European humanitarians in Zanzibar. She had only contempt for the British anti-slavery campaigners who took no interest in the welfare of people who had been freed: at best, she commented sarcastically in her memoir, European humanitarians were knitting woollen socks for the former slaves.

Complications: the Monument to Slaves in Stone Town, Zanzibar. Wikimedia

That it is possible to engage with Ruete while criticising her views on slavery and her role as a slave owner was demonstrated in 2009, when the Hamburg-based artist HM Jokinen created the performance “An Maria Ernestina,” an artistic intervention designed to disrupt the exhibition about Ruete at the Hamburg town hall. “I welcome the exhibition about Sayyida Salme, daughter of a slave,” the artist wrote at the time. “But I reject the honouring of a princess who accepted as normal the services of slaves and who profited from them.”

Ruete was also a perceptive observer of racism in Germany and the colonial gaze to which she herself was subjected: “At social events, in the theatre and at concerts, I had the feeling that I was constantly being looked at — something that I found most annoying,” she recalled in her second book, Briefe nach der Heimat. “One day, as my husband and I were out for a stroll, a couple of ladies in an equipage went by. Not only did they stare at us when they went past; but, when I accidentally turned around, I noticed the two ladies kneeling on the back seat in order to be able to observe us more closely.”

It is telling that the first German edition of Briefe nach der Heimat, in which Ruete writes about the first years of her life in Germany, was published only in 1999, six years after its English translation, and has never been reissued. Doesn’t the unnaming of Emily Ruete Square also perpetuate the silencing of Ruete’s critical views about Hamburg society?

I too have misgivings about the readiness with which Emily Ruete Square was unnamed, but mine are different from those articulated by Matthias Iken and aren’t specific to memorials tainted by Hamburg’s colonial past. Germany is still a country of perpetrators, accomplices, bystanders and their direct descendants. Memorialising the lives of the victims of Nazi Germany (or of German colonialism, for that matter) while removing from public view any references to the lives of perpetrators, accomplices and bystanders risks obscuring that fact.

Over the past twenty-eight years, the artist Gunter Demnig has laid more than 75,000 Stolpersteine (“stumbling stones”): concrete cubes with brass plates inscribed with the name of a victim of Nazi persecution. The overwhelming majority of Stolpersteine are in Germany. This is undoubtedly an effective means of helping Germans to remember the Holocaust and honour the many ordinary people who became its victims, but shouldn’t Germans also be compelled to stumble across the names of perpetrators and accomplices, lest the complicity of ordinary Germans is forgotten?

Or, as I proposed some twenty years ago, might it not be appropriate for Hamburg residents to perform a public reading not only of the names of the thousands of Hamburg Jews who were killed in the Holocaust but also of the names in the 1943 Adressbuch, the last directory of all the heads of all households registered in Hamburg, which was published during the second world war?

Bismarck is in good company. Other historical figures — Immanuel Kant among them — have been exposed as apologists for colonialism or as racists. Postcolonial and anti-racist iconoclasts would be very busy indeed if we decided to no longer commemorate the lives of individuals who used the “n” word, denigrated people of colour or were implicated in German colonial ventures. Which is not to say that Kant’s writings about “races,” for example, don’t deserve more critical attention than they have received thus far.

Nor are the demands to raze controversial memorials unprecedented. After 1989, East Germans were often only too ready to expunge all traces of the German Democratic Republic by renaming streets and schools and removing memorials. Sometimes the desire to draw a line under the past even led to the targeting of people like Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who happened to be communists but who could not be held responsible for Stalinist repression. With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that attempts to expunge all references to East Germany’s communist regime have been counterproductive and ill-conceived.

But when it comes to German debates about memorials today, I don’t see a cancel culture at work. Rather, I detect attempts to neutralise, if not sanitise, the past. Complementing a restored and cleaned-up Bismarck monument with an exhibition about Hamburg’s colonial past and with a counter-memorial, however worthy that may be in itself, could encourage Hamburg residents to wash their hands of the legacies of colonialism. Rather than letting the past intrude into the present, a counter-memorial on its own might put the past to rest. But the thirty-four-metre high Bismarck monument would stand in the way of such memorial hygiene.

Sure, it could be regarded as an eyesore. But because it is so monumental and ugly, it can’t be easily ignored. It could therefore serve as an awkward reminder of Germany’s dark pasts, and their legacies and continuation into the present. Something like that happened in 2004–05 when the Wissmann statue, which had been put into storage in 1968, was re-erected for fourteen months in the context of HM Jokinen’s afrika-hamburg.de art project.

Like the Hamburg war memorial, whose message was meant to be neutralised by Hrdlicka’s counter-memorial, the granite Bismarck should remain a beacon for protests and a canvas for graffiti and other ephemeral art, notwithstanding any adjacent counter-memorial. Let’s hope that the authorities don’t take the view that a counter-memorial is a substitute for anti-memorial graffiti and that the statue therefore needs to be kept spotlessly clean.

The Hrdlicka memorial is not enough to counter Hamburg’s most obnoxious war memorial: traces of red paint, and of countless attempts to remove that paint, have done at least as much to call the war memorial’s raison d’être into question. The head of the district of Hamburg-Altona, which is responsible for one of the smaller Bismarck statues, had a good point when she announced after it was defaced that council workers were not expected to clean it up immediately.

Bismarck has been a controversial historical figure not only because of his role in German colonialism but also because he was an anti-democrat, because he tried to repress the organised labour movement and because of his anti-Semitism. He was also the founder of Germany as a political entity. Critically engaging with his memory could prompt a reassessment not just of the kind of aggressive nineteenth-century nationalism that informed the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian war, which led to the unification of Germany, but also of the idea of the nation that suffuses today’s understanding of what it means to be German.

I hope the Bismarck colossus overlooking the river Elbe will stick around to catalyse discussions that go beyond a distancing from recognisably dark pasts and instead engage with seemingly unproblematic presents. I also hope that closer attention to the experiences of Emily Ruete will facilitate a public conversation about everyday racism and the lives of people of colour in Hamburg, be it in the late nineteenth or in the early twenty-first century.

Some weeks ago, the state archives created a new position to investigate the colonial dimensions of street names in Hamburg. Obviously the authorities are hoping to avoid in future the kind of embarrassment that was caused by the naming of Emily Ruete Square. But what might actually be needed to get people in Hamburg to engage with the complexity that made Ruete such an intriguing historical figure is a (non-official) effort to rename that square in Hamburg-Nord. •

The post Cancelling Bismarck appeared first on Inside Story.

A superior public health infrastructure with a large number of intensive care beds helps explain Germany’s comparatively low mortality rate. At no stage have hospitals been overwhelmed by patients requiring ventilators; in fact, German hospitals have been able to treat patients from Italy, France and the Netherlands. Crucial in keeping the number of infections manageable has been a nationwide lockdown and social distancing rules that have been observed by most people.

Over the past couple of weeks, Germany’s state governments have loosened restrictions. Most shops are back in business, many students have been able to return to school, and museums and art galleries have reopened. In one state, even restaurants are operating, albeit only for local residents.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and the sixteen state premiers met by video last Wednesday to discuss a further easing of the restrictions. Many of the premiers have been pushing for a speedy relaxation of the rules, and Merkel, the ever-cautious trained natural scientist, could do little but acquiesce. The only concession she secured was a commitment to reimpose restrictions locally if the number of new infections topped fifty per 100,000 inhabitants in a particular district. Since Wednesday, this Obergrenze, or upper limit, has been breached in five districts, but the local authorities’ response has been far less consistent than had presumably been envisaged by Merkel and the virologists advising her.

Many commentators have suggested that the rationale for easing restrictions quickly has been the realisation that Germany is reaching a tipping point. Germans overwhelmingly welcomed the lockdown when it was introduced in March, but now many of them are sick and tired of it and demanding a return to life as usual. A sizeable minority want to work, shop and go on holidays exactly as they used to. They are also no longer in favour of wearing the mandatory face masks on public transport and in shops, or of obeying social distancing rules.

The last time an Obergrenze became politically contentious was in late 2015 when the then premier of Bavaria, Horst Seehofer, demanded that Germany impose an upper limit on the number of asylum seekers admitted in a given year. This declaration embroiled Seehofer and Merkel in a bitter conflict lasting more than two years, which he eventually won. Now it is Merkel who insists on an upper limit, and again it is doubtful she will prevail.

Talk of an Obergrenze isn’t the only reminder of the so-called refugee crisis. Then, too, many politicians and journalists warned that “die Stimmung kippt” — that Germany was reaching, or had already reached, a tipping point, after which a majority of Germans would reject the refugee policies of the Merkel government. Then and now, those predicting a soon-to-be-reached tipping point could point to opinion polls. In September 2015, a clear majority supported the Merkel government’s decision to admit asylum seekers whose claims should have been processed in Greece or Hungary. Six months later, that was no longer the case. Now, polls suggest that support for the restrictions imposed by federal, state and local governments is declining fast.

Public protests are the most visible evidence of a change of public mood. Since the beginning of the lockdown, local governments have prohibited large public gatherings. But in a country in which rallies have long been an important means of protest, it has proven difficult for the authorities to ban demonstrations altogether.

Take 1 May, a day that’s more than any other associated with noisy rallies. This year the trade unions cancelled their traditional Labour Day marches, but that didn’t stop others. In Hamburg, for example, the authorities issued permits for forty-three public protests, always with the proviso that organisers agreed to an Obergrenze (usually twenty-five demonstrators), a stationary format, everybody wearing masks and a 1.5 metre gap between demonstrators. In almost all cases, protesters obeyed these rules.

Elsewhere, wild protests have taken place without the prior approval of local authorities, along with rallies whose participants haven’t adhered to stipulated conditions. Nearly all of these protests were directed at the lockdown. They have continued even after many of the restrictions were removed.

The first of these protests was in Berlin on 28 March. Protesters gathered on Rosa Luxemburg Square and one of the organisers, the writer Anselm Lenz, handed out copies of the Grundgesetz, Germany’s constitution. In an interview he said that the state had formed an alliance with the pharmaceutical industry and digital technology companies to abolish democracy. Only forty people attended what was later dubbed the first Hygiene-Demo, but the crowds were larger at subsequent rallies. Last Saturday, the police tried to restrict access to the square to ensure that the permitted number of demonstrators — a mere fifty — would not be exceeded, whereupon more than a thousand demonstrators gathered at nearby Alexanderplatz.

The largest demonstrations have been held in Stuttgart, the capital of Baden-Württemberg, in the affluent southwest of the country. There, the first rally took place on 18 April — but only after Germany’s high court had ruled that a ban imposed by the local authorities had to be rescinded. Last Saturday, about 5000 demonstrators gathered at Stuttgart’s Cannstatter Wasen, a large open space that is often used for festivals. Following the court ruling, the Baden-Württemberg authorities have been less restrictive and had granted a permit for a 10,000-strong demonstration.

Some of these demonstrations have been marred by violence. On two occasions, journalists were attacked. On others, there were squabbles between demonstrators and police who tried to enforce the stipulated Obergrenze and social distancing rules.

Similar demonstrations have been held elsewhere: from San Francisco to Melbourne, and from London to Naples. In all these cases, they have attracted a motley bunch of protesters, including, among others, conspiracy theorists, people belonging to far-right fringe groups, anti-vaxxers and civil rights activists. In some instances, populist leaders — most notably Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro — have given them their blessing.

What’s specific to Germany isn’t the much-reported gatherings in Berlin and Stuttgart but the numerous protests in small towns in East Germany. I believe these are the manifestations of the discontent that has made politicians nervous and eager to end the restrictions sooner rather than later.

In Zittau, a town of about 30,000 in the southeast of Saxony, close to the borders with the Czech Republic and Poland, a Facebook group of people critical of the lockdown formed about six weeks ago. On 6 April, the group sent an open letter to the local media. Its twenty-four signatories bemoaned “massive and disproportionate human rights violations.” They claimed that the restrictions represented the kind of totalitarianism that had last been seen thirty years ago. During the weekly rallies in Zittau, demonstrators have shouted, “Wir sind das Volk” (We are the people), the catchcry of the civil rights activists who took to the streets during the dying weeks of the German Democratic Republic in 1989.

Pirna is another medium-sized town in the southeast of Saxony. Like Zittau, Pirna is in an electorate where the candidate for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD, came first in the 2017 federal elections. There, the first wild protest was organised on 22 April by a police officer who represents the AfD in the local shire parliament.

Last Wednesday, about 250 people turned up for the latest demonstration opposite the town hall. Two days later, Pirna’s mayor, Klaus-Peter Hanke, invited three of the protesters and Saxony’s minister for social cohesion, the Social Democrat Petra Köpping, to join him in a panel discussion live-streamed on Facebook and YouTube.

Köpping did most of the talking, trying to explain the rationale behind her government’s response to the pandemic. At the conclusion of the event, one of the protesters said he much appreciated the fact that the minister had provided a lot of information. Earlier he had complained that the information supplied by the government was contradictory and sometimes incorrect, but also somewhat proudly admitted that for the past few weeks he had stopped paying attention to news related to the pandemic.

Outside of Saxony, Köpping is known as the author of the 2018 book Integriert doch erst mal uns! (You ought to integrate us first!), which argues that many East Germans had been the victims of German reunification, and that their experience, including their humiliation at the hands of West Germans, had never been properly acknowledged. During the panel discussion, she followed the script recommended in her book: she took the protesters’ concerns seriously and implied that they were legitimate, spoke patiently and conveyed empathy.

Only once did Köpping lose her calm. When one of the panellists complained that the police response to the demonstrations in Pirna had been heavy-handed, she said that it had to be seen in the context of a general deterioration of political culture. She talked about the personal abuse directed at her, and then made a reference to the protests against refugees in 2015, suggesting that they and the more recent protests against the lockdown were comparable.

There are indeed parallels between the opposition to government policy in 2015 and the opposition to government policy now. In both cases, the protests were sometimes initiated and at other times instrumentalised by the far right. As happened in 2015, protesters have objected to not being consulted and to being disadvantaged by government policies. Misinformation campaigns, some of them led by Russian state-owned media, fuelled some of the protests in 2015. In 2020, stories that the pandemic is less harmful than the common flu or is a ploy by Bill Gates can be traced back to Russian sources.

In 2015, those opposed to the government’s refugee policy saw themselves (rather than forcibly displaced non-Germans) as victims. In 2020, too, protesters perceive government policy as a means to harm them rather than protect others. (Of course, if the rate of infections were to increase substantially, everybody, and not just people in aged care facilities, would be at great risk of falling victim to the virus.)

Recent polls suggest that the Christian Democrats have benefited from the current crisis. With its support dropping below 10 per cent, the AfD’s efforts to capitalise on any disquiet about the government’s measures have failed. By and large, so have other attempts to connect an anti-migrant message to the concerns about the recent restrictions.

The government’s response to refugees in August and September 2015 is now widely seen as a mistake, and this assessment informs government policy in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic today. About a week ago, Matthias Iken, deputy editor-in-chief of the conservative Hamburger Abendblatt, wrote that the federal government was at risk of repeating its errors from 2015, namely failing to abandon a policy “that was initially called for but which could not be sustained. In the same way in which a country can’t accommodate close to a million refugees within a few months, it can’t be put on ice for weeks.” Favourable approval ratings, a sympathetic media and admiration from Germany’s neighbours would once again turn out to be but a “fleeting blessing.”

This historical analogy implies that Merkel’s policy in 2015 was politically suicidal rather than logistically impossible. After all, eventually Germany met the challenge of accommodating the refugees successfully. The analogy also neglects the fact that the narrative about the refugee policy’s political impossibility may be true for some parts of the country, including the southeast of Saxony (where vehement opposition to that policy began well before Merkel’s approval ratings nose-dived), but incorrect for others. The idea that Germany reached, and then went beyond, a tipping point in late 2015 has been shaped by a focus on what happened in places such as Pirna that were not representative then and are not representative now.

It would be a mistake to assume that local unrest in Pirna and Zittau will be replicated in the rest of the country. Hamburg may be just as unrepresentative as Pirna, but it’s worth noting that of the forty-three protests held in that city on 1 May not one was about the lockdown. While it’s reasonable to weigh up the costs and benefits of measures designed to slow down the spread of the coronavirus, it would make little sense to let government policy be informed by a misplaced fear of popular discontent.

This is not to downplay the significance of the current demonstrations. The protesters may well radicalise, as happened during 2014’s anti-immigration Pegida marches in Dresden and 2015’s anti-refugee protests. But the anger that drives the protests now, particularly in the east of the country, needs to be understood as more than simply a response to the lockdown, in the same way that the anti-immigration protests have never just been about migrants. For that reason alone, it would be wrong to make extensive concessions to the protesters — and in the process perhaps risk Germany’s exposure to the virus increasing exponentially — in the hope of ending the discontent. •

The post Tipping points appeared first on Inside Story.

In the New York Times, columnist Bret Stephens imagined what people in 2025 would make of today’s crisis. The year 2020 would be remembered for the rise of authoritarianism, he thought: “The pandemic provided a ready-made excuse for democratic governments around the world to obstruct opposition parties, ban public assemblies, suppress voting, quarantine cities, close borders, limit trade, strong-arm businesses, impose travel restrictions and censor hostile media outlets in the name of combating ‘false information.’”

Early evidence from around the world gives some support to Stephens’s view. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has sidelined parliament indefinitely and is ruling by decree. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte told the police to shoot people who violate the curfew, and his track record in government suggests he meant it and the police will be only too happy to oblige. In Israel, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not only capitalised on his country’s fear by postponing his own trial, writes Chemi Shalev in Haaretz, but has also “opened Israel’s door to a totalitarian state by deploying the Shin Bet’s formidable surveillance apparatus on Israeli citizens, with no external or parliamentary oversight.” Orbán, Duterte and Netanyahu all seem to have got away with entrenching their positions and silencing dissent. Elsewhere, too, measures that do little to halt the spread of the virus but demonstrate the state’s capacity and willingness to restrict the liberties of some of its citizens — the internment of potential carriers of the virus in a far-flung immigration detention centre, for instance — have met with applause.

Even governments and leaders in countries that have shown few signs of supporting illiberal politicians have suspended constitutionally enshrined freedoms without meeting much resistance. Governments have prohibited church services and football matches, banned demonstrations, declared states of emergency, and imposed curfews and travel restrictions without attracting an outcry. Does this suggest a growing preparedness to submit to authoritarian rule?

Predictions that the coronavirus pandemic will further strengthen authoritarian regimes and erode liberal democracy are also supported by fifteen or so years of evidence of a trend towards authoritarianism and a rise in right-wing populism. In its annual review of human rights in Europe, published last week, Amnesty International notes how “values were changing across Europe,” with the rule of law, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly increasingly under threat in several countries. The report draws attention to the deterioration of human rights in countries such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Romania and Serbia, and is also critical of France, where “the authorities disproportionately restricted the right to freedom of peaceful assembly,” and Germany, where a majority of states “introduced far-reaching new police powers, including extensive surveillance measures.”

According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s most recent Democracy Index, democratic practices have been in decline for several years. Each year, the EIU uses five categories of data — electoral process and pluralism; the functioning of government; political participation; political culture; and civil liberties — to calculate a score for each of 167 countries. Last year’s report recorded the lowest average global score since the index was first produced in 2006.

The US-based (and US government–funded) think tank Freedom House found that 2019 was the fourteenth consecutive year of decline in global freedom. According to its most recent Freedom in the World report, “The gap between setbacks and gains widened compared with 2018, as individuals in sixty-four countries experienced deterioration in their political rights and civil liberties while those in just thirty-seven experienced improvements.”

The methodologies used by Freedom House and the EIU differ, as do some of their country-by-country results, but their overall findings are remarkably similar. The most recent Freedom House and EIU surveys both put Norway at the top of their charts (with Sweden and Finland joint first in Freedom House’s ranking, and Iceland and Sweden coming second and third in the EIU’s), and countries notorious for human rights violations, such as North Korea, Syria and Turkmenistan, at the bottom.

Election outcomes have also been used as evidence of the decline of liberal democracy, and they do show far-right parties increasing their share of the vote. According to the 2019 Timbro Authoritarian Populism Index, populist and extremist parties captured around 10 per cent of the vote in thirty-three European countries in 1993, but that figure has doubled since then. Today, more people are living in countries with authoritarian, autocratic or right-wing populist leaders than twenty — or even ten — years ago. Think of Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the United States.

In several European countries, respectable centre-right or centre-left parties have invited parties that used to be considered unfit for government to join them in coalition agreements. Norway’s Fremskrittspartiet (Progress Party), for example, deemed too extremist just ten years ago, was part of the country’s ruling coalition from 2013 until January this year, when it withdrew in protest at the repatriation from Syria of a Norwegian woman suspected of having supported Islamic State. In Finland, the right-wing populist Finns Party was part of a governing coalition led by Juha Sipilä of the conservative Centre Party from 2015 until 2017. In a recent interview with the German magazine Spiegel, the country’s current prime minister, Sanna Marin of the Social Democrats, who heads a centre-left government, didn’t categorically rule out a future deal with the Finns Party.

To judge whether the current pandemic is likely to hasten the end of liberal democracy and accelerate the rise of populism and authoritarianism, we need to know more about why populist leaders and autocratic regimes have been comparatively successful in recent years. If we knew which factors have contributed to their appeal, we could make a more informed prediction about the likely effects of the coronavirus crisis. It would also be useful to know more about the similarities and differences between, say, Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, or between Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and Orbán’s Fidesz. Finally, we need to better understand why a country such as Norway was awarded a perfect score for the strength of its liberal democracy despite the fact that the data was collected when the country was governed by a coalition that included the Fremskrittspartiet.

In search for answers to these questions, I turned to four books about populism and/or the far right published in the past twelve months.

Cas Mudde is a Dutch political scientist at the University of Georgia. He has written half a dozen books about populism, racism and right-wing extremism, the latest of which, The Far Right Today, is a very readable introduction to what he calls the “fourth wave of the postwar far right.”

According to Mudde, this wave began at the turn of the century and followed three earlier waves: neo-fascism (1945–55), right-wing populism (1955–80) and the radical right (1980–2000). For Mudde, people on the far right believe that “inequalities between people are natural and positive” and are hostile to liberal democracy. He distinguishes between the extreme right, which rejects democracy, and the radical right, which “accepts the essence of democracy, but opposes fundamental elements of liberal democracy, most notably minority rights, rule of law, and separation of powers.” While both variants of the far right are nativist and authoritarian, only the radical right can be, and often is, populist.

Mudde aims to highlight the main characteristics of the far right over the past twenty years. That’s a big ask because one of its features is heterogeneity. “The far right is plural rather than singular,” Mudde writes. “[E]ven within the most relevant subcategory of the far right, that is, populist radical right parties, differences are at least as pronounced as similarities.” And even in countries that are structurally similar, far-right movements and parties differ enormously in terms of ideology, organisation and strength.

The far right has grown over the past twenty years to the point that it has become mainstream, says Mudde. It has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between the radical right and the mainstream right, and coalitions between radical-right parties and mainstream parties have become routine. He also observes that the leaders of far-right parties — once exclusively white men — increasingly resemble those of mainstream parties. He cites the example of Alice Weidel, the parliamentary co-leader of the Alternative for Germany: “female and lesbian, she worked for Goldman Sachs and speaks Mandarin, and lives partly abroad (in Switzerland) with her non-white partner.” The far right’s supporters, however, are still overwhelmingly white and male.

The far right’s support, Mudde says, is fuelled more by sociocultural than socioeconomic anxieties, although it is not always easy to separate the two: “It is the sociocultural translation of socioeconomic issues that explains most support for far-right policies.” The issues that have energised the far right more than any other are immigration and integration, but he doesn’t hold the “refugee crisis” responsible for its mainstreaming. Its ultimate goal is a monocultural ethnocracy — a nominally democratic regime in which citizenship is based on ethnicity. But far-right groups are also obsessed with security (typically blaming migrants for insecurity) and corruption.

Mainstreaming and normalisation should not be confused with domestication. Mudde argues that we have been witnessing a radicalisation of the mainstream. This is also true in organisational terms: some of the most successful far-right parties in Europe — the Freedom Party in Austria, PiS in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary — were previously mainstream conservative parties. At the same time, mainstream parties have adopted positions that were previously the preserve of the far right, with the Republicans in the United States being a case in point. In countries whose electoral systems favour coalition governments, the populist radical right has become the most logical partner for mainstream right-wing parties because of its ideological fit.

“In fact,” Mudde writes, “over recent decades, the populist radical right has barely moderated, not even when in government. Instead, mainstream parties have radicalised, moving further towards the (populist radical) right in terms of, first and foremost, immigration and integration, but also law and order, European integration (or international collaboration more generally), and populism.” The far right is increasingly able to set the agenda. In that, it has been helped by elements of the mainstream media.

The picture painted by Mudde is bleak. His book doesn’t provide grounds for optimism about how the world will look when the current crisis is behind us. But he has some practical suggestions: the defenders of liberal democracy ought to fight for it (rather than merely against the far right), they ought to reclaim the political agenda, and they “should set clear limits to what collaborations and positions are consistent with liberal democratic values.” I suspect Mudde would not consider Norway between 2013 and 2019, or Finland between 2015 and 2017 to be exemplary success stories

The main value of Mudde’s book is its broad sweep — but given the heterogeneity of the phenomenon that he describes, this is probably also one of its weaknesses. A more important drawback is Mudde’s unwillingness to dig deeper. I take his point that the far right is successful because its agenda has been adopted by previously moderate conservatives. But that raises the question of why nativism and authoritarianism are more attractive now than they were twenty years ago — including to previously moderate conservatives. For it’s hard to believe that the radicalisation of mainstream parties is largely the result of tactical positioning.

Pippa Norris teaches politics at Harvard University and is professor of government at the University of Sydney. Her co-author, Ronald Inglehart, is a political scientist at the University of Michigan. Their book Cultural Backlash, while a hefty 554 pages, puts forward a comparatively simple argument: over the past few decades, largely because of changing values between generations but also because of the expansion of tertiary education and increasing urbanisation, high-income Western societies have moved “in a more socially liberal direction.” As cultural change reached a tipping point, an “authoritarian reflex” was triggered, and social conservatives began supporting populist authoritarian parties and political leaders. Here is a summary of their argument about Trump’s America:

We argue that a tipping point has been reached in the gradual erosion of the socially conservative hegemony of traditional values in America. This has triggered a negative authoritarian counterreaction among moral conservatives threatened by these cultural shifts — a backlash that has been especially powerful in mobilising older generations of white men in rural communities.

Norris and Inglehart write about long-term cultural change as if it has occurred naturally. They also depict the “authoritarian reflex” as almost inevitable: “Newton’s third law of motion holds that ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,’” they write. While conceding that “societal changes are more complicated than physical ones,” they nevertheless claim that these changes “can reach a tipping point that brings an analogous response.” Their evidence suggests that “birth cohort effects” play an important role in societal change. But I am sceptical about applying Newton’s law to sociocultural dynamics. What about the human capacity for adaptation and value change?

Norris and Inglehart argue that the minority position of social conservatives doesn’t act as a brake on their influence during the tipping point phase because they are much more likely to vote than young and generally less conservative people.

Unlike Mudde, who treats populism as a common feature of the radical right, Norris and Inglehart argue that political parties can be classified along three axes: authoritarian–libertarian, populist–pluralist, and (economic) left–(economic) right. In doing so, they recognise that the rise of populism in Western democracies manifested itself also in the emergence of powerful left-wing and/or libertarian populist parties and movements, such as Podemos in Spain, the Five Star Movement in Italy, and Syriza in Greece, and that authoritarian values (security, conformity and obedience) shouldn’t be conflated with the values promoted by the (economic) right. In their view, however, populism in itself can also cause damage: it “tends to undermine the legitimacy of democratic checks on executive powers, opening the door for soft authoritarian leaders.”

Their analysis focuses on the attraction of parties that offer both populism and authoritarianism, “a dangerous combination fuelling a cult of fear.” They argue that authoritarianism arose more from cultural backlash than economic grievance, whereas those who perceive economic disadvantages (without necessarily experiencing them objectively) tend to be particularly attracted to populism. Overall, however, and much like Mudde, they agree that the terrain on which today’s key battlelines are drawn is culture rather than the economy. That claim is supported, for example, by a survey of thirteen democracies showing that since 1984, non-economic issues have become more prominent than economic issues in party programs.

Norris and Inglehart’s analysis is informed by large-scale longitudinal datasets about attitudes and values, voting behaviour and social change. As often happens in this kind of data-driven research, the figures also set limits for their analysis. The abundance of data about electoral behaviour means their litmus test for the strength of authoritarianism is the performance of authoritarian parties at the elections. They have comparatively little to say about people who hold authoritarian values long before a political party advocating these values enters the scene.

Norris and Inglehart are not as pessimistic as Mudde. While concluding that “it remains to be seen how resilient liberal democracy will be in Western societies, or whether it will be damaged irreparably by authoritarian populist forces,” they also seem to believe that the “advance of liberal values” will resume after the “tipping point era.”

Where Mudde believes that by trying to steal the far right’s thunder, mainstream parties are normalising authoritarian positions, Norris and Inglehart take a very different position. They claim that governing elites in countries such as Norway and Sweden “may have undermined confidence in democratic institutions” by not responding to “genuine public concerns” about refugees and asylum seekers, and that it is possible to squeeze out authoritarian-populist parties “by adopting immigration policies that are more restrictive” and using “nationalistic language.” In fact, they seem to validate the far right’s criticism of policies and programs for asylum seekers and refugees by demanding that they “need to be carefully calibrated to avoid cultural backlash and accusations of ‘queue jumping.’”

I don’t doubt that it is possible to sideline authoritarian-populist parties (as happened last year in Denmark, for example) or prevent them from playing a major role in the first place (as has happened in Australia, among other countries). But this often comes at the high price of the radicalisation of mainstream parties. The rankings in the EIU and Freedom House reports make me wonder whether this radicalisation is always properly accounted for — particularly in cases where it does not affect the functioning of government, citizens’ political participation, civil liberties and the electoral process, and where authoritarian values play out in relation to non-citizens, particularly those seeking asylum.

Norris and Inglehart ask the question that Mudde sidesteps: why has there been a recent trend towards authoritarian populism in Europe and the United States? I am, as they are, convinced that those who flock to authoritarian parties and leaders often do so because they feel threatened by society’s liberalisation, rather than because they are the victims of economic globalisation or because they feel threatened by migrants. But I am afraid that Norris and Inglehart’s focus on parties and votes is too narrow, and that they are telling only part of the story.

Mudde provides a very accessible account of a phenomenon that can be observed around the world. Norris and Ingleheart’s book is more narrowly focused — but within that focus the authors furnish a comprehensive analysis that is rich in detail. Overall their book is less readable than Mudde’s because they keep repeating their main thesis, and overload the text with statistical information (much of which could have been relegated to the appendix). Given the insights they are offering, the text’s unwieldiness is a great shame.

Walden Bello is a Filipino political activist, eminent sociologist and former member of parliament who was awarded the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize) in 2003 for his efforts “in educating civil society about the effects of corporate globalisation.”

Bello’s book differs in three important respects from the two I’ve discussed so far. First, his analysis doesn’t focus on European and North American democracies. In fact, of his case studies, only one, about Italy, is European; the others deal with Chile, Indonesia, India, Brazil and Thailand. But not even Bello’s Italy is part of the global North as we know it, because he is writing about the rise of fascism in the Italy of the 1920s. That points to the second difference: Bello adopts a broader, historical approach spanning the past century. Finally, he doesn’t focus on electoral patterns and doesn’t rely on survey results; rather, in Marxian fashion, he focuses on class struggles and the dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution.

For Bello, “movements of the extreme right, authoritarian right, and fascism are variants of counterrevolution.” Thus, Benito Mussolini in 1920s Italy and Augusto Pinochet in 1973 in Chile led counterrevolutionary movements — against reform socialism in Italy, and against the Allende government in Chile, respectively. Only the fascism of Rodrigo Duterte, he says, has not been counterrevolutionary.

Although I’m not convinced by Bello’s argument that Marx’s 1851 text, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte, can guide our analysis of authoritarian populism today (or of Pinochet’s and Mussolini’s regimes), Counterrevolution does offer useful insights and, in some respects, can serve as a corrective to the books reviewed above. I mention only two insights here: Bello emphasises the role played by charismatic leaders, and draws attention to the fact that today’s far right is often using a critique of neoliberalism and globalisation first formulated by the radical left.

As authoritarianism increased its appeal, Theodor Adorno’s writings about the social psychology of fascism were rediscovered. Last year, Verso republished the path-breaking study The Authoritarian Personality, the result of a large research project led by Adorno in the United States during the 1940s that tried to explain the rise of fascism. Also last year, a transcript of a lecture about the extreme right, delivered by Adorno at the University of Vienna in April 1967 at the invitation of the Socialist Students of Austria, was published for the first time in German. The English translation will be available later this month.

In Germany, the year 1967 is best remembered for an anti-authoritarian revolt. Two months after Adorno’s talk, Benno Ohnesorg, one of the students protesting against the Berlin visit of the Shah of Iran, was shot dead by the police; the ensuing demonstrations marked the beginning of the student rebellion in Germany. It is less well known that 1967 also saw the resurgence of the German far right. In November 1966, the National Democratic Party of Germany, which had been founded only two years earlier, won more than 7 per cent of the vote at state elections in Hesse and Bavaria. The following year, shortly after Adorno’s Vienna lecture, it was successful at three more state elections.

I bought my copy of Adorno’s published lecture at a newsagency at a train station in a medium-sized German town, which is perhaps as good an indication as any of its reach. The interest that it has generated in Germany has a lot to do with the fact that Adorno’s reflections can be read as an original and perceptive commentary on the authoritarian-populist Alternative for Germany, which has been represented in federal parliament since 2017.

Adorno writes about the National Democratic Party’s campaign against intellectuals and established political parties and about its anti-Americanism, its claim to represent the true democrats, its attempt to monopolise the attribute “German,” its gesturing towards issues that must not be named, and its practice of making up stories and representing them as facts. He observes that the mobilisation of support for the far right appeals to a yearning for catastrophe, reminding us how little will be gained if we assume voters and followers of authoritarian populism make only rational choices when succumbing to the appeal of the Trumps and Orbáns and Bolsonaros.

Adorno observed that the approach of the German far right was characterised by a unique constellation of rational means and irrational ends. He found that the far right’s propaganda, much like the Nazis’ propaganda, was not a means to transport a message but was actually the substance of their politics. Adorno’s attention to propaganda is particularly noteworthy. He would have had much to say about social media’s impact on the rise of the populist far right — which surprisingly rates hardly a mention in the other three books.

Of the four books reviewed here, the one that was never intended for publication is perhaps the most interesting.

Well before we all became obsessed with a virus, two of the authors reviewed here likened authoritarianism to a contagious disease. Adorno suggested that the masses needed to be inoculated against the tricks employed by the far right, and that these tricks needed to be uncovered and named. I don’t share his optimism about the efficacy of such inoculation, but it’s certainly worth a try.

“Perhaps my stance can best be compared to that of the virologist,” writes Bello, “who is engrossed in the study of an exotic but deadly virus for scientific reasons and to make a contribution to the development of a vaccine against it.” He does not offer such a vaccine in his book, but at least he recognises the key role of contestation. While I don’t have much time for the use of physical laws in the social sciences, I am surprised that Mudde, Norris and Inglehart pay no attention to the opposition that has often been energised by the successes of far-right politicians. Whether authoritarian populists succeed will also depend on the strength of the counter-movements they trigger. Focusing on the rise of the populist far right without taking into account those movements unduly favours pessimism.

I would like to suggest that in order to come to grips with the phenomenon of authoritarian populism, neither Mudde’s overview, nor Norris and Inglehart’s number crunching, nor Bello’s class analysis gets us particularly far on its own. What is probably also needed is a combination of the kind of study carried out by Adorno and his collaborators in the 1940s, and ethnographic analyses that help us understand how and why individuals and communities subscribe to authoritarian values.

While the four books nevertheless help us to understand key aspects of the phenomenon of contemporary authoritarian populism, they don’t enable us to predict the post-coronavirus future. Contrary to the impression I gave at the beginning of this article, the evidence is messy. So far, the coronavirus crisis has harmed as well as benefited autocratic and populist leaders. That’s because some of them — including Erdoğan, Trump, Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson — initially failed to take the threat seriously. While some, including Orbán and Duterte, seized the opportunity to shore up their position, others who we might have expected to use the virus as a pretext for declaring a state of emergency and ruling by decree have been surprisingly reluctant to do so. They include, most importantly, Donald Trump, who has threatened to suspend Congress but so far done little more than use the crisis as an excuse for daily campaign events camouflaged as press briefings. That 2020 will be remembered for the rise of authoritarianism is by no means a foregone conclusion.

Should we really be most concerned now about the question of whether liberal democracy in the global North emerges weakened or strengthened out of the current crisis? That we can is a sign of our privilege. And it’s an indication of our (global Northern) egotism that in our newspapers we read much these days about the future of liberal democracy, and little about how the coronavirus might affect the global South.

Or maybe we shouldn’t ask “what will liberal democracy look like after the end of the world as we know it?” in the first place. “Perhaps some of you will now ask me… what do I think about the future of the far right?” Adorno said at the end of his Vienna lecture:

I think this question is wrong, because it is too contemplative. This way of thinking, which assumes that such things ought to be viewed as if they were natural catastrophes, like cyclones… that are subject to forecasts, implies a kind of resignation, whereby one removes oneself as a political subject. It implies a spectator’s relationship to reality. How these things will develop, and the responsibility for how they develop, that’s eventually up to us.

Oh, and by the way, the full title of R.E.M.’s 1987 song is: “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine).” •

The post Is illiberalism the force of the future? appeared first on Inside Story.

As I wrote last week, it seemed safe to take that statement at face value and expect Germany to accept between 1000 and 1500 of the children who have arrived in Greece with other refugees in recent weeks. With the participating countries including heavyweight France, I assumed that up to 2500 of the children currently in dangerously overcrowded camps on Lesvos and other islands would be evacuated. Germany’s share might be well below the 5000 demanded by the Greens in the resolution debated on 4 March in the Bundestag, and below the ten unaccompanied minors for every 500,000 EU residents suggested by Luxembourg’s foreign minister Jean Asselborn. But it would be a start.

My assumption was wrong. On 12 March, the EU home affairs commissioner, Swedish Social Democrat Ylva Johansson, announced in Athens that seven EU member states had agreed to take 1600 children between them. According to a report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany will take up to 400, France at least 300, and the remainder will be divided among Portugal, Finland, Luxembourg, Croatia, Ireland and Bulgaria. At the same time, perhaps in an attempt to indicate how the overcrowding really ought to be tackled, the European Union offered €2000 each for up to 5000 asylum seekers on the Greek islands who voluntarily return home.

Given that there are well over 40,000 asylum seekers on the Greek islands, among them thousands of minors, the offer to accommodate a paltry 1600 children is pitiful. Their relocation will do little to solve the problems on Lesvos, Samos, Chios and Kos. This failure on the part of the so-called coalition of the willing also bodes ill for future agreements to settle people rescued in the central Mediterranean by privately funded organisations such as Sea-Watch and Mission Lifeline.

At the same time, officially at least, the European Union remains unconcerned by the mounting evidence that Greece has been violating the human rights of people who have crossed the Turkish–Greek border since 28 February. It now appears that those who were beaten up and sent back to Turkey were the lucky ones. Others have been detained at what the New York Times calls a “secret extrajudicial location.” According to the German current affairs program Monitor, some of these detainees have been deprived of legal representation, summarily tried, and sentenced to up to four years’ prison.

Monitor’s report was broadcast last Thursday. Since then, Europeans have largely stopped paying attention to anything but the coronavirus pandemic. Thus far, the virus seems not to have spread to the camps at Europe’s borders (or to those in Idlib, for that matter). But it’s probably only a matter of time. Last week, the first Covid-19 case was reported on Lesvos. Given conditions in Moria and other camps on the Aegean islands, an outbreak of the disease would be disastrous.

The situation is grim, but some of the defenders of Europe’s values haven’t given up. I mention just two. The German charity Mission Lifeline has conducted search-and-rescue missions in the central Mediterranean. On 8 March, it launched an appeal to fund a charter plane to bring refugee children and their carers from the Greek islands to Germany. Within just a few days, more than the necessary €55,000 had been donated. While it seems unlikely that the German government will allow such a flight to go ahead, the campaign continues to draw attention to the situation in Moria and elsewhere.

Some members of the European Parliament have been highly critical of the European Commission’s backing of the Greek government’s approach. One critic is the chair of LIBE, the parliament’s committee on civil liberties, justice and home affairs, Juan Fernando López Aguilar, a constitutional lawyer and former Spanish justice minister. At a time when everybody else seemed preoccupied with the coronavirus, López Aguilar wrote an article for the Spanish edition of the Huffington Post about the “anti-European virus of insolidarity” that is devouring the European Union. He described Ursula von der Leyen’s talk about the Greek ασπίδα, or shield, supposedly protecting Europe, as “singularly outrageous” because of its complicity with the fear-mongering of the far right.

“Greece does not need rhetorical ‘solidarity,’” López Aguilar wrote. “It is one thing to support Greece and quite another to uncritically and unconditionally support whatever the Greek authorities do — or the Greek neo-Nazis, who, drunk with xenophobic violence, try to repel the ‘avalanche.’”

Many European commentators have rightly said that the democracies of Europe will be tested by the virus that is currently afflicting many thousands of their people. But Europe would do well to worry as much about the long-term damage caused by the “virus of insolidarity.” •

The post That other virus appeared first on Inside Story.

Her nomination by the European Council in July last year seemed less about her personal qualities and expertise than about the hostility of influential council members, including French president Emmanuel Macron, towards Weber and/or Timmermans. Last week, however, von der Leyen demonstrated that her previous assignment, as German defence minister, had prepared her well for the top job in Brussels. Only fatigues, helmet and flak jacket were missing when she fronted the press to declare Europe’s support for Greece’s treat response to refugees arriving from Turkey. The tone was befitting a general’s calm assessment of a grave threat.

“We… have seen how tense and how difficult the situation is,” she told journalists. “The Greek authorities are facing a very difficult task in containing the situation… I am fully committed to mobilising all the necessary operational support to the Greek authorities.” Flanked — and dwarfed — by Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Croatian prime minister Andrej Plenković, European Council president Charles Michel and the president of the European parliament, David Sassoli, she was nevertheless obviously in charge when she decreed: “We will hold the line and our unity will prevail.” She ended her brief statement by thanking “Greece for being our European ασπίδα in these times.”

Her statement assumed that Europe needs a Greek ασπίδα, or shield, because Greece is defending Europe’s borders. Just a few days earlier, on 28 February, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had announced that Turkey would no longer prevent asylum seekers from crossing into neighbouring Greece or Bulgaria. Thousands of them, many of them Afghans and Iranians who don’t enjoy the limited protection available to Syrian refugees in Turkey, immediately rushed to the Turkish–Greek border, some of them on board free buses provided by the Turkish authorities to ferry migrants from Istanbul.

The Greeks responded by closing their border and deploying additional military units and border police to guard it. Greek security forces then repelled prospective intruders by firing tear gas canisters and stun grenades. According to a report in the German magazine Spiegel, a twenty-two-year-old Syrian man died after being hit by a bullet. Turkish sources claim he wasn’t the only casualty. All those who had managed to cross the land border but had been picked up by the Greek police were immediately returned to Turkey, often after being beaten up by police or border guards. Greece also announced that it would accept no new asylum applications.

Von der Leyen’s use of the term ασπίδα may have been meant as a reference to Operation Aspida, which was launched in 2012 by the government of Antonis Samaras, Mitsotakis’s predecessor as leader of Greece’s conservative New Democracy party. Then, too, Greece’s European partners expected it to control a section of the EU’s external border: a 200-kilometre stretch mostly marked by the river Evros, which divides Greek West Thrace from Turkish East Thrace. Operation Aspida involved the construction of a barbed wire fence and the deployment of an additional 1800 border guards to keep out refugees and other irregularised migrants. It was accompanied by Operation Xenios Zeus, which was aimed at detecting — and then detaining — migrants living without a visa in Greek cities. Both operations were terminated when left-wing Alexis Tsipras replaced Samaras as prime minister in 2015.

I suspect Mitsotakis and his cabinet associate the term ασπίδα not only with the securitisation of the border eight years ago but also with an earlier effort to keep Asian invaders out of Europe, 2500 years ago. “Who doesn’t understand that this is a normal Turkish invasion?” Adonis Georgiadis, vice-president of New Democracy and minister for development in the current government, tweeted last week. As far as invasions from an Asian neighbour are concerned, perhaps none is better remembered — in Greece and elsewhere — than that of the Persians in 480 BCE. Then, a small Greek force led by King Leonidas of Sparta held up the vastly superior Persian army at the pass of Thermopylae. While their famous last stand only delayed the Persian advance, it allowed the Greek forces to regroup; the following year the Persians were decisively beaten and had to withdraw.

The Greek far right has frequently drawn on the history of Leonidas’s last stand to argue that all “illegal immigrants” need to be deported. The Golden Dawn, the fascist party that until last year held eighteen seats in Greece’s parliament, used to gather regularly at Thermopylae. References to Thermopylae are also used by the far right outside Greece. Last week, for example, a contributor to the white supremacist website VDare wrote: “Like their ancestors at Thermopylae, Greeks are trying to repel an Asiatic invasion… Western Civilisation began with ancient Greece. And it might end with the Third Hellenic Republic if the West doesn’t fight back.”

The river Evros is one of the sites where a replay of the battle of Thermopylae is now being imagined. The other is the Aegean Sea, or rather those of the Greek islands that lie only a few kilometres from the Turkish mainland. There, the heroics of the defenders of Greece against the imagined invasion include burning down facilities operated by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and the Swiss charity One Happy Family, assaults on journalists and aid workers, and attempts to prevent rubber dinghies carrying irregularised migrants from reaching Greek shores.

But it would be unfair to lay the blame for Greece’s hostile response to asylum seekers squarely at the feet of the far right. At the time of Operation Aspida, Human Rights Watch and other non-government organisations accused Samaras’s New Democracy government of violating the human rights of people seeking Europe’s protection, and of forcing desperate people to resort to using riskier routes, thus contributing to a higher number of border-related deaths. Similar accusations can now be levelled at the Mitsotakis government. It has been responsible for pushbacks (which are illegal under international law) and for endangering the lives of people trying to reach Greece by boat.

According to a recent New York Times report, Greece is also maintaining extrajudicial detention centres. It wants to deport to their countries of origin asylum seekers who arrived after 28 February and are being detained on board a Greek navy ship — without formally assessing whether they are owed protection. Police have done little to curb the activities of Greek vigilantes and far-right activists from France and Germany, who have taken it upon themselves to repel or expel asylum seekers and the people helping them.

Von der Leyen did not visit One Happy Family’s torched community centre on Lesvos, and only observed first-hand Greece’s ασπίδα in operation at the river Evros. Yet even there, it should have been obvious to her that the Greeks have been using tear gas and stun grenades to repel desperate migrants, including families with small children. She would certainly have been briefed about Greece’s decision to suspend its refugee determination procedures. But in an attempt to “hold the line,” she offered only praise for the Greek government’s hardline approach, and ignored its flouting of European human rights and refugee law. She presented as a visiting commander-in-chief, inspecting her troops at the southeastern limits of Europe, thereby distinguishing herself from her avuncular predecessor, Jean-Claude Juncker. (To be fair, von der Leyen had not sought to become Juncker’s successor; the job she had eyed was that of NATO secretary-general.)

After 28 February, asylum seekers also tried to reach Greek islands just a few kilometres off the Turkish west coast. According to local media reports, 977 people succeeded within the space of twenty-four hours on the first weekend of March alone. Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Kos and some smaller islands were often the first European port of call for Syrian refugees during the so-called refugee crisis of 2015–16. It was opposite the island of Kos that Alan Kurdi and his family boarded a small inflatable boat in the early hours of 2 September 2015; for many readers internationally, the photo of three-year-old Alan’s dead body on a Turkish beach would have epitomised the crisis.

Although the number of arrivals dropped sharply in early 2016 after the Balkan route was closed, conditions on the islands went from bad to worse. By the end of last year, the Moria camp on Lesvos, for example, which had been built for 3100 people, accommodated more than 20,000. “The suffering is palpable, the hopelessness is insidious, the feeling of abandonment is all-consuming,” wrote Annie Chapman, an English volunteer doctor working in Moria, in the Guardian in early February. She was particularly concerned about the situation of the most vulnerable camp residents: “Guardians work hard to keep the most vulnerable safe, but… monitoring and care is stretched, and problems continue to spiral. With finite space and an infinite number of increasingly vulnerable people arriving, many minors and women are living alone outside the [secure] sections, at risk of abuse, violence, and systemic failings.”

The conditions have been appalling not least because Moria and other camps have been hopelessly overcrowded. And that’s because the Greek authorities have been slow in processing asylum seekers, and because until very recently they refused to transfer people from Lesvos and other islands to the mainland. Conditions have also been poor because Greece didn’t take full responsibility for the asylum seekers crossing its borders and instead left their care to private agencies, individual volunteers from elsewhere in Europe, and local people.

At the height of the crisis of 2015–16, Greek islanders often welcomed new arrivals — so much so that Lesvos fisherman Stratis Valamios and eighty-six-year-old Lesvos islander Emilia Kamvysi were among the favourites to win the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize. Pundits assumed the extraordinary hospitality of the islanders would have to be acknowledged. But the arrival numbers kept growing and, with the Greek government failing to transfer people to the mainland, many islanders began to resent their presence. The islanders’ anger was initially directed at the authorities, but its target has shifted to the unwanted foreigners themselves. The Greek government saw no need to defuse the situation on the islands. It was demanding that other EU member states accommodate some of its asylum seekers and probably calculated that images of suffering children were aiding its cause.

Elsewhere in Europe, the appalling conditions on Lesvos have been a symbol of the failure of Europe’s asylum seeker policy for at least the past two years. In Germany, in particular, civil society groups have demanded that asylum seekers be evacuated from the islands and, if necessary, accommodated in Germany. Two years ago in Hamburg, for example, a coalition of civil society groups calling itself Hamburg hat Platz (Hamburg has space) began demanding that the state government agree to the resettlement of 1000 additional refugees from Greece.

Städte Sicherer Häfen (Safe Harbour Cities), a 140-strong network of German towns and cities formed last year in response to Italy’s refusal to let migrants rescued in the Mediterranean disembark, was also ready to welcome asylum seekers and refugees, including people accommodated in Moria and other overcrowded camps in Greece. Network members have been willing to accommodate asylum seekers over and above those assigned to them by Germany’s federal and state governments under a quota system.

These calls became louder towards the end of last year. Just before Christmas, Robert Habeck, the co-leader of the Greens, gave a much-quoted interview to the Sunday paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. Asked what he thought of the Greek prime minister’s repeated call that other European countries relieve Greece’s burden, Habeck said, “First, get the kids out. Around 4000 children crowd on the islands. Lots of girls, lots of fragile little people. Our humanity demands that we help quickly.” His sentiments were widely echoed, although it was not clear whether he meant unaccompanied minors or children more generally.

Among those backing Habeck’s call was Heribert Prantl, a senior journalist with the liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung. He called the German government’s inaction “criminal” and likened the children on Lesvos to the infant Jesus, pointing out that the latter too had not been a Christian. Although the government rejected Habeck’s call, its timing (which meant that the children in Moria became associated with Mary’s child in Bethlehem) generated significant momentum, shifting the German debate. The issue was no longer whether to assist Greece and accommodate some of the asylum seekers stranded there, but when to evacuate vulnerable children.

The images of asylum seekers being tear gassed at the Greek land border focused the attention of critical European publics on several linked issues: Europe’s failure to develop a new common asylum system that could replace the existing Dublin regulations; the humanitarian crisis in Idlib that prompted Erdoğan to blackmail the European Union by unleashing a wave of irregularised migrants in its direction; the fact that Turkey is currently hosting more asylum seekers and refugees than any other country; the shortcomings and potential collapse of the refugee deal between the European Union and Turkey; and the intolerable conditions in Greek refugee camps.

In Germany, the spectacle of stun grenades being lobbed in the direction of unarmed men, women and children sparked demonstrations and pledges by mayors and state premiers to accommodate asylum seekers from Greece. The day after the first images of violence at the Turkish–Greek border appeared on German television screens, spontaneous demonstrations and vigils in support of a more generous German policy were held in nineteen German cities. More such rallies occurred over the following days. On 7 March, for example, some 5000 people took to the streets in Hamburg, and 4000 in Berlin.

Predictably, representatives of the extreme right-wing Alternative for Germany, or AfD, called for sanctions against Turkey, categorically rejected calls to admit children from Greece (calling them, borrowing a term used by Donald Trump and the Australian government, “anchor children”) and suspected a plot that would allow the German government to let in yet more people of the wrong colour and religion. They also showed their solidarity with Greece (the same country, by the way, whose people were accused not so long ago by AfD politicians of being lazy and undeserving of a bailout by fellow eurozone countries).

Perhaps surprisingly, however, many ordinary Germans remain open to the idea of resettling refugees from Turkey or Greece. In a reputable survey conducted three days after Erdoğan’s announcement, 57 per cent of respondents concurred with the following statement: “The refugees ought to be allowed to cross the border into Greece, and afterwards should be divided among the EU member states.” And 48 per cent thought that “Countries such as Germany and France should take in refugees, even if other EU member states are opposed to that.”

Last week in parliament, the Greens put forward a resolution calling for the admission of 5000 children and other vulnerable asylum seekers from Greece, an issue over which the governing coalition has been divided. Most Social Democrats want Germany to admit a sizeable number of asylum seekers from Greece. They agree that states and local councils prepared to take in extra people should be encouraged and enabled to do so. Speaking in his capacity as interior minister of Lower Saxony, prominent Social Democrat Boris Pistorius pleaded with the federal government to allow the states to go it alone and lead a coalition of the willing within the European Union.

The Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, have been saying that there must be no repeat of 2015: of the mass influx and the ensuing debate that divided the country and damaged the party’s brand. But they too were divided. Of the two main contenders for the party leadership, one, the conservative Friedrich Merz, opposes Germany taking in any asylum seekers whatsoever from Greece, whereas the other, the North Rhine-Westfalian premier Armin Laschet, who is considered to be a loyal Merkel supporter, advocates a more generous approach. The issue has also created unusual alliances: at a recent meeting of the parliamentary party, it was Merkel’s bête noire, interior minister Horst Seehofer, who defended her record and objected when it was suggested that Germans did not want any more refugees. Merkel herself has remained largely silent on the issue.

In the end, with the exception of eight members of the governing coalition who either abstained or voted against the government, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats toed the government line: that a German initiative could only happen as part of an EU initiative. Last Sunday, though, the Koalitionsausschuss — a committee comprising the leaders of the three governing parties together with Merkel and her deputy, Social Democratic finance minister Olaf Scholz — agreed that Germany would, after all, go ahead and accommodate between 1000 and 1500 children from Greece on the basis that a handful of other EU governments signed up to a joint initiative. By then, that condition had already been met, with France, Finland, Portugal, Luxembourg and Croatia indicating they were willing to help out.

Given the size of the problem, though, the capacity of countries such as Germany and the willingness of municipalities to help, the evacuation of perhaps no more than 2500 children and other particularly vulnerable asylum seekers from Greece would be largely symbolic. Besides, it remains to be seen whether the promises will be kept. It wouldn’t be the first pledge by EU member states to resettle refugees and asylum seekers, or fund programs to assist them, to be left unfulfilled.

“We will hold the line and our unity will prevail,” Ursula von der Leyen said last week in Greece. “Now is the time for concerted action and cool heads and acting based on our values.” Given the uncompromising attitudes of Hungary and other Eastern European EU member states, a joint European approach that respects the rights of asylum seekers and other irregularised migrants — an approach that is indeed guided by their rights — is unrealistic. “Our unity” therefore means unanimous support for the response summed up by von der Leyen in Greece: a show of solidarity with Greece, a commitment to sealing the European Union’s external borders for asylum seekers, and — publicly at least — a shying away from criticising the Greek government’s flagrant violations of EU human rights and refugee law.

This is not an approach that would uphold the values considered intrinsic to the European project, enshrined in Article 2 of the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon:

The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.

In 2015, at the height of the last large-scale influx of asylum seekers, von der Leyen was one of the staunchest defenders of Angela Merkel’s decision not to close the German border. She strongly supported the sentiments encapsulated in Merkel’s famous statement, “Wir schaffen das” (we are able to do this). Perhaps she adopted the persona of Europe’s commander-in-chief last week because she sensed that this was the only way she could speak for all EU member states. If so, then von der Leyen made the mistake of identifying the smallest common denominator and thus mirroring the views of the likes of Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who are obsessed with “illegal immigration.” The current leadership of von der Leyen’s party, Germany’s Christian Democrats, may also have made the mistake of assuming that a simple majority would not be sufficient when it comes to deciding to take in additional asylum seekers and refugees, and that nothing short of unanimity would be required for such a momentous decision.

Von der Leyen made another mistake by focusing exclusively on the member states’ national governments. More so than most, she should know that an alternative approach is available, one in which European cities and regions are empowered to respond to situations such as those unfolding on Lesvos, thereby upholding the values spelled out in Article 2 of the Lisbon treaty. That’s to do with her family history. Her father, Ernst Albrecht, was also a prominent Christian Democrat. Six years after his return from Brussels, where he had headed the Directorate-General for Competition, Albrecht became the premier of Lower Saxony. Today he is perhaps best remembered for his unfortunate commitment to building a nuclear waste facility in his state.

But Albrecht should also be remembered for his decision, on 24 November 1978, to invite 1000 Indochinese “boat people” to settle in Lower Saxony. This was well above the number allocated to Lower Saxony by the federal government. In fact, in the previous three-and-a-half years, since the end of the Vietnam war, West Germany as a whole had taken in a total of only 1300 Vietnamese refugees. Albrecht and his state government subsequently decided to accommodate further contingents of “boat people.” He also prompted fellow state premiers to follow his example, was a supporter of the charity operating the Cap Anamur, which carried out search-and-rescue missions in the South China Sea, and lobbied conservative politicians in Europe in support of a European rescue mission for “boat people.”

If the German government is concerned about the backlash against the arrival of a sizeable number of asylum seekers in, say, Saxony, it could take up the offers of the eight German states and 140 cities and towns that so far have pledged to go it alone if a national consensus couldn’t be reached. They include, for example, the state government of Berlin, which has said that it has the capacity to take in 2000 people from Greece, including 150 unaccompanied minors, immediately.

German cities are not the only ones offering a safe harbour for asylum seekers and refugees. A network similar to Städte Sicherer Häfen, the Association Nationale des Villes et Territoires Accueillants (National Association of Welcoming Cities and Territories), exists in France. At the European level, sixty municipalities are part of the European Network of Solidarity Cities. It includes, among others, Amsterdam and Milan, Barcelona and Gdansk, Strasbourg and Munich. Incidentally, it also includes Athens and Thessaloniki, the two largest cities in Greece.

Ursula von der Leyen’s performance in Greece last week and the subsequent arguments over the evacuation of children from the Aegean islands suggest that Europe is in a bad way. “Respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights” don’t seem to count for much. But things are not entirely dire: an alternative Europe — as evident in Athens and Amsterdam, Barcelona and Berlin — is slowly emerging. But that’s no comfort for those stuck in Moria, wedged between Greek and Turkish border guards at the river Evros, or forgotten in all the other camps at or beyond Europe’s borders that never make it onto the evening news. •

The post In defence of Europe appeared first on Inside Story.

What happened? Until last October, the East German state was governed by a coalition made up of the left-wing Die Linke, the Social Democrats and the Greens. Bodo Ramelow, leader of the senior partner in that coalition, served as state premier. Ramelow, a former trade union official who moved from West Germany to Thuringia after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is the first Die Linke leader to preside over a German state government.

When Thuringia voted on 27 October last year, Die Linke became the strongest party in state parliament. But its partners both lost seats, and the Red–Red–Green coalition lost its majority. The biggest losers, though, were the governing Christian Democrats, who crashed from 33.5 to 21.7 per cent. Apart from Die Linke, two other parties could claim to be winners: the liberal Free Democrats, who hadn’t been represented in the 2014–19 parliament but now cleared the 5 per cent threshold, albeit by a mere seventy-three votes, and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD, which more than doubled its previous vote and beat the Christian Democrats into third place.

Both the Christian Democrats and the Free Democrats had ruled out coalitions with Die Linke and the AfD, but between them the latter two parties occupied fifty-one of the ninety seats in parliament. This meant that no feasible combination of parties could command a majority in parliament. For the time being, the Ramelow government remained in office.

Not all Christian Democrats in Thuringia were opposed to the idea of supporting a Ramelow-led minority government. This was largely because politicians tend to have an eye on public sentiment. The Linke leader is immensely popular in Thuringia; according to a poll conducted at the end of January, 71 per cent of respondents approved of his performance as premier and 60 per cent said they would vote for him if the premier were popularly elected. Even among Christian Democrat voters, Ramelow is the most popular politician and remains the preferred state premier.

That’s not the only reason why some Christian Democrats have been open to deals with Die Linke despite the fact that it is the successor of the Socialist Unity Party, which ran the German Democratic Republic until 1990. The Christian Democrats in Thuringia are also a successor party — to the East German Christian Democrats. They were once one of the four non-communist Blockparteien, which were represented in parliament and supported the East German regime. Those of today’s party members who belonged to the pre-1990 East German Christian Democrats may well remember the close working relationship their party had with the Socialist Unity Party — and thus with some of the people who ended up with Die Linke.

But however much some of Thuringia’s Christian Democrats would have liked to cooperate with a government led by Ramelow, they were not allowed to do so, because their party headquarters in Berlin has categorically ruled out any deal, anywhere, with AfD or Die Linke.

Notwithstanding the lack of a clear mandate, a Ramelow government remained an option. That’s because the state’s constitution allows for a premier to be elected with a simple majority of parliamentary votes as long as two rounds fail to produce an absolute majority for a candidate. Die Linke, the Social Democrats and the Greens were confident that it would come to that — and that a minority government would work because it would solicit the support of Free Democrats or Christian Democrats on a case-by-case basis.

The election of the new premier was scheduled for 5 February. In the first two rounds of voting, Ramelow won comfortably against the candidate of the AfD, Christoph Kindervater, the mayor of a small village in Thuringia, who isn’t actually a member of the AfD. As expected, though, Ramelow failed to gain an absolute majority in either round because nearly all Free Democrats and Christian Democrats abstained. In the third round, Ramelow suddenly faced two challengers: Kindervater and the leader of the Free Democrats, Thomas Kemmerich. Much to the consternation of members of the Red–Red–Green coalition, Kemmerich won. Having formally accepted the position, he was duly sworn in as Thuringia’s new premier.

Kemmerich’s election was only possible for one reason: all AfD members of parliament voted for him rather than for their own candidate. He was also supported by all but three Christian Democrats, who were no longer abstaining.

Kemmerich’s candidature had not been a spontaneous decision; in fact, the AfD, knowing that he would stand, had executed a clever plan to prevent the re-election of Ramelow while allowing the far-right party to claim that it was simply part of a conservative bloc whose candidate won.

All hell broke loose after Kemmerich’s election. The outrage on the left side of politics was perhaps best epitomised by the response of Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, the parliamentary leader of Die Linke, who, rather than congratulate the new premier, threw a bouquet of flowers at his feet.

As far as Kemmerich himself was concerned, he had been democratically elected. He said he did not intend to govern with, or even courtesy of, the AfD and announced that he would seek talks with Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Greens to put together a cabinet. But the Social Democrats and the Greens immediately declined the invitation. Even the Christian Democrats, who after all had voted for Kemmerich, suddenly realised that they could not support a government led by him.

Kemmerich was born in Aachen, a city in Rhineland, in the west of West Germany. When he moved to Thuringia after the fall of the Wall, he brought a key element of Rhineland culture with him: carnival. According to its supporters, carnival allows people to be irreverent and call a spade a spade. Its detractors would argue that it encourages people to make tasteless jokes. His response on 5 February suggested that he might have thought of his election — at the height of the carnival season — as a great joke, and if others did not get it, he could simply resign as if the joke had never been made. But nobody outside Thuringia’s Free Democrats and Christian Democrats was prepared to treat his candidature in that way.

The outcry over Kemmerich’s election — and even more so over his decision to accept the result — was also deafening among conservatives. The Free Democrats and the Christian Democrats in Thuringia were not the only targets of sustained criticism. Those who had congratulated Kemmerich immediately after the vote were also in trouble. Among them was the federal government’s high-profile special envoy for East Germany, the Christian Democrat Christian Hirte, who had posted a tweet congratulating Kemmerich for his election “as a candidate of the [political] centre” and wishing him success for the “difficult task” ahead. Angela Merkel considered the tweet a sackable offence and promptly replaced Hirte.

The most important collateral damage of Kemmerich’s election was the national leader of the Christian Democrats, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer — or AKK, as she is usually referred to in Germany. Although she had distanced herself from the actions of her colleagues in Thuringia, she had been unable to stop them, and afterwards was unable to convince them to toe the party line and agree to fresh elections. Five days after the debacle in Thuringia’s parliament, she announced that she would not seek to succeed as chancellor and would resign as leader of the party once she steered it through the process of nominating a candidate for the chancellorship at the 2021 federal elections.

Like Kemmerich, AKK is a carnival tragic. In fact, before her elevation to the position of general secretary of the Christian Democrats in 2018 — when she was premier of Saarland, a state even smaller than Thuringia — she was known also for the irreverent (or tasteless) jokes she made as Putzfrau Gretel (Cleaning-Woman Gretel), a persona she used during the carnival season. Leaning on her broom, she would pontificate about the world and make her audience laugh. She seems to have left the broom behind when she moved to Berlin, where it could have been used to rid the Christian Democrats of their closet AfD bedfellows.

AKK’s lack of resolve and authority was put into sharp relief by two of her allies: first, by the premier of Bavaria, Markus Söder of the conservative Christian Social Union, who within minutes of the vote lambasted the behaviour of Free Democrats and Christian Democrats in Thuringia; and then by the German chancellor, who was on a state visit in South Africa as events unfolded in Thuringia. Often considered a ditherer, Merkel was quick to respond in unequivocal terms, calling the local Christian Democrats’ decision to vote for Kemmerich “inexcusable.”

On 8 February, only three days after his election, Kemmerich resigned at the urging of his own party. After initially hedging his bets, leader Christian Lindner had joined the chorus of those condemning Kemmerich’s election. Lindner was being true to form; in 2017, having decided to call off coalition negotiations between the Free Democrats, the Christian Democrats and the Greens in Berlin, he famously said, “It’s better not to govern, than to govern wrongly.” But his position, much like AKK’s, may turn out to have been irreparably damaged by the events in Thuringia.

What explains the extent of the outrage at Kemmerich’s decision to stand, and to accept his election?

In today’s Germany, it’s taboo for politicians belonging to Die Linke, the Social Democrats, the Greens, the Free Democrats, and the Christian Democrats or their sister party, the Christian Social Union, to collaborate with the AfD. This means that these parties are committed not to enter into agreements with the AfD and not to rely on the AfD’s votes — at the national, the state or the local level — to pass legislation. To depend on the support of AfD parliamentarians in a vote as crucial as that of 5 February in Thuringia was a violation of that taboo. The term most often used to describe what had happened was Dammbruch, a breaching of the dam.

The violation was perceived particularly acutely because Thuringia’s AfD is led by Björn Höcke, the poster boy of the AfD’s extremist Flügel faction, who according to a recent court ruling may be called a “fascist,” and whose words and deeds are closely monitored by the Bundesverfassungsschutz, Germany’s federal intelligence agency.

Taboos proscribe human behaviour that is ostensibly repulsive but might be considered attractive, at least by some. No taboo is needed, for example, to stop parliamentarians from using their speeches to abuse the people who voted for them — simply because it would not occur to politicians to do that. But the idea of forming an alliance with the AfD is sufficiently attractive, if only to some, that it requires a taboo to stop them from acting impulsively.

Despite its speed, intensity and near unanimity, the response to Kemmerich’s election doesn’t prove that a collaboration between, say, the Free Democrats and the AfD is unthinkable in today’s Germany. In East Germany, in particular, several prominent members of the Christian Democrats have questioned their party’s official line that it must not collaborate with the AfD. This is despite the fact that in the East German states the AfD tends to be far more radical than in West Germany. Advocates of a rapprochement between Christian Democrats and the far right have included the leader of the Christian Democrats’ parliamentary party in Saxony, Christian Hartmann, and key Christian Democrats in the East German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Prominent members of a 4000-strong network of self-confessed conservatives associated with the Christian Democrats, the Werte-Union, have also repeatedly argued that the differences between AfD and the Christian Democrats could be easily bridged.

But whenever such arguments have been made, they have met with a firm response from Christian Democrat leaders, including AKK and Merkel. After the Werte-Union welcomed Kemmerich’s election, for example, other Christian Democrats demanded that the party dissociate itself from that group (and possibly expel all its members), which compelled the conservative network hastily to endorse the party line and categorically rule out any collaboration with the AfD.

Thuringia’s Christian Democrats have convincingly argued that they had held no talks with the AfD prior to Kemmerich’s election. While they didn’t collaborate with the far right, though, they did collude with them. At the national or state level, this had never happened before. But at the local level, particularly in East German district and town councils, Christian Democrats have often collaborated, cooperated or colluded with AfD representatives. In local parliaments, the “dams” and “firewalls” conjured by AKK and others have been far less important. But local arrangements between Christian Democrats and the AfD have been informal and have usually been struck outside the media spotlight.

Elsewhere in Europe, the taboo that governs the relations between the democratic parties and the far right hardly exists at all. Last week, in an interview with the German news magazine Spiegel, Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin wouldn’t exclude the possibility that her Social Democratic Party would cooperate with the True Finns, the Finnish equivalent of the AfD. People in Finland expected politicians to identify solutions to pressing problems, she explained, rather than engage in ideological battles. In Denmark, centre-right minority governments have relied on the support of the right-wing populist Danish People’s Party for fifteen of the past twenty years. In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party was the minor partner in conservative-led governments from 2000 until 2005 and again from 2017 until last year.

Why, then, do the overwhelming majority of German centre-right politicians, let alone Social Democrats and Greens, shun the AfD? Much of their response reflects a particular view of what happened towards the end of the Weimar Republic, when Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party — intent on replacing democracy, much like Björn Höcke’s AfD — came to power not least because it was tolerated by many conservatives.

In fact, the key historical moment that is often referenced in discussions about the ramifications of Kemmerich’s election happened in Thuringia. There, at the 1929 state elections, the Nazis won 11.3 per cent and the governing conservative coalition lost its majority. Rather than trying to form a coalition with the Social Democrats (which was then by far the largest party in state parliament), the conservatives opted to collaborate with the Nazis. In 1930, Hitler’s henchman Wilhelm Frick, who was later hanged as a war criminal, became Thuringia’s minister for education and the interior and set about “cleansing” the public service. The conservatives, who thought they had successfully co-opted the Nazis in Thuringia, tried to do so again three years later at the national level, thus paving the way for Hitler to become chancellor.

The historical analogy is, at best, problematic. Thuringia in 2019–20 bears little resemblance to Thuringia in 1929–30. Then, the conservative forces were not committed to democracy; nor, at the other end of the political spectrum, was the Communist Party. In today’s Germany, democratic ideals and a commitment to human rights and the rule of law are far more entrenched than they were during the Weimar Republic.

It is true, though, that Höcke’s AfD has borrowed some of the Nazis’ vocabulary. Much like them, the AfD is anti-democratic (and thus Kemmerich’s claim to have been “democratically elected” was not true in the sense that he had not been elected by people who believed in democracy). Much like Hitler wanted to destroy the Weimar Republic, Höcke and other Flügel representatives aim to tear down the Berlin Republic. And like Hitler’s party, Höcke’s AfD wants to become respectable and be taken seriously as a viable and legitimate alternative to the centre-right parties only in order to supplant not just these parties but all democratic structures.

Kemmerich and Thuringia’s Christian Democrats would have done well to cast their eyes back to the outcome of the 1929 elections, and to the successful attempts of a far-right party to use the conservatives’ loathing of the left to their advantage.

The taboo that prevents Christian Democrats and others from collaborating with the AfD is only part of the story; in fact, it obscures what might prove a more important issue, the question of whether the democratic parties are adopting views held by the AfD.

None of the parties outside the AfD has ruled out embracing positions of the populist far right. Obviously, a categorical refusal to advocate a particular stance on the sole grounds that it has been endorsed by the AfD would make little sense. But how about positions that are, for example, anti-democratic or racist — that is, positions that are an integral part of the far-right mix?

In the past, many prominent Christian Democrats, as well as some Social Democrats and Free Democrats, held views that are now principally associated with the far right. Occasionally, they also formed alliances with groups that were committed to particular varieties of right-wing extremism, without necessarily being likened to the Nazi Party. The first time the Christian Democrats collaborated with radical right-wing populists was not the election of Kemmerich in 2020 but the formation of a coalition government between the Hamburg Christian Democrats and the so-called Schill Party, led by the extremist law-and-order advocate Ronald Schill, in 2001. (While Kemmerich’s tenure lasted only three days, the government of the Christian Democrats and the Schill Party was in office for more than two years.)

Before the emergence and rapid rise of the AfD in 2013, Christian Democrats sometimes justified embracing extremist positions by arguing that a major conservative party needed to cover the entire right of the political spectrum, if only to deprive more radical alternatives of oxygen. The long-time leader of the Christian Social Union, Franz Josef Strauß, famously said that “there must not be a democratically legitimated party to the right of the Christian Social Union.”

Since it became obvious that the AfD is here to stay, Christian Democrats have put forward two arguments against adopting AfD positions. One is that the right-wing extremism often embraced by conservative politicians like Strauß is no longer compatible with the principles of a centre-right party. This is an argument made by Angela Merkel, among others. For her, she said in 2016, Strauß’s dictum was valid only as long it was possible to remain true to Christian Democratic principles. At the time, she had in mind the opposition to her asylum policy led by politicians of the Christian Social Union, including Merkel’s own interior minister Horst Seehofer. Christian Democrats who make the same argument, such as Daniel Günther, the premier of Schleswig-Holstein, tend to identify as liberals.

The other argument is strategic. Strauß and others were convinced that far-right parties could be kept small if they were unable to claim that they alone championed particular extremist views. The evidence from Bavaria largely supported this argument: only once, in 1966, did a far-right party manage to win seats in state parliament. But this stance came at a price: it positioned Strauß’s party to the right of all others represented in federal parliament; his image as a politician toying with ideas that were otherwise associated with the far right ensured that the conservatives, led by Strauß as their candidate for chancellor, lost the 1980 elections.

Markus Söder, the current leader of the Christian Social Union, was long a faithful Strauß disciple. In 2016, for example, he demanded to “end the asylum tourism” in the expectation that such statements would appeal to prospective AfD voters. But just ahead of the 2018 state elections in Bavaria, Söder realised that Strauß’s strategy no longer worked. He made an about turn, drew a clear line between the Christian Social Union and the AfD, regained the support of traditional conservatives who had threatened to vote for the Greens, and thereby ensured that his party remained the dominant force in Bavaria. Since then, another deeply conservative state premier, Saxony’s Michael Kretschmer, has also won a state election by distancing himself from the AfD.

At present, the leading politicians of the Christian Democrats and the Christian Social Union agree that their parties should reject extremist positions advocated by the AfD — whether it’s because they believe, as Günther does, that their party ought to occupy the political centre and be open to progressive ideas, or because they are convinced that Söder’s und Kretschmer’s strategy has worked. But AKK’s retreat will reignite debates about principles and strategies. If the Christian Democrats ultimately reject both Günther’s and Söder’s arguments, then the taboo on cooperation would no longer hold. It would make little sense to embrace the AfD’s positions but refuse to form an alliance with a party representing up to a quarter of the electorate.

Outside Germany, too, the question of whether conservative parties should embrace the demands of the far right is more relevant than the issue of coalitions. But a preparedness to consider coalition governments that include the far right can also pave the way for policy shifts. Denmark is a good example. For years the Danish People’s Party was lent credibility because successive governments relied on its support. The current government of Social Democrat Mette Frederiksen no longer needs the far right to govern, but it has nevertheless adopted key planks of its platform, particularly in relation to the far right’s asylum policy. Something similar has happened in Austria, where the conservative People’s Party, which twice formed a government with the far-right Freedom Party but is currently in a coalition with the Greens, is now championing policies that used to be owned by the far right.

Where to now for Thuringia? Kemmerich’s resignation could have been followed by a repeat of the election of 5 February, except with both Christian Democrats and Free Democrats abstaining in all three rounds. But the AfD has said that it might now vote for Ramelow, in which case he too would have to resign to avoid being tainted by its support.

Die Linke has demanded — unsuccessfully, thus far — that at least four Christian Democrats and/or Free Democrats must vote for Ramelow in the first round to ensure that he is elected with an absolute majority. On Monday, Ramelow put forward another idea, which was endorsed by the Greens and the Social Democrats: new elections and, until then, an interim “technical” government led by his immediate predecessor, Christiane Lieberknecht from the Christian Democrats, who retired as a member of parliament last year. On Tuesday, Thuringia’s Christian Democrats rejected that idea.

It is not hard to see why. Ramelow is likely to benefit from new elections; polling conducted last week put his party at 40 per cent, with the Christian Democrats down to 14 per cent and the Free Democrats below the 5 per cent threshold. If the election results approximated current polling, the Red–Red–Green coalition would command a comfortable majority in parliament. The threat of new elections may be what is needed to convince the Christian Democrats to support Ramelow’s re-election.

Whatever happens, the AfD has successfully exposed leading Free Democrats and Christian Democrats as naive, greedy and unprincipled. On Monday night, Björn Höcke addressed a demonstration organised by the far-right Pegida movement in Dresden, claiming that a coup d’état engineered by Angela Merkel had toppled democratically elected premier Thomas Kemmerich. While the majority of Germans may find such claims bizarre, they appeal to his followers. And there are many of those — in fact, the events since 5 February have only cemented Höcke’s position as the de facto leader of Germany’s far right.

Where to now for Germany? The Christian Democrats are currently experiencing the most serious crisis in their seventy-five-year history. Their internal problems affect the work of the coalition government in Berlin and are likely to further entrench the view among Germany’s partners that the country is not interested in providing leadership. The party that more than any other has shaped the history of the Federal Republic and has led the federal government for fifty-two of the past seventy-one years is at a collective loss about how to position itself. It does not know how to reverse its longstanding decision not to collaborate with both Die Linke, a democratic party with an anti-democratic past, and the AfD. It does not have a collective vision for a life after Angela Merkel. And it does not know how to deal with those of its members who are tempted to violate the taboo of getting into bed with certified fascists such as Björn Höcke.

The events of 5 February have strengthened the resolve of Christian Democrats like Daniel Günther to position their party as an antidote to the far right. Conservative Christian Democrats appear to get the message; on Monday, the Christian Democrats in Dresden called on their followers to demonstrate against another Pegida demonstration — the first time this has happened in the more than five years since Pegida began holding its regular Monday evening rallies.

AKK’s announcement that she will step down has meant that two positions are now up for grabs: that of the leader of the Christian Democrats and that of the conservatives’ candidate for German chancellor. At the moment, there are three likely candidates for the position of party leader (although none of them has officially declared an intention): the premier of North Rhine-Westfalia, Armin Laschet, who belongs to the party’s moderate left and has been a staunch supporter of Angela Merkel; health minister Jens Spahn, a conservative; and Friedrich Merz, another conservative and long-time Merkel critic. Those three would also want to lead the Christian Democrats and the Christian Social Union into the next elections. But — notwithstanding his protestations — Markus Söder may also throw his hat into the ring. In any case, the question of how to deal with the AfD is likely to dominate the discussion over who will lead the conservatives from later this year and, potentially, Germany from 2021.

Or from 2020? AKK failed partly because last year Merkel resigned as party leader but not as chancellor. Whoever succeeds AKK will probably try to convince Merkel that she needs to go straight away. She won’t like it and will argue that she needs to remain at the helm in the second half of the year when Germany holds the rotating presidency of the European Union. But she may not have a choice.

If Merkel were forced out, the Social Democrats would probably demand new elections, and Germany may have a new chancellor by Christmas. I won’t hazard a guess about who will follow Merkel, but it seems certain that it will be a man: Laschet, Spahn, Merz, Söder — or Robert Habeck, the charismatic co-leader of the Greens.

That last possibility also says something about Germany in 2020. While the rise of the AfD has made life difficult for Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, it has strengthened the Greens. It has provided motivation and oxygen to groups outside parliament that not only oppose the far right but also fight for measures to combat climate change and for a generous asylum and refugee policy. In other words, Germany might have experienced a resurgence of the far right since 2013, but it has also seen a civil society–led backlash against the extreme right and in favour of an alternative vision of society that may otherwise have been utterly unrealistic. Watch this space. •

The post Anatomy of a broken taboo appeared first on Inside Story.

As I left Melbourne last Thursday, near the end of Australia’s hottest month on record, the temperature hovered just below 40 degrees. In earlier years, a day like this would have been considered part and parcel of summer, and perhaps an opportunity to hit the beach after work. Not so this summer, when scorchers have been associated primarily with an increased risk of fire. On the day my plane left, large bushfires continued to burn in New South Wales, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory, while new fires had started in Western Australia and Tasmania.

As we touched down in Hamburg the following winter’s day, I was met by temperatures more typical of spring. Throughout Germany, January 2020 was one of the warmest winter months since the beginning of systematic measurements in 1881. While the change has been as noticeable in Germany as it has in Australia, its consequences for Germany’s weather have not been considered all bad. But the fact that summers have become warmer and lasted longer hasn’t stopped many, if not most, Germans from becoming deeply worried about climate change.

Australians’ concern over climate change has been prompted by droughts, floods and fires at home. Germans, by contrast, are as alarmed by global as much as by local changes in weather patterns and their impact. They tend to point to the melting of ice in the Arctic, the desertification of the Sahel and extreme weather events in the Americas, Asia — and Australia.

So it isn’t surprising that the bushfires have received a lot of coverage in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. While the Australian media have paid particular attention to the loss of homes, the fires’ impact on the built environment has hardly featured in the German media. Here, the focus has been on the loss of wildlife and the destruction of a swathe of Australia’s forests.

Much of the German coverage has also focused on Australia’s ranking as the world’s largest polluter on a per capita basis and the fact that its government has been reluctant to combat climate change. Australia’s role at COP25, the Madrid climate change conference in early December, was widely reported and roundly condemned. Its refusal, alongside Saudi Arabia, the United States and Brazil, to agree to more ambitious targets led news bulletins on 14 and 15 December, the concluding days of the conference, and featured in long articles in the newspapers.

“Australia is considered the secret villain of the climate conference,” the Berlin-based Tagesspiegel reported. “Environmentalists are amazed at Australia’s stubbornness in Madrid. Because the country is well positioned economically, it would be easy for the government to launch renewable energy projects.”

In Europe, bewilderment is a common response to the Morrison government’s climate policies. Most commentators find it difficult to fathom why complacency and denialism prevail on a continent, perhaps the most vulnerable of all to climate change, whose people seem to have the resources to transition quickly to a net carbon-neutral economy and lead the world in developing innovative renewable energy technologies. But how to explain that Australia’s response to climate change is shaped, as much as anything, by its culture wars? Or that the Australian coal industry receives government subsidies while the parties currently or previously in government happily accept donations from the coal industry?

Australians, for their part, seem not so much puzzled by overseas responses to climate change as largely oblivious to them. While the European media devoted much attention to Australia’s position at COP25, their Australian counterparts showed little interest in the conference’s deliberations. Not only that — most of them also ignored the concern voiced in other countries about Australia’s intransigence.

That concern matters. The more people become alarmed about the rate of climate change and appalled by the behaviour of rogue states such as Australia, the more likely it is that they will put pressure on governments and businesses to take a stance.

European businesses are already feeling the pressure. The first news item I saw after touching down in Hamburg concerned a demonstration outside the Siemens offices in Hamburg. In one of a series of protests during January, sixty-five members of Fridays for Future picketed the offices early in the morning in protest at Siemens’s decision to provide signalling equipment for the railway line that will service the Adani coalmine in Queensland.

Siemens’s decision not to cancel the contract is only half of the story. On 12 January, Siemens boss Joe Kaeser announced that “there is a legally binding and enforceable fiduciary responsibility to carry out this train signalling contract” (while at the same time reserving “the right to pull out of the contract if our customer violates the very stringent environmental obligations”). But he also bent over backwards to reassure critics about the company’s green credentials. “Siemens, as one of the first companies to have pledged carbon neutrality by 2030, fundamentally shares the goal of making fossil fuels redundant to our economies over time,” he said. Earlier he had intimated that the contract was so small that it had “slipped through” the net, and that new control mechanisms had been put in place to ensure that Siemens avoids making a similar mistake in the future.

Kaeser’s misgivings about the contract were also obvious when he addressed a 3000-strong business council meeting in Berlin on 27 January. Before he could speak, a young climate activist mounted the stage and gave a short speech that was applauded by the audience. Not only did the organisers let her speak; Kaeser afterwards paid his respects to her concerns and said he wished that she had brought fifty or one hundred of her friends along and stayed for the meeting. This isn’t a sign of an ideological commitment to environmentalism, of course: it is good business sense. International corporations like Siemens have long recognised that there is money to be made in the transition to carbon-neutral economies and no future in fossil fuels.

So far, the protests against Siemens’s involvement in the Adani project have been unsuccessful. Long term, though, the pressure on companies involved in coalmining in Australia, and on the banks that fund projects like Adani’s, could pay off. The decisions by the Queensland and federal governments to grant the necessary approvals for the Adani mine may mean little if the company fails to raise the capital required to dig up the coal.

Why should young Germans feel strongly enough about a coalmine in Queensland to picket Siemens’s headquarters in Hamburg? While many Australians seem to believe that Australia’s natural environment belongs to them (and so it is up to them to either trash or preserve it), elsewhere, in societies that haven’t been shaped by settler colonialism, nature is considered to be part of humankind’s heritage. From a German perspective, a project that endangers the Great Barrier Reef is as bad as one that threatens to destroy the famed mudflats of the German North Sea coast.

And while the Morrison government may believe that it is entirely up to Australia to decide whether to mine and export coal (or uranium, for that matter), such beliefs are not shared by many outside Australia.

But the impact of civil-society pressure on companies investing in Australia is only one consequence of a global awareness about the urgent need to tackle climate change. Governments that implement policies leading to higher electricity, petrol and house prices in order to change consumer behaviour are likely to make efforts to ensure that other countries don’t take advantage of the price differential.

The European Union, which is committed to such policies, expects its trading partners to abide by the same environmental standards it is prescribing for its member states. Australia has been confronted with those expectations during the current negotiations about a free trade agreement, which are reported to have hit a snag because of the insistence by Australia’s second-largest trading partner that Australia meets certain climate change targets. The EU’s expectations mean that trade minister Simon Birmingham is kidding himself when he claims that FTAs are “overwhelmingly commercial undertakings between countries” and that they should “focus on commercial realities.”

Even without an FTA, Australia wouldn’t necessarily be able to evade the EU’s expectations. EU president Ursula von der Leyen has suggested that the European Union penalise countries that don’t pull their weight when it comes to combating climate change. As she said in a recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos:

[T]here is no point in only reducing greenhouse gas emissions at home, if we increase the import of CO2 from abroad. It is not only a climate issue; it is also an issue of fairness. It is a matter of fairness towards our businesses and our workers. We will protect them from unfair competition. One way for doing so is the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.

So far, the carbon border adjustment mechanism (or carbon border tax) is little more than a thought bubble. But as the sense of urgency about climate change increases, it could turn into a firm policy before too long.

The idea that countries with policies detrimental to the effort to tackle climate change ought to be penalised is not new. Last year, Norway and Germany suspended aid to Brazil in response to the Brazilian government’s condoning of deforestation in the Amazon Basin.

Once there is broad agreement globally that CO2 emissions need to come down fast, it is also conceivable that the UN Security Council will be given the task of ensuring that countries do their fair share. The pressure on Australia may well come in the form of sanctions and tariffs that will hurt an unprepared economy.

This is not the first time that many Europeans have been aghast at Australian policies. Earlier, Australia’s Indigenous policies — particularly the Howard government’s refusal to issue an apology and successive governments’ refusal to enter negotiations about a treaty — and its asylum seeker policies have scandalised many people outside Australia. Then, too, the main response was one of bewilderment. Why is a country as affluent as Australia behaving in such a mean-spirited manner?

The Australian government may reason that it has nothing to fear from its steadfast commitment to the local coal industry, because international condemnation of government policies harmful to Indigenous people and non-citizens proved inconsequential. But in those two cases, the argument that the treatment of first nations peoples and asylum seekers was a sovereignty issue had some traction. And besides, Europeans may have sympathised with marginalised Aboriginal people and incarcerated “boat people” but they did not identify with them.

That isn’t the case this time. Nobody outside Australia thinks that Australia has the sovereign right to pursue policies that contribute to the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, to name but one example — let alone to pursue policies that hasten global climate change. Many in Europe take the Australian government’s extremist views on climate change personally — this is no longer about other people whose rights need to be upheld. It is about our future.

The Australian government argues that other countries, including those of the European Union, have also been slow in responding to the challenge of climate change. That is indeed the case. But most governments in the global north now recognise the catastrophic dangers posed by climate change, and are committed to act. And they are often called on to act by electorates that believe current government policies don’t go far enough.

The Morrison government is also hiding behind other recalcitrants, notably the United States. The idea that Australia could somehow be shielded from the anger of countries that try to tackle climate change is a dangerous illusion. There are now only two or three other governments that share Canberra’s extremist views. True, the all-powerful US government is one of them. But emissions trading schemes cover much of the United States already; in fact, California’s is second in size only to that of the European Union. And if anybody but Donald Trump were to win the elections in November, Australia would quickly find itself truly isolated.

It amazes me how unprepared the Australian public seems for the eventuality of other countries turning on Australia because it is seen to be wilfully ruining the commons. Australians ignore the resolve of other countries to tackle climate change — and overseas awareness of Australia’s role as an unrepentant contributor to global warming — at their peril. •

The post How Australia’s love affair with coal looks from afar, and why it matters appeared first on Inside Story.

Although the AfD attracted only one in eight German electors, it won 27 per cent of votes in the East German state of Saxony, narrowly beating the Christian Democrats’ 26.9 per cent. This remarkable result brought Saxony’s next state election, still two years away, into sharp focus.

Some commentators portrayed the state election — which was eventually scheduled for 1 September this year — as potentially the most significant state-level vote since reunification; others called it a Schicksalswahl, an election that would determine Germany’s fate. A Bundestag in which a far-right newcomer had become the largest opposition party was one thing; a state parliament in which the AfD was the dominant party would be quite another. Would the AfD once more outperform the established parties? Might it even be able to form government? Or would Saxony become ungovernable?

The rise of the AfD, which has been around for just six years but is represented in the national Bundestag and all sixteen state parliaments, is widely interpreted as the most obvious sign of a Rechtsruck, a lurch to the right, in German society. As I’ll explain, I don’t subscribe to that view. What’s beyond doubt, however, is that the AfD has undergone its own Rechtsruck. From a party of Eurosceptics with a neoliberal agenda, it has morphed into a far-right party whose leaders promote an aggressive nationalism, deny that humans are responsible for climate change, and bitterly oppose Germany’s accommodating of significant numbers of refugees and asylum seekers.

The radicalisation of the AfD’s program didn’t scare off voters; on the contrary, it attracted a higher percentage of the vote. But the party’s support has been unevenly distributed. In the 2017 federal election, for example, it scored well below 10 per cent in the four northwest German states of Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony, Bremen and Hamburg. In Saxony, where it performed best, the results were also mixed: in Leipzig 2, one of two electorates in Saxony’s largest city, it came only third, behind the left-wing Die Linke, which topped the vote, and the Christian Democrats. At the other end of the spectrum, in Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, in Saxony’s southeast, the AfD’s candidate scored 37.4 per cent, the party’s best individual result nationally.

Most of Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge’s 245,000 inhabitants live in small towns, the largest of which are Pirna, the shire’s administrative centre, and Freital. Both have populations of just below 40,000 and are within easy reach of Dresden. But the shire also includes small villages, some of which can’t easily be reached by public transport. It extends over 1654 square kilometres, approximately the combined total size of the city-states of Hamburg and Berlin.

Like other parts of the former German Democratic Republic, the southeast of Saxony was hit hard by the massive changes to the economy after 1989. The industrial bases of towns like Freital, Pirna, Sebnitz and Heidenau mostly disappeared, leaving industries that employ only a fraction of the workforce. Unemployment skyrocketed and the population declined, with young people — and young women, in particular — leaving for West Germany. In 2002 and 2013, Pirna and other communities along the Elbe and its tributaries were also hit hard by floods.

In economic terms, though, the shire has recovered well. Saxony’s unemployment rate is 5.4 per cent — lower, for example, than in Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, or in the city-state of Hamburg. With 4.2 per cent, the shire of Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge has the lowest unemployment rate in all of Saxony.

For many communities here, the growth of tourism has been a key ingredient of economic recovery. Both Saxon Switzerland — the mountains along the Elbe between Pirna and the Czech border — and the Ore Mountains are a hiker’s paradise, and the latter are also a popular skiing destination. The shire has also benefited from the fact that nearby Dresden — less than a half-hour’s train ride away from some population centres — has been booming.

Most of the tourists are Germans, with another significant proportion from the neighbouring Czech Republic. But international tourism is playing its part. The tourism industry has also been responsible for labour migration; hotels and restaurants regularly fill vacancies by recruiting staff from across the Czech–German border.

To try to understand the local mood and get a sense of how the 1 September election would unfold in this part of the state, I visited Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge frequently over the months leading up to Sunday’s vote, speaking to local members of parliament, mayors and other local politicians and representatives of civil-society organisations. By mid August, while the forthcoming state elections were featuring prominently in the national media, the campaign still didn’t seem to be in full swing in the shire. Was this perhaps evidence of a political culture that was different from the one I had grown up with in West Germany?

Sunday 18 August 2019

With only a fortnight of campaigning still to go, the local newspaper, the Sächsische Zeitung, is dominated by matters other than the election. No large election rallies are scheduled in Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, and only one public forum involving the main candidates in each of the four state electorates that cover the shire. This series of forums has been organised by the Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung, the state body responsible for civic education. On 28 June, admittedly very early in the campaign, only sixty people had turned up for the forum in state electorate #49, which covers the town of Dippoldiswalde and the Eastern Ore Mountains.

Outside Pirna and Freital, comparatively few election posters are on display. Almost all of the ones that show local candidates or party leaders depict the faces of men, simply because most candidates in Saxony, and most of the parties’ state leaders, are men. Of the twenty-four candidates representing the six parties predicted to get over the 5 per cent threshold in the shire’s four state electorates — Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Greens, Die Linke, Free Democrats and AfD — only nine are women. Only the Greens and Die Linke are led by a team of one man and one woman; the leaders of the other four parties are men.

In Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, in particular, politics is men’s business. The Pirna town council, for example, has twenty-seven members, just three of whom are women. Only one of the nineteen towns in Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge has a female mayor. Surely the peculiar politics in the shire have something to do with the fact that women play only a marginal role.

The politician whose image is most conspicuous in public spaces is forty-four-year-old Michael Kretschmer, the state premier. From 2002 until 2017, he was a member of the Bundestag; from 2009 until 2017 he also served as deputy leader of the Christian Democrats in federal parliament. The support he enjoyed in 2013 in the electorate of Görlitz, in Saxony’s east — 49.6 per cent of the primary vote, 30 per cent more than the runner-up from Die Linke — seemed rock-solid. But in 2017 he narrowly lost his seat to an AfD candidate. Less than a month later, Saxony’s premier, Stanislaw Tillich, resigned to make way for him. Since then, he has tried hard to convince people in Saxony that he is willing to listen, and that a vote for the AfD is not an effective means of protest.

On the question of how to deal with the AfD, Saxony’s Christian Democrats are divided. A minority of state MPs wouldn’t be opposed to forming a minority government that is tolerated by the far-right party. Kretschmer has ruled out such an option. But the matter is complicated. The vote compass developed by the Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung allows voters not just to see how closely their own views align with those of each political party but also to compare the positions held by the parties. According to the compass, the Christian Democrats and the AfD have a lot in common (about as much as, for example, the Social Democrats have in common with the Greens). The common ground between the Christian Democrats and their current state and national coalition partner, the Social Democrats, is far smaller.

Kretschmer and his supporters are also ruling out a coalition with Die Linke. They are willing to contemplate a deal with the Greens (which may be the only option left to them), but it is hard to see how they could agree on the phasing out of coalmining, for example, or the detention of “deportable” asylum seekers. The vote compass also detects very few synergies between Christian Democrats and Greens (as few as between the Social Democrats and the AfD), a problem both Kretschmer and the leaders of the Greens have acknowledged.

Among the parties that have put up posters across the shire is the neo-Nazi Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or NPD. Back in 2004, the NPD won 9.2 per cent of the statewide vote — by far the party’s best result in any state election since 1990. It was represented in Saxony’s parliament until 2013, when it missed the 5 per cent threshold by only 0.1 per cent. The NPD has had a strong presence in the shire, but at the local elections in May it performed well only where the AfD did not run candidates.

The AfD and NPD are not the only parties whose slogans are designed to blame foreigners, including refugees, for society’s ills. The Free Democrats are just more subtle. As one of their posters reads, dog whistle–style: “Drogen, Clans, Extremismus — Hier nicht!” (Drugs, clans, extremism — not here!)

Monday 19 August 2019

The election forum for state electorate #48 is held in a small performance space in Freital. About 150 people have come to listen to six local candidates, among them the sitting member and prominent Christian Democrat, Roland Wöller, interior minister in the state government.

Some of the candidates seem poorly prepared. The Social Democrats’ Daniela Forberg, for example, seems sometimes to be hastily consulting her party’s election program when she responds to questions. Others resort to oversimplifications and misrepresentations in the expectation that they won’t be held to account. Discussing the controversial issue of whether police officers should be identifiable, Wöller conveys the impression that the Greens and Die Linke would like the police to sport name badges, when all they have suggested is that police officers should be identifiable by means of a number that can be cited if a complaint is lodged.

Germany’s asylum policies elicit the strongest response from the audience. Should asylum seekers whose protection claims are unsuccessful be immediately deported, the moderator wants to know. Neither Wöller nor Forberg, whose parties have been responsible for asylum seeker policy at the national level, point out that it would be against longstanding government policy to deport people to war zones. Only Die Linke’s candidate does justice to the complexity of the issue.

The most uncomfortable question comes towards the end, from a man who introduces himself as a local businessman. He says that when crossing a nearby square he noticed a man wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with these words: “Schwarz ist die Nacht, in der wir euch kriegen / Weiß sind die Männer, die für Deutschland siegen / Rot ist das Blut auf dem Asphalt” (Black is the night when we’ll get you / White are the men who are victorious for Germany / Red is the blood on the road). These are the lyrics of a song, “Schwarz ist die Nacht,” recorded by Frontalkraft, an East German neo-Nazi rock band. The questioner didn’t say anything to the man with the t-shirt because he was not confident that other people nearby would support him if the situation got ugly. What would you do, he asks the six panellists. And “should I perhaps not encourage my non-German employees to learn German, lest they then be able to read such texts?”

The answers are evasive and unsatisfactory. None of the panellists wants to say that the presence of neo-Nazis is a major problem, and none wants to admit that neo-Nazi symbols, statements and attitudes are tolerated, if not condoned, by more than a few isolated (and, as one candidate ventured, “sick”) individuals.

Freital has had an image problem at least since 2015, when it became the scene of militant protests against a former hotel housing asylum seekers at the height of the “refugee crisis.” The town has also been associated with the Gruppe Freital, a far-right terrorist group formed in that year. Key members of the group were arrested in 2016, and two years later eight of them were convicted and given long prison sentences.

At the height of the protests against asylum seekers, Freital was also the scene of counter-protests — often carried out by people from Leipzig and Dresden, though, if not from places further afield. Many local citizens claimed that they were caught in the middle. Freital’s image as a hotbed of neo-Nazis has meant that journalists from West Germany regularly visit the town; too often the reports they file reinforce its image but do little to understand its problems. But the image, of course, is not without foundation.

Unlike in Pirna, whose mayor has gone out of his way to promote an image of a town that welcomes strangers and encourages asylum seeker support groups and anti-fascist initiatives, Freital’s local administration claims that the town has been victimised and its people misrepresented. But in Pirna, as in Freital, the AfD and politicians sympathising with its positions have enjoyed strong support at the ballot box. The Pirna mayor’s decision to take a stance might have had an impact on what can be said in public, but so far it doesn’t seem to have swayed people’s opinions.

Tuesday 20 August 2019

Public broadcaster MDR has published the results of a survey of which issues will be most decisive in influencing the voting decisions of electors in Saxony. It was no surprise that 24 per cent nominated “climate change and the protection of the environment.” Thanks to Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future, reinforced by last year’s exceptionally hot and dry European summer, climate change has been the dominant issue in public debate in Germany this year. One result is the meteoric rise of the Greens, who outpolled the Social Democrats in the recent European elections, with some observers speculating that Robert Habeck, the charismatic co-leader of the Greens, rather than the leader of the Christian Democrats, might succeed Merkel as chancellor after the next national elections.

It is less obvious why another 24 per cent of surveyed voters nominated “refugees, immigration, asylum policy.” For a start, most issues to do with migration are federal rather than state matters. Also, this year has seen a further decline in the number of asylum seekers reaching Germany. In the first seven months of 2019, according to the latest statistics, Germany received 86,300 new applications for asylum — a far cry from 2015 and 2016, when the combined total was more than 1.1 million new applications. The shire currently accommodates 574 people with a pending asylum application, as well as 569 whose application has been rejected, and 807 refugees who have been granted protection. Only one in thirty-eight residents of the shire doesn’t hold a German passport, making Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge one of the shires with the lowest percentage of foreigners in the country.

At lunchtime, I come across a comparatively rare sight: a party campaigning in Pirna’s pedestrian mall. On a stall drumming up support for the Greens are one of the party’s local politicians and five members from Mönchengladbach, a city in the Rhineland, more than 600 kilometres west of here. They have come to Pirna and Freital for five days to support fellow Greens. They report that the experience of engaging with prospective voters is very different from back home. “We don’t normally get shouted at when campaigning,” I’m told. “People tend to be more civil back home.” No wonder then that none of the parties is doorknocking voters here.

Greens membership is low here compared with West Germany, and anybody offering to put leaflets in letterboxes or let themselves be abused in the local mall would be welcome. On the other hand, West German advice, help and attention comes with the burden of a twenty-nine-year post-reunification relationship in which West Germans knew what was best and took some pleasure in pointing out how ignorant, reactionary and behind the times their brothers and sisters in “Dunkeldeutschland,” or Dark Germany, were.

Tonight, about 200 people have come to listen to the six local candidates in state electorate #50, which includes Pirna, at a Landeszentrale-hosted forum. But the best-known local candidate, at least among people outside Pirna, has not been invited because her party isn’t likely to win more than 5 per cent of the vote. Frauke Petry won electorate #158, Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, in 2017 for the AfD; at the time, she was her party’s co-leader. Immediately after the election, she quit the AfD to set up the Blue Party. The AfD had moved too far to the right, she said. The Blue Party has had no electoral success so far, and Petry has not been able to persuade more than a handful of federal and state parliamentarians to leave the AfD and join her.

Petry’s nemesis was Jan Zwerg, the chairman of her local branch. He is now the general secretary of the AfD in Saxony, and the AfD’s candidate in state electorate #50. Zwerg is associated with the AfD’s right-wing faction, the so-called Flügel (wing), whose most prominent figure is Björn Höcke. Outside Germany, Höcke is perhaps best known for calling the Berlin Holocaust memorial a “Denkmal der Schande” (monument of shame). The Flügel has been investigated by Germany’s federal intelligence agency for advocating positions that violate Germany’s constitution. Saxony is a Flügel stronghold.

The standard of the debate is not high, although an improvement on yesterday’s in Freital. The questions from the audience appear designed to confirm divisions rather than elicit new information. Given the male-only panel, it seems fitting that all questions come from men. As in Freital, men also make up the majority of the audience, most of whom are over sixty.

Both here and in Freital, the audience learns little about the candidates themselves. Tonight, though, there are three exceptions. Zwerg exudes self-confidence bordering on arrogance, and on one occasion can’t be bothered answering a question put to him by the moderator. The Greens candidate is plainly out of his depth; when asked about the AfD’s proposal to build new nuclear power stations in Saxony, he obviously doesn’t know what to say.

The third exception is the sitting member, thirty-five-year-old Oliver Wehner of the Christian Democrats. When asked with whom he would consider forming a coalition after the elections, he rules out the AfD. Imagining a situation in which he and Zwerg have to negotiate the government’s policy, he explains: “And then he [Zwerg] says, for him it is important that Germans and foreigners are treated differently when they go to see a doctor. I would have an issue with that. And then, if Herr Zwerg becomes interior minister in Saxony, I might read in the paper that people have been shot at the border, then I would have my second problem.”

At this point, Wehner can’t continue because many in the audience protest vociferously. Perhaps trying to defuse the situation, the moderator says he can “understand” that people are annoyed by what Wehner has said.

Wehner’s stance is unusual. It might have something to do with the fact that he was once responsible for the former hardware store used to accommodate asylum seekers in Heidenau in August 2015, which became the focal point of violent protests. But it also makes sense for him to rule out collaborating with Zwerg from a purely strategic point of view: voters who agree with the AfD won’t vote for the Christian Democrats just because they claim they can understand people’s frustration and anger, even if it is directed against asylum seekers. Prospective Greens voters, on the other hand, might be persuaded by conservative politicians who distance themselves from the far right.

In Pirna and in Freital, politicians of all persuasions have bemoaned the fact that society has been divided. All have expressed the hope that relationships can be mended. It is true that the question of how to respond to asylum seekers has divided families, workplaces and society at large. The yearning for unity is palpable, but it’s hard to see how expressing empathy for irrational fears will solve the issue.

Wednesday 21 August 2019

I return to Freital for what is probably the best-attended campaign event in the shire. The audience is younger, bigger and more diverse, and they have come to see Robert Habeck, co-leader of the Greens. Unlike any other German politician, he has genuine rock star appeal.

Rather than giving speeches, Habeck and Wolfram Günther, co-leader of Saxony’s Greens, engage with the audience by responding to questions. Most are critical of the Greens’ policies, but Habeck and Günther take their time in answering them and don’t shy away from issues that seem overly complex. The audience — including those who would probably never vote for the Greens — show their appreciation by being patient and respectful. Here it seems possible to have a conversation that does more than buttress pre-existing views.

Habeck stresses his belief that it is essential to debate issues with one another. Here again, West Germans are at an advantage. Broadly speaking, Saxony’s postwar political culture (including civic education) was first shaped by the communists, whose hegemony remained undisputed until 1989, and then by the Christian Democrats, whose hegemony was not challenged until 2017. There was little room for debate. West Germans like Habeck, who were already adults when the Berlin Wall fell, also lived through two periods in the 1970s and 1980s in which society was bitterly divided: first over the use of nuclear energy and then over the stationing of American cruise missiles. For East Germans, on the other hand, the controversy over Germany’s response to migrants, refugees and asylum seekers is the first that prompted everyone to take sides. But the schism — within families, communities and workplaces — hasn’t been overcome by a discussion engaging both sides of the divide.

Habeck is asked about possible coalitions after the elections. He recounts his involvement in three sets of negotiations: twice in his home state of Schleswig-Holstein in the north of Germany, and once at the federal level after the 2017 election. The latter talks (between Christian Democrats, Free Democrats and Greens) ended when the leader of the Free Democrats walked out. According to Habeck, these negotiations failed because there was no genuine willingness to be innovative and find common ground. Habeck was also involved in negotiating the current coalition between the same three parties in Schleswig-Holstein, and has only good things to say about his fellow negotiators. He would know, however, that deeply conservative Christian Democrats like Michael Kretschmer have very little in common with Christian Democrats like Schleswig-Holstein’s decidedly liberal premier Daniel Günther.

In a final statement, Habeck comments on the AfD without mentioning it by name. He refers to Brexit as a salutary lesson about the viability of populist positions. He then makes the only reference I have heard during the campaign to the fact that the election in Saxony takes place exactly eighty years after Germany’s invasion of Poland and the beginning of the second world war, imploring the audience “not to vote for a party that has an unbroken relationship to fascism.”

Sunday 1 September 2019

It’s ten days later now, and the results are in. The most extreme scenarios — that the AfD would come first; that Michael Kretschmer’s position would be weakened to the extent that he would be replaced by a Christian Democrat willing to make a deal with the AfD; that Saxony would become ungovernable; or that the Social Democrats would lose so badly that they would leave the coalition in Berlin — have not come to pass. In Saxony, the Social Democrats fared less well than ever before in a state election in the Federal Republic; but the result in today’s other state election, in the East German state of Brandenburg, was much better for the Social Democrats, which remains the strongest party there and is likely to lead the next coalition government (presumably with the Greens and Die Linke).

In Saxony, the Christian Democrats won 32.1 per cent of the vote and the AfD came second with 27.5 per cent. They were followed by Die Linke with 10.4 per cent, the Greens with 8.6 per cent and the Social Democrats with 7.7 per cent. The Free Democrats failed to reach the 5 per cent threshold and will not be represented in the next state parliament. The most likely outcome will be a coalition between Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Greens.

In Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, the Christian Democrats retained two of the four electorates. In both cases, they were probably helped by the strong showing of two independents. Oliver Wehner, the Christian Democrat who tried to tell a Pirna audience why it would be unconscionable for him to collaborate with the AfD, lost his seat. Frauke Petry scored a paltry 805 votes.

The results are noteworthy for several reasons. First, the number of people who voted was significantly higher than at the 2014 election, with the AfD as the main beneficiary. Second, both in Brandenburg and in Saxony, some people seemed to have voted strategically. Given the real prospect that the AfD would become the strongest party, a sizeable number of followers of the other parties probably voted for the party that had the best chance of beating the AfD: in Saxony, this strategic voting strengthened the Christian Democrats; in Brandenburg the Social Democrats were the beneficiaries.

Third, immigration was the key issue for 34 per cent of AfD voters but for only 2 per cent of those who voted for Social Democrats or Christian Democrats. Fourth, the main losers weren’t the Social Democrats but Die Linke, which was once the undisputed second-largest political force in the state, and is now just one of three minor parties. And, finally, about a third of electors voted out of a sense of disappointment and two-thirds from conviction. For AfD voters, though, disappointment was the more important factor.

No doubt talk about a Rechtsruck, a lurching to the right, will intensify over the next few days. It is true that the AfD trebled its vote in Saxony. It is also true that more than a quarter of electors cast their vote for a party that advocates extremist positions and whose most significant faction, the Flügel, is under observation by the federal intelligence agency.

But let’s put things into perspective. The rise of the AfD has also prompted the rise of a powerful counter-movement. It has politicised people who consider themselves liberals or even conservatives, particularly in West Germany. It has prompted numerous innovative civil-society initiatives to strengthen democracy. It has contributed to the electoral successes of the Greens. I would even argue that the much-acclaimed Willkommenskultur, the culture of welcoming refugees in 2015, was itself also already a reaction against the xenophobia advocated by the AfD and the Pegida movement.

It’s also important to remember that Germany has moved to the left politically over the past thirty years, becoming a more tolerant society whose majority has embraced the fact that this is a country of immigration. In the early 1990s, during a previous “refugee crisis,” when hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the former Yugoslavia sought refuge in Germany, Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Free Democrats and respectable media outlets such as Der Spiegel fanned fears of migrants and advocated positions that today would not be acceptable outside the AfD.

The Rechtsruck thesis also suggests that those who now vote for the AfD changed their views in recent years. Numerous surveys show this not to have been the case. Sentiments, attitudes and opinions have barely changed; what has changed dramatically is the range of views that can acceptably be voiced publicly (although “publicly” often means within the echo chambers provided by Facebook and other social media). That, of course, is a cause for concern. But the experience of the past four years suggests that German democracy, by and large — in the West more so than in the East — is remarkably resilient. It’s important to reflect on the events of 1 September 1939 and on its causes — but not because the past is about to return. •

The post The significance of 1 September appeared first on Inside Story.

The man whose followers call him Il Capitano (the captain) has been able to position himself as the strongman of Italian politics and the de facto leader of the European far right. He has effectively sidelined both prime minister Guiseppe Conte and Luigi Di Maio, the leader of the Five Star Movement, the nominally senior partner in Italy’s governing coalition.

Salvini is well-known for his racism and for trying to prevent asylum seekers from reaching Italy. His policies and practices have been controversial not least because they appear to contravene Italian and European law, though so far neither Italian nor European courts have issued rulings against him. But it was only a vote in the Italian senate that stopped him from facing criminal charges for directing the coast guard vessel Diciotti not to dock at an Italian port with rescued migrants on board.

Neither Di Maio nor Conte, nor Nicola Zingaretti, the leader of the Partito Democratico, the largest opposition party, have had Salvini’s measure. Even Pope Francis wields less influence among Italy’s Catholics than Salvini, who claims to be a devout Christian and often fondles a rosary in public but has dismissed many of the Pope’s views, particularly concerning the human rights of migrants. According to an analysis published recently by the Guardian, it was former Trump strategist Steve Bannon who in 2016 advised Salvini to go after the Pope.

But Salvini might have met his match: thirty-one-year-old Carola Rackete, a German woman who, in Italy, is referred to as La Capitana.

Unlike Salvini, who failed to complete his university studies in history, worked briefly as a journalist, and has otherwise been a full-time politician for most of his adult life, Rackete is a ship’s captain by training. She has a degree in nautical science from Jade University, and worked for several years as an officer on German and British research ships in the Arctic and Antarctic, on cruise ships and on a Greenpeace vessel.

Rackete joined the German activist group Sea-Watch in 2016. The organisation had been established the previous year to keep the European Union accountable by patrolling the Mediterranean and, if necessary, rescuing migrants at sea. Rackete briefly captained the organisation’s Sea-Watch 2 in 2016, and in June 2019 was put in charge of the Sea-Watch 3, a fifty-metre Netherlands-registered vessel built as a supply ship for Brazilian oil platforms.

Over the past two years, Sea-Watch has clashed with Libyan, Maltese and Italian authorities. On two occasions in 2017, dozens of people died because the Libyan coast guard thwarted attempts by the crews of Sea-Watch 2 and Sea-Watch 3 to rescue them. Between June and October 2018, Maltese authorities prevented the Sea-Watch 3 from leaving the port of Valetta because, they claimed, the ship had not been properly registered. In January and May 2019, the Italian authorities tried to prevent the Sea-Watch 3 from disembarking people it had rescued; in both these instances, though, they were eventually landed in Italy to be taken to other EU countries for the processing of their asylum claims.

On 12 June this year, the Sea-Watch 3, under Rackete’s command, rescued fifty-three people in international waters off the Libyan coast. Two days later, the Italian government issued a security decree making it an offence for non-government organisations to disembark rescued migrants in Italy, and provided for hefty fines for noncompliance. Rackete rejected Libya’s offer to let the Sea-Watch 3 disembark its passengers at a Libyan port, because migrants are exposed to torture, rape, forced labour and extortion in that country. She also rejected suggestions by European politicians that she head for a Tunisian port, because, like Italy, Tunisia had closed its ports to migrants rescued in the Mediterranean and has no refugee determination process.

Sea-Watch 3 nevertheless aimed for the Italian island of Lampedusa to disembark its passengers. But while he allowed the medical evacuation of some of them, Salvini prohibited the ship from entering Italian waters. He accused Rackete and her crew of being the “accomplices of traffickers and smugglers” and running a “pirate ship.” For two weeks, the vessel remained in international waters in deference to the Italian government’s order, but on 26 June Rackete declared a “state of necessity” — a provision in international law describing circumstances that preclude the unlawfulness of an otherwise internationally unlawful act — and took the ship to within a couple of miles of Lampedusa.

Three days later, with people on board becoming increasingly restless and the situation threatening to spiral out of control, Rackete decided that she had no choice but to dock at Lampedusa. As the Sea-Watch 3 approached the quay, a much smaller Italian customs vessel tried to block it. A minor collision ensued, with no injuries, and Rackete completed her manoeuvre. Video footage of the incident suggests that Rackete did not deliberately endanger those on board the Italian ship and that it was more likely that the latter’s recklessness led to the accident.

When the German captain left her ship, she was arrested by Italian police and later charged with resistance, violence against a warship, and people smuggling, and put under house arrest. On 2 July, a judge in Agrigento, Sicily, ordered her release after throwing out two of the charges. Another judicial hearing is scheduled for 17 July.

Since her release, Rackete has been holed up at a secret location in Italy. That’s not because she wants to avoid the publicity surrounding her case but because she has reason to fear for her safety. She has been subjected to online abuse and has received death threats. In Germany, former police officer and serial video blogger Tim Kellner published a YouTube video attacking Rackete and her family, which to date has been viewed more than 320,000 times. Most of the more than 3700 comments posted so far applaud Kellner and are informed by hatred. Some contain threats. For example, “Grillgucker” wrote: “A bullet between the eyes would solve the problem.” Others referred to her as Assel (woodlouse) or Zecke (tick), or to her and her supporters as Volksverräter, the term used in Nazi Germany for traitors.

In Italy too Rackete has been threatened with rape and murder, for which Salvini can take part of the blame. He has used social media to attack her, calling her a criminal and claiming that she committed an act of war. Referring to the crew of the Italian customs vessel, Salvini said she had tried to kill five members of the Italian military.

If Salvini’s tone has become more strident, I suspect that’s because twice in the past week he has suffered a defeat. First Rackete was able to defy his order and dock in Lampedusa. Then two of the charges against her were dismissed and she was released from house arrest. Salvini has also attacked Alessandra Vella, the Agrigento judge, claiming her decision was politically motivated, shameful, scandalous and dangerous, and suggesting that Vella resign from her position and seek a career in politics. After her decision, Vella too has been subjected to abuse and death threats. Salvini has also threatened to push for “judicial reform.”

In other, forthcoming court cases Salvini’s own policies and conduct will be closely examined. Last week, Rackete’s Italian lawyer Alessandro Gamberini announced she would launch a libel lawsuit against the minister. At least outwardly, Salvini remained unconcerned about that prospect, writing on Twitter, “She breaks the law and attacks Italian military ships, and then sues me. The mafia doesn’t frighten me, so why should I be afraid of a rich and spoiled German communist.” But now Gamberini has upped the ante: in the fourteen-page statement prepared for the court, he not only claimed that Salvini broke the law on twenty-two occasions, he also asked the court to order the closure of Salvini’s Twitter and Facebook accounts.

But a case before the European Court of Human Rights might provide a bigger headache for Salvini. It concerns one of the incidents in 2017 in which the Libyan coast guard prevented a Sea-Watch ship from rescuing migrants. Seventeen survivors are now suing the Italian government for abetting the Libyan coast guard in their return to Libya, where they were exposed to extreme forms of violence.

If the court finds against Italy, the case might have similar ramifications as the Hirsi case, in which the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2012 that Italy had breached its international legal obligations when returning migrants intercepted in the Mediterranean to Libya under a deal negotiated between the Gaddafi and Berlusconi governments. Italy had been taken to court by a group of Somalis and Eritreans rescued by the Italian navy only to be handed over to the Libyans.

In its ruling, the court found that “the Italian border control operation of ‘push-back’ on the high seas, coupled with the absence of an individual, fair and effective procedure to screen asylum-seekers, constitutes a serious breach of the prohibition of collective expulsion of aliens and consequently of the principle of non-refoulement.” This judgement was behind the decision by the European Union and Italy to use the Libyan coast guard for pull-backs. But it is conceivable that the court will find the pull-backs contravene international law no less than the Italian push-backs of 2009.

There are two more reasons why Salvini has been under the pump. First, the absurdity of Italy’s Libyan solution has again been put into sharp relief. This week, the Italian government announced that it wants to work even more closely with the Libyan coast guard. But Salvini’s argument that the Libyans could rescue and look after migrants trying to reach Europe sounds increasingly hollow. In the early hours of 3 July, a government-run migrant detention centre in the Libyan capital Tripoli was bombed, presumably by the forces of general Khalifa Haftar, who has been waging war against the government in Tripoli. At least forty-four of the detainees died when two missiles struck the centre, and more than 130 were severely injured. According to reports, the centre’s guards shot at detainees who were trying to escape after the first missile hit.

Salvini is also vulnerable as an indirect result of the fact that Italian and European support for militias aligned with the Libyan government has made it more difficult for people smugglers to sell places on small boats leaving from Libya. Why pay money to smugglers when the boat is likely to be intercepted by the Libyan coast guard and its passengers returned to Libya? Smugglers have therefore offered an alternative option: larger ships take people from the North African coast to an area within easy reach of Italy, and there they are transferred to dinghies or other smaller vessels that take them directly to Lampedusa or Sicily.

As a result, seventeen small boats, carrying more than 300 migrants, landed in Lampedusa alone during the two-week stand-off between Sea-Watch 3 and the Italian government. Salvini doesn’t want to talk about them because they make a mockery of his claim that he has been able to seal Italy’s maritime borders to migrants arriving by boat.

Carola Rackete and Sea-Watch have suffered much abuse in recent days, as has the Pope, who used a mass on Monday to speak out on behalf of migrants. But Rackete has also been hailed as a heroine, both in Italy and in her native Germany, and Sea-Watch has received much support, including from unexpected quarters.

Within twenty-four hours of Rackete’s arrest, a campaign launched by two German television presenters had netted more than €1 million in donations, mostly from people in Germany, but a sizeable amount also from Italians. In fact, Sea-Watch has received so much extra funding that the organisation has decided it can afford to share some of it with other organisations running private search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean.

Predictably, politicians from the far-right Alternative for Germany have praised Salvini’s stance and condemned the Sea-Watch captain. Equally predictably, Rackete has been applauded by politicians from the Left and the Greens. Perhaps less predictably, among the first to defend her were the two most popular German politicians, federal president Frank-Walter Steinmeier and foreign minister Heiko Maas. They were followed by the European Union’s budget and human resources minister, and prominent Christian Democrat, Günther Oettinger, and by development minister Gerd Müller of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, the Christian Democrats’ sister party.

Remarkably, Müller has called not only for a resumption of European search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean, but also for an evacuation of refugees from Libya in a joint EU–UN operation. On 8 July he told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung that “the people in the [Libyan] camps of misery have the choice of dying in the camps through violence or hunger, to die of thirst in the desert on the way back or to drown in the Mediterranean.” While Angela Merkel hasn’t yet commented on Rackete — or Müller’s proposal, for that matter — a government spokesperson has strongly condemned the criminalisation of private search-and-rescue missions. Even Merkel’s bête noire, hardline interior minister Horst Seehofer, wrote to Salvini to ask for the reopening of Italy’s maritime borders.

Sea-Watch’s and Rackete’s responses to the rhetorical support they have received from the federal government have been lukewarm. They have pointed out that Germany has also provided funding and logistical support to the Libyan government, and that more than words are needed.

The German print and electronic media have largely rallied behind Rackete, and have often been critical of the Italian government and the European Union. Numerous newspapers have published long feature articles about the deaths in the Mediterranean and the tussle between Salvini and Sea-Watch. Last Saturday, Germany’s premier news magazine Spiegel ran a cover story about Rackete. Most of the articles in the German media have avoided portraying the conflict in national terms, even though Salvini has tried to make much of the fact that Rackete is German.

Across Germany on the weekend, tens of thousands took to the streets in around ninety separate protests against Rackete’s arrest, the criminalisation of rescue missions in the Mediterranean and the German government’s complicity in migrant deaths. In Hamburg, about 4000 people marched under the slogan “Free Carola,” although the organisers had expected a crowd of only 1500. In Berlin, 6000 turned out for the same cause.

While European governments took their time to agree on the distribution of the people rescued by the Sea-Watch 3, there has been no shortage of offers to accommodate them. In Italy, archbishop Cesare Nosiglia of Torino said that his archdiocese was willing to take care of the migrants from the Sea-Watch 3. In Germany, several towns and cities have offered to accommodate migrants rescued in the Mediterranean — over and above those asylum seekers assigned to them by the federal and state governments. Thirteen local councils have formed the Bündnis Städte Sicherer Hafen (Alliance of Safe Haven Cities). Among them is Rottenburg, a town of about 40,000 in Baden-Württemberg in Germany’s affluent and conservative southwest.

Christian Democrat Stephan Neher has been Rottenburg’s mayor for more than ten years. “We want to act globally and take advantage of globalisation,” he said soon after the Sea-Watch 3 announced that it had rescued fifty-three people. “Therefore, we also have to bear its negative consequences. Anyway, accommodating fifty-three refugees in Rottenburg would be a piece of cake.” He even offered to send a bus to Italy to pick them up. Neher’s stance seems to have attracted a lot of local support: this week, he told the German weekly Zeit that when he walks through his town, he is often stopped, because Rottenburg residents want to know when the refugees will arrive and how many of them the town is “allowed” to host.

What explains the magnitude of support for Sea-Watch in Germany? Carola Rackete is part of the answer. For a start, she is comparatively young. Since the emergence of Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement, young people and their concerns are being taken seriously. To give one other example: the Social Democrats are currently looking for a new party leader, and the most obvious candidate is thirty-year-old Young Socialists chairperson Kevin Kühnert.

For those who have long campaigned for an about-turn in Europe’s approach to forced migration, Rackete is an activist with the necessary street cred. She is principled and determined and, sporting dreadlocks and appearing barefooted in a television interview, she looks every bit like somebody who might otherwise live in a treehouse in the occupied Hambach Forest protesting against open-cut coalmining or demonstrating against the deportation of asylum seekers or disrupting a gathering of Neo-Nazis. No doubt her appearance also helps explain the vitriol reserved for her by far-right trolls.

Moderates who are concerned about German, Italian and European asylum seeker policies but who would never join potentially violent protests can also embrace her because she does not come across as a radical. Contrary to what Salvini has claimed, she is no communist.

Rackete does not let herself be provoked by Salvini. In interviews, she is calm and her words are measured. Talking to German television station ZDF, she declined to comment on Salvini’s attacks on her. “I find it inappropriate to insult others,” she explained. “I like to work with facts. And anyway, as a captain you shouldn’t get excited. At least not in front of others.” In interviews, she presents as a captain: as somebody who is responsible for her crew and for the migrants rescued by them, and who takes that responsibility seriously.

Rackete is also highly articulate and clearly knows what she is talking about: about her ship, the international law of the sea, Europeans’ moral responsibilities, and conditions faced by migrants in Libya. At the same time she claims that she prefers her actions to do the talking for her.

Her arguments are convincing. She is not calling for Europeans’ pity but insists that Sea-Watch is standing up for the rights of forced migrants. A recent article in the online edition of the Bremen daily Weser-Kurier was illustrated by an image of Rackete with a quote from her: “There is a right to be rescued. It’s all about the principle of human rights.”

Commentators in Italy and Germany have likened Rackete to Sophocles’s Antigone: the woman who defies the law of Thebes by deciding to bury her brother Polynices. When brought before Creon, the King of Thebes, Antigone justifies her action by claiming that divine law trumps state law. Rackete too has claimed that she has obeyed one set of laws (namely international law) only to fall foul of another set of laws. But here the parallels end. For Sophocles, Antigone (rather than Polynices) is the key tragic figure of his play. Rackete would probably point out that the real issue is the drowning of migrants rather than her violation of Italian law, and that the conflict between the two sets of laws could be solved if domestic law were adapted to conform with international legal standards.

Finally, Rackete stood up to powerful, unscrupulous and objectionable Matteo Salvini, and did not let him bully her into submission. That explains why her case has attracted more support than that of Pia Klemp, a young woman who captained Sea-Watch 3 (and, before that, the Iuventa, a ship belonging to non-government organisation Jugend Rettet). Like Rackete, Klemp has been charged with people smuggling offences in Italy and, according to her Italian lawyer, she could face “up to twenty years in prison and horrendous fines.” Unlike Rackete, Klemp has been portrayed as Salvini’s victim rather than as an opponent who got the better of him.

The drama around the Sea-Watch 3 has also resonated with Germans for reasons that are unrelated to the attributes of particular individuals. (I discussed some of them in Inside Story a year ago, so I’ll focus on other aspects here.) Over the past decade in particular, the idea has slowly taken hold that non-German residents of Germany enjoy the same rights as citizens. To use the words of Angela Merkel, who ought to be credited with insisting on this idea even when it was unfashionable, “The values and rights of our Basic Law are valid for everyone in this country.”

Once it is accepted that the first line of the constitution’s Article 1, “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar” (human dignity is inviolable) applies to everybody in Germany, then it makes little sense to deny this right to people outside Germany’s borders. An increasing number of Germans believe that the obligation to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean has nothing to do with their particular motivation for migrating or degree of suffering; rather, it’s to do with their being human. This conviction prompts people to attend rallies, donate money for organisations like Sea-Watch, and demand that their local communities commit to accommodating additional refugees.

Also in the mix is a commitment to Europe. When the Spiegel put an image of Carola Rackete on its cover last week, it did so with the headline “Captain Europe.” This should be read as more than a reference to the Captain America superhero movies. Those yearning for another, better Europe in which solidarity is not a hollow term focus on what happens at its borders, because it is there that the idea of Europe has been most severely compromised. As the following episode shows, this is not always made as explicit as it was on the Spiegel cover.

One of the German cities whose council has passed a resolution condemning Italian and European policies is Hildesheim in Lower Saxony. Because it’s the town where I was born, I was interested to find out about the debate surrounding this resolution.

Hildesheim’s councillors voted in August 2018 on a resolution jointly submitted by Social Democrats, Greens and the Left titled “Facilitate and support rescue at sea — fight against the dying in the Mediterranean — accommodate people in distress.” Although the Christian Democrats opposed the resolution on the grounds that these issues were none of the city council’s concern, one Christian Democrat rose to speak in its favour. According to the minutes, “It is true that the council cannot solve all of the world’s problems, such as the persecution of the Rohingya or the poverty of the elderly, and has to concern itself with the problems it has been entrusted with. However, the obstruction of rescue ships is a scandal which needs to be identified also by the Council of Hildesheim.”

This explanation is at once baffling and compelling: baffling because the persecution of Rohingya, on the face of it, is as much an event outside the council’s remit as the deaths at Europe’s borders; compelling because the councillor’s obvious reasoning is that the scandal is European-made, and that implies an obligation to speak up as a European.

The German support for rescue missions in the Mediterranean may also be informed by the experience of the Willkommenskultur (or culture of hospitality) of 2015–16, when many Germans rose to the challenge of accommodating a record number of asylum seekers rather than revert to the fear, if not panic, evoked by a comparable situation in the early 1990s. But I suspect that the safe haven initiatives by German cities and the recognition that human rights don’t end at national borders will prove more significant than the much-discussed Willkommenskultur.

While Carola Rackete is still in hiding, Sea-Watch is sending a new crew to Lampedusa. It is hoping that Italian authorities will release its ship soon, and that it can then return to the waters off the North African coast.

Meanwhile, three other non-government organisations are active in the Mediterranean. Earlier this month, the German organisation Sea-Eye’s ship Alan Kurdi handed over sixty-five rescued migrants to the Maltese authorities; the day after leaving Malta, it then rescued another forty-four migrants and is now looking for a harbour where it can disembark them. Alex, a yacht belonging to the Italian organisation Mediterranea Saving Humans, also defied Salvini’s orders and last week disembarked forty-one migrants in Lampedusa. And the Barcelona-based organisation Proactiva Open Arms is still active but has been threatened by Spanish authorities with fines of up to €900,000 if it continues its rescue mission.

The EU is once again talking about distributing migrants rescued in the Mediterranean among some member states without having to haggle over the quotas each time. But so far these talks, like many similar talks on previous occasions, haven’t had any tangible outcomes.

Gerd Müller’s idea of evacuating migrants from Libya has met with silence both in Brussels and in Berlin. But it may be less far-fetched than it seems. Germany, for one, has been resettling some migrants deported from Libya to Niger: according to unofficial figures, 276 Eritreans and Somalis were resettled in mid October and early December 2018, for example. Thus there is a precedent for another kind of “Libyan solution.”

In the meantime, conditions in Libya could hardly get worse, and the European border in the Mediterranean remains the deadliest border in the world, accounting this year for about half of the world’s border-related deaths. In the first ten days of July, the International Organization for Migration counted eighty-three border deaths in the Mediterranean, while there were seventy-eight in all of June.

When Carola Rackete described the seventeen days it took to find a solution for the people her crew had rescued, she drew attention to the fact that there was a lot of talking — in Rome, in Berlin and in Brussels — but no action. By acting, she exposed the emptiness of the talking. Even Matteo Salvini, who likes to portray himself as a can-do politician but, like Donald Trump, spends most of his time campaigning, was shown to be spouting mere rhetoric. •

The post The remarkable deeds of Captain Rackete appeared first on Inside Story.

Outside observers of West Germany began diagnosing a peculiar “German angst” from the 1980s on. It was first detected in widely held fears that German forests would all but disappear because of acid rain, and it was said to inform West German opposition to the deployment of American nuclear Pershing II and cruise missiles in Europe.

In the United States and elsewhere in Europe, angst was also held responsible for Germany’s opposition to the 1991 and 2003 Iraq wars. Not only did outside observers depict postwar Germans as timid, apprehensive and anxious, but Germans also came to see this as a fair characterisation. In 1991, Otto Graf Lambsdorff, leader of the Free Democrats and a former senior minister in Helmut Kohl’s cabinet, explained to the New York Times Germany’s reluctance to participate in the war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. As the paper’s journalist reported:

Overriding all was “German angst,” which Mr Lambsdorff defined as “the fear of losing things hitherto taken for granted.” He called it a fear of losing political, social and even ecological stability. He said “German angst” was best expressed in the motto chosen for the German demonstrations [against the war in Iraq]: “We won’t let our future be destroyed.”

Just as the idea that Germans were perennially angst-ridden gained universal acceptance, something odd happened. Germans’ laid-back response to the 2007–08 global financial crisis and its aftermath confounded the same observers who had become used to associating Germany with a timid and somewhat neurotic collective disposition. With unemployment on the rise, Germany was certainly affected by the crisis, but Germans took the downturn in their stride.

In 2009, the long-time Berlin correspondent of the New York Times, Roger Cohen, wrote a much-discussed article in the weekend magazine of Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s most respected broadsheets. He found that a nation that “like no other had embodied so precisely a sentiment which was more than simple fear but had not yet become panic” had responded with a lack of fear, “bordering on carefreeness,” to the worst recession since the Great Depression. “The world has been turned upside down: the situation is dire, but Germans are happy. Or, at least, they remain calm.” Cohen suggested that the world would do well to become used to these new Germans.

Germans’ response to the global financial crisis was not the first indication that the nation’s mood had changed. A carefree Germany had been on display in the summer of 2006, during the so-called Sommermärchen, the fairytale 2006 World Cup. The German team only came third, but that didn’t stop Germans from embracing the tournament, not just cheering on their own side but also generally being enthusiastic and generous hosts.

Cohen’s diagnosis remained valid in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Many Germans certainly feared a similar catastrophe, but when these fears prompted the government, led by an unusually decisive Angela Merkel, to order the staggered decommissioning of the country’s nuclear industry, the decision’s impact on energy security created comparatively little concern. Similarly, during the eurozone crisis, Germans grumbled, but they did not use the opportunity to engage in collective doomsaying.

“The euro is teetering, neighbouring countries are complaining about pressure from Berlin, and the German chancellor is rushing from one crisis summit to another,” an English-language Spiegel Online article observed in December 2011. “Typically more anxious, the Germans appear to be strangely unperturbed amid the furore.” Reporting on the results of a survey for the Guardian in June 2014, Philip Oltermann suspected that the Germany of “weltschmerz and angst, a nation constantly terrified of pending nuclear doom and haunted by memories of hyper-inflation, a joyless people… belongs to the history books.”

Those trying to explain the comparatively laid-back mood of the new Germany often associated the demise of German angst with the country’s successful return to “normality.” This normality supposedly became possible once the two Germanys had been reunited and most members of the generation responsible for the horrors of Nazi Germany had died. Gerhard Schröder, who presided over a coalition government of Social Democrats and Greens from 1998 to 2005, regularly conjured this normality. He was the first postwar chancellor who could claim not to have any personal memories of Nazi Germany (he was born in April 1944).

Schröder himself was “a normal postwar German,” Cohen writes in his 2009 essay, “growing up without a father, who had died in war, forced to live with the pain but not allowed to talk about it, because the Germans’ losses were overshadowed by their crimes.” For Cohen, this newfound normality entailed the end of shame and guilt about the Nazi past, which made it possible to talk about what the loss of a father meant.

In recent weeks the debate about German angst has been given a new impetus with the publication of Frank Biess’s book Republik der Angst: Eine andere Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (“The Republic of Fear: An Alternative History of the Federal Republic”). Biess rewrites the history of West Germany between the late 1940s and the late 1980s as a history of its fears. He shows how pervasive these fears have been, and thereby casts doubt on the dominant view that pre-reunification West Germany was a remarkable success story.

This is one of the most incisive, original and substantive contributions to the history of contemporary Germany published in recent years. That may be partly because its author is not a history professor in Germany, but teaches German history at the University of California, San Diego. Being German-born and educated but American-based, he can combine the perspective of the outsider with that of the insider.

Biess goes along with the journalists’ diagnosis of a peculiarly German angst, but not because he sees it as a national pathological trait. The collective paranoias and anxieties of postwar Germany are not rooted in a national psyche, he believes, but emerged from Germany’s past — the Nazi regime and the Holocaust — and from memories of that past. In an article published last month, Biess and his co-author Astrid Eckert suggest that the much-debated thesis about a German Sonderweg — the unique trajectory that might account for Nazi Germany — could perhaps be turned on its head: “the real Sonderweg began in 1945,” they write, and was the result of the legacy of the Holocaust and of German fascism.

Unlike many of the journalists writing about German angst, Biess takes the fears seriously, even when they have turned out to be unfounded (as most of them have), rather than passes judgement. That is, he doesn’t follow the tendency among historians to pass judgement on earlier generations with the benefit of hindsight — with the knowledge, in this case, that worst-case scenarios did not eventuate. As far as postwar West German history is concerned, narratives that tell the past through the lens of its presumed outcomes all too often make success seem inevitable.

Biess describes several cycles of collective angst: fears of revenge at the hands of the victims of Nazi Germany in the late 1940s; fears triggered by the recruitment of German men by the French Foreign Legion in the 1950s; fears of a new war in the 1950s and 1960s; fears that workers would be replaced by robots; fears held by, or prompted by, the student protesters of the late 1960s; and fears of a nuclear Armageddon as a result of a malfunctioning nuclear power plant or an atomic war in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some of these fears were informed by past experiences or memories of such experiences; others were projections shaped by an uneasiness about present developments. In every case, the angst eventually subsided.

Having grown up in West Germany in the 1960s, I recognise very well some of the fears described by Biess. When I was a child, I knew that I would have to make a quick decision about which of my belongings to take with me if an air-raid warning was sounded and we had to seek shelter in our cellar (where my parents kept supplies of tinned food for emergencies, though it wouldn’t have provided much protection). I gave much thought to the question of which toys to save and which to leave behind.

One evening, when I was eleven, my father announced that war was imminent. I went to school the next day and told my friends. Their parents hadn’t made similar predictions, but none of them thought I was mad. Later in life I tried to figure out what had happened at the time to alarm my father, but I couldn’t find news of any particular crisis in East–West relations at the time. We lived close to the German–German border, and I think he must have been concerned by one of the war games that were conducted regularly in the fields near our house. The fears I experienced were the result of experiences my parents had had: my father as a seventeen-year-old in the Wehrmacht, and my mother as a teenager whose home was destroyed in an air raid.

Later, like many of my generation of university students, I feared that one of the nuclear power stations being built in Germany would leak radiation. How ironic it would be, I thought, if we had so far survived the cold war unscathed only to fall victim to radiation sickness caused by an industry for which neither Russians nor Americans could be blamed.

Looking back at the first twenty-five years of my life from the vantage point of my life in Australia, I realised how I had been beholden to fears: of war, of a nuclear meltdown, of a resurgence of fascism and an all-too-powerful state. But on visits to Germany I also became aware of how the mood was changing. I first noticed a shift in the first half of 1989, after I had been away for almost four years. But what I experienced as a kind of West German Spring didn’t last beyond the end of that year, when the Berlin Wall came down and a feeling of impending doom returned.

Like Roger Cohen, I began to sense the emergence of a new, more relaxed Germany about ten years ago. From my perspective as a visitor, the old West Germany seemed at its most relaxed in the seventeen months from the 2014 World Cup win over Brazil until the late autumn of 2015, when the majority of Germans were still convinced that the accommodation of a million refugees was not only manageable but presented an opportunity to showcase a hospitable and relaxed Germany. East Germany was, of course, a different story.

When Roger Cohen published his essay about a carefree Germany in 2009, he assumed that Germans had dealt with their fears once and for all. Germans are “prouder, more relaxed,” he found. “These are profound transformations, which took decades. They won’t be easily undone.” He was wrong. German angst is back.

To start with, Germans are scared of Donald Trump. In a reputable survey done last year by a leading insurance company, 69 per cent of Germans said they feared that the world was becoming a more dangerous place because of the current US president. That was their greatest fear. Of course, people in many other countries, including the United States, would share that concern.

Germans are also afraid of the consequences of climate change. They are not alone in that either, but because of the long-lasting influence of the movement against nuclear power in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they are perhaps more attuned to environmental issues than, say, North Americans or Australians. When discussing the environmentalist movement of the 1970s and 1980s, Biess writes that the “mobilisation of ecological angst serves as a key means of enforcing political action.” But he cautions that when angst becomes chronic, people get used to it, which engenders paralysis rather than resistance. So far, the fear of global warming is still sufficiently acute to prompt Germans to demand, often successfully, that their government take action. In that sense, fear is a productive emotion.

Two other fears have significantly contributed to a mood change in the past three years. A minority of Germans fear migrants, particularly those from Islamic countries. They are afraid of cultural change and of having to share housing and other scarce resources. Often their fear leads them to follow demagogues of the far right who promise to guard Germany against being “swamped” by “waves” of foreigners who don’t speak German, don’t look German and don’t value German cultural practices. Others, possibly the majority, fear far-right extremists, right-wing populists and whatever other forces are out there exploiting the fear of non-white or Muslim others; but out of fear they sometimes condone demands put forward by those same right-wing populists.

Those fearful of the xenophobic minority are afraid not only because they don’t want anti-democratic parties such as the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD) to be represented in parliament and wield political influence. They are also afraid of the rage of those who believe that foreigners are transforming Germany — rage no longer reserved for asylum seekers or Muslims but now also directed at representatives of the media and of government, from the local village mayor to the federal chancellor.

The fears that are being instrumentalised by the AfD are not unique. Nor is the AfD. Those voting for Donald Trump in the United States, for Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord in Italy or, most recently, for the Finns Party in Finland have much in common with the AfD’s voters. In the global north, fears of migrants in general, and those who arrive uninvited in particular, are widespread. In that respect, the mood in Germany is in fact comparatively relaxed. Think of the hostility evident in Hungary or Poland, for example. Not to mention that most extreme case of collective asylum seeker phobia, Australia.

What distinguishes Germany is that the fears providing oxygen to the far right are less significant than the fears of people who are afraid of the far right. So much for the normality that Schröder was fond of talking up. The angst after the AfD won 12.6 per cent of the vote at the 2017 federal elections — more than the Free Democrats, more than the Greens, and more than the Left — and became the strongest party in the largest East German state, Saxony, demonstrates how the Nazi past still shapes Germany’s economy of emotions.

Incidentally, the existential fears triggered by the stationing of American nuclear missiles in Germany and by the construction of nuclear power stations contributed to the early successes of the German Greens, who entered the Bundestag in 1983. In 2019 the Greens are once again the main beneficiaries of the fear of far-right extremism. In opinion polls they are currently ahead of the Social Democrats, and well ahead of the AfD.

The Greens are also benefiting from a heightened concern about the likely effects of global warming. But what we are seeing now is not a repeat of the environmentalist movement of the 1970s and 1980s. German students taking part in the Fridays for Future demonstrations are articulating a fear for our planet. Previously, one of the characteristics of German angst had been the egotism that went with it. Germans concerned about the effects of acid rain feared that their forests would die. The hundreds of thousands of Germans who demonstrated against the deployment of Pershing II missiles were scared of a nuclear war on German soil. Those opposed to nuclear power stations were afraid that they would be affected by a core meltdown.

The focus on German angst has tended to be as blinkered as German angst itself. Fear in Germany is more than German angst. Germans who tell me that they don’t venture outside after dark for fear of being assaulted by young men who arrived as asylum seekers may genuinely believe that they aren’t safe, and it often makes little sense trying to contradict perceptions by citing crime statistics. But in some parts of Germany, those young men themselves are too afraid to venture outside after dark, and they could refer to crime statistics to back up their fears. A history of the phenomenon of angst in postwar Germany could easily dismiss non-German perspectives. It is to Frank Biess’s credit that he acknowledges this issue, although he does not discuss it in any detail in his book.

In the epilogue to Republik der Angst, Biess suggests countering right-wing populism by mobilising the fear of a demise of liberal democracy and a pluralistic society. I am not convinced. Germans belonging to the so-called silent majority who still vote overwhelmingly for democratic parties are already letting their politics be dictated by fear. But that fear does not spur them to action.

It seems to me that it might be more productive to mobilise a related emotion, namely anger: about the undue influence right-wing populists have on some areas of government policy (such as refugee policy) and the disproportionate amount of time granted to them on television to expound their views. Another disposition, however, is needed at least as urgently. As long as the fear of the far right is sufficiently pervasive to jeopardise an effective defence of a multicultural, liberal Germany, courage is more important than yet more fear.

I would also be wary of Biess’s strategy because fear is not an emotion that can be easily predicted or managed. This is something that his book demonstrates well. Sometimes fears resist being mobilised or contained, he writes: “As we all know from experience, emotions can’t always be controlled by means of deliberate manipulation.” •

The post The fall and rise of German angst appeared first on Inside Story.

The hashtag is an initiative of Ali Can, an activist whose parents came to Germany as Kurdish refugees in 1995. Can runs seminars about cultural diversity and was one of the founders, in 2016, of an association called Interkultureller Frieden, or Intercultural Peace. The same year he set up the Hotline für besorgte Bürger for people to express their concerns about migrants, asylum seekers or Muslims, or ask questions about integration and multiculturalism. The hotline encourages calls from who vote for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD.

#MeTwo was inspired by #MeToo; the “two” aims to draw attention to the fact that migrants can have two identities, such as German and Turkish, or German and Kurdish. When Can posted a video message on 27 July asking people to share their experience of racism by using the hashtag, his inspiration was German footballer Mesut Özil’s announcement that he would never again play for Germany.

Özil’s declaration — made in a long English-language statement posted on Twitter and Facebook in three instalments, three hours apart — has prompted fiery debate and lots of soul searching. Much of the latter was the result of Özil’s claim to have been the target of racist slurs. Among those he identified as racists was none other than Reinhard Grindel, the head of the German Football Federation, the world’s largest sports association.

In an earlier life, Grindel was a member of parliament for the Christian Democrats; at the time, he attracted attention on account of his hardline opposition to cultural diversity. Under the #MeTwo hashtag, a Die Linke member of parliament, Sevim Dagdelen, reported that Grindel had once told her that she was an example of failed integration.

In order to explain Özil’s resignation from the German football team and the extraordinary response to it, we need to go back to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Few expected the young and relatively inexperienced German team to be in the running for the title, but they defied expectations by reaching the semi-final (which they lost to Spain). Football aficionados were surprised not only by the decisiveness of the German wins in the first two knockout rounds (first against England, then against Argentina) but also by the speed, elegance and intelligence of the football they played. Five of the players singled out for praise had come of age since the previous World Cup: defender Jérôme Boateng, forward Thomas Müller and midfielders Toni Kroos, Sami Khedira and Mesut Özil. Between them, they had previously played only twenty-six international level matches.

The team for the 2010 World Cup stood out for two reasons. At the time, all played in the Bundesliga, Germany’s premier league, which suggested that this was a home-grown German team rather than a team of international stars with German passports. Three of the four shooting stars had a migrant background: Boateng is the son of a German mother and a Ghanaian father, Khedira has a German mother and a Tunisian father, and Özil’s paternal grandparents migrated to Germany from Turkey when his father was two years old. And all three were born in Germany: in Berlin (Boateng), Stuttgart (Khedira) and Gelsenkirchen in the Ruhr Valley. Only Khedira has two passports, but the others too could have opted to make themselves available for their fathers’ (or, in Özil’s case, grandfather’s) countries. (In fact, Boateng’s half-brother Kevin-Prince once played for Ghana’s national team.)

Later in 2010, in Berlin, Germany played Turkey in a qualifier for the European Championship. Supporters of the Turkish team, many of them German-born or long-term German residents, abused Özil for choosing to play for the German side rather than for Turkey. The booing didn’t seem to faze him; his performance was one of the reasons for the German team’s three–nil victory. After the match, German chancellor (and football tragic) Angela Merkel congratulated Özil in the team’s dressing room. The encounter resulted in the first of a series of photos showing the German chancellor with Özil — hugging him, shaking his hand, and often beaming in his company. The following month, Özil won a prestigious Bambi award in the “integration” category.

Sociologists Andreas Zick, Andreas Hövermann and Michael Müller of the University of Bielefeld found that diversity in Germany had become more widely accepted during the 2010 World Cup, and that racist attitudes had declined. They titled their study “The Özil Effect,” highlighting the role Mesut Özil had played as the personification of a new, more tolerant, less nationalistic, multicultural Germany.

Singled out: German chancellor Angela Merkel congratulates Mesut Özil after Germany’s win over Argentina at the 2014 World Cup finals in Rio de Janeiro. Jean Catuffe/Getty Images

I suspect the Özil effect could also be observed during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. The German team, which included a core of players who had come onto the scene four years earlier, defeated the host team seven–one in a dazzling semi-final and then won the tournament by defeating Argentina. One of the iconic images of Germany’s victory in Brazil shows Angela Merkel in the team’s dressing room, surrounded by the players, including a bare-chested Özil draped in the German flag.

Unlike in 2010 and 2014, Germany was one of the favourites to win this year’s World Cup, but the team bowed out ignominiously after the group phase. The losses against Mexico and South Korea, and the narrow and unconvincing victory over Sweden, stand for Germany’s worst performance in the history of the World Cup. Never before had the country been eliminated that early.

Özil, who had been singled out as a key contributor to the win in 2014 and the German team’s impressive performance four years earlier, was now held responsible for Germany’s early exit. While it’s true that he played in both games that Germany lost but not in its win against Sweden, the criticism has been unfair. He was not playing more poorly than the rest of the team; in fact, it has been shown that he was more effective than his teammates. But those blaming Özil for Germany’s poor showing in Russia didn’t have only his performance on the football pitch in mind.

For Özil’s detractors, the origins of Germany’s disastrous performance can be traced back to a photo published on 14 May. It shows Özil, together with Emre Can and Ilkay Gündogan, two other footballers of Turkish cultural background who have played for Germany, in the company of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The trio, all of whom make their living in the English Premier League, had met Erdoğan at his request in London. It was less than six weeks from the Turkish presidential and parliamentary elections, and Erdoğan was on the campaign trail (which took him also to European countries with a large Turkish diaspora).

At the meeting, Gündogan presented Erdoğan with a football jersey with the handwritten inscription, in Turkish, “For my revered president, sincerely.” Erdoğan’s AKP party later published four photos of the encounter on Twitter. Suddenly, something Özil had posted the day before made sense: he had tweeted a photo showing just him and the two other footballers, titled “In good company this evening…,” with a winking face emoji and the German and Turkish flags.

The next day, Reinhard Grindel released a statement in which he criticised the players, saying that the Football Federation “of course respects the special situation of our players with a migratory background” but that it also “stands for values which are not sufficiently recognised by Mr Erdogan.” In the German media, Özil in particular was lambasted for allowing the Turkish autocrat to pose with him, and thereby indirectly supporting Erdoğan’s bid for re-election. Some commentators and far-right politicians demanded that the offending players be excluded from the German team, but on 15 May, German coach Joachim Löw nominated both Özil and Gündogan for the World Cup in Russia.

Five days after the publication of the photos, the Football Federation brokered a meeting between Özil, Gündogan and German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Photos of the three men were published in all major German newspapers, as if they were an antidote for the Erdoğan pictures.

The Football Federation had clearly hoped that the meeting and photo opportunity with Steinmeier would be the end of the matter, but the controversy over the photo with Erdoğan didn’t die down. While Gündogan tried to explain himself in interviews and on social media, Özil remained silent. This wasn’t surprising; even at the best of times, Özil is reluctant to talk to journalists. During friendly matches against Austria and Saudi Arabia, some German fans booed the two players.

For her part, Angela Merkel spoke out in support of Özil and Gündogan; ever the pragmatist, she pointed out on 10 June that “we need them so that we can do well [in Russia].” Not long after, she visited the German team’s training camp in Austria, and met in private with Özil and Gündogan.

In early July, ten days after the German team was eliminated from the World Cup, Grindel said in an interview that he expected Özil to explain himself. Both Grindel and the team’s manager, former German player Oliver Bierhoff, made statements that could be interpreted as blaming Özil for Germany’s poor showing in Russia. Others were more direct; Bayern Munich boss Uli Hoeneß said that Özil was hiding his unsatisfactory performance behind the Erdoğan picture and that “for years he has played only rubbish.”

By that stage, editorialists and other commentators largely agreed that Özil was at best naïve when he posed for a photo with the Turkish president. Even people who otherwise supported him have been baffled by his decision to meet with Erdoğan during the Turkish election campaign. Ali Can, for example, suggested that Özil lacked “diplomatic awareness.” But public opinion was divided over whether Özil was entitled to meet whomever he wanted to. Public opinion was also divided over the question of who was to blame for the German performance in Russia, and for the fact that the controversy over the photo overshadowed the team’s preparations, if not the World Cup itself.

The Football Federation’s hope that the controversy would die down, remained unfulfilled. It again dominated headlines after Özil informed his 23.2 million Twitter followers and 30.9 million Facebook fans that he had decided not to play again for Germany. Seemingly confirming the views of those who had argued he was naïve, Özil defended meeting Erdoğan: “For me, having a picture with President Erdogan wasn’t about politics or elections, it was about me respecting the highest office of my family’s country. My job is a football player and not a politician, and our meeting was not an endorsement of any policies.”

Özil also wrote in detail about the racist abuse he had suffered as a result of the Erdoğan photo. He reserved his strongest criticism for Grindel: “I will no longer stand for being a scapegoat for [Grindel’s] incompetence and ability to do his job properly… In the eyes of Grindel and his supporters, I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose. This is because despite paying taxes in Germany, donating facilities to German schools and winning the World Cup with Germany in 2014, I am still not accepted into society. I am treated as being ‘different.’”

Footballers who supposedly don’t look German have long been the targets of racism in German. In his wonderful book Heimaterde, which recounts his travels through a culturally diverse contemporary Germany, Lucas Vogelsang tells the story of Jimmy Hartwig, the son of an Afro-American GI and a German woman. Hartwig played in the Bundesliga, and twice for the German national team, in the 1970s and 1980s, and endured much abuse. Things have improved since those days, and most clubs now take a tough line if supporters racially abuse players.

In the public arena, too, racist slurs are seemingly less readily tolerated than they used to be. In 2016, Alexander Gauland, then deputy chair of AfD, said that “the people” like Jérôme Boateng “as a football player. But they don’t want to have a Boateng as their neighbour.” The remarks were roundly condemned — even by then AfD leader Frauke Petry, who apologised on behalf of her party — and for a short time they even affected the AfD’s showing in the polls. It seemed that Gauland had crossed a red line.

But shortly afterwards, Petry herself continued Gauland’s general line of attack. She told journalists that it was “a shame” that Mesut Özil never sang the national anthem when it was played ahead of international matches. She also objected to his posting photos on social media that showed him making the pilgrimage to Mecca, and wondered whether this “publicly celebrated trip” was also intended to be a political statement.

And when the German team failed to win the 2016 European Championship, having been the clear favourite, another prominent AfD politician, Beatrix von Storch, suggested that the team’s performance was due to the fact that not all its players were German.

While Gauland’s initial comment drew lots of criticism, subsequent similar statements have not prompted as much outrage. The more often players like Özil and Boateng were publicly attacked on account of their cultural background, colour of skin or religion, the more difficult it seemed to become to show solidarity, and the more acceptable such attacks then appeared.

Insinuations that Germany was eliminated from the tournament in Russia because of Özil should have been as scandalous as Gauland’s remarks about Boateng two years earlier, but they seemed to have become part of a new normality.

The response to Özil’s resignation from the national team dominated Germany’s media for more than a week. Angela Merkel has so far not commented on Özil’s claims of endemic German racism, but at least she had the grace to say that she regards him highly, that he is a great footballer and that she respects his decision to resign from the national team.

Özil’s former teammates have been less generous. Only Jérôme Boateng has spoken out in support of his abi, or brother, Mesut. Thomas Müller has demanded that the matter be put to rest, because “there is no racism in the German national team,” as if anybody had made such a claim.

A week ago, the team’s captain, goalkeeper Manuel Neuer said that he had not previously commented on the issue because he hadn’t been asked for his opinion and because he did not want to pass value judgements — only to do just that. He suggested that the German team must include only players “who are really proud to play for the national team, and who give everything for the opportunity to play for their country,” thereby not so subtly implying that Özil, who was notorious for not joining in when the national anthem was sung before matches, should have been excluded.

German coach Joachim Löw has kept his job despite the German team’s embarrassing performance in Russia. He is known to have long believed that Özil is a footballing genius, and had been one of his most loyal supporters, even when Özil didn’t play well. In 2012, when Germany failed to make the final of the European Championship, Löw angrily responded to critics who suggested that the failure of Özil and others to sing the national anthem was symptomatic of a lack of commitment. “It’s nice to sing the anthem,” Löw said. “But doing so is not evidence of quality, and [not singing it] does not prove that somebody is unwilling to fight.” But this time, Löw too has remained silent.

For Özil, the matter now seems to be closed. He has said what he felt needed to be said. He will continue to play football — not for Germany, but for his English club Arsenal. In a recent match against Paris Saint-Germain, Arsenal’s new manager Unai Emery appointed Özil the team’s captain. This is an indication that in England Özil has the public support that Löw and most of his former German teammates are denying him.

Özil will also remain German — after all, Germany is the country where he was born and grew up, the country that he represented ninety-two times as a player, and the only country of which he is a citizen. He will remain Turkish, because Turkey is the country of his parents and grandparents. But Özil’s identity cannot be divided between two neat categories, “German” and “Turkish.” One of his recent tweets is titled “Welcome to my city” and includes video clips that show him walking through London. He is a global citizen with a global following: worldwide, only four other footballers have a larger social media following than his.

In Germany, the debate about what Özil did and didn’t do has been overtaken by necessary, long overdue discussions about racism, about integration and about German identity. These discussions were prompted by Özil’s decision to talk publicly about his experiences, but they focus on everyday racism rather than the racism experienced by celebrities or the racism of leading AfD politicians. Racism is not a uniquely German problem, but it is a problem of Germany — rather than of a few obnoxious far-right figures.

The fact that the AfD, whose representatives are often openly racist, have the support of about 15 per cent of the electorate is only one facet of that problem. Another is that people who could not be accused of being racist — Thomas Müller and Joachim Löw, for example — don’t speak up when somebody close to them is vilified. And perhaps the biggest problem is that the 85 per cent of Germans who don’t vote for the AfD have done too little to stop racist attitudes and xenophobic sentiments from becoming more respectable.

The German team’s next match, against World Cup–holder France, takes place on 6 September. That will be an opportunity to once again talk football. Enough has been said about Özil’s lack of judgement in May, and about his more recent disappointment and anger, but much remains to be said about Özil as one of the most talented footballers of his generation. What better opportunity to reminisce about Özil’s magic when watching a German team that no longer includes him. Much might also be said then about the joy of watching a talented and culturally diverse national team. From a German point of view, it is unfortunate that that team will be France’s Les Bleus rather than the German Nationalmannschaft. ●

The post “I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose” appeared first on Inside Story.

What’s to blame for the rising death toll? Three explanations are commonly given: the obstruction and criminalisation of private search-and-rescue missions, the absence of a concerted European effort to rescue migrants at sea, and the policies of the new government in Rome. Italy has closed its ports not only to search-and-rescue ships operated by non-government organisations but also — albeit only temporarily — to commercial vessels that pick up migrants, and navy ships engaged in the European Union’s Operation Sophia, whose ships have patrolled the Mediterranean since 2015, mainly to combat people smuggling. Earlier this month, Italy’s new far-right interior minister Matteo Salvini even threatened to prevent the Diciotti, an Italian coastguard vessel, from disembarking sixty-seven migrants at a Sicilian port.

The central Mediterranean route has arguably become more perilous since Salvini, the hard-line federal secretary of the Lega Nord, was sworn in as deputy prime minister and interior minister on 1 June. Lega Nord campaigned strongly on an anti-immigration and anti-migrant platform during the election, and the openly xenophobic Salvini is determined to fulfil its campaign promises. Within days of his appointment, he announced the closure of Italy’s ports, arguing that Italy had long enough carried the can for its European partners.

But it would be wrong to solely blame Italy’s new government. Other European countries have been every bit as anxious to reduce the number of irregular migrants arriving at Europe’s southern borders, and Malta has also gone as far as closing its ports to ships operated by NGOs. If it were up to the Austrian government, Europe’s external borders would be impenetrable even for people fleeing war or persecution — which is especially significant because Austria assumed the European Union’s rotating presidency on 1 July and is in a position to set the EU’s agenda, if only for six months.

Italy itself was a most reluctant recipient of rescued migrants well before the Lega became responsible for the government’s policies. It has been clamping down on private search-and-rescue missions since July 2017, when it demanded that NGOs operating in the central Mediterranean sign a code of conduct requiring them, for example, to “receive on board… upon request by the competent National Authorities, judicial police officers for information and evidence gathering with a view to conducting investigations related to migrant smuggling and/or trafficking in human beings.” All this is a very long way from Operation Mare Nostrum, the Italian government’s response to two mass drownings near Lampedusa in October 2013, which resulted in the rescue of some 100,000 migrants over a twelve-month period.

In fact, an excellent recent report by Forensic Oceanography, which is highly critical of Italian and European policies and practices in the central Mediterranean, is titled “Mare Clausum,” closed sea, in reference to exceptional practices in the Middle Ages that challenged the Mare Nostrum approach that had endured since the Roman empire.

The swearing in of the new Italian government — a coalition between the former regionalist, right-wing Lega Nord and the new-right populist (and ostensibly anti-establishment) Movimento 5 Stelle, or Five Star — has nevertheless marked the beginning of a new chapter in Europe’s approach to irregular migrants.

That became obvious on 10 June, when the Aquarius, a former German coastguard vessel jointly operated by the German–Italian–French–Swiss NGO SOS Méditerranée and Médecins Sans Frontières, was barred from entering an Italian port. On 9 and 10 June, the ship had rescued 629 migrants in international waters off the Libyan coast in an operation coordinated by Italy’s Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre.

Although Malta’s prime minister initially tweeted that Salvini’s instructions “manifestly go against international rules,” his government followed the Italian lead and denied the ship’s request to dock at a Maltese port. In the end, the Spanish government allowed the Aquarius to enter the port of Valencia. Because the ship was kept waiting in the waters between Italy and Malta and then took several days to reach the Spanish coast, a full week passed between the migrants’ rescue and their eventual disembarkation. The Aquarius has not yet returned to the search-and-rescue zone near the Libyan coast, and is currently in Marseille. Its operators say it will eventually resume its role, but they are hesitant to give the go-ahead, because they are afraid not only of a repeat of the recent odyssey but also of worse scenarios, including a confiscation of the ship.

Their misgivings are well founded. Later in June, the Lifeline, a ship operated by the German NGO Mission Lifeline, with 234 rescued migrants on board, was also denied access to an Italian port and, initially, also prevented from docking at Valetta in Malta. Only when eight European countries — Malta, France, Italy, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, the Netherlands and Belgium — agreed to accept passengers whose asylum claims were successful did the Maltese government relent. But the Maltese authorities have since seized the Lifeline and initiated legal proceedings against its captain. A few days later, they also detained the ship and aeroplane operated by another German NGO, Sea Watch. It is probably no accident that Sea Watch, Mission Lifeline, SOS Méditerranée and Médecins Sans Frontières were among the NGOs that refused to sign the Italian code of conduct last year.

Of the eight NGOs conducting search-and-rescue missions in the central Mediterranean last year, only one is currently active, the Spanish organisation Proactiva Open Arms. Italian authorities impounded its ship, the Open Arms, in March, accusing its crew of people smuggling, but an Italian court ordered its release a month later. When the Open Arms rescued sixty migrants in June, Malta and Italy once again closed their ports. On 2 July, the ship was finally able to dock in Barcelona.

When the Open Arms next returned to international waters, near the Libyan coast, it came across a woman clinging to the wreckage of a destroyed rubber boat, and two bodies. She reported that she had been left behind when the Libyan coastguard had rescued the boat’s other passengers and that a passing cargo ship had not stopped to help her. The Open Arms has since taken the survivor and the bodies to the Spanish island of Majorca.

While Proactiva’s claims have been contested by Salvini, and by the Libyan authorities and a German TV journalist on board the Libyan coastguard vessel, the harrowing images posted by the NGO have directed critical attention to the role assigned to Libya. The European Union and Italy have provided the Libyan government with generous funding, training and ships to establish a coastguard that the Europeans expect to prevent migrants from leaving Libya and to take back those who are — depending on one’s perspective — caught or rescued within Libyan territorial waters. Rescue operations near the Libyan coast, which were coordinated until recently by the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre in Rome, are now led by the Libyans themselves. The (European) architects of this new arrangement want all migrants rescued near Libya — including those picked up in international waters and not rescued by the Libyans themselves — to be disembarked at a Libyan port.

That is highly problematic for two reasons. First, lavish European funding notwithstanding, the Libyan coastguard doesn’t yet have the capacity to patrol along the entire Libyan coastline and coordinate complex search-and-rescue operations involving commercial ships, European naval vessels and ships operated by NGOs. It also has to be mindful of not treading on the toes of powerful militias that control sections of the coast.

Second, and more importantly, the migrants who decide to risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean do so not least because Libya is unsafe. Most of them have had first-hand experience of Libyan prisons or detention centres, where migrants are locked up and mistreated to extort money from their relatives back home or in Europe. Torture and rape are common. The human rights violations experienced by migrants have been documented in numerous recent reports by Human Rights Watch and similar organisations. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the High Commissioner for Human Rights have also highlighted the cruelties inflicted on irregular migrants in Libya.

As a Refugees International field report from June 2017 observed, “Some of the refugees and migrants interviewed by RI in Italy said they had been working in Libya and had not planned to travel to Europe. However, they made the journey to Italy to escape the violence in Libya.” The same organisation produced another report in April, after the European Union had become more reliant on the Libyan authorities to prevent migrants from leaving for Europe, finding that “European engagement has failed to significantly improve the situation.”

An Amnesty International report, also from last year, had this to say:

Refugees and migrants are routinely exposed to human rights violations committed by Libyan officials and security forces and abuses at the hands of armed groups and criminal gangs, who are often working in close cooperation and to mutual financial advantage. They suffer torture and other ill-treatment and arbitrary detention in appalling conditions, extortion, forced labour and killings at the hands of Libyan officials, militias and smugglers. In a lawless country, refugees and migrants have become a resource to be exploited — a commodity around which an entire industry has grown.

Even the German foreign office has raised concerns about the human rights situation in Libya. In a report partially leaked early last year, most of which has since been made public under freedom of information legislation, German diplomats pointed to “authentic” evidence of the torture, rape and routine executions of migrants and described “conditions similar to those in concentration camps.” This hasn’t stopped the German government from backing European attempts to outsource border controls to the Libyan regime.

It is in Germany that the criminalisation of private search-and-rescue missions has resonated particularly loudly. That’s partly because at least four of the ships that operated in the Mediterranean last year were funded entirely by German organisations, and partly because support for search-and-rescue missions is perceived as a commitment to an alternative Europe — one that is neither afraid of strangers nor anxious to seal its external borders.

Support for search-and-rescue operations is also seen as a way of symbolically snubbing the far right, which has grown in strength not least because its leaders have blamed refugees and asylum seekers for all ills. The Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD, Germany’s largest opposition party, has long tried to equate private search-and-rescue missions with people-smuggling networks. While AfD politicians speak of “so-called refugees” and “so-called rescuers,” and label the latter criminals, their supporters sometimes go one step further. At a far-right Pegida protest in Dresden last month, prominent Pegida activist Siegfried Däbritz referred to the local NGO Mission Lifeline, whose ship was at the time trying to find a port to disembark the 234 people it had rescued: “You must have heard what’s happened to our beloved Dresden human-smuggling organisation,” whereupon the crowd chanted: “Absaufen! Absaufen!” (Drown! Drown!).

Last week I attended two panel discussions about search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean. The first followed the screening of the documentary Iuventa in a Berlin cinema. This fascinating Italian–German co-production tells the story of a group of young people, most of them Germans in their teens and early twenties, who formed the NGO Jugend Rettet (Youths Saving Lives) in mid 2015 to raise money for a private search-and-rescue mission and raise awareness about the humanitarian catastrophe happening in the Mediterranean. With the help of crowdfunding they bought and fitted out a Dutch fishing trawler, christened it Iuventa, and used it to rescue some 14,000 migrants trying to reach Europe from Libya. The Italian authorities seized the ship in August 2017, claiming that it had been used to ferry illegal migrants to Italy and that its crew was colluding with people smugglers. (Jugend Rettet had refused to sign the code of conduct I mentioned earlier.) Attempts to procure the Iuventa’s release through the Italian courts have failed.

The previous day, some 200 mainly young people had turned up to listen to a Greens member of parliament, a lawyer and a representative of SOS Méditerranée at a forum hosted by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which is aligned with the Greens. Here, too, the discussion focused on the question, “What next?” On both occasions, the mood in the audience was ambivalent. There was a lot of pessimism about the prospects for human rights in a Europe run by the likes of Salvini, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz, where far-right populist movements seem to dictate the political agenda. How much worse could it possibly get? (After the film screening, an Australian doctor who had sailed on the Iuventa pointed out that Europe’s current policies vis-à-vis irregular migrants were almost as bad as Australia’s — which suggests that in Europe we haven’t hit rock bottom yet.)

But I was also surprised by the level of optimism about civil society’s capacity to effect a change of policies. Perhaps this makes sense in a country that would not have coped with the arrival of over a million asylum seekers in 2015 and 2016 if civil society had not come to the rescue of government agencies evidently out of their depth. But some of that optimism was also informed by the sudden surge of public support for private search-and-rescue operations.

In late June, when the Lifeline could not find a port to land at, a group of activists formed the Bündnis Seebrücke (Alliance Sea Bridge). Organisers expected 800 people to come to its first rally in Berlin on 7 July — 12,000 turned up. Since then, the Seebrücke movement has spread across the country, and even to smaller towns. On Friday last week, 1000 people demonstrated in Bonn and 800 in Kiel; on Saturday, 700 protested in Düsseldorf, 250 in Augsburg, 500 in Stuttgart and 2000 in Bielefeld. Given that it’s the height of summer, these are significant numbers. Rallies in Hannover, Dresden, Koblenz, Münster, Hamburg, Kaiserslautern, Aachen and numerous smaller towns are planned for next weekend.

“It ought to be possible to mobilise not 12,000 or 20,000, but half a million people in support of the search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean,” a member of the audience said after the screening of Iuventa. At the event hosted by the Böll Foundation, a woman remarked that the momentum of the Seebrücke movement reminded her of the early days of the peace movement in the 1980s. No doubt such statements reflect wishful thinking, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Seebrücke demonstrations turned out to be more than a one-off and overall modest articulation of discontent.

As in the days of the peace movement, the comparatively uncontroversial demand to save lives in the Mediterranean could bring together people whose politics have otherwise little in common: left-wing activists and the churches, for instance. In fact, while the largest Bündnis Seebrücke rally so far attracted 12,000 supporters, a certain well-known Vatican-based proponent of search-and-rescue missions had a live audience of 25,000 last Sunday when he drew attention to recent shipwrecks in the Mediterranean and demanded “respect for the rights and dignity of all.” (Incidentally, the Pope could yet play a role. A representative of the Council of German Protestant Churches, which has co-funded the Sea Watch plane grounded by the Maltese authorities, has raised the possibility of the Vatican, a sovereign state, requesting the release of the plane.)

In any case, the opportunity to support an evidently good cause, which, according to a recent opinion poll, has the support of three-quarters of Germans, is providing a welcome focus for those troubled by the rapid rise of the far right and the Merkel government’s attempts to distance itself from the Willkommenskultur that marked the public response to refugees and asylum seekers in 2015.

The supporters of search-and-rescue operations are not only incensed by the far right. On 12 July the respectable liberal weekly Die Zeit published two articles under the heading “Oder soll man es lassen?” (Or should one refrain from doing it?). The subheading explained that the paper wanted to discuss whether it is “legitimate” for private organisations to rescue refugees and migrants in the Mediterranean. One of two articles published under the headline was highly critical of NGOs such as Mission Lifeline and Sea Watch. But the author’s arguments were not perceived to be the problem; rather, it was the weekly’s question about whether it was legitimate to save lives.

Die Zeit’s unreserved front-page apology a week later, and the loud and unanimous condemnation of an inappropriate question by all other liberal media outlets — from the news magazine Der Spiegel to the Munich-based national daily Süddeutsche Zeitung — obscured two phenomena. First, many Europeans, including many Germans, do think and say what the unfortunate headline suggested as one possible option, namely that irregular migrants trying to reach Europe by boat should be left to drown, if only to deter others from attempting the same journey.

Second, although the issue is incredibly simple it should not be oversimplified. The SOS Méditerranée representative at the panel discussion hosted by the Böll Foundation put it well. For her, she said, it doesn’t matter why somebody decides to embark on the journey to Europe; once they have done so, and risk drowning, she has the moral obligation to rescue them if she can. What also makes the issue simple is the fact that the main claims put forward by critics of rescue missions — namely that there is a causal link between the number of people who leave Libya and the number of NGOs operating off the Libyan coast, and that the NGOs are effectively providing a “taxi service” for the smugglers — are false. The available evidence — detailed in a contribution to Oxford University’s Border Criminologies blog published last year, for example — strongly suggests that NGOs’ search-and-rescue missions do not constitute a pull factor. There is also no evidence for collusion between smugglers and rescuers.

But the matter is nevertheless complex, because there is no evident causal link between the likelihood of rescue at sea and the number of casualties. Migrants continued to drown in large numbers during Operation Mare Nostrum. Fewer migrants have drowned in the first three weeks of July than in the first three weeks of June, when three ships run by NGOs were still patrolling the waters off the Libyan coast.

To be fair, the NGOs operating in the Mediterranean did not set out simply to rescue as many people as they could; for most of them, these operations were only part of a larger agenda. They wanted to shame the European Union into establishing a well-funded search-and-rescue agency. They failed. But that still leaves the question of whether it ought to be the responsibility of the European Union and its individual member states to ensure that nobody drowns in the Mediterranean.

The NGOs also wanted to spotlight the human tragedy unfolding in the Mediterranean. They largely failed in that, as well. “We rescued 27,000 people, and nobody paid attention,” a woman from SOS Méditerranée observed during one of the panel discussions. Given the current level of attention, at least in Germany and Spain, it will be interesting to see how closely Europeans follow the journey of SOS Méditerranée’s Aquarius when it embarks on a new rescue mission in coming weeks.

Spotlights, and an audience that pays attention to what they illuminate, are much needed. But the focus on what is happening in the Mediterranean sometimes suggests that the main issue is the lack of a safe passage from the African coast to Europe. Much less attention is paid to what is happening, out of sight, in Libya and Algeria.

While Salvini’s policies are undoubtedly informed by racism, or at least the attempt to appeal to racist elements in the Italian electorate, he has a point. For many years, Italy was left in the lurch. With the notable exception of the current Spanish prime minister, the European politicians who recently complained about Salvini’s heartlessness have been reluctant to accommodate irregular migrants rescued in the Mediterranean and to establish whether they are owed protection. Both the idea that Italy is the main culprit, and the suggestion that irregular migration to Europe could be stopped if only migrants could be prevented from departing Libya are naive.

Libya is only one part of a larger picture. Smugglers vary the products they offer if conditions change. As the chance to be rescued close to the Libyan coast and not to be returned to Libya decreases, the boats chosen by smugglers are likely to be better able to cover longer distances. The Italian government’s announcement that it would not let migrants rescued in the central Mediterranean land has led to an increase in departures from Morocco and arrivals in Spain. For June 2018, the Missing Migrants project counted 6926 migrant arrivals in the western Mediterranean (three times as many as last year), compared with 10,297 in the central Mediterranean (two-fifths of last year’s figure).

Finally, it’s important to remember that the commitment to rescuing a fellow human being who is drowning is only one relevant moral response. Another has to do with the underlying reasons why people feel compelled to leave their homes and risk their lives in an attempt to reach Europe. An exhibition showing currently at the German Historical Museum in Berlin highlights the importance of the sea for Europe, from the Greek colonisation some 2800 years ago to today. The comparatively small part of the exhibition that deals with today’s migration across the Mediterranean has the appearance of a belated addition. This is regrettable, because a history museum would have been the right place to explain today’s irregular migration in the context of a longer history that includes, for example, slavery, the exploitation of natural resources, unfair terms of trade, the sale of arms and the support of murderous regimes. Such a history could prompt discussions about moral obligations that exist well before a person is about to drown. ●

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Neither Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats nor Martin Schulz’s Social Democrats won an absolute majority in September. As has happened after every previous national poll, the elections were followed by talks about the formation of a coalition government. (Even on the one occasion when the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, won an absolute majority, in 1957, those talks took place, and West Germany again ended up with a governing coalition.)

This year, for the sixteenth time, the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian counterpart won more seats between them than its large rival, the Social Democrats. Under these circumstances, a coalition without the Christian Democrats is technically possible; in practical terms, it is the only realistic contender to lead a new government.

Only the Linke and the AfD were in favour of new elections; all other parties fear that they would fare worse than they did on 24 September.

What was different this time was that nobody seemed in a hurry to commence the coalition talks. In fact, virtually nothing happened for three weeks. Angela Merkel, the only politician realistically in a position to invite others to sit down and negotiate, kept her own counsel while she and other leading politicians fought another election campaign, this time in the West German state of Lower Saxony.

Once the talks got under way, they were slowed and complicated by two factors. The first was the experience of two parties that have recently been in coalition with Merkel’s Christian Democrats. The Free Democrats won almost 15 per cent of the vote in 2009 and were the minor coalition partner over the four years in Merkel’s second government, 2009–13. But most Free Democrat voters disapproved of the party’s performance and punished it at the next polls, where it failed to reach even the 5 per cent threshold to sit in the Bundestag. As a result, the party was only willing to be part of a coalition that could be perceived to be dancing to a Free Democrat tune. With Merkel at the helm, that was never likely, and so the Free Democrats showed no great enthusiasm for being part of another coalition with the Christian Democrats.

The Social Democrats were also burnt badly by serving under Merkel. After a four-year partnership with the Christian Democrats between 2013 and 2017, they won a paltry 20.5 per cent of the vote — the party’s worst national result since the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949. Even as the votes were being counted, the party’s leadership decided to rule out another GroKo, or Grosse Koalition, the term used to denote a coalition between the two major parties.

The second factor reflects the strength of two parties considered ineligible to help form government. For the first time in history, the new Bundestag includes a significant number of members — 153 out of 709 — who were elected on the ticket of either the AfD or the Linke (or Left), the successor party to East Germany’s pre-1990 Socialist Unity Party. With both the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats ruling out a coalition with AfD or Linke, the government will have to command not just a majority of seats but also a majority of the seats not held by AfD and Linke.

In the immediate aftermath of the election, this appeared to leave only one option: a coalition government of Christian Democrats, Free Democrats and Greens. Such a coalition — termed a Jamaica Coalition, after the black-yellow-green flag of Jamaica — had been tried, not particularly successfully, in the West German state of Saarland from 2009 to 2012. A Jamaica Coalition was also formed earlier in 2017, without much fuss, in Schleswig-Holstein, a state in Germany’s north.

After drawn-out exploratory talks — the Sondierungsgespräche — and seemingly after agreement was tantalisingly close, the Free Democrats pulled the plug. That left three possibilities, all of them previously ruled out: a minority government, new elections, or a GroKo. Merkel made it known that she did not want a minority government, which has never before been tried federally in Germany but is a common feature of Scandinavian democracies.

Talking about talks: the Social Democratic Party’s Martin Schulz (second from right) arrives for talks about a new government with chancellor and Christian Democratic Union chair Angela Merkel and Christian Social Union chair Horst Seehofer in Berlin on Wednesday 20 December. Markus Schreiber/AP Photo

Only the Linke and the AfD were in favour of new elections; all other parties fear that they would fare worse than they did on 24 September — or rather, that the AfD would become even stronger.

That left the GroKo, which required the Social Democrats to turn their categorical “no” into a “maybe.” They came under intense pressure to do just that: from Merkel and other leading Christian Democrats, from sections of the media and from German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier, himself a Social Democrat.

And so, at a party congress early this month, the Social Democrats reluctantly agreed to enter into talks with the Christian Democrats. These talks, which took place this week, were not negotiations over the formation of a new government, but rather preliminary meetings, or Vorsondierungsgespräche, to agree to the agenda, format and timing of Sondierungsgespräche. Should these exploratory talks, scheduled for the second week of January, be successful, the parties would then decide whether to enter into formal negotiations.

At that point, the Social Democrats would convene an extraordinary party congress on 21 January to discuss the results of the Sondierungsgespräche. If both sides agreed to conduct proper negotiations, and if these negotiations were successful, then it would be again up to both parties to sign off on the outcomes. The Social Democrats would let their 440,000 members have the final say.

If all goes well, the new government could be in place in March, six months after the election. If there are further hiccups, the process could take a lot longer. There might even be new elections sometime next year, or a minority government led by a Christian Democrat other than Merkel.

In terms of forming a new government, Merkel, Schulz and other leading federal politicians have achieved little in the past three months. All they can show for their efforts are successful preliminary discussions about the format and timing of exploratory talks that in turn might lead to formal negotiations. At the same time, the state politicians in Lower Saxony signed off on a GroKo and elected a new state premier less than six weeks after the elections. It’s no wonder that observers outside Germany are befuddled, sense chaos, and conjure the image of a rudderless Germany.

But the participation of Merkel, Schulz and others in Vorsondierungsgespräche and Sondierungsgespräche has not meant that the business of government has been suspended. Germany is still governed by a coalition between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. Merkel is the reigning chancellor, and Sigmar Gabriel, a Social Democrat, is her deputy and foreign minister. Cabinet meets regularly; parliament sat for a week in November, and again throughout last week.

In fact, the evidence that the most recent GroKo has been working reasonably well according to the Social Democrats’ own standards — even beyond its official use-by date of 24 September — might convince the party’s leaders to continue in their current role. The question is whether the party’s members would be prepared to go along with that. Many of them were critical of Martin Schulz for being too soft on Merkel during the election campaign. And the party’s influential youth wing, the Young Socialists, or Jusos, have already promised to campaign against a continuation of the current constellation.

When the AfD won 12.6 per cent of the vote in September, it was the first time since 1949 that a party of the far right has been represented in the Bundestag. Yet the second claim I mentioned earlier, that Germany has lurched to the right, is also wrong. First, it’s important to remember that the AfD was already represented in thirteen of sixteen state parliaments, and its vote in September was correctly forecast by all major polls. In fact, according to the pollsters, if the elections had been held a year earlier, the AfD might have done better. Its appearance in the Bundestag should therefore not have come as a surprise.

Second, the vote for the AfD is comparatively modest compared to broadly comparable parties in nearby countries. To Germany’s south, in Austria, the Freedom Party won 26 per cent of the vote in this year’s elections. To the west, the National Front’s Marine Le Pen won 21 per cent of the vote in the first round of this year’s French presidential elections, and 34 per cent in the second. To the north, the Danish government relies on the support of the People’s Party, for which more than one-in-five Danes voted at the last general election. Across Germany’s eastern border, Poland’s government is led by the Law and Justice Party, which attracted almost 38 per cent of the vote in 2015. In fact, of Germany’s nine neighbours, only tiny Luxembourg has a populist party comparable to but proportionally less significant than Germany’s AfD.

Finally, the AfD’s success also needs to be seen in the context of the shifts along Germany’s political spectrum. Under Merkel, the Christian Democrats have moved to the centre, if not the left, to become what is effectively the larger of two major parties with a social democratic agenda. The German equivalents of leading representatives of the political right in other democracies — Donald Trump, Austria’s Sebastian Kurz or even Britain’s Theresa May — could no longer be easily accommodated within Merkel’s party. It has become tricky to compare the electoral appeal of right-wing, conservative-nationalist populist programs across Western democracies; for example, the environmental, refugee and human rights policies pursued by Australia’s Liberal–National coalition government have much in common with those advocated by the AfD, but little with those of the Merkel government.

And to speak of the AfD’s success in Germany is to tell only half of the story. The party might have won 12.6 per cent of the national vote on 26 September, but three weeks later it barely scraped over the 5 per cent threshold in Lower Saxony. Lower Saxony, of course, is in the old West Germany. In the so-called neue Länder, or new states, of the east, the situation is very different. In Saxony, in the country’s southeast, more than a quarter of the electorate voted for the AfD, giving it more support than any other party. Twenty-seven years after reunification, Germany seems politically more divided than ever before.

Although Germany hasn’t lurched to the right and the AfD’s success was predictable and comparatively modest, the election results still came as a shock. More than the question of how to form the next government, journalists, politicians and other public commentators have been preoccupied with the issue of how to deal with the AfD. Should it be ignored? Or should its every hysterical claim be dutifully reported and then countered with reasoned argument?

For the representatives of the other political parties in the Bundestag, the key question has been this: should we try to win back those who voted for the AfD by stealing some of its thunder? Or should we distance ourselves from the AfD, its policies and its rhetoric, and call a spade a spade, identifying the party’s slogans as racist, xenophobic, undemocratic and anti-European, daring voters to cross the red line between sentiments that have been acceptable and those that have not? The leader of the Free Democrats, the Linke’s co-leader Sahra Wagenknecht, the Christian Social Union and the right-wing remnants of Merkel’s Christian Democrats have occasionally tried to lure AfD voters back into the fold by singing from the AfD’s song sheet. But Merkel and other Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats and the Greens have vehemently rejected such an approach.

Merkel and her allies are not necessarily driven only by the desire to be morally principled. They may also have cast their minds back to pertinent developments twenty-five years ago. In 1992, about 440,000 people applied for asylum in Germany, many of them refugees from the former Yugoslavia. The question of how to respond to refugees and asylum seekers dominated the political agenda. Just months earlier, the small Saxonian town of Hoyerswerda had been the scene of pogrom-like riots directed at asylum seekers and migrant workers from Vietnam and Mozambique. The German Willkommenskultur, or culture of welcome, which characterised much of Germany’s response in 2015, was still a long way off; in the early 1990s, most Germans — in the East and in the West — wanted fewer asylum seekers, and many would have liked to refuse protection to anybody claiming to flee war or persecution.

In the second half of the 1980s, a new far-right party, the Republicans, began attracting significant support. When it won 7 per cent of the vote in the European parliamentary elections in 1989, some Christian Democrats did what John Howard would try to do in the second half of the 1990s when faced with the challenge of Pauline Hanson: they began sounding more and more like their far-right challengers, particularly when talking about migrants and asylum seekers.

Ahead of the 1992 elections in the West German state of Baden-Württemberg, leading conservatives were convinced that the Republicans could be kept out of parliament only by reducing the differences between the policies of the Christian Democrats and those of the right-wing extremists. The strategy could not have been more mistaken. Not only did the Republicans win more than 10 per of the vote to become the third-largest party in state parliament; they did so at the expense of the Christian Democrats. Meanwhile, the number of racist attacks mounted.

It could be argued that the AfD’s electoral gains at the 2017 national polls in Saxony paralleled the Republicans’ success at the state level in 1992. In recent years, Saxony’s premier, Stanislaw Tillich, has tried hard not to alienate voters who might sympathise with the AfD. He tolerated the weekly far-right Pegida rallies in Dresden; he defied Merkel by declaring in 2015 that “Islam has no place in Saxony.” Following the AfD’s success on 24 September, Tillich resigned as premier, but it seems unlikely that his successor will change course. Meanwhile, Saxony has recorded a particularly high number of incidents of racist violence directed at asylum seekers and other migrants.

The question of how to deal with the AfD is part of a much broader debate about Germany’s and Germans’ identity, and about their visions of the future. It is playing out at family gatherings and on talk shows. It sets the tone when Germans discuss Europe, refugees, the shortcomings of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, or even the Nationalmannschaft, Germany’s national football team.

Live broadcasts of the Nationalmannschaft’s matches are one opportunity for Germans to come together as a community of viewers. Running commentaries shared with family and friends become part of an imagined national conversation. Another opportunity is provided by the popular police procedural Tatort, which is produced by the German, Austrian and Swiss public broadcasters. Having premiered in 1970, it has become the longest-running and most-watched TV series in Germany. Before commercial television began, Tatort episodes sometimes attracted twenty-five million viewers; even now, an average episode has close to ten million viewers. Before and after they’re broadcast, Tatort episodes are extensively reviewed in the print media; often they first screen in cinemas.

Last Sunday night was no different. Tatort’s 1039th episode, “Dunkle Zeit” (dark times), featured two Hamburg-based Federal Police officers, Julia Grosz and Thorsten Falke, the latter played by Wotan Wilke Möhring (perhaps best known to Australian audiences for his part in Fatih Akin’s Soul Kitchen). The pair is given the job of protecting the leader of a far-right political party and finding the killer of her husband.

The similarities between fiction and reality are obvious. The party in the episode, the New Patriots, is obviously modelled on the AfD, although the film is set in Hamburg, rather than, say, Dresden. The New Patriots politician in the crime drama bears uncanny resemblances to former AfD frontwoman Frauke Petry and the current co-leader of the party in the Bundestag, Alice Weidel. The episode’s narrative provides a foil for the protagonists to debate the AfD’s ideology and to try out different responses to the challenge it is posing.

The leaders of Germany’s far right in the Tatort episode “Dunkle Zeit”: party leader Nina Schramm (Anja Kling) flanked by Benjamin Reinders (Ben Braun, right) and Gerhard Schneider (Patrick von Blume). Marion von der Mehden/NDR

The reviews of “Dunkle Zeit” have been mixed. Many see the narrative as drawing on too many stereotypes. Others like the fact that the portrayal of the New Patriots and their leader closely follows the script provided by the AfD. Both on the screen and in real life, the party is influenced by Steve Bannon–like ideologues and drifting ever farther to the right, and has been riven by differences and defections as a result. In the film, a professor of economics with comparatively moderate views who was one of the party’s leaders is being marginalised; in real life, the economist Bernd Lucke, one of the founders of the AfD, left the party in 2015 after having been dethroned by Frauke Petry, who herself quit the AfD immediately after the September 2017 elections because she felt it had become too extremist.

Not surprisingly, the territory covered in “Dunkle Zeit” was too close for comfort for the AfD, whose co-chair, Jörg Meuthen, condemned the Tatort episode as an attempt to brainwash Germans, and another weapon in the public broadcasters’ “ideological battle” with the AfD.

But “Dunkle Zeit” is no piece of left-wing propaganda. It accurately recounts the arguments of the far right, including the claim that Germany is being swamped by foreigners, who are held responsible for a crime wave.

In the episode, the policeman Thorsten Falke acts as the sparring partner of the far-right politician. His views are often as blunt as hers; when the police ask themselves who would benefit from the politician’s murder, Falke quips, “Germany.” He doesn’t necessarily win the contest with the politician — her rhetorical skills are superior to his. But when she tries to argue that “the people” are understandably angry about immigration and crime, Falke demonstrates that there is an effective alternative to a response that would take the far right’s slogans seriously.

Falke says that he grew up in the Hamburg suburb of Billstedt, where “there were always more foreigners than Germans.” As a kid, he says, he was regularly beaten up by his Turkish school mates because he was a non-believer, a “potato.” He then joined a boxing club, and the same kids who had beaten him up were now proud that a German wanted to train with them. The club still exists, Falke continues. “The chairman’s name is Ali, he is a friend of mine, the coaches are called Yusuf, Milan and Kenbala. They are all donating their time. For the past fifteen years, girls have trained there too, many of them Muslims, some wearing a head scarf. That is my Germany.”

In “Dunkle Zeit,” the murderer is eventually caught, but the question of how to respond to the New Patriots remains unresolved. In the Germany of 2017, the question of how to respond to the far right should not be reduced to the question of how to deal with the AfD. Who knows, the AfD might lose seats if new elections were called in mid 2018, and it might disintegrate further if Frauke Petry’s new outfit, the Blue Party, were able to attract more defectors.

Rather, the question is how to respond to those Germans who are attracted by the AfD’s slogans. They include those who felt compelled to vote for the AfD in September, many Linke supporters, as well as others who never participate in elections. Most of them resent the fact that the Germany they want has already been largely replaced by Falke’s Germany. For those trying to curb the AfD’s influence, it will be tempting to pretend that it’s possible for Germans to turn back the clock rather than celebrate a Germany that is more multicultural, more polyglot and more curious about the outside world.

Part of the challenge is that the Germany of 2017 is contradictory. It’s not so long since most Germans, in the former communist East and in the West, were vehemently opposed to asylum seekers. The AfD is a recent phenomenon, but the sentiments shared by its supporters have a long history. AfD voters didn’t suddenly discover that they hated foreigners and inner-city liberals.

The sentiments serviced and fuelled by the AfD are not those of outsiders who are normally only encountered in a Tatort episode. Rather, they are shared by a cross-section of the population, although men, middle-aged Germans and certain professions are over-represented among AfD voters. In “Dunkle Zeit,” the far-right politician observes that many members of her party are police officers. The AfD could make a similar claim.

The last time Federal Police inspector Thorsten Falke featured in a Tatort episode that imitated real life and had a political message was in 2015, in episode 957, “Verbrannt.” It first screened on television on 11 October, a few days after the celebrations of the twenty-fifth anniversary of reunification (which it referenced), and concerns the death in custody of an African man in Salzgitter, a town in Lower Saxony. According to the state police, the man, who was shackled and lying on a mattress in a police cell, died after he set his mattress alight. Falke establishes that policemen tasked with looking after the man murdered him.

“Verbrannt” is a thinly disguised fictional account of the death of Oury Jalloh, a man from Sierra Leone who burned to death in a police cell in the East German town of Dessau in 2005. The police charged in relation to his death were acquitted, but the case has very recently been reopened. The Germany of 2017 is Falke’s Germany, rather than that conjured by the AfD. But the murder of Oury Jalloh is as much part of this Germany as the Willkommenskultur of 2015.

In the Germany of 2017, the AfD is not an aberration. This Germany is not a composition in black and white, where heroes in shining white armour purge the nation of the dark forces of the AfD. Again, Tatort’s fiction is instructive: while “Verbrannt” portrays several state police as racists, Falke himself is not without blame: presumably drawing on skills he acquired in a club that also trains young Muslims wearing a headscarf, he had severely beaten the African man, who had been the subject of a police surveillance operation targeting a ring of drug dealers.

Perhaps the main challenge is not how to deal with the AfD and its supporters, but how not to be blinkered by focusing on the AfD — and lose sight of attempts to sweep the murder of an African man under the carpet, of the Merkel government’s increasingly restrictive asylum seeker policies or, for that matter, of the macho behaviour of men like Falke who are fighting the good fight. •

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That isn’t surprising. A declaration, unlike a convention, is non-binding, and no UN member state would adapt its behaviour today to conform with principles adopted fifty years ago. But the presumed irrelevance of the 1967 declaration also has to do with the weakness of the principles it enshrines. It espouses the rights of nation-states to grant asylum, and to define their grounds for doing so, as they see fit. It does not say that those seeking asylum have the right to be granted asylum.

But there are still at least two reasons to commemorate Resolution 2312. First, we may want to mourn the end of a road: the 1967 declaration was the last instrument dealing with asylum that the international community agreed to. (Plans for a convention on asylum were put to rest in 1977, when a conference of plenipotentiaries failed to agree on a text.) Second, we could think of the declaration as a reminder of a promise that remains to be fulfilled. Other UN declarations assumed significance because they were the first step towards treaties. Attempts to agree on a convention on territorial asylum failed dismally, leaving the declaration stranded, but that’s not an indication of the worthiness, or otherwise, of such an international instrument.

The history of the 1967 declaration begins in 1948, when the Human Rights Commission, asked to prepare a draft of what became the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proposed that such a declaration should include the following articles: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own” (draft article 11(2)), and “Everyone has the right to seek and be granted, in other countries, asylum from persecution” (draft article 12(1)).

In subsequent discussions in the Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs Committee, usually known as the Third Committee, UN member states raised concerns about the duty on states implied in draft article 12(1). The minutes of the Third Committee meeting of 3 November 1948 record that the Australian delegation — led by the ambassador to the Soviet Union, Alan Watt — “pointed out that formulas implying obligation must be avoided in the text of the declaration of human rights,” which ought to be a “precise statement of the fundamental rights of man and must make no reference to the corresponding obligations of the State.” Australia therefore supported a proposal by Saudi Arabia to delete the words “and be granted” from the draft. By the time the General Assembly voted on the Universal Declaration on 10 December 1948, draft article 12(1) had become Article 14(1): “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.”

For some of the international lawyers who had contributed to the discussions about the Universal Declaration, Article 14 was unsatisfactory. Hersch Lauterpacht, for example, thought that the formula adopted by the General Assembly was “artificial to the point of flippancy” and that it would have been preferable if a reference to the right to asylum had been left out of the Declaration altogether.

René Cassin, who represented France in Third Committee discussions, was similarly dissatisfied. But he also found the draft article 12 wanting, because it failed “to indicate whose duty it would be to give effect to the right of asylum affirmed in the declaration.” In the Third Committee, France had unsuccessfully proposed to amend the draft by adding a sentence that spelled out this duty: “Everyone has the right to seek and be granted, in other countries, asylum from persecution. The United Nations, in concert with Countries concerned, is required to secure such asylum for him.”

The Universal Declaration was envisaged to be a stepping stone for a binding instrument on human rights. In 1966, the UN General Assembly adopted the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but it contained no right to asylum. As early as 1952, the Commission on Human Rights had abandoned attempts to include a right to asylum in a draft covenant. In its report, the commission summarised the arguments put forward against such an article:

It was stated that there was no fundamental right of the individual to be granted asylum but only a right of the State to extend its protection to him; that it was at once impracticable and undesirable to impose on States the obligation in advance of opening their territory to an unascertainable number of persons who might qualify for asylum.

Five years after the Commission on Human Rights had decided to omit the right to asylum from the draft covenant on human rights, Cassin, by then chair of the commission (and leader of the French delegation), initiated another attempt to enshrine the right to asylum in international law. This time, he proposed a separate declaration.

Cassin reintroduced the idea that a right to asylum would be viable as long as the obligation to grant asylum rested with the international community, rather than only with the nation-state on whose territory an individual sought asylum. Article 1 of a draft declaration on the right of asylum, which France submitted to the Commission on Human Rights in April 1957, read: “Responsibility for granting asylum to persons requesting it shall lie with the international community as represented by the United Nations.”

Article 4 of the French draft spelled out how the United Nations was to meet its responsibilities: it “shall, in the spirit of international solidarity, consult with States as to the most effective means of providing help and assistance” to those entitled to seek asylum. But the United Nations envisaged in the French draft was not merely an organisation in New York; rather, it was the sum total of its member states. According to the draft introduced by Cassin, the obligation to protect “everyone whose life, person or liberty is threatened, in violation of the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” therefore also rested with individual nation-states. The second part of draft article 4 read:

With the object of lightening the burden assumed by countries granting asylum in the first instance, other States shall examine in the same spirit of solidarity the appropriate measures to be taken, particularly the admission to their territory of a certain number of persons granted asylum in the first instance by another State.

It took ten years for Cassin’s initiative to bear fruit, because several UN members objected to the sentiment and substance of the French proposal. Australia had more reservations than most. Former crown solicitor Fred Whitlam (whose son Gough would later be prime minister) summarised Australia’s concerns when he wrote in 1958 that the French draft amounted to a “substantial inroad on national sovereignty.”

The Declaration on Territorial Asylum eventually adopted in December 1967 was a watered-down version of the French draft. But it still contained a reference to the “spirit of international solidarity” and thus to the idea that the human right to seek and be granted asylum, on the one hand, and national sovereignty, on the other, could only be reconciled if the international community agreed on the principle of burden-sharing.

Today, the ideals that informed the Universal Declaration’s draft article 12(1) — “Everyone has the right to seek and be granted, in other countries, asylum from persecution” — seem even further removed from reality than they were fifty years ago. Rather than admitting “to their territory persons granted asylum in the first instance by another State” in the spirit of international solidarity, nation-states have become adept at off-loading people seeking asylum.

Israel’s plan to deport tens of thousands of Eritreans and Sudanese to Rwanda and Uganda is only the latest example. Australia’s Pacific “solution” is another. The haggling over the distribution of refugees in Europe is also evidence that today, more than ever before, the so-called refugee crisis is in the first instance a “crisis of solidarity,” as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon observed last year.

It has been largely forgotten that the right to asylum is different from the rights afforded to refugees in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (whose articles do not once mention the word asylum). Those advocating for displaced persons tend to focus on the 1951 Convention, although the drafters of that treaty were not primarily concerned with the rights of people seeking asylum. Paying attention to a dead end of history, the ultimately failed attempts to enshrine the right to asylum in international law, which culminated in the 1967 Declaration on Territorial Asylum, may allow us to broaden our discussions about the challenges posed by global displacement and forced migration.

A year after the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on Territorial Asylum, the Norwegian parliamentarian Aase Lionæs spoke at the presentation of the 1968 Nobel Peace Prize to René Cassin, who was being honoured as one of the architects of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Lionæs said that the Universal Declaration had put “a dividing line in history. It breaks away from the old, set doctrines of international law; yes, it allows us to look out over the boundaries of the old sovereign states toward a world society.”

In a similar fashion, the long-forgotten 1967 Declaration on Territorial Asylum might allow us to see beyond the constraints of national sovereignty. We might get no more than a fleeting glimpse, but it could remind us of the need to envisage and work for alternative futures. ●

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Travelling across Germany in recent weeks, I’ve come across plenty of stalls run by the Jehovah’s Witnesses and other Christian groups, but relatively few signs of the forty-two political parties vying for votes. The elections aren’t a topic of conversation in pubs or supermarkets, on local buses or trains, or at the barber. Posters advertising the main parties are surprisingly low-key.

Partly this is because the contest between Angela Merkel and her main challenger, the Social Democrats’ Martin Schulz, resembles a friendly — and inconsequential — exchange of banter rather than a dispute between two political adversaries. Partly it’s because the result seems a foregone conclusion.

The Social Democrats are the junior partner in the current black–red coalition. At the last polls, in 2013, they won 25.7 per cent of the vote, less than two-thirds of the 41.5 per cent gained by the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, or CSU. The two major parties and the CSU formed a coalition, with the Greens and the Left making up the parliamentary opposition. The Free Democrats and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, both narrowly missed the 5 per cent threshold required to enter parliament.

Unlike the second Merkel government, 2009–13, which relied on the support of the Free Democrats, this third Merkel government has not seen significant disagreements between the major coalition partners. That’s not least because Merkel has been happy to adopt key Social Democratic policies — such as the introduction of a minimum wage — and not to oppose other popular Social Democratic initiatives, making it all but impossible for the Social Democrats to distinguish their position from her own. Most recently, in June, Merkel paved the way for the Bundestag to legislate marriage equality, although she, like most Christian Democrats, voted against the bill.

The appearance of harmony between Merkel and the Social Democrats also reflects the support the latter gave her during the so-called refugee crisis, the defining issue of her third government. Then, Merkel’s main critic was one of her own: the Bavarian premier and CSU leader, Horst Seehofer. He demanded — unsuccessfully — that Germany impose an upper limit of 200,000 asylum seekers and refugees per year. Seehofer also accused Merkel of having broken European and German law by allowing hundreds of thousands of refugees to enter Germany, and publicly humiliated her when she attended the CSU’s annual congress in November 2015. On other occasions too, the CSU rather than the Social Democrats has seemed to be Merkel’s more difficult partner.

Merkel’s willingness to adopt Social Democratic positions, and the Social Democrats’ unwillingness to side with either Seehofer or the Greens–Left opposition, allowed her to consolidate her position. According to Germany’s seven leading pollsters, the Christian Democrats and the CSU combined will win around 38 per cent of the vote, while the Social Democrats are expected to come a distant second, with around 23 per cent. Four minor parties — the Greens, the Left, the Free Democratic Party and the AfD — will each receive between 7 and 11 per cent. No other party will get anywhere close to the 5 per cent threshold.

Maybe the pollsters will be proven wrong. I suspect the AfD will be slightly more successful than predicted because it mobilises many traditional non-voters. The result will also depend on how many Germans cast their vote. But unless something unpredictable happens — a last-minute Russian or Turkish intervention in the campaign, for example — it is hard to see how Merkel could lose from here.

To become chancellor, Martin Schulz would need the support of the Greens and the Left, but if today’s polls were accurate, such a red–red–green coalition would have the backing of barely more Germans than the Christian Democrats and the CSU in their own right. If the polls aren’t way off the mark, then Merkel, rather than Schulz, will form the next government.

What is hard to predict is the composition of Merkel’s fourth government. Will it be once more a black–red coalition (with possibly disastrous consequences for the Social Democrats)? Will it be a black–green government — a coalition between Christian Democrats, the CSU and the Greens? Although that is probably Merkel’s preferred option, it would be bitterly opposed by many conservative Christian Democrats and most in the CSU (though two West German states are governed by a black–green coalition, one of them, Baden-Württemberg, with the Christian Democrats as the minor partner).

Will Merkel once again seek the support of the Free Democrats? That would embolden her conservative opponents. Or will the election produce a “Jamaica coalition” between Christian Democrats and CSU (black), Free Democrats (yellow) and Greens (green)?

Martin Schulz has never before played a role in federal politics. He used to be a local politician, and from 1987 to 1998 served as mayor of Würselen, a town of about 40,000 near Aachen in the far west of Germany. He was elected to the European parliament in 1994, becoming the leader, first, of the parliament’s German Social Democrats, and then of the Socialist faction. From 2012 until 2017, he was president of the European Parliament. When it became clear that the next president would be a member of that parliament’s conservative faction, Schulz decided to seek a seat in the German Bundestag.

The Social Democratic leadership anointed Schulz as their candidate for the office of Bundeskanzler, or federal chancellor, in late January. In March, an extraordinary party congress confirmed the choice and unanimously elected Schulz party leader. The decision of vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel not to stand, and the surprise nomination of Schulz led to a temporary surge in the polls. In late March, the Social Democrats reached 33 per cent in the polls and drew level with the Christian Democrats and the CSU. But five months later, after three state election losses — in Saarland, Schleswig-Holstein and Nordrhein-Westfalen — the Social Democrats’ prospects are as poor as they were just before Schulz was drafted.

Until early this month, though, the party remained hopeful, and many observers believed that Schulz would be able to significantly narrow the gap between his party and Merkel’s. His opportunity to make up lost ground came on 3 September, during the only public debate between Merkel and her main challenger. But anybody who had expected a fight was bitterly disappointed. The much-anticipated “duel” turned out to be little more than a civil conversation between two politicians who seemed to agree on just about everything. Schulz, who as recently as late July had wanted to make refugee policy a key issue in the campaign, expressed approval of Merkel’s handling of the 2015 refugee “crisis.” When it came to national security, their policies were indistinguishable. At one point, the Social Democrat took Merkel by surprise by proposing to lobby the other European governments to end negotiations with Turkey over its accession to the European Union, but she was quick to agree with him, thus depriving him of an opportunity to present himself as an alternative even on that issue.

Rather than providing the Social Democrats with much-needed momentum, the debate enhanced Merkel’s position. Most viewers — sixteen million, or one in five, Germans were watching — believed that Merkel presented the better arguments, was more competent and made a more favourable impression.

The real winners of the debate were the minor parties. The day after the Merkel–Schulz encounter, in another televised debate, the leaders of the minor parties emphasised that their positions differ, often substantially, from those of the two major parties. This second debate demonstrated that the electorate does have a choice between radically different alternative visions — for example, between that of the Greens, on the one hand, and that of the AfD, on the other. The second debate was also evidence of synergies that carry the potential for intriguing alliances: between the Greens and the CSU, or between the AfD and the Left.

Four days after his “duel” with the chancellor, Martin Schulz spoke in Kassel, a city of 200,000 in the Social Democrats’ heartland. More than 2000 people gathered on Königsplatz, a square in the centre of the city. Since 1949, Kassel has always been won by a Social Democrat. In 1972, Holger Börner, who later became premier of Hessen and who in 1985 led the first coalition government involving the Greens at state level, won more than 60 per cent of the vote there. At the last election, the Social Democrat candidate attracted 40 per cent, but his party won only 34 per cent of the party vote, with the Christian Democrats coming a close second. This time, the Christian Democrats have a realistic chance of wresting the electorate from the Social Democrats.

The Martin Schulz speaking on Königsplatz was more combative than the candidate who had debated Angela Merkel on television. On that occasion, many viewers could have been forgiven for thinking that Schulz’s only ambition was to become Merkel’s foreign minister. This time, he referred to himself as the next German chancellor. But such a claim was no longer credible.

In Kassel, too, Merkel was not the main target of Schulz’s passionate speech. Instead, he lambasted the Turkish and American presidents, both of whom are popular targets in Germany at the moment. He also targeted the AfD, which he labelled “a shame for Germany.” That remark earned him the loudest round of applause of the evening. The remainder of the speech was received politely but without much enthusiasm. At least half of the onlookers seemed to have come out of curiosity rather than to show their support for the candidate.

Telling contrast: a Social Democratic Party poster showing former chancellor Willy Brandt, displayed recently in Leverkusen. Federico Gambarini/dpa

Even the diehard Social Democrats in the audience remained reserved. Schulz is knowledgeable and earnest. He is committed to the Social Democratic cause. He can be charming, and he appears to be passionate about core Social Democratic themes, such as social justice. The fact that he doesn’t wear designer clothes and that he sports an unfashionable beard — that he looks like a tram conductor, as one journalist commented — makes him appear to be authentic. But anybody yearning for a rock star candidate would have been well advised to attend the Rolling Stones concert in Hamburg, rather than one of Schulz’s campaign events.

The Social Democrats would have done well if they had been able to present a candidate with Mick Jagger appeal. After all, a lack of charisma is one of Merkel’s weaknesses. Schulz’s inability to capitalise on Merkel’s weak point was highlighted a few days ago, when a poster from the 1972 election campaign, featuring the then Social Democratic chancellor, Willy Brandt, was put up in the West German city of Leverkusen, and immediately attracted nationwide attention. Social Democrats with memories reaching back forty-five years would have reflected on the contrast between the larger-than-life and divisive Brandt and the pedestrian but amiable Schulz.

The Königsplatz crowd was heterogeneous: young and old, men and women. The audience also included a large proportion of recent migrants. The same couldn’t be said of the Social Democrats accompanying Schulz or speaking before him. Most of them looked like marginally younger and slightly more fashionable versions of their leader: white men in their late forties or fifties, balding, with glasses, wearing suits with red ties (unlike Schulz, who chose a boring blue).

Compared to the people who dominated the AfD campaign event I attended the following day, however, even the Social Democrats in Kassel, who did include a couple of women, seemed a colourful lot. The AfD candidates and office-bearers in attendance were all white men, and so were most of the people who had come to listen to them. This time, the main attraction was Björn Höcke, the leader of the AfD in Thüringen.

Höcke is notorious for being one of the most prominent figures in the AfD’s new right faction. Even in his own party he is a controversial figure. In a speech in January, he referred to the national Holocaust memorial in Berlin as a “monument of shame” and called for a 180-degree turn in German memorial politics. Other AfD leaders distanced themselves from Höcke and initiated a process that could lead to his expulsion from the party. But so far it has proven difficult to dislodge him, because he is popular among the AfD base, particularly in East Germany.

I encountered Höcke in the banquet hall of a restaurant in Nordhausen, a town of 42,000 about 100 kilometres east of Kassel. Although geographically close, Nordhausen and Kassel are worlds apart. Ausländer, or non-Germans, make up only 2.3 per cent of Nordhausen’s population, whereas 17 per cent of Kassel’s residents are non-citizens. Kassel is in the comparatively affluent West German state of Hessen, governed by a coalition of Christian Democrats and Greens. Nordhausen is in the comparatively poor East German state of Thüringen, the only state in Germany with a premier belonging to the Left. The federal electorate that includes Nordhausen, however, has always been won by the Christian Democrats.

Höcke himself is not contesting the elections of 24 September. His close ally, and candidate for the local electorate, Jürgen Pohl, is one of the AfD’s twelve candidates in Thüringen (all of whom are men), and he was the other speaker at the AfD event. Like Höcke, Pohl is positioned on the far right of a far-right party. He occupies the promising second spot on the AfD’s state ticket, and is likely to represent the AfD in the next Bundestag.

I had braced myself for incendiary speeches, but Höcke did not live up to his reputation. (He did so two days later in East Berlin.) Unlike Schulz, Höcke is not only charming but also charismatic. Unlike the Social Democrats who greeted Schulz in Kassel, the local AfD supporters in Nordhausen clearly adored their man. Schulz tried his best but failed to sound confident; those curious to see him up close probably came to catch a glimpse of the party leader about to lose the election, rather than the next chancellor. He is somebody who elicits pity. Höcke and Pohl oozed self-confidence. So did their audience. They know that even if the AfD wins less than 10 per cent of the national vote, and despite the fact that it will not be involved in forming the next government, it will be able to set much of the political agenda.

The unemployment rate in Germany is now at its lowest since Reunification in 1990. In Kassel, it’s 5.9 per cent, which is also a record low. In Nordhausen, it’s 6.3 per cent, only marginally higher. The Christian Democrats’ key slogan of this campaign is “Für ein Deutschland, in dem wir gut und gerne leben” (For a Germany where we like to live and where we live well). That slogan makes sense to most Germans, including the crowd on Königsplatz. The majority of Germans are content and believe they are well-off, and it is therefore not surprising that most Germans would prefer things remain the same, and for the next government to be led by Angela Merkel.

The 120 or so people who came to hear Höcke and Pohl in Nordhausen live in a different reality. Although they are now materially almost as well-off as people in Kassel, many East Germans believe that they have been short-changed and marginalised. The Germany they envisage is not a continuation of the country administered by Merkel for the past twelve years. They want a country that is culturally homogeneous and in many respects like the old German Democratic Republic: a country in which the state takes care of everything and everybody, and which is closely aligned with Russia rather than with Western Europe.

Schulz managed to get the Kassel crowd excited only once: when he reminded his listeners that a local AfD politician had called a work of art on Königsplatz “entstellte Kunst,” a term that is reminiscent of the Nazis’ “entartete Kunst,” or degenerate art. The work is Nigerian artist Olu Oguibe’s Das Fremdling und Flüchtlinge Monument, a sixteen-metre-high obelisk with the inscription “I was a stranger and you took me in.” It’s part of the Documenta, arguably the world’s most important show of contemporary art, which is staged in Kassel every five years. The local Social Democrats who spoke before Schulz were proud of the Documenta. Their praise for provocative publicly funded art won them applause.

By attacking the AfD over its attempt to label a work of art as degenerate, Schulz reaffirmed the view that the new Germany must define its identity also negatively — as that of a country that has severed all links with its Nazi past. In Kassel, as elsewhere in West Germany, that view is largely uncontroversial.

In West Germany, the process whereby the nation came to distance itself from its Nazi past was slow and difficult. It was, initially at least, driven by civil society, rather than by the government. That was different in East Germany. There, the communist government tried to offer Germans a positive identity: as the citizens of a nation-state with anti-fascist credentials. At the hotel where I was staying in Nordhausen, a large plaque opposite the reception desk says “Ich weiss, dass wir die Sieger sein werden” (I know that we will be the victors). It’s next to a portrait of Albert Kuntz, a communist member of parliament, who after having been imprisoned in concentration camps for almost twelve years, was murdered in the infamous Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in Nordhausen three months before its liberation.

The Dora-Mittelbau memorial is not far from the hall where Höcke and Pohl campaigned for the AfD. The street that leads to the memorial is called Straße der OdF, or OdF Street. OdF stands for “Opfer des Faschismus,” victims of fascism. Attempts to make the citizens of the German Democratic Republic believe that they were victors were largely unsuccessful (except, perhaps, every four years during the Olympics). East Germans also did not readily identify with the victims of fascism. But they did identify as victims: of Adolf Hitler, of their own government, of the Soviet Union or of the capitalist West. Now, twenty-seven years after Reunification, many of them still think of themselves as victims: of globalisation, of their very own Angela Merkel, or of West Germany. Höcke and Pohl, a lawyer who calls himself “Volksanwalt,” the lawyer of the people, appeal to that sense of victimhood.

With Merkel and Schulz behaving as if they were an old couple who intend to live together amicably for many years to come, and with right-wing extremists like Höcke and Pohl trying to make people believe that they are moderates, is there any room for emotions in this election campaign?

There is. Ask Angela Merkel, who more than any other German politician is able to control her own emotions. More than any other German politician she has also been able to arouse emotions. In order to see those emotions at work, journalists flock to Merkel’s campaign events in East Germany. There she is greeted with chants of “Merkel muss weg” (Merkel has to go), and worse. Much worse. In Bitterfeld, she was pelted with tomatoes. In Torgau, riot police were needed to shield her from the crowd. More angry protesters greeted her in Finsterwalde. When she was due to speak in Wolgast, the local Christian Democrats moved her campaign event indoors — allegedly because of the inclement weather, but more likely because they anticipated violent protests.

In Nordhausen, those listening to Höcke and Pohl were enthusiastic listeners — much more so than the crowd in Kassel — but they did not abuse their political opponents. Nor did they chant racist slogans. There was no need for that kind of aggression; they were, after all, among friends. If Merkel had visited Nordhausen, the reception she would have received might have been similar to that in Bitterfeld or Torgau.

Germans who identify as victims are no longer just bitter; now many of them are angry and full of hatred. And they demonstrate their hatred — and particularly their loathing for Merkel — publicly. As the AfD’s stocks have risen over the past four years, some of its followers sense that there is an opportunity to do something with their anger, and to take revenge. It’s difficult to take revenge by attacking global capitalism. Sometimes it’s possible to take revenge by pelting politicians such as Merkel with tomatoes. It’s comparatively easy for those who feel they have been short-changed to direct their anger at others: at asylum seekers and refugees, for instance.

Whatever the outcome of the election, the challenge of dealing with the anger and hatred of Germans who feel they have been left out remains. AfD politicians like Pohl are likely to give voice to that anger in the Bundestag, and could perhaps thereby defuse some of the aggressive energy that drives people to throw tomatoes at Merkel and stones at the windows of asylum seeker hostels. But there are also indications that the rise of the AfD has the opposite effect: the AfD makes hate speech appear to be respectable. That was on display during the encounter between Merkel and Schulz, when one of the four journalists adopted the language of the populist far right when asking some of his questions.

Merkel will win these elections, but so will the AfD. The most intriguing question might therefore not be whether Merkel will form a coalition with the Greens, the Social Democrats or the Free Democrats. What I would really like to know is what she will do about the AfD. In an interview published in Frankfurter Rundschau this week, Merkel says that she doesn’t mind being abused when campaigning in East Germany, and that she keeps her appointments in the East to encourage “those who are taking a stance against the hatred.” But Merkel is not known as somebody who easily forgives and forgets. •

The post The stamina of Angela Merkel appeared first on Inside Story.

Merkel has a point, at least in relation to Germany. In the first six months of 2017, the number of asylum seekers arriving there fell to just over 90,000. While that’s about three times the number for all of 2006, the first year of Merkel’s reign as chancellor, it’s far fewer than last year, and only about a tenth of the total number in 2015, the year of the so-called European refugee crisis.

Martin Schulz, the Social Democrat who wants to replace Merkel as chancellor, begs to differ. Last weekend, he conjured the spectre of a new European emergency. “Unless we act now,” he warned, history would repeat itself. With Merkel and the Christian Democrats in mind, he said that it would be “cynical to play for time and try to ignore the refugee issue until the federal elections.” This week, he is off for discussions with Italy’s prime minister, Paolo Gentiloni.

Gentiloni is likely to tell Schulz that talk of a looming refugee crisis makes little sense. For Italy, the crisis is already in full swing. In the past six months, more than 100,000 irregular migrants arrived in Europe by sea, 85 per cent of them disembarking in Italy. Many more are waiting for an opportunity to make the crossing from Libya. Meanwhile, some of Italy’s European partners are refusing to come to its aid. The Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary have said that they won’t take any asylum seekers who first entered Europe in Italy. Austria has threatened to deploy troops at the border, and its foreign minister, Sebastian Kurz, has told his Italian counterpart that Italy ought to stop transferring migrants from Lampedusa and Sicily to the European mainland.

Although Schulz made his name in European, rather than German, politics — he was a member of the European Parliament for twenty-four years, and its president for five — he is likely to be less interested in Italy’s problems than in his own. And the most pressing of these is this: how can he improve the Social Democrats’ chances of leading the next government? If the elections were held now, the most recent polls suggest that Schulz’s party would win less than 25 per cent of the vote while the Christian Democrats could expect about 40 per cent. Not only does it seem increasingly likely that Merkel will win the elections of 24 September; there is also a distinct possibility that she will lead a government made up of the parties of her choice: the Christian Democrats, the Bavarian Christian Social Union, and the Greens.

In other words, Schulz’s announcement that he wants Germany’s response to refugees to feature prominently in the election campaign is a sign of desperation. It is also risky — for two reasons. A greater emphasis on refugees would provide an urgently needed lifeline to the right-wing populists of the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD), who, if the current trend continues, might not attract enough votes even to be represented in the next German parliament. If they did attract enough support, then it’s likely their success would come at least partly at the expense of the Linke, the successor party of the East German communists, which Schulz would need as partner if he wanted to be the next chancellor at the head of a red–red–green coalition government.

The other risk is that Schulz’s strategy could rebound directly on his own party. He wants to remind Germans of what happened in 2015, when Germany took in about 890,000 asylum seekers, but that risks reminding them of the fact that the Social Democrats didn’t publicly oppose Merkel’s response at the time. For the past four years, they have been part of her government, and thus — nominally at least — have been co-responsible for whatever policies the government pursued.

Schulz must be hoping that voters not only overwhelmingly regret Germany’s generous response in 2015, but also single out Merkel as the one who should be blamed. He has some reason to be optimistic. Surveys suggest most Germans believe that their country took in more asylum seekers than it should have in 2015. And Schulz’s likely claim that Merkel alone is to blame for Germany’s response could draw on evidence that many might find persuasive.

Four months ago, Welt am Sonntag journalist Robin Alexander published Die Getriebenen, a book examining in minute detail the German government’s policy response to refugee arrivals during 2015–16. The book became an instant sales hit, and within a couple of weeks it had risen to the top of the Spiegel bestseller list for nonfiction. It occupied that position for three weeks, and remained in second place for another three weeks. It still holds a respectable fourteenth place.

Alexander spoke with many of those involved in the German policy response in September and October 2015, including Bavarian premier and prominent Merkel critic Horst Seehofer. The book reads as if Alexander was listening in when Merkel conferred by phone with Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann late on 4 September 2015, with both agreeing not to turn back refugees stranded in Hungary. Alexander appears to have been in the room when, shortly afterwards, Merkel rang her deputy Sigmar Gabriel, the leader of the Social Democrats, who took her call “while sitting on the couch at his home in Goslar.”

In fact, Merkel seems to have been the only key player who declined Alexander’s request for an interview. That makes Die Getriebenen a curiously unbalanced account: it is a book about Merkel, but it relies on the testimony of people, like Seehofer, who disagreed with Merkel all along, or who, like Gabriel, have been anxious to distance themselves now that Germany’s initial enthusiasm for welcoming refugee arrivals has dissipated.

Alexander is critical of Merkel’s response to the refugee crisis for three main reasons. He claims that her actions have been responsible for a number of disastrous outcomes: a fractured European Union; the rise of populist nationalism in Europe; divisions within Germany; and intensified terrorist threats. He argues that Merkel’s policy fix, namely the European Union’s deal with Turkey, didn’t solve the issue. And, most importantly, he tries to show that she had little understanding of the issues and no plan — that she made policy on the run, neither consulted her colleagues and international partners nor sought democratic legitimation, and let herself be carried away by her emotions. He singles out what he sees as two serious mistakes. One was the decision not to close the border on 13 September, although the means to do so were available at the time; the other was Merkel’s willingness to pose for selfies with asylum seekers during her visit to a hostel on 10 September.

In his indictment of the German chancellor, Alexander is not alone. In their much-discussed book Refuge, which appeared at the same time as Die Getriebenen, eminent refugee studies scholar Alexander Betts and economist Paul Collier accuse Merkel of having adopted the stance of the “headless heart” and having exacerbated rather than defused the crisis. According to Betts and Collier, Merkel’s decision not to close Germany’s borders “created powerful and disastrous new incentives,” prompting hundreds of thousands more to risk the journey to Europe. Betts and Collier, too, are scathing of the deal that Merkel negotiated with Turkey and, like Alexander, they hold her responsible for the Brexit vote. “The key decisions of the refugee crisis inadvertently resulted in the people of one of the largest member countries of the European Union deciding to leave it,” they write.

It’s hard to see how Merkel, rather than the British voters, can be blamed for Brexit (or even for the election of a right-wing populist government in Warsaw, another alleged result of her actions). Alexander’s attempt to establish a link between the mass arrivals of 2015 and the emergence of a terrorist threat in Europe is equally shaky; the fact that Anis Amri, the man responsible for the December 2016 attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, had arrived in Lampedusa five years earlier and had unsuccessfully claimed asylum can hardly serve as evidence for the claim that his crime was facilitated by the German government’s response to refugees and asylum seekers in 2015.

I would like to take Alexander’s claim that Merkel’s handling of the crisis led to a polarisation of German society more seriously. The events of autumn 2015 certainly provided oxygen to the AfD. Xenophobes do feel emboldened to speak their mind in public. And incidents of racist violence have increased dramatically over the past three years. But research suggests that the number of Germans who hold racist views has not dramatically increased; rather, many of them no longer feel too inhibited to raise their voices. On the other side of the political divide, more Germans are committed to solidarity with refugees. Germany’s response has polarised and politicised society, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

If Merkel’s policy-making didn’t have these disastrous consequences, then much of the sting goes out of Alexander’s criticism of her day-to-day management of the crisis. It doesn’t entirely invalidate that criticism, though. There is little doubt that Merkel’s decision-making — in this instance, but also on other occasions — has not relied strongly on consultations with others. She may not have been able to foresee the consequences of her actions, and may have stumbled, without a clear plan, from one crisis to the next; here, too, I concede that Alexander’s analysis may well be correct.

I strongly disagree with his charge that Merkel’s policies were driven by events outside her control, and his implied criticism that her policy response was entirely opportunistic. As I have argued in previous essays in Inside Story, the event that was key to Merkel’s response was not the drowning of Alan Kurdi, nor the discovery of the bodies of seventy-one migrants in a truck in Austria, nor the demonstration of German Willkommenskultur at the Munich railway station, nor images of refugees in Budapest holding up signs showing pictures of “Mama Merkel.” Her crucial experience happened on 26 August 2015 in Heidenau.

On 21 and 22 August, a racist mob protested against a decision by the state government to accommodate more than 500 asylum seekers in a former hardware store in that small town south of Saxony’s capital, Dresden. To begin with, Merkel was not particularly concerned and showed no interest in visiting the Heidenau hardware store — or any other refugee hostel. On 24 August, her deputy, Social Democrat Sigmar Gabriel, visited Heidenau. He referred to the racists who had tried to attack the facility as Pack (scum) and demanded that they be locked up. He told reporters that it was important not to concede even one millimetre to “the most un-German characters I could imagine.” That same day, the Munich tabloid Abendzeitung appeared with a blank front page under the heading: “This is what the Federal Chancellor says.” The editorial explained why the space was left blank: “The nation would have listened to her, would have thought about it, would have discussed it. Would have, would have, would have, but alas has not.”

Two days later, Merkel finally visited Heidenau. She was shocked by what she found, and told locals opposed to the asylum seeker accommodation, who had earlier screamed “traitor” and “c–t” in her face, that there would be “no tolerance towards those who question the dignity of others.” Five days later, during the customary summer press conference, Merkel added: “There can be no apologies… The key is not to show even the slightest bit of understanding. No biographical experience, nothing that happened in the past, nothing, absolutely nothing justifies [their] stance.”

The decision to defy the Heidenau protesters and to insist that asylum seekers enjoy the same basic rights as citizens in Germany informed her response to the refugee crisis. Alexander concedes as much. But I would go one step further. Her insistence on upholding Article 1(1) of Germany’s Basic Law — “Human dignity shall be inviolable” — and providing a lesson to those who don’t respect the rights of others became a leitmotif that characterised her response to the refugee crisis. Rather than being opportunistic, rather than not knowing what she was doing, she was unerring in her defiance. Under her leadership, the Christian Democrats did not lurch to the right (as they had done in the early 1990s) in a vain attempt to gain the support of those opposed to foreigners in general and asylum seekers in particular.

When Merkel declared at her party’s annual congress in December last year that “a situation like that in the late summer of 2015 cannot, should not and must not be repeated,” she was referring less to her decision not to close the borders than to the often chaotic way in which that decision was implemented. At the same time, she has always been ready to tell Germans they ought to be proud of the country’s accommodation of 890,000 asylum seekers in 2015.

I suspect it will be Schulz’s downfall to have underestimated the sense of pride Germans feel when looking back at 2015. That sense of pride has become more pronounced since the election of Donald Trump. Germans like to tell themselves that they can do better — and are more relaxed about the challenges of globalisation — than the big brother on the other side of the Atlantic.

While I don’t share Alexander’s views about the outcomes of Merkel’s policies and about what drove them, I agree with him that Merkel’s response didn’t solve anything. The deal she negotiated with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was bad to begin with, and for several months now it has threatened to unravel. So far, the benefits Turkey gains — very substantial monetary assistance, political clout and a commitment that a greater number of Syrians from Turkey will be resettled than the number of irregular migrants returned to Turkey from Greece — have seemed to sway Erdoğan not to rescind the deal. But with the relationship between Turkey and Germany nearing rock bottom, he may merely bide his time until closer to the German elections.

Here, Schulz is on to something. History may not repeat itself, but the prospect that hundreds of thousands of desperate people, encouraged by Turkey, may try to reach northern Europe is real. The question then becomes: would Germans want Schulz to deal with that crisis, or would they prefer a safe pair of hands? Would they really want somebody in charge who seems to get easily excited about impending catastrophes? If Schulz wants to draw on Alexander’s analysis, the question might also be: would Germans really want a government led by a party that two years ago, while ostensibly in power, had very little influence over the direction of Germany’s policy?

Merkel has not responded to Schulz’s over-excitement. She is on holidays. Currently, that could only be in her favour. •

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First responses ranged from bewilderment to ridicule. David Harris of the American Jewish Committee reminded the Pope that “the Nazis and their allies erected and used concentration camps for slave labour and the extermination of millions of people during World War II.” In Australia, Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt was also quick to denounce the pontiff. “The Pope really is a fool if he cannot tell the difference between a Nazi concentration camp and a refugee camp,” Bolt sneered.

The Pope made the offending remarks in Rome’s Basilica of St Bartholomew during a service for twentieth and twenty-first century martyrs, including an eighty-five-year-old French priest, Jacques Hamel, who was killed last year by Islamist extremists. During his sermon, the Pope also referred to a Muslim man whose Christian wife had been murdered because she refused to take off her crucifix. He had met the man last year during a visit to a refugee holding centre on the Greek island of Lesvos.

Refugees were not the focus of the Pope’s sermon, and media reports suggest that his written notes didn’t include a reference to concentration camps. The Vatican has, however, made available a transcript of what he said. “I do not know if that man is still in Lesvos or if he has managed to go elsewhere,” Pope Francis said of the man he encountered last year. “I do not know if he was able to get out of that concentration camp.” He immediately offered an explanation for his use of the term: “perché i campi di rifugiati – tanti – sono di concentramento, per la folla di gente che è lasciata lì.” In the Reuters report, that explanation is rather clumsily translated as “because refugee camps, many of them, are of concentration (type) because of the great number of people left there inside them.”

The news agency’s decision to insert an extra word (“type”) to help readers make sense of the Pope’s remarks is an indication of their ambiguity. Did he want to say that refugee camps can be likened to concentration camps because of the number of people accommodated there? Didn’t he rather, as I suspect, realise that his impromptu remark could be misunderstood, and try to backpedal by drawing attention to the fact that the refugees are “concentrated” in holding centres like the one on Lesvos and are not at liberty to leave them? After all, they are being sent back to Turkey under last year’s controversial deal between the government in Ankara and the European Union.

In any case, the quote makes it clear that the Pope did not equate refugee camps with Nazi concentration camps. Having visited Auschwitz-Birkenau last year, he would know that what he saw in Lesvos bore no resemblance to the slave labour and extermination camps associated with the name Auschwitz. But David Harris had a point when he said that “precision of language and facts is absolutely essential when making any historical reference.” Was the pontiff – who, after all, is not a native Italian speaker – not sufficiently attentive to the words he used when he spontaneously referred to concentration camps? Or was he perhaps deliberately careless to provoke a response?

Australians would be familiar with comparisons between concentration camps and camps holding refugees. In 2002, for example, Melbourne artist Juan Davila, who came to Australia in 1974 as a refugee from Pinochet’s Chile, called the Woomera immigration detention facility a “concentration camp.” Two years earlier, one of Australia’s most respected refugee law experts, Sydney University academic Mary Crock, was reported to have said after a visit to the Curtin detention centre that “aspects of the centre resembled a concentration camp.” More recently, the regional processing centres on Manus Island and in Nauru have frequently been likened to concentration camps.

If we take “concentration camp” to mean “Auschwitz,” then such comparisons are extremely problematic. If, however, the intention is to employ the term in a more generic sense, then it is arguably legitimate to use “concentration camp” to draw attention to certain aspects of European holding centres and Australian immigration detention facilities.

According to the New World Encyclopedia, a concentration camp is “a large detention centre created for political opponents, specific ethnic or religious groups, civilians of a critical war-zone, or other groups of people”; imprisonment in such camps is not guided by “due process of law fairly applied by a judiciary.” In the English language, the term was first used during the Cuban war of independence (1895–98) to refer to the reconcentrados, camps set up by the Spanish military to intern Cubans. During the second Boer war (1899–1902), the British established concentration camps to “concentrate” Boer civilians; the term was then widely used in the British press. More than 26,000 women and children died in these camps.

In Germany, the equivalent term, Konzentrationslager, was not pioneered by the Nazis. It was first used in 1904 during the genocidal war against the Herero and Nama in German Southwest Africa to refer to internment camps that were modelled partly on the concentration camps in neighbouring British South Africa. In the early years of the Weimar Republic, concentration camps were set up for short periods to intern non-German Jews and left-wing political prisoners. Thus, when the Nazis came to power and almost immediately set up Konzentrationslager – the Dachau concentration camp commenced operations on 22 March 1933, only seven weeks after Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor – neither the term nor the concept was new.

The first Nazi Konzentrationslager were not designed to exterminate large numbers of people. It was not until after the second world war, once the full extent of the Holocaust had become known, that the term “concentration camp” acquired the connotations it has today. These connotations are so specific that they arguably don’t cover the full range of Nazi Konzentrationslager.

In Australia, a government agency still used the term in a generic sense as late as 1940. When Smith’s Weekly complained in November of that year that the Sydney telephone directory listed two internment camps for enemy aliens as “concentration camps,” it was not decrying the use of the term, but outraged at the fact that the Post Office published the camps’ locations while censorship prevented newspapers from revealing such details.

Does this history matter, given that the term concentration camp is now universally associated with Nazi death camps, and particularly with Auschwitz? I believe it does, if it helps to remind us that the concentration of irregular migrants at the so-called hot spots established by the European Union, and the concentration of asylum seekers and refugees in Australian-run immigration detention centres, is not entirely unprecedented.

A year ago, former Court of Appeal judge Stephen Charles QC wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald: “The camps in Manus Island and Nauru have long since ceased to be mere detention centres. They are now concentration camps.” Such an observation could be helpful too. Not because the regional processing facility in Nauru resembles Auschwitz, but because the term “detention centre” may no longer be adequate to describe that facility, in the same way that the term “refugee camp” (which connotes a camp set up to protect and look after refugees) may no longer be an adequate designation for the holding centre on Lesvos.

Charles seems to have had Auschwitz or other death camps in mind when he referred to concentration camps. He wrote that the purpose of the concentration camps in Germany “was to separate various groups – communists, Jews, homosexuals – from the German community.” That was certainly true for the earlier Nazi camps, such as Dachau and Buchenwald. It could be argued that detention centres, too, are such spaces of exclusion.

The pontiff’s impromptu use of the term campo di concentramento may well have been the result of a deep sense of frustration over Europe’s asylum seeker and refugee policies, and the lack of interest in the plight of refugees in much of Europe. He followed his reference to the man he met last year at the holding centre on Lesvos with the observation that “ agreements seem to be more important than human rights.” I suspect the agreements that the Pope had in mind were the 2016 deal between the EU and Turkey and the agreement between the EU and Libya concluded earlier this year. Human rights organisations have condemned both.

It is unlikely that the Pope’s criticism of the European response to refugees and asylum seekers would have been reported if he hadn’t used the term “concentration camp” in the same sermon. And maybe that also justifies his use of the term. At least that’s what Christoph Heubner seems to believe. He is the vice-president of the International Auschwitz Committee, which represents Auschwitz survivors. Heubner did not think the pontiff’s words were inappropriate. “He overdrew to move hearts. That’s legitimate.” Heubner told the German Press Agency.

In last year’s Sydney Morning Herald article, Stephen Charles claimed that the German Konzentrationslager “were maintained in great secrecy; most Germans had little or no knowledge of the awful and dehumanising conditions in which detainees were kept.” This is a myth that many Germans are still fond of repeating. But research has conclusively shown that Charles’s is not an accurate observation. It would be equally untrue to say that Australians have little or no knowledge of the conditions on Manus and in Nauru, or that Europeans have no way of knowing about the conditions in Greek refugee camps (or in the prisons of the European Union’s new best friend, Libya).

And maybe this is the only appropriate comparison between today’s camps and the Nazi concentration camps: today’s Europeans and Australians pretend that they don’t know and bear no responsibility for their governments’ response to refugees and other irregular migrants in the same way that most Germans between 1933 and 1945 pretended the camps had nothing to do with them, and that the best response was to cover one’s eyes and ears.

Pope Francis didn’t say that. But he might have. On more than one occasion, he has condemned what he calls “la globalizzazione dell’indifferenza,” the globalisation of indifference. The attentiveness demanded by David Harris – a “precision of language and facts… when making any historical reference” – is essential indeed. It should also be an attentiveness attuned to etymologies and contested meanings. But even more essential is the kind of attentiveness about whose lack the Pope has been so concerned.

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What’s equally depressing is that Donald Trump’s victory was sealed by the votes of just over a quarter of eligible voters. Despite the high stakes, only a little over half of American citizens over the age of eighteen participated in the election. In itself, that isn’t a new development. In 2012, the participation rate was less than 55 per cent, and Barack Obama was able to garner votes from only 28 per cent of the electorate. In fact, the last time that more than 60 per cent of eligible voters cast their votes in presidential elections was in 1968, when Richard Nixon won; in a three-horse race with Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, Nixon was elected with the support of barely a quarter of the electorate.

In Australia, where voting is compulsory, people’s disdain for the political system is as pronounced as it is in the United States and in much of Europe. “Australians are so fed up with business as usual that they seem happy to consider crooks, spivs, vain millionaires with deep pockets and deeper self-interests, serial litigants, science deniers, one-issue nutcases, and the odd moron,” Fairfax’s Mark Kenny recently commented. Perhaps most worryingly, many of those fed up with business as usual look towards right-wing xenophobes. In Australia, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is as much the beneficiary as Nigel Farage’s UKIP was in the 2015 British parliamentary elections, Norbert Hofer in the recent Austrian presidential elections, and Trump on 8 November. Grassroots movements on the left of the political spectrum, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, and left-of-centre populist parties, such as the Pirates in Germany and Sweden, and the G500 in the Netherlands, have also benefited from the disenchantment with parliamentary democracy in its current form.

Australia provides further evidence that the system itself is in crisis. Since 2007, Australia has had five prime ministers, one of them on two separate occasions, because the incumbents were either voted out of office or removed by their own party when they were deemed too unpopular. The current federal government is not only distrusted and disliked by the majority of the electorate (less than a year after having been voted in), but it is also highly ineffectual, partly because it is afraid to make decisions that could make it even more unpopular or jeopardise its slim majority.

The Australian public has lost interest in elections, even though journalists try to make them appear interesting by reporting about electoral contests as if they were sporting competitions. Nevertheless, governments are in constant campaign mode. They are obsessed with opinion polls and try to pre-empt voters’ disapproval of their policies by submitting every initiative to focus groups before announcing it.

At least Australia’s Liberal–National Party coalition was able to form government soon after the elections. After the last elections in Spain, a new government only emerged after ten months. Belgium was ruled for 541 days by a caretaker government until Socialist Party leader Elio Di Rupo was finally able to cobble together a coalition government following the 2010 federal elections.

In Against Elections, the Belgian writer David Van Reybrouck lists the symptoms of a system in crisis: “low voter turnout, high voter turnover, declining party membership, governmental impotence, political paralysis, electoral fear of failure, lack of recruitment, compulsive self-promotion, chronic electoral fever, exhausting media stress, distrust.” He suggests that a system that seemed to make sense some 250 years ago is no longer adequate:

If the Founding Fathers in the United States and the heroes of the French Revolution had known in what context their method would be forced to function 250 years later, they would no doubt have prescribed a different model. Imagine having to develop a system today that would express the will of the people. Would it really be a good idea to have them all queue up at polling stations every four or five years with a bit of card in their hands and go into a dark booth to put a mark, not next to ideas but next to names on a list, names of people about whom restless reporting had been going on for months in a commercial environment that profits from restlessness?

Van Reybrouck says that elections are the anachronism at the heart of today’s malaise – that they are “the fossil fuel of politics.” He certainly has a point when he claims that democracy is not synonymous with electoral democracy, and that we ought to step back, acknowledge that “our current democracy is the result of a chance conjunction of circumstances over the past two hundred years” and question some of our assumptions about what democracy meant and could mean. He convincingly argues that electoral democracy in its current form has a rather short history, going back no further than the late eighteenth century.

Athenian democracy, which is often hailed as the birthplace of our political system, relied on sortition – the drawing of lots – more than on elections. So did the political systems of some of the Italian city-states in the Middle Ages. Sortition, in conjunction with rotation, ensured maximum participation and, in principle at least, no distinction between the governing and the governed (who could be tomorrow’s holders of power). It thus prevented the emergence of what populists like Trump refer to as the “establishment” or the “political class” or the “elites.” Of course, in Athens this was true only insofar as those eligible to participate in the democratic process were concerned: women and slaves were excluded from power.

According to Van Reybrouck, electoral democracy was not intended to empower the people. Rather, both in France and in the United States, the new elites wanted to disempower both the hereditary rulers and the people, who could not be trusted to govern themselves (and many of whom were initially not eligible to cast a vote).

Van Reybrouck believes that deliberative democracy is the answer to a system in crisis. He wants assemblies of citizens who have been selected by the drawing of lots, or by a combination of sortition and self-selection, to have a major role in policy-making. Participants would be compensated for their time and effort to ensure that they could join such a decision-making body. He also says how not to do it; he believes that Kevin Rudd’s 2008 citizens’ summit was an exercise in replacing the “elected aristocracy” with a “self-elected aristocracy.”

Van Reybrouck lists several examples of deliberative democracy in action to demonstrate that the model he champions has worked in the recent past. Among others, they include the 2004 Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform in British Columbia and the 2013 Convention on the Constitution in Ireland. Where a referendum simply “reveals people’s gut reactions,” his model requires a group of citizens to arrive at an informed opinion (both by talking among themselves and by listening to specialist advice) in a lengthy process.

Could fellow citizens chosen by lot be trusted to arrive at sensible decisions any more than elected politicians? Van Reybrouck is optimistic: “We are all adults now and politicians would do well to look past the barbed wire, trust the citizens, take their emotions seriously and value their experience.” On other occasions, though, those same citizens may have been responsible for the election of the likes of Pauline Hanson and Donald Trump. Would they listen to each other and to expert advice? Isn’t there the risk that they would encourage each other to adopt extreme positions?

Democracy should mean more than being allowed to vote in elections every few years. But the prospect of a citizens’ assembly having a say about Australia’s refugee and asylum seeker policies is no more enticing than what we have now. In the current model, cynical politicians try to play towards an audience they perceive to be overwhelmingly narrow-minded, xenophobic and egotistical, and formulate policies that disregard the rights of refugees and asylum seekers in order to be re-elected. The alternative to President Trump and Senator Hanson can’t be to put Trump and Hanson voters in charge of policy-making and trust them to make well-informed decisions that respect the interests and rights of others.

But while Van Reybrouck may not have the remedy, there is little doubt in my mind that his diagnosis ought to be taken seriously. The vote for Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the success of the populist far right in elections across Europe suggest that something is seriously amiss. There are, of course, exceptions to the trend. New Zealand might be one. Iceland could be another one: there, last month’s elections were triggered by revelations that leading Icelandic politicians, including prime minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, feature in the Panama Papers. Anywhere else, the ensuing public outrage should have guaranteed a large vote for the populist far right. In Iceland, it didn’t.

The comparative weakness of right-wing populism in Iceland may well be the legacy of the politicisation of Iceland’s electorate during the Búsáhaldabyltingin, the Pots and Pans Revolution, in the wake of the Icelandic financial crisis. The example of Iceland could also suggest both that Van Reybrouck has a point and that his model of randomly selected citizens’ assemblies is deficient. Between 2010 and 2012, Iceland experimented with deliberative democracy to draft a new Constitution. There, a group of twenty-five citizens was chosen not by drawing lots but by a popular vote (and later, when that vote was annulled, by parliament). But the twenty-five women and men weren’t left to their own devices; instead, all Icelanders were invited to become actively involved in the discussions. “Crowdsourcing for democracy” is how the Finnish scholar Tanja Aitamurto called these kinds of exercises in a recent book.

Arguably, that attempt to involve everyone raised the standard of political debate. But what works in a country with a population the size of Canberra doesn’t necessarily work elsewhere. It might suggest, though, that the crisis of electoral democracy could also be addressed by devolving decision-making to the local level, where it is more easily possible to involve all residents – not just citizens – in deliberative processes. •

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In Germany itself, the anniversary dominated newspapers and magazines and featured prominently on talk shows and current affairs programs on television and radio – to the extent that Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, an event whose anniversary usually prompts intense public reflection, was barely mentioned. But which was the pivotal event that deserved to be singled out? Which date in particular marked Germany’s extraordinary response to the refugee crisis?

Was it 27 August, when the bodies of seventy-one migrants were found in a refrigerated truck in Austria? Was it 2 September, when Nilüfer Demir’s images of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, whose body had been washed up on a Turkish beach, began circulating online? Or was it rather 4 September, when Angela Merkel and her Austrian counterpart Werner Faymann agreed to ignore the Dublin Regulation and issue an invitation to refugees who were receiving a hostile reception in Hungary?

While all these events received much attention, most German commentators focused on 31 August 2015. On that day, Angela Merkel gave her traditional Sommerpressekonferenz, an extended mid-year press conference. Before inviting journalists’ questions, she spoke about the influx of refugees into Europe. By then, the ministry of the interior expected a total of 800,000 irregular migrants to arrive that year in Germany alone.

Merkel said that Germans’ response needed to be guided by the principles laid down in the Basic Law, the Federal Republic’s 1949 constitution. She referred to Article 16a, the right to asylum. She also talked about Article 1(1) – “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority” – and emphasised that it did not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens.

At length, she discussed the measures already taken or planned by her government. “Germany is a strong country,” she said in conclusion. “The motif with which we approach these things has to be: [In the past,] we were able to do so much – we are able to do this. We are able to do this, and wherever there are obstacles, we have to overcome them, we have to deal with them.”

More than anything else, the three words wir schaffen das (we are able to do this) are likely to define Merkel’s reign as chancellor. Even back in August 2015, it was clear that they were more than a rhetorical flourish (which is not something Merkel is known for anyway) and had been planted deliberately. Since then, she has reiterated these three words many times, albeit sometimes with qualifiers (such as “but we won’t be able to do this all by ourselves”). Despite being harshly criticised for her statement by members of her governing coalition, and despite the fact that a clear majority of Germans now opposes her refugee and asylum seeker policies, she has stuck to these three words.

In recent weeks, public commentators seeking to identify the event that could stand in for the extraordinary developments of August and September 2015 have focused on Merkel’s optimism at the time, and on her stubborn refusal to abandon it – even after the number of arrivals was larger than anticipated, after the sexual assaults perpetrated by migrant men on New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne and elsewhere, and after the terrorist attacks in July. Of course, wir schaffen das also lent itself to analyses exploring whether Germany has indeed been “able to do this,” and whether there is any foundation for the chancellor’s continued optimism.

In other respects, though, the focus on the anniversary of Merkel’s wir schaffen das was a curious choice, because the Sommerpressekonferenz preceded the decision she and Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann made to accommodate thousands of refugees stranded in Hungary. In a way, the commentators didn’t so much commemorate the occasion on which she first uttered the three words, but rather her subsequent refusal to back down and adopt a less optimistic tone after the decision to keep Germany’s borders open.

What prompted Merkel to launch her wir schaffen das on 31 August last year? And how did her decision to be demonstratively optimistic relate to the decision four days later not to bar large numbers of refugees from entering Germany?

Merkel introduced her discussion of refugee issues at the press conference by talking about the dead migrants discovered in Austria four days earlier. “These are images that exceed our imagination,” she said. “All this happens while we here live in very secure circumstances.” The tragedy on an Austrian Autobahn allowed Merkel to contrast the precariousness of the lives of people fleeing war or persecution with the comfort enjoyed by Germans, but it didn’t prompt Merkel’s decision to talk to the nation, via the Sommerpressekonferenz, about refugees.

Merkel was spurred to take the initiative by events a week earlier in the small town of Heidenau, just south of Saxony’s capital, Dresden. On the weekend of 23–24 August, racist riots in front of a former hardware store, which had been repurposed to accommodate asylum seekers, reminded Germans of a past most thought was well behind them: the past of the anti–asylum seeker hysteria of the early 1990s and the pogrom-like protests in Rostock-Lichtenhagen on 22–25 August 1992.

Merkel travelled to Heidenau on 26 August. This was the first time in her ten years as a chancellor that she had visited a hostel for asylum seekers. She was stunned when locals greeted her with chants of “Volksverräter,” a term that was used in Nazi Germany to designate people accused of treason against their own nation.

Merkel’s wir schaffen das was also a statement of defiance in light of the aggression and anger she experienced in Heidenau. “We need to clearly distance ourselves. There can be no apologies,” Merkel said at the press conference five days after her visit, referring to the protesters. “The key is not to show even the slightest bit of understanding. No biographical experience, nothing that happened in the past, nothing, absolutely nothing justifies [their] stance.”

When, less than a week after her wir schaffen das, she agreed to let refugees stuck in transit in Hungary enter Germany, she did so partly to send a message to those who had rioted in Heidenau. Not only was she not going to make concessions to appease xenophobes; she upped the ante, as it were. In doing so, she seemed, for a while at least, to have the backing of a broad majority of Germans, and the almost unanimous support of the print and electronic media.

Since August last year, there have been other Heidenaus. An alarmingly large proportion of Germans sympathise with those who try to torch buildings where asylum seekers are accommodated. In two state elections in the former East Germany, in Sachsen-Anhalt on 13 March and in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern earlier this month, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, a party whose leaders openly advocate xenophobic and Islamophobic positions, have won well over 20 per cent of the vote, in both instances becoming the second-largest party in state parliament.

In Sachsen-Anhalt, the AfD polled far more votes than the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats and the Greens combined; in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the state in Germany’s northeast that includes Merkel’s own electorate, it won more votes than the Christian Democrats. (In the state electorates that comprise Merkel’s own federal electorate, the Christian Democrats prevailed narrowly.)

For almost a year, Horst Seehofer, the leader of the Christian Democrats’ Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, or CSU, has relentlessly attacked Merkel over her refugee policies. This may partly be because he was outraged about not having been consulted on 4 September, when Merkel and Faymann agreed to ignore the Dublin agreements. But his stance is also informed by a doctrine, once formulated by the legendary Franz Josef Strauss, that there must not be a democratically legitimated party to the right of the CSU.

More recently, Sigmar Gabriel, the leader of the Social Democrats and Merkel’s deputy in the federal coalition government, has also hit out at Merkel, both accusing her of mismanaging Germany’s response to refugees and echoing Seehofer’s demands that the government agree on an upper limit of irregular migrants admitted to Germany per year.

Last month it emerged that Merkel did not in fact invent the line wir schaffen das; rather, it was Sigmar Gabriel who had coined it in a podcast on 22 August last year. It is telling that he has kept quiet about his authorship, preferring instead to criticise Merkel for repeating a phrase “that doesn’t solve a single problem.” He also doesn’t want to be reminded of the fact that, unlike Horst Seehofer, he was briefed beforehand about Merkel and Faymann’s plan not to close the borders to refugees, and did not raise any objections.

Neither Seehofer nor the hate-mongers from the AfD have been swayed by the fact that Merkel has presided over the introduction of several draconian legislative measures. These make it easier for the authorities to deport asylum seekers whose claim for protection has been rejected, and make it possible to provide different levels of support to asylum seekers depending on where they come from. Merkel’s critics have also been unimpressed by the controversial German-engineered deal between Turkey (or rather, its autocratic president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan) and the European Union, which makes it all but impossible for irregular migrants to enter Europe via Greece.

Angela Merkel doesn’t have many political friends these days. In the Bundestag, perhaps the Greens, with whom Merkel would love to be able to form a coalition government, are her staunchest supporters. In earlier years, the Social Democrats were happy to bask in the glow of her popularity. But with an eye on the federal elections in the second half of next year, they are now distancing themselves from a chancellor who appears to be wounded.

Gabriel has obviously been encouraged by the fact that in the elections of 4 September in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the Social Democrats did comparatively well, although they too lost votes. Their comparative success has been widely attributed to the opportunism of the premier, Social Democrat Erwin Sellering, who criticised Merkel’s response to refugees, saying during the election campaign that “Merkel still pretends that Germany can accommodate everybody who has been persecuted.”

How justified are Merkel’s detractors? Were Germans “able to do this”? And if so, are they likely to be able to do this in years to come?

Federal, state and local authorities have been struggling to cope with the influx of asylum seekers. If it hadn’t been for the fact that many Germans have volunteered their time in the past twelve months – for example, accommodating new arrivals, teaching them German, helping them to fill in forms, interpreting, organising transport and childcare – many government services would probably have collapsed.

But it should also be acknowledged that the number of new arrivals, particularly between August and November 2015, presented enormous challenges even for a country as affluent and well-organised as Germany, and that, overall, these challenges were met successfully.

The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees – the agency in charge of registering new arrivals and processing their protection claims – has underperformed, to say the least. Hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers are still waiting to lodge their claims, and many more have been waiting for months, if not years, for a decision. But once the agency was able to recruit hundreds of new staff last year, things began looking up: in the first eight months of 2016, it has made decisions on almost 400,000 asylum claims, and in the same period only a little over 250,000 asylum seekers arrived in Germany.

So far, only 40,000 of those who have arrived since 2015 have found a job. The unemployment rate among refugees is above 50 per cent, compared to 6.1 per cent overall. But rather than being an indication that Germany was not “able to do this,” this result demonstrates that last year’s expectations – that refugees would quickly find employment and thereby address labour shortages – were utterly unrealistic.

The federal government has spent billions of euros on paying for accommodation, language courses and training, and the processing of claims. It can afford to do so, because Germany doesn’t have a budget deficit. But the funds have not always arrived at the local government level, where they are most needed.

Sufficient funds have not been a guarantee for efficient management. New arrivals are distributed across Germany according to a formula that takes into account individual states’ population size and economic capacity. The performance of state and local administrations has varied significantly. Bavaria, led by premier Seehofer, has done comparatively well, whereas the state of Berlin has performed particularly poorly.

Resources have not been spread evenly among asylum seekers. Eritreans, Syrians and Iraqis, for example, have access to language classes, while those from countries that have been deemed safe do not. Among asylum seekers and refugees, a class system has emerged. Some asylum seekers have had their claims processed promptly; others haven’t yet been invited to submit claims, although they arrived some time last year. Some have been stuck in gymnasiums and other emergency accommodation; others have been accommodated in apartments.

While the number of irregular migrants who arrived last year posed enormous challenges, there is broad agreement that the authorities are comfortably able to cope with the expected 300,000 new arrivals this year. This is still a sizeable number in a country of about 82 million people.

The government’s capacity to deal with the influx is reflected in somewhat surprising opinion polls. While a majority rejects Merkel’s refugee policies, the proportion of Germans who trust Merkel’s wir schaffen das has risen from 37 per cent last September to 43 per cent in August, according to Emnid polling.

The question of whether Germany will continue to successfully manage the arrival of irregular migrants can’t be readily answered. What if Erdoğan decides that it is not worth Turkey’s while to act as a bouncer at Europe’s southeastern gateway? What if, once again, hundreds of thousands of refugees enter Europe via Greece and then make their way to Germany? What if the economic situation in Germany changes, unemployment rises, and there is pressure on the budget? Most importantly, what if the popular opposition to the presence of irregular migrants in Germany continues to grow?

Many German observers have been astounded by the fact that Angela Merkel has stuck to her guns and maintained wir schaffen das. In the past, she wasn’t known for policies that were ideologically driven, nor was her approach to governing informed by unshakeable convictions. Often, as she sought to align her views with those of the majority of voters, it was difficult to figure out what exactly she stood for. That is clearly no longer the case. Also, unlike some of her predecessors, Merkel is not a gifted speaker, and does not usually rely on rhetoric to communicate her views to the public; it was therefore unusual for her to make so much use of a three-word slogan.

But let’s not be fooled. Angela Merkel has not ruled out seeking another four-year term as chancellor at the 2017 elections. All indications are that she is already preparing herself for battle. She knows that she needs to regain the affection and trust of voters to be able to pull off a fourth election victory. Insisting stubbornly that Germans will be able to deal successfully with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees is not going to allow her to make up lost ground.

With the benefit of hindsight, it appears that the launch of wir schaffen das on 31 August last year was indeed a historic occasion. Exactly one year later, she has come up with a new and very different line: Deutschland wird Deutschland bleiben (Germany will remain Germany).

She tried out these words first in an interview with the liberal Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung. Unlike wir schaffen das, the new line came in response to a question and did not seem to have been planned. But lest anybody failed to grasp its significance, on the day of the interview’s publication the website of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union ran an article with the title “Merkel: Deutschland wird Deutschland bleiben.” A week later, Merkel repeated the line in a much-anticipated speech in the German Bundestag. On both occasions, she said that “Germany will remain Germany, with everything we cherish.”

Both the old and the new slogan use the first person plural. Merkel seems to seek a communion with her people, although the significance of the grammatical form is ambiguous. The “we” in wir schaffen das could refer to the government as well as to all Germans. In the more recent line, Merkel seems to suggest that her patriotism doesn’t differ from that of other Germans. Or is she perhaps using the royal we?

The earlier line was meant to encourage Germans to swing into action. It is oriented towards the future. Now she seems to be intent on calming down her audience, assuring them that the past is replicated in the future. “Let’s make things happen,” on the one hand, and “nothing will happen,” on the other.

In one sense, this new slogan is tautological. But in another, it affords the opportunity to define what Germany is, or ought to be, all about. In the Bundestag last week, Merkel spelled out what the Germany she cherishes looks like. According to the chancellor, it is based on four values: freedom, security, justice and solidarity. In another recent interview, she said, “We are a country for whom the dignity of every single human being is paramount.”

This is, of course, not the same Germany that AfD voters conjure and long for, although her new mantra is dangerously close to the AfD’s rhetoric. The party’s leader in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, for example, said recently, “We fight for Germany to remain the country of Germans.”

Merkel embraces change but assures voters that everything will stay as it is. Thorsten Denkler, Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Berlin correspondent, called this “Merkelian dialectics.” Taken on its own, Merkel’s new line is unrealistic – much more so than her wir schaffen das. It suggests that all newcomers embrace and adapt to German values and German cultural traits, whatever they may be. It denies the obvious: that Germany has changed almost beyond recognition in the space of one generation, and is likely to continue changing rapidly both as a result of globalisation and because of its substantial migrant intake.

But I suspect that if Merkel feels confident enough to run again next year, and if she is re-elected, it will be because enough voters have realised she was right on 31 August 2015, and ignore her new mantra. And if my hunch is correct, then an extension of her term as chancellor (possibly courtesy of Greens support) would only prove that Germany has not remained what it was, and that it continues to evolve as a dynamic society of immigration.

At this point, it is difficult to predict what will happen next year. It may well be that the AfD’s support continues to surge. On the weekend, though, in local elections in Lower Saxony (a West German state), the AfD mostly remained below 10 per cent, which might suggest that the party’s meteoric rise is a predominantly East German phenomenon. Next Sunday, the voters of Berlin will elect a new state parliament – and the result of these elections will provide further clues.

It may well be that Horst Seehofer’s recent Deutschland muss Deutschland bleiben (Germany must remain Germany), rather than Merkel’s Deutschland wird Deutschland bleiben, will gain traction. While Merkel told the Bundestag that Germany has changed and will continue to change – “there is nothing wrong with change,” she said – Seehofer and his Christian Social Union don’t want Germany to change “as a result of migration and refugee flows,” as the party’s recent position paper put it. Merkel tries to reassure Germans; Seehofer tries to make the most of their fears.

Will the established parties be able to absorb AfD voters? And if so, what would be the price? Last week, the former leader of the left-wing Die Linke, Gregor Gysi, put forward an idea that makes some sense. “The [Christian Democrats] have a job to do, which can’t be done by anybody else. They could integrate parts of the AfD,” he said. In his analysis, the AfD has become possible because Merkel made the Christian Democrats adopt Social Democratic policies, just as her predecessor as chancellor, Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder, had distanced himself from his party’s Social Democratic heritage. As a result, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats have become almost indistinguishable parties of the centre; the AfD then filled the vacuum that opened up on the right of the political spectrum. In Gysi’s view, the problem could be rectified once the Christian Democrats are in opposition (which would require Die Linke and the Greens to join a Social Democrat–led government).

If the Christian Democrats were to lose next year’s election, support for the AfD might indeed decline. That’s not so much because Merkel’s party would move to the right, but because the AfD’s focus would be gone. The party is beset by internal rivalries and power struggles. With one exception, its message is diffuse. That exception is the demand, inevitably chanted at rallies by supporters of AfD and and the anti-immigration movement PEGIDA: “Merkel muss weg!” (Merkel has to go).

Yes, the right-wing populists are opposed to Muslims, refugees, inner-city lefties, feminists, intellectuals, footballers of African background and others who in their view don’t have a place in the country of the Germans. But they reserve their hatred for Merkel, the East German woman who betrayed them. As Tilman Gerwien wrote in the magazine Stern last week, “the AfD is the anti-Merkel party.” It is their shared hatred of Merkel that holds the AfD’s warring factions and its disparate group of followers together. If she were to go, the party’s main target would disappear.

What Gysi didn’t say is that many of the AfD’s voters in the East German states previously voted for Die Linke. The AfD’s success became possible also because Die Linke, once identified as a left-wing party of protest, has become yet another establishment party. Since 2014, one of its politicians has even been premier (of the East German state of Thuringia). Nor did Gysi mention that the deputy leader of his party, Sahra Wagenknecht, has lately been advocating refugee and asylum seeker policies that are suspiciously close to those of the AfD.

There is another reason to be wary of Gysi’s analysis. The circumstances of the rise and demise of another right-wing populist party, the Republikaner, in the early 1990s suggests that the Christian Democrats might only strengthen the AfD if they took on some of its agenda and thereby tried to absorb its voters. The Strauss doctrine may have worked in Bavaria, but in neighbouring Baden-Württemberg attempts by the Christian Democrats to starve the Republikaner of votes by adopting right-wing populist positions backfired badly.

Views on whether Germany has changed, or will change, for the better may differ. But it is hard to argue with the claim that over the past twelve months German domestic politics have been more fascinating, and have had more significant implications for the rest of Europe, than at any other time in the past twenty years. And it’s hard to see how that will change anytime soon. •

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Instead, the government announced two new initiatives: legislation to allow authorities to impose control orders on fourteen-year-olds suspected of planning terrorist activities, and an approach to the states with the view to introducing post-sentence preventive detention for people convicted of terrorist offences.

Neither initiative is particularly new. A similar amendment to counterterrorism legislation was introduced last year. The bill was found wanting when it was scrutinised by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, not least because it would have authorised control orders on people under the age of eighteen without including any significant safeguards.

Later, in December 2015, the Council of Australian Governments meeting had agreed on post-sentence preventive detention for terrorists as well as longer pre-charge detention for terror suspects. Post-sentence detention is already possible for sex offenders and, in some states, for perpetrators of particularly violent crimes.

So what prompted Turnbull and attorney-general George Brandis to call a press conference earlier this week to resurrect last year’s initiatives? “There has been an increase in the frequency and the severity of terrorist attacks globally and particularly in Western nations such as ours,” the prime minister explained. He referred to three attacks in particular: a suicide bombing in Afghanistan that killed at least eighty people and wounded more than 230, and the attacks in Munich and near Würzburg in Germany.

In Munich, a German-born eighteen-year-old had killed nine people, most of them teenagers from Turkish or Albanian backgrounds; in a train near Würzburg, a seventeen-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan armed with a hatchet and a knife had attacked fellow passengers, wounding four of them. While the Munich attacker was apparently targeting Muslims, the Afghan teenager was inspired by Islamic State propaganda; police found a hand-painted jihadist flag at his home.

Brandis and Turnbull’s press conference wasn’t prompted by attacks targeting Australians or a terrorist incident on Australian soil. Nor was it occasioned by evidence that suggested such an attack is imminent. “We have the best counterterrorism, the best security agencies in the world,” Turnbull claimed, which suggests that the new legislation was not designed to shore up an otherwise fragile security apparatus.

Why, then, did the government prioritise the fight against terrorism? For one, by talking about terror, Turnbull avoids talking about the Australian Building and Construction Commission reforms or his economic plan. Given the likely composition of the new Senate, the first project is dead in the water; as far as the second is concerned, Australians have surely heard enough about “jobs and growth” for the time being.

Does the announcement indicate that the prime minister agrees with the assessment of the Australian’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, that the Labor Party is allowed to score easy goals on account of “the Liberals bizarrely vacating the rhetorical field”?

Or is he concerned not so much about what’s been said to the left of the Liberals, as by the noises emanating from the right? Is the emphasis that the government places on new counterterrorism measures perhaps a signal in the direction of far-right populist Pauline Hanson and her supporters? During the election campaign, Turnbull said that Hanson was “not a welcome presence” in Australian politics. But he met with her this week, a day after the counterterrorism measures were announced, and, according to Hanson, the two had an amicable discussion. “He took note of everything I said and was very interested in my opinion,” Hanson told reporters afterwards. “I feel he is prepared to listen to me.”

According to Turnbull, the measures announced this week “are designed to deter terrorism, prevent it, ensure that the nation and our people are kept safe and to provide reassurance that Australians can and should continue going about their daily lives.” Perhaps more importantly, the prime minister wants Australians to “understand and recognise that the Australian government and its agencies are doing everything possible to keep them safe.”

Counterterrorism measures are, on the one hand, just that: measures to combat terrorism. On the other, though, they respond to Australian anxieties. These anxieties are not necessarily well founded. Australians might think they aren’t safe, and to make sure they feel safe the government introduces new counterterrorism measures.

This approach has a precedent. During the second world war, the Australian authorities interned residents of Japanese, Italian and German extraction both as a precautionary measure, to prevent them from assisting the enemy, and to appease public opinion. At the time, the government had no reliable evidence that so-called enemy aliens were intending to act as spies or saboteurs, but there was ample indication that public sentiment was overwhelmingly in favour of their internment.

Turnbull and Brandis weren’t the only members of the newly elected Australian government who invoked the threat of terrorism this week. Immigration minister Peter Dutton – a man who attracted much praise from his boss during the election campaign and again this week when both men celebrated the success of Operation Sovereign Borders – told Sky News editor David Speers that doctors must be prevented from disclosing what’s going on in Australia’s immigration detention centres. The secrecy provisions in the Border Force Act, Dutton confirmed when questioned about the doctors’ pending High Court challenge to the act, are “an anti-terrorist measure.”

Of course, anti-terrorist measures are only necessary if the asylum seekers imprisoned in Nauru and on Manus Island include terrorists. While neither Dutton nor Turnbull has said that Australia’s offshore detention centres are designed to prevent terrorists from entering Australia, Dutton’s comments invite Australians to draw that very conclusion. Dutton, in particular, has form in this regard. On the second-last day of the election campaign, he linked boat arrivals to terror attacks. And some three months earlier, Malcolm Turnbull linked the terror attacks in Brussels to the arrival of refugees – only to be told publicly by Belgium’s ambassador to Australia, Jean-Luc Bodson, that such comments were “dangerous”.

At around the same time as Malcolm Turnbull announced new counterterrorism measures, another attack took place in Germany. A twenty-seven-year-old Syrian man who had come to Germany two years earlier as a refugee blew himself up outside a music festival in the Bavarian town of Ansbach. His claim for protection had been denied, and he was told that he would be deported to Bulgaria, where he had initially entered the European Union. Fifteen people were wounded in the suicide attack. In a video the attacker professed loyalty to Islamic State.

Like her Australian counterpart, German chancellor Angela Merkel responded this week to the terrorist threat and to fears in the population. Not only did she call a press conference, she convened the traditional summer press conference, which is usually held towards the end of the summer school holidays, a month early. There she announced a nine-point plan to combat terrorism. Like those of her Australian counterparts, the measures she proposed included new legislation. But the law to be introduced in Germany is not aimed at curtailing the rights of terror suspects or keeping people in prison after they have served their sentence; rather, it is to prevent the online sale of guns.

Given that the attacker on the train and the Ansbach suicide bomber had both sought refuge in Germany, Merkel had much to say about her country’s response to refugees. “The fact that two men, who came to us as refugees, are responsible for the crimes of Würzburg and Ansbach, mocks the country that has accommodated them,” she said, only to add: “It mocks the many other refugees, who have genuinely sought our protection against violence and war, and who want to live peacefully in a world that is foreign to them, after they lost everything.”

According to Merkel, the terrorist attacks challenge Germany to reconcile its insistence on freedom with its desire for security. George Brandis also talked about “respecting our liberal democratic values” and “keeping the balance right between security and freedom.” But the values that Brandis invoked are ill-defined.

That’s different in Germany. Constitutionally, Merkel has much less wiggle room to negotiate the contradictions between human rights and the security concerns. At the same time, she remains unwilling to revise her mantra “Wir schaffen das” (We are able to do this), which she first formulated during last year’s summer press conference.

“Again and again – after New Year’s Eve in Cologne, and now again after the horrible terrorist attacks – we ask ourselves: Are we really able to do it?” she said. “Are we able to successfully master this great challenge, which in the last instance is the flipside of globalisation’s positive effects and which demonstrates to us the dark sides of globalisation? For me, there is no doubt: we stick to our principles. One principle is Article 1 of our Constitution, that human dignity is inviolable. But another principle is: we provide asylum to those who have been persecuted for political reasons, and, in line with the Geneva Convention, we also provide protection to those who flee war and displacement.”

In Germany, Hanson-style populists who demand that refugees and Muslims be kept out enjoy at least as much support as they do in Australia. The right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, has tried to exploit the terrorist attacks of the past two weeks. But it is inconceivable that Merkel would agree to meet with AfD leader Frauke Petry to find common ground.

It’s the recognition of the principles mentioned by Merkel that distinguishes the discussions about terrorism and refugees in Germany from those in Australia. In Australia, the discourse of human rights is weak, not least because it can’t draw on the codification of such rights in the Constitution. That’s why the journalists who attended the press conference at which Turnbull and Brandis introduced the new counterterrorism measures failed to ask about the appropriateness of control orders for fourteen-year-olds – who, mind you, have not been convicted of any crime.

Notwithstanding the differences between Australia and Germany, public discourse in the two countries has one feature in common. In both countries, terrorism is associated primarily with attacks perpetrated by Islamists in the West. “There has been an increase in the frequency and the severity of terrorist attacks globally and particularly in Western nations such as ours,” Turnbull claimed earlier this week.

Because of Western military involvement in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, Germans and Australians may still take note of terrorist incidents in these countries. But there is next to no awareness of what has been happening in Nigeria, Mali, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Yemen, Thailand or Bangladesh, although these countries have each suffered more from terrorist attacks than either Australia or Germany.

“Everything is global in the twenty-first century in reality, because of the speed of communications,” Turnbull told journalists. People in Nigeria or Yemen might beg to differ. In the affluent West, we are still safely quarantined from much of what Merkel called the “flipside of globalisation’s positive effects.” •

The post Worlds apart appeared first on Inside Story.

The EU leaders’ previous meeting, on 7 March, was convened at Germany’s request to discuss an agreement between the European Union and Turkey to prevent refugees from crossing into Greece from Turkey. The deal was intended to allow European countries to reopen their borders. Angela Merkel and her government wanted a European solution to the refugee crisis and a return to free movement across Europe’s internal borders, not least because of upcoming elections in three German states.

The 7 March summit ended without an agreement, at least partly because Turkey surprised the European Union with new proposals, and Merkel returned empty-handed to Berlin. A week later, the Christian Democrats, the party she has led for the past sixteen years, lost ground in elections in Sachsen-Anhalt in East Germany and in Rheinland-Pfalz and Baden-Württemberg in the West, as a significant number of conservative voters switched their support to the populist far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD.

It’s important to recognise that Merkel herself was not necessarily among the losers in those three states. The leaders of the Christian Democrats in Rheinland-Pfalz and Baden-Württemberg, who both expected to form government after the elections, lost heavily. But the evidence suggests that they did so partly because they had disowned Merkel. Among the clear winners were the reigning premiers of these states, Malu Dreyer of the Social Democrats and Winfried Kretschmann of the Greens, both of whom are vocal supporters of Merkel’s refugee policies.

This didn’t stop Merkel’s internal critics. Last week, they continued to blame her for the Christian Democrats’ losses, claiming that the conservatives’ poor performance was entirely due to the federal government’s refugee policies and demanding that she agree at last to an upper limit on the number of refugees admitted by Germany. Merkel refused to do so, as she has done many times over the past few months. She also criticised attempts to close the escape route through the Western Balkans. But she promoted a Turkish–European deal to stem the flow of refugees to the European Union.

The leaders of the twenty-eight EU countries struck that deal with Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu on Friday. According to a statement released by the European Council at the conclusion of the meeting, the agreement reflected a desire to “break the business model of the smugglers and to offer migrants an alternative to putting their lives at risk.” But what exactly does it entail?

Most irregular migrants arriving on any Greek island from Turkey after the following day, Saturday 19 March, will be returned to Turkey. Those applying for asylum will have their applications processed in Greece, but only asylum seekers who can provide evidence that they won’t be protected in Turkey will be able to remain in Greece. For every Syrian returned from Greece to Turkey, another Syrian will be resettled from Turkey to an EU country. Up to 72,000 Syrians from Turkey will be resettled under this scheme, and they will be distributed according to a quota system agreed on last year. Turkey also committed to policing its sea border with Greece to prevent refugees from reaching the European Union in the first place.

In return, the EU governments agreed to pay Turkey €6 billion (half of it now and the other half by the end of 2018) for projects designed to benefit refugees in Turkey. They also agreed to lift visa requirements for Turkish citizens by the end of June, and to “re-energise” Turkey’s route to EU membership.

Finally, the European leaders and the Turkish prime minister agreed that the European Union “will work with Turkey in any joint endeavour to improve humanitarian conditions inside Syria, in particular in certain areas near the Turkish border which would allow for the local population and refugees to live in areas which will be more safe.”

The United Nations refugee organisation, the UNHCR, has been deeply sceptical about the deal. While the UNHCR used diplomatic language, Amnesty International and other human rights organisations, and refugee advocacy groups including Germany’s widely respected Pro Asyl roundly condemned the agreement. So did commentators who had previously supported Angela Merkel’s stance.

They did so for good reason. Friday’s agreement assumes that people seeking protection in Greece will receive the same level of protection if they’re returned to Turkey. That is an illusion for two reasons: Turkey’s refugee policies and procedures, and Turkey’s human rights record.

Turkey acceded to the 1951 Refugee Convention with a significant reservation, namely that it would apply the Convention’s provisions only to European refugees. That pretty much excludes all refugees currently in Turkey. Three years ago, Turkey passed a Law on Foreigners and International Protection that doesn’t distinguish between European and non-European refugees, but so far it hasn’t been fully implemented. In the meantime, Turkey distinguishes between Syrian refugees, who are granted temporary protection on a prima facie basis and are entitled to basic rights and services including the right to work, and other refugees, who don’t have access to these rights and services. As a detailed report published by the European Council on Refugees and Exiles last December makes clear, even for Syrians many of the rights considered essential in Europe (and embodied, for example, in rulings by the European Court of Human Rights) exist only on paper, if at all, in Turkey.

Asylum seekers and refugees aren’t the only ones whose human rights are breached by the Turkish government. Under the autocratic regime of president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, newspapers critical of the government have been closed down, government critics have been jailed, and a war against sections of Turkey’s Kurdish minority continues. Because Erdoğan’s government violates human rights norms, negotiations over Turkey’s accession to the European Union ought to be on hold. Courtesy of the deal struck last week, they are being sped up instead. In return for Turkey’s contribution to securing Europe’s external borders, the European Union is turning a blind eye to these democratic and human rights deficits.

But it’s the final item of the European–Turkish agreement, the creation of so-called safe zones in Syria, that is potentially the most troubling. These zones are likely to be used by Turkey as a justification for returning refugees to Syria or stopping them from entering Turkey in the first place. They could also provide a pretext for Turkey to intervene militarily in areas of Syria controlled by Kurdish forces. And they potentially expose internally displaced people to the risk of becoming the pawns of warring parties in Syria, whether the Assad regime, ISIS or Turkey.

This is not to argue against one important aspect of the deal, namely that Europe will be obliged to resettle Syrian refugees from Turkey. Turkey accommodates far more refugees from Syria than all European countries combined. And while the standards of protection in Turkey are not as high as in EU countries, for millions of Syrians Turkey has provided comparative safety. The European Union ought to support Turkey’s efforts to provide housing, education and health care to refugees. It ought also to assist Turkey by resettling refugees currently living there – not by paying Turkey for a refugee swap, but by admitting far more than the paltry 72,000 Syrians agreed to on Friday.

As Angela Merkel keeps pointing out, she and Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann didn’t decide to open Germany’s and Austria’s borders in early September 2015 and let in hundreds of thousands of refugees. Rather, they decided not to close them, and to let refugees enter Austria and Germany without registering them.

Merkel has not been trying to force Germany to accept a very large number of refugees. Nor does she necessarily believe that Germany should take its fair share of the world’s displaced people – that it should match the efforts of countries like Lebanon, Jordan, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Ethiopia. Nor is she strongly committed to the right of asylum enshrined in Article 16a of the German constitution. In fact, by declaring their countries of origin safe, her government has repeatedly made it difficult for people to engage Germany’s protection obligations.

But the German chancellor is committed to upholding the German constitution’s Article 1 (1): “Human dignity shall be inviolable.” As she explained in an interview three weeks ago, “That applies to everybody who is in our country, no matter whether they are German or a guest or a refugee or whoever.” According to Merkel, the human rights of somebody who arrives at Germany’s borders and seeks asylum must be respected. The principle that human dignity shall be inviolable applies not only to the refugee whose protection claim has been recognised (and who, according to the government, needs to be quickly integrated into German society), but also to the person whose claim has been rejected and who will therefore be deported.

Merkel’s commitment to Article 1 is admirable. After gaining a reputation during the first nine years of her reign as a ditherer and a pragmatist without any strong convictions, she has shown leadership on an issue open to exploitation by the populists of the far right. Because of her commitment to Article 1, she has spoken out strongly against Germans who resisted accommodating refugees in their towns and villages. Not only should Germans obey the rules of hospitality; they must also respect the human dignity of their guests not because of their status as guests but because, as far as their claim to human dignity is concerned, they are no different from German citizens.

It now appears that Merkel’s concern for human dignity ends at the German border. Article 1 of the constitution may apply to whoever happens to be in Germany, but it does not apply to people in Greece or Turkey or Syria. It does not apply to Turkish journalists and academics who are being jailed because they are staunch critics of president Erdoğan. It does not apply to refugees stranded in Turkey or Greece.

Is the German government to blame for the outcome of last week’s EU summit? Yes and no. Yes, because Merkel desperately wanted the European Union to strike a deal with Turkey. Other EU leaders, including François Hollande, were reportedly much less enthusiastic about that deal.

To be fair, though, Friday’s deal was not Merkel’s preferred solution. She had wanted the European Union to agree to an equitable distribution of asylum seekers and refugees across its twenty-eight member states. Each country was to take a proportion of displaced people according to its capacity. Under such a deal, Germany would have taken more than anybody else, but every country would have accommodated at least some refugees. She was also in favour of a generous resettlement scheme whereby the Europeans would admit a sizeable number of Syrians directly from countries of first asylum.

Last year, the European Union agreed that an initial 160,000 people would be moved from Italy and Greece to other EU countries on the basis of individual European nations’ capacity to resettle refugees. The Guardian reported last week that of these 160,000, only 937 have so far been resettled.

This suggests that the Turkish–European deal won’t work either – unless, of course, Germany committed last week to resettling all Syrians passed on by Turkey (with the proviso that such a commitment would only be honoured if it were not made public), or Germany’s European partners assumed it will be the sole resettlement country simply because everybody else will be unwilling to accommodate any refugees. Either way, there is little doubt that Germany is prepared to take in more Syrians from Turkey and from Greece.

In recent weeks, the number of refugees reaching Germany has dropped dramatically to fewer than one hundred per day (compared with thousands who arrived each day in the second half of last year). In that context, Germany would easily be able to accommodate at least the 72,000 Syrians who might be resettled in the European Union according to last Friday’s agreement.

How did it come to this? Weren’t Europeans prepared to accommodate – indeed, didn’t they welcome with open arms – large numbers of refugees less than six months ago?

The images of Germans handing out toys to Syrian children at railway stations in Munich and elsewhere were deceptive. By October, national governments and popular majorities in most countries of the European Union didn’t want to have anything to do with refugees – not just in the countries of Eastern Europe but also in Britain and Denmark. Almost anywhere else, the mood was wary at best.

The wave of compassion triggered by wide dissemination of the image of Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body in early September quickly dissipated. Even in September, only three countries were willing to accommodate a significant number of refugees: Germany, Austria and Sweden. Italy and Greece, the first ports of call in Europe for most new arrivals, were also willing to play their part. But only a handful of others – among them Finland and Luxembourg – were prepared to consider an arrangement whereby refugees would be distributed across EU member states according to a quota system.

Compassion turned into indifference, indifference turned into wariness, and wariness into fear. This is not to say that most Europeans are afraid of refugees. Some are, of course, and they feel vindicated by the terrorist attacks in France. But in Western Europe, more are worried that the arrival of refugees will unleash the far-right extremists. In Germany, in particular, the fear of a resurgent far right outweighs other anxieties.

This fear seems justified. A party with a xenophobic anti-immigration agenda won more than 30 per cent of the vote in state elections in Austria last year; if federal elections were held in Austria now, that party could overtake both the conservatives and the Social Democrats. In the recent state elections in Germany, the AfD won more than 15 per cent of the vote in Baden-Württemberg, a traditionally conservative and exceptionally affluent state in West Germany. According to recent opinion polls in Sweden, the populist, xenophobic Sweden Democrats would win up to a third of the vote if national elections were held there now.

But it is too easy to say that the decision to leave the borders open to refugees turns democrats into supporters of the far right. In Germany at least, many of those voting for the AfD didn’t suddenly discover the attraction of racism. Their belief system didn’t change after September 2015. Instead, they are now willing to own up to their views. A large proportion of the AfD’s voters didn’t vote in previous elections. In East Germany, many AfD voters once voted for Die Linke, the former communist party. Die Linke, much like the AfD, has been able to attract disaffected Germans who identify as victims, blame foreigners and the West for their supposed suffering, and consider Vladimir Putin their hero. In recent months, racism, Islamophobia and over-the-top German nationalism have become more visible, but they were not spawned by the arrival of refugees.

In Germany, which has accommodated the majority of irregular migrants crossing into Europe last year, another factor has contributed to the increasing wariness about the prospect of further mass arrivals. Contrary to expectations, Germany has struggled to cope with the new arrivals.

Unlike, say, Greece, Germany does have the necessary material resources, but its bureaucratic processes have not been up to the task. No federal agency knows exactly how many irregular migrants arrived in 2015, and how many of them stayed on rather than proceeding to Sweden. Many of those who arrived last year have not yet been able to lodge their application for protection; others, who did apply, have been waiting for many months, and in some cases more than a year, for a decision. Sports centres and other facilities that were meant to serve only as emergency accommodation for a couple of weeks have been used to house refugees for months. In fact, if it were not for the assistance provided by an army of volunteers, the services put in place for refugees who arrived last year might have long since collapsed.

The story is similar in Sweden. The Scandinavian country, too, couldn’t cope with the influx of refugees last year. But in fairness, it should be noted that Sweden accommodated more refugees than Germany on a per capita basis, and that Germany was in a much better financial position.

While Friday’s agreement stipulates what is to happen to irregular migrants arriving in Greece from 20 March, it is silent on what will happen to people who arrived in Greece before that date and who are now stranded, given that the route via Macedonia is all but closed. Theoretically, they should be transferred to other European countries under the quota system agreed to last year, but that is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Last Wednesday Angela Merkel gave a speech in the German parliament in which she argued why a deal with Turkey was necessary. She put a lot of emphasis on the relationship between Greece and the other twenty-seven EU countries, and suggested that it was crucial for the European project that Greece not be left to its own devices. But if Greece’s interests were uppermost in the minds of Europe’s heads of government last week, then it is curious that the 46,000 refugees currently in Greece are not mentioned in the press release put out by the European Council.

While the measures agreed on last week were meant to come into effect at the weekend, few of them can be implemented immediately. For starters, Greece does not have the personnel to deal with a large number of individual asylum applications. The return of refugees to Turkey may yet be challenged in the Greek and European courts. After all, other EU countries are currently prevented from returning asylum seekers to Greece in line with the provisions of the Dublin Agreements, after the European Court of Human Rights found that asylum seekers in Greece don’t have adequate access to rights and services. It seems obvious that their access to those rights and services would only be further diminished if they were returned to Turkey.

Of course the deal between the European Union and Turkey is unlikely to do anything other than temporarily stop the flow of refugees into Europe. People smugglers and refugees themselves will look for other routes: via Bulgaria, via Russia and northern Europe, or via the central Mediterranean. None of these routes is any safer than the one via Greece and the Western Balkans. As long as the root causes of people movements – particularly, but not only, in Syria and Iraq – are not addressed and as long as the accommodation of refugees in neighbouring non-European countries such as Jordan and Lebanon – and Turkey! – is inadequate, desperate people will continue to try reaching Europe. •

The post Dealing with Mr Erdogan appeared first on Inside Story.

Prominent Christian Democrats have been urging Merkel, the leader of their party, to set an upper limit on the number of refugees allowed into Germany, and have criticised her for opening the country’s borders to refugees in September last year. The conservative Christian Democrats’ coalition partners have also sought to distance themselves from the German chancellor: in November, Horst Seehofer, the leader of the Christian Social Union – the Christian Democrats’ sister party in Bavaria – publicly humiliated Merkel over her stance on refugees at a party congress, and four weeks ago he described her refugee policies as Herrschaft des Unrechts (a rule of injustice) because, he argued, she had acted outside the law. The accusation was designed to hurt deeply: most Germans would associate a country in which Unrecht reigns supreme as an Unrechtsstaat, a term reserved for Nazi Germany and for the communist-era German Democratic Republic, where Merkel lived most of her life.

Most observers were convinced that the government would have either restricted the number of refugees arriving at the border in time for this Sunday’s elections, or abandoned its policy of admitting all those who presented themselves. Some speculated that Merkel, if she proved inflexible, would be replaced, or that she would go on to be toppled after 13 March if voters desert the Christian Democrats in droves.

Until recently, Merkel herself did little to dampen the expectation that her government would be able to get on top of the situation. She assured Germans that the European Union would eventually come to Germany’s rescue by agreeing to a fair distribution of refugees among member states. At the same time, she insisted that the only way to address the refugee crisis in Europe effectively was to tackle its root causes.

A meeting of the EU heads of government on 18 and 19 February was meant to finally seal a deal. Domestically, Merkel prepared the ground by addressing parliament and advocating a European solution based on a deal with Turkey. She also drew a line in the sand: “Those who need and seek protection shall be granted protection.”

The EU leaders met, but the Turkish prime minister, whose cooperation was needed to strike a deal, failed to turn up because a car bomb had killed thirty people in Ankara the day before he was to travel to Brussels. A meeting of the “coalition of the willing” – those of Germany’s European partners least hostile to the idea of burden-sharing – was cancelled, not least because one of Germany’s erstwhile allies, Austria, had closed its borders to refugees. Merkel appeared to be isolated. With the defection of Austria, and the earlier announcement by Sweden – the European country that took in the largest number of refugees per capita last year – that it too would no longer be able to keep its borders open, Germany’s last remaining ally, out of self-interest if nothing else, was Greece.

Another special EU summit was scheduled for 7 March. The timing would have left Merkel with barely an opportunity to turn around the tide of public opinion in Germany, which had become increasingly critical of her response to the refugee crisis. This time, before travelling once more to Brussels, she cautioned Germans not to expect too much. It was just as well she did. The summit ended in the early hours of Tuesday morning, this time with the Turkish prime minister in attendance, but again without an agreement.

But at least it was now possible to glimpse the contours of a possible joint European–Turkish response. Turkey would commit to policing its maritime border with Greece and preventing refugees from trying to reach Kos, Lesbos and other Greek islands off the Turkish coast. It would also take back irregular migrants who had entered Greece via Turkey. The European Union would pay Turkey a total of €6 billion for its efforts, twice as much as previously agreed. But the Turkish government wants more than just monetary compensation. It proposed that for every migrant Turkey received from Greece, the European Union would accept a Syrian refugee whose protection claims had been recognised, from Turkey. Australian readers might be reminded of Julia Gillard’s failed Malaysia refugee swap.

Turkey may expect, and may indeed have been promised, other concessions that have not been broadcast yet: most importantly, a speeding up of the process of EU accession, and visa-free entry into EU countries for Turkish citizens.

By the time the European leaders next meet, on 17 March, the voters of Baden-Württemberg, Rheinland-Pfalz and Sachsen-Anhalt are likely to have transformed Germany’s political landscape. According to the latest opinion polls, 13 per cent of voters in Baden-Württemberg and 9 per cent in Rheinland-Pfalz will vote for the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD. In Sachsen-Anhalt, the party is forecast to win almost 20 per cent of the vote.

The AfD was founded only three years ago by Bernd Lucke, a prominent Eurosceptic and professor of economics at the University of Hamburg. Lucke and his supporters left the party last year because it was drifting inexorably towards the far right of the political spectrum. Now, the AfD campaigns on a platform that demands the immediate closure of Germany’s borders. Its leader, East German Frauke Petry, has gone so far as to say that the security forces ought to be given orders to shoot refugees trying to cross into Germany, seemingly oblivious of the fact that not long ago, after the fall of the Wall, German border guards who had followed orders to shoot refugees were tried in German courts.

At the last federal elections, the AfD, then still with a largely Eurosceptic focus, narrowly missed getting over the 5 per cent threshold designed to keep minor parties out of parliament. But it was more successful in subsequent state elections, and is now represented in three state parliaments in East Germany and two in West Germany. And local elections in the West German state of Hessen last weekend provided a taste of what might happen on Sunday. The AfD won about 13 per cent of the vote and is now the third-largest party at the local level, ahead of the Greens. (It should be noted, however, that the AfD’s success in Hessen was also the result of a record low voter turnout.)

The conservatives have good reason to be afraid of the AfD’s growing popularity, as people who last voted for the Christian Democrats seem particularly inclined to cast their vote for the AfD. The other party losing a large proportion of votes to the far right is Die Linke (The Left), the successor party of the Socialist Unity Party, the communist party that was once in control of the German Democratic Republic. Die Linke is particularly strong in East Germany, and its voters are more likely than others to feel disadvantaged and vulnerable to suggestions that ordinary Germans are suffering because refugees are receiving special attention and devouring federal, state and local government resources.

It is perhaps more surprising that the AfD is appealing to Germans who have traditionally voted for the Christian Democrats. This could well be because of (rather than despite) the fact that conservatives like Horst Seehofer have adopted some of the AfD’s rhetoric and proposals in demanding that the government take a tougher approach on refugees. Twenty-four years ago, Germany was also deeply divided over the question of how to respond to refugee arrivals. Then, the Christian Democrats were afraid of another party on the far right, Die Republikaner, and ahead of crucial state elections in Baden-Württemberg they sought to cancel out the far right’s appeal by embracing some of its rhetoric. The strategy misfired badly, with Die Republikaner gaining almost 11 per cent of the vote. Most of the right-wing party’s voters had previously voted for the conservatives.

After these 1992 state elections, and after it dawned on conservative political leaders that they had contributed to the poisoning of the debate by tolerating racism and xenophobia, Germany’s political establishment changed tack and distanced itself from the far right and its xenophobic rhetoric. With some notable exceptions, particularly in Saxony, the far right lost votes and influence. So it could well be that the Christian Democrats will lose votes because many of them, including its leaders in Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz, Guido Wolf and Julia Klöckner, gave in to the temptation to berate Angela Merkel about her unpopular refugee policy, and thereby repeated the tactical mistake of twenty-four years ago.

In Baden-Württemberg, the polls predict a clear win for the party of the reigning premier, the Greens. If that happens, it will be the first time in German political history that the Greens have become the strongest party in a state election. In Rheinland-Pfalz, the reigning premier is a Social Democrat who only a couple of months ago was rated no more than an outside chance of winning the elections. But she is doing well, and may yet pip Klöckner at the post. Significantly, the premiers of Rheinland-Pfalz and Baden-Württemberg have been vocal supporters of Merkel’s stance on refugees.

It is true that the overwhelming majority of Germans is now opposed to Merkel’s refugee policy. (Support for the policy has picked up again, though, after it reached a low when young men, many of them recent arrivals from North Africa, sexually assaulted women celebrating New Year in the streets of Cologne and other German cities.) Yet Merkel’s overall approval rating is still comparatively high. And recent surveys reveal that a majority of Germans still agree that refugees fleeing persecution or war ought to be granted protection in Germany.

Merkel can count on a handful of prominent loyalists in her own party, on the support of key Social Democrats (such as Rheinland-Pfalz’s premier, Malu Dreyer), and on the backing of the Greens, who for some time now have appeared to be Merkel’s favourite option as future coalition partner. She still has the support of large sections of the print and electronic media, most importantly the mass-circulation tabloid Bild, which in the early 1990s was in the forefront of those vilifying asylum seekers. Bild not only supports Merkel’s line on refugees, but is also running a strong campaign against the AfD.

While the AfD’s anti-refugee hysteria appeals to a sizeable chunk of the electorate, and while public protests against refugees are on the increase, particularly in East Germany, many other Germans are willing to take to the streets to protest against racism and xenophobia, and to lend authorities a hand in dealing with the one million new arrivals last year. Most of those committed to actively supporting the settlement of refugees in Germany seem unlikely to vote for the Christian Democrats, but Merkel can count on their support nevertheless.

Regardless of the outcome of the elections on Sunday, Merkel won’t resign. And there is nobody in her own party who is likely to topple her. The only immediate alternative to Merkel would be Wolfgang Schäuble, but at seventy-three he would be an interim solution at best. The only Christian Democrat who seems a viable option to lead the party into the next federal election campaign, defence minister Ursula von der Leyen, has supported Merkel’s refugee policy.

Perhaps Merkel’s biggest assets, however, are her personal strengths. For one, she has stamina. The most recent EU summit wasn’t the first that saw her still sitting at the table, arguing her position, at 3 o’clock in the morning. When dealing with her party and with the German electorate she has also proven able to keep listening without deviating from her bottom line. And she has proven to be able eventually to convince her listeners that she is right. In December, when it seemed that she had few friends left in her own party, she received a standing ovation when she defended her refugee policy at the party’s annual congress.

Another key strength is her self-belief. In a one-hour conversation with talkshow host Anne Will broadcast ten days ago, she said that she did not have a Plan B, and that the search for escape routes was a distraction she did not need. “Only the person who is confident and has self-belief can win,” she added.

Again and again during the interview she used the word vernünftig, which translates as reasonable or rational. “I believe, we are on a rational pathway,” she said. And: “I am committed to providing a rational solution.” The natural scientist who became a politician showed little sympathy for colleagues – in Germany and elsewhere in Europe – who are pursuing options that may be popular but are neither rational nor reasonable. She claimed that politicians have a duty to generate rational and reasonable outcomes out of complex and difficult situations, rather than give in to the impulse to please voters clamouring for a deceptively easy fix. This is not the Merkel of old, who on many occasions was quite happy to endorse popular options rather than promote solutions that were in the country’s best long-term interests.

It must pain Merkel that the rational arguments she puts forward haven’t gained much traction. Most Germans now blame her for opening the borders in early September, for instance, but Merkel rightly claims that this perception is wrong. “The borders were open,” she says. “I just didn’t close them.” She was not in favour of closed European borders then, and she isn’t now. The draft resolution of this week’s EU summit proclaimed that for irregular migrants the route from Greece via the Western Balkans to Central and Northern Europe had been closed. Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras and Merkel opposed that line (the former because it meant that refugees would become stranded in Greece), and successfully insisted it be revised. Leaving one of the meetings on Monday night, and having already walked past waiting journalists, Merkel turned around and told them, “Today is not about closing anything!”

She is convinced that it doesn’t make sense to build fences – that it’s not a rational decision. This has little to do with an inner conviction; after all, she believes in border controls between Turkey and Greece, and, ultimately, in the idea of a Fortress Europe. This is not to say that her policy lacks personal conviction. It comes into play when she talks about the anti-refugee hysteria in places such as Heidenau and Clausnitz. As she told Anne Will ten days ago, “Human dignity shall be inviolable. That’s Article 1 of our Constitution, and that applies to everybody who is in our country, no matter whether they are German or a guest or a refugee or whoever.” Article 1 of Germany’s Basic Law doesn’t specify that it applies to anybody who happens to be on German territory, but for Merkel there is no doubt that this was the intention of its drafters. In fact, in an interview yesterday she again referred to Article 1, but misquoted it. “Die Würde jedes Menschen ist unantastbar” (Every human being’s dignity shall be inviolable), she said, adding that this also meant it was important not to think of refugees as an amorphous mass of people but to respect each refugee with his or her unique history.

In the meantime, refugees keep arriving in Greece. The route from Greece to Germany – via Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria – has been almost cut off since Serbia and Slovenia decided that migrants transiting their country will now need a visa. But a new route may soon open up, with refugees travelling from Greece via Albania and then crossing the Adriatic Sea to Italy.

The ceasefire in Syria holds, but that is not to say that the exodus of refugees from Syria has stopped, or that Syrian refugees living in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon aren’t still trying to seek protection in Europe. Besides, Syrians aren’t the only ones fleeing war and persecution; those desperate to reach Europe also include Afghans, Iraqis, Eritreans and others.

In Germany, thanks to the barbed wire fences being rolled out along borders in the Western Balkans, the number of refugees arriving from Austria has decreased significantly. In February, the federal police counted only 38,750 new arrivals, and the numbers keep dropping. If the influx of refugees arriving via Austria were to slow to a trickle, then Germany could offer to take a large proportion, if not all, of the Syrians who have been found to be refugees in Turkey and who are being traded for migrants returned to Turkey from Greece. To make the Turkish proposal viable, Germany might have to do that anyway; at last count, only 870 of the 160,000 refugees in Greece or Italy that the European Union agreed to distribute across member states last year have been resettled.

The crucial question is this: will Germans support a significant intake of refugees – something in the order of half a million per year? My guess is that they will, as long as the government favours the resettlement of a substantial number of refugees and strongly argues its case. That will depend, in turn, on whether Merkel can survive her party’s disastrous showing at the forthcoming elections. I expect that she will survive, and comfortably. And she may not be too unhappy for the Christian Democrats’ rising star Julia Klöckner, who has given her a lot of grief over the government’s refugee policy, to fail in Rheinland-Pfalz, and for political ally Winfried Kretschmann, of the Greens, to remain premier in Baden-Württemberg. Strange times indeed.

Merkel will keep trying to convince Germans that her approach is vernünftig and thus in Germany’s best interest. At this point, at least, her arguments aren’t making headway in the emotionally charged debate about refugees. Maybe she realises that it will take more than appeals to reason to shift German public opinion and the views of her counterparts in other EU countries. In her interview with Anne Will, she referred to the situation at Idomeni, at the Greece–Macedonia border. “Maybe those pictures will have some impact,” she mused, hoping perhaps that Europe will once more be swayed by images of suffering. •

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Around 2000 refugees broke through police barriers on Monday and crossed into Germany near Passau in the southeast of Bavaria. The Bavarian state government has accused the Austrians of conveying people arriving from Slovenia as speedily as possible to the German border, without checking whether they would like to claim asylum in Austria and without informing German officials about where and when buses will arrive. Several roads have been closed to normal cross-border traffic.

Since last Saturday, refugees have been entering Germany at a similar rate to arrivals in the first half of September, after Angela Merkel and Werner Faymann agreed to suspend border controls. But accurate figures are hard to come by. The Bavarian government claims that at least 270,000 refugees entered Germany via that state’s border with Austria in September, but the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees registered 163,000 arrivals that month. The discrepancy is partly explained by the fact that many new arrivals have not yet been registered, but the Bavarian government might also be exaggerating the numbers to put pressure on the German chancellor.

The latest official estimate of how many irregular migrants will arrive during 2015 dates from the second half of August, when interior minister Thomas de Maizière said that Germany could expect up to 800,000. Even though refugee movements increased in September, the federal government has yet to update that figure. In early October, newspapers reported that the German authorities were confidentially anticipating up to 1.5 million new arrivals in 2015; the government has neither confirmed nor denied that figure.

If the official estimate of 800,000 is correct, then Germany will receive about as many new arrivals, per capita, as Austria (which has a population of 8.6 million and is expecting about 85,000 arrivals in 2015). But both countries might end up accommodating far fewer refugees per capita this year than Sweden, which has a population of just under ten million and is anticipating 190,000 new arrivals.

Not every refugee crossing the Austrian–German border is going to add to the load carried by Germany. Many Syrians, in particular, are heading for Sweden because it has suspended individual refugee status determination procedures for Syrians and also has a generous family reunion policy. Several large tents in front of Hamburg’s central railway station are testament to the fact that up to a thousand of the refugees entering Germany at present are only passing through: the tents accommodate new arrivals who have come to Hamburg because it is Germany’s gateway to Scandinavia.

Germany’s federal, state and local governments fervently hope that the rate of new arrivals will fall over the remaining two months of 2015. But that’s unlikely to happen because of a change of circumstances in refugee-producing countries; in fact, analysts believe that the Syrian government’s Russian-backed military offensive around Aleppo will only accelerate the exodus from what is by far the largest individual source country for refugees in Europe. Instead, the number of arrivals will depend on the success of three sets of policies: tough new measures for asylum seekers whose protection claims are, or are likely to be, unfounded; the fortification of Europe’s external borders; and the fair distribution of asylum seekers and refugees across Europe.

Earlier this month, the German Bundestag passed legislation – the Asylverfahrensbeschleunigungsgesetz, which follows hard on the heels of a similar bill passed in early July – making it easier to remove people whose applications for asylum have been rejected. The new law is partly designed to remove alleged incentives for people whose protection claims are unlikely to succeed. During their initial stay in temporary accommodation, for example, asylum seekers receive an allowance of €143 per person per month; under the new law, the states can provide some of that assistance in kind – by issuing asylum seekers with bus passes, say, and deducting the value from the allowance. Because of the administrative expenses involved, however, only Bavaria has so far decided to trial the new provision, and to do so only with a select group of people from the Western Balkans.

Asylum seekers from that region, which accounted for almost 30 per cent of new asylum applications in the first nine months of this year, are considered to have little chance of being allowed to remain in Germany. Albania, Montenegro and Kosovo have been declared safe countries of origin, which allows faster processing of nationals of these countries. Under the new legislation, nationals of “safe” countries who have submitted their asylum claims after 1 September are also no longer permitted to work.

Yet expectations that the Asylverfahrensbeschleunigungsgesetz would result in the immediate departure of large numbers of failed asylum seekers – possibly in planes provided by the air force – have proved unrealistic. And even if the numbers were to rise significantly, the revised policy would initially target people who arrived months, if not years, ago. The states would still need to provide accommodation for new arrivals, and the removals (which are also a state responsibility) are likely to tie up resources and personnel needed to provide reception services. In some cases, too, failed asylum seekers can’t be removed because the European Union hasn’t concluded return agreements with their countries of origin.

Angela Merkel’s most strident critic since early September has been Bavaria’s premier Horst Seehofer, leader of the state’s Christian Social Union, sister party to Merkel’s Christian Democrats. Seehofer has demanded even tougher measures to deter asylum seekers, prevent them from entering Germany, and remove them quickly should their claims be unfounded. He wants to establish “transit zones” along the border with Austria where new arrivals from the Western Balkans and other countries declared safe could be kept until their asylum claims have been processed. Transit zones at German airports, where asylum claims can be processed quickly and failed applicants can speedily be removed, are the model. Having initially rejected Seehofer’s idea, Merkel has now embraced it. She knows, however, that her coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party, is opposed to the scheme, and that its implementation is almost impossible, unless of course Germany decides to follow Australia’s example and imprison asylum seekers on their arrival (which, at this point, appears unlikely).

Merkel’s hope that the European Union would agree to a fair distribution of refugees and asylum seekers across Europe has proved illusory. Five countries are still carrying the bulk of the burden: Italy and Greece, the first ports of call, and Austria, Sweden and Germany. Britain and most of the Eastern European member countries remain firmly opposed to a quota arrangement; and all the other members, including France, have been most reluctant to implement the agreement reached earlier this year to move 160,000 arrivals from Greece and Italy to other European countries. By the end of last week, nine European countries had committed to resettling only a total of 854 of the 160,000 and, of those, only eighty-six had actually been moved: about half to Sweden and the other half to Finland.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has sought and received substantial concessions from the European Union and Germany in return for his country’s assistance in stemming the flow of refugees to Greece. Merkel, who had always been adamant that Turkey shouldn’t become a full member of the European Union, has even signalled that she might support a speeding up of the accession process. But Turkey has so far done very little to prevent refugees leaving for nearby Greek islands, and that is unlikely to change until well after the Turkish elections this Sunday.

So there is little prospect that any of the three sets of policies will be particularly effective in slowing or halting arrivals. Only the onset of winter and a decision by Croatia and Slovenia to follow Hungary in physically excluding refugees could significantly reduce the number of people entering Austria, Germany and Sweden.

At the end of August, Merkel proclaimed, “Wir schaffen das” (“We are able to do this”). She repeated that sentence throughout September and in the first half of October, but over the past couple of weeks she has been less confident and emphatic. As early as 12 October, she qualified her mantra by adding “aber wir schaffen das nicht alleine in der Welt” (“but we won’t be able to do this all by ourselves”).

Across Germany, mayors and other local political leaders had already decided that the challenge was too daunting – unless, of course, it were possible to stop more refugees from entering Germany. Many of the local politicians who have declared that the capacity of their city, town or shire is exhausted are Christian Democrats. But they also include Social Democrats and members of the Greens. Two weeks ago, for example, Lutz Trümper, the mayor of Magdeburg, the capital of the East German state of Saxony-Anhalt, left the Social Democratic Party in protest at the federal government’s refugee policy. Earlier this week, Boris Palmer, a prominent member of the Greens and mayor of the university town of Tübingen in the West German state of Baden-Württemberg, claimed that in many respects Germany had reached the limit of its capacity.

Germany is conveying contradictory impressions. On the one hand, the newspapers are full of reports about local and state authorities struggling to cope: shortages of beds, shortages of buildings that could be used to accommodate new arrivals, shortages of teachers, social workers and police. The evening television news shows large numbers of people crossing the Austrian–German border or being accommodated in tents.

On the other hand, life goes on as if the mass arrivals had never happened. Walking around Passau earlier this week, I was struck by how comfortable people seemed to be. This is the town closest to where tens of thousands of people were entering Germany from Austria. For the Germans catching the late October sun on one of the benches along the rivers Inn and Danube, or having their coffee and cake in one of the town’s many cafes, nothing had changed. No refugees were evident in Passau’s mall or in the town’s pretty parks; in fact, many of the town’s residents would never have met a refugee. It’s no different in other places in Germany – or Austria, for that matter.

At a town hall meeting in Nuremberg this week, Angela Merkel agreed with her audience that Germany was accommodating “very, very many” refugees, only to add, “But there are eighty million of us.” That doesn’t match the experience of the 102 people of Sumte, a tiny village in the east of Lower Saxony, where a vacant former office block is being converted into accommodation for 1000 refugees. But it is the experience of most Germans, whose everyday lives are barely being touched by the mass arrivals.

For a country of eighty million, 800,000 new arrivals are a lot to cope with. But who else could cope with this kind of challenge as comfortably as Germany can? To meet the additional costs the federal government has been able to draw on a healthy budget surplus. Finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble believes that it will be possible to balance the budget next year as well, although by the end of 2015 the additional annual costs will probably have amounted to more than €10 billion for the federal government alone. According to Germany’s Office for Labour, September’s unemployment rate was a record low of 6.2 per cent. According to the International Labour Organization’s methodology, the rate is an even lower 4.5 per cent. Either way, Germany is performing better than any other European country; France’s rate is more than twice as high, and Spain’s about five times.

Is Germany able to do this? Of course it is. It will be able to house a million refugees – or two million, for that matter. It will be able to provide decent accommodation, language courses and, once the new arrivals have learnt some German, jobs. It will master the logistical challenges involved. But that’s only part of what is now meant when Germans ask, “Schaffen wir das?” (“Are we able to do this?”)

For many Germans, schaffen involves more than food and accommodation. It means providing these necessities in an orderly manner after refugees have been registered on arrival, and it means that asylum claims are processed quickly. It is obvious that this is not yet the case. Many, if not most, of those who have arrived since August have not yet been able to lodge an asylum claim. Once they do, they have to wait for months before they learn of its outcome. The distribution of new arrivals across Germany is still chaotic. Local authorities often hear of the impending arrival of hundreds of refugees only a few hours in advance; they frequently don’t have time to prepare emergency accommodation in gymnasiums, get hold of enough camp beds and bedding, and find caterers able to provide food.

Merkel knows that order needs to be restored quickly, and in recent weeks she has often said this is her first priority. Restoring order doesn’t matter too much for the many volunteers who are welcoming refugees, helping out, or accommodating them in their homes. Neither does it matter much for those who would like to send all refugees back to where they came from. But Merkel needs to convince the silent majority – who for the past ten years, during Merkel’s long reign, were promised that life could always be free of turbulence – that order has been restored, and she needs to do that very soon.

The question “Schaffen wir das?” also means: will Germany be able to deal with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees without a return to the anti–asylum seeker hysteria of the early 1990s? Will Germans continue to vote for moderate parties and shun extremists, or will the populist far right, which is still comparatively weak, gain in strength? Will Germany soon have its very own Marine Le Pen or a political leader as successful as Austria’s Heinz-Christian Strache?

“Kippt die Stimmung?” (“Is the mood going to change?”) Commentators have been asking this question for weeks. Literally, kippen means “topple” or “tip” – a sudden turn much like a change of weather during the summer months in Melbourne. The metaphor suggests that a change of mood could be sudden, and that it could have catastrophic consequences. I suspect that while observers are waiting for a sudden radical change, they have missed the fact that much has changed already. In Saxony, Germans opposed to the arrival of refugees are already in the majority. There, and in other parts of East Germany, it is already considered normal for local politicians to say that their communities can’t possibly be expected to accommodate more than a handful of refugees, for locals to form picket lines to prevent refugees from gaining access to buildings designed to accommodate them (as happened recently in Übigau in the East German state of Brandenburg), and for far-right extremists who try to attack asylum seekers physically to be applauded by a not-so-silent majority (as happened last week in Freiberg in Saxony).

Much has changed since the days in early September when Munich residents welcomed refugees arriving at the city’s central railway station from Hungary. The naive enthusiasm of six weeks ago has gone. That’s not such a bad thing.

The outcome of the current developments is not yet a foregone conclusion. Deutschland könnte es noch schaffen; Germany might still be able to do this. It’s true that resentment and hatred dominate in some parts of East Germany. But civil society groups supporting refugees have formed in many areas in which local government, state and federal agencies are struggling, including in Saxony. It’s not only the far right that is gaining in strength, so too are the groups that want Germany to be able to do this. It is still possible that the silent majority will choose to identify with the project of accommodating and successfully integrating hundreds of thousands of refugees, rather than with attempts to intimidate or assault them. But it is also possible that those who are fearful of or feel resentful towards refugees will come to believe that there is nothing wrong with venting their anger. •

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Klotzsche, once a town in its own right, is one of Dresden’s northern suburbs. Its grand houses recall the days in the second half of the nineteenth century when the city’s wealthy burghers saw it as a desirable place to live. In recent years, it has attracted technology companies and three Fraunhofer research institutes, among them the well-known Center for Nanoelectronic Technologies. Sleepy but pleasant and reasonably affluent, Klotzsche shows comparatively few signs of having once been part of the German Democratic Republic.

Last week’s demonstration was co-organised by the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD, which was established in early 2013 by Bernd Lucke, a professor of economics at the University of Hamburg. Lucke’s aim was to harness the eurosceptic vote and provide an option for voters opposed to Germany’s bailing out of Greece and other eurozone countries. The party narrowly failed to reach the 5 per cent threshold in the 2013 national elections; in 2014 and 2015, it won more than 7 per cent of the vote in the European elections and managed to send elected representatives to five state parliaments, including Saxony’s, where it attracted just under 10 per cent of the vote. In July 2015, Lucke and other prominent members left the AfD because they felt that the party had moved too far to the Islamophobic and xenophobic right.

At the Klotzsche protest, the AfD provided the PA system and supplied the protesters with placards. The men who addressed the crowd in front of the Klotzsche Rathaus, the building that once housed the town’s mayor and its local administration, were both prominent representatives of the party. One was André Wendt, a forty-four-year-old professional soldier and current member of the state parliament of Saxony.

The other organisation behind the protest was Dresden–Klotzsche sagt nein zum Heim (Dresden-Klotzsche Says No to an Asylum Seeker Hostel), a local organisation formed late last year after the state government announced long-term plans to accommodate sixty asylum seekers in a former school in the suburb. Its first public protest was in November last year, and its main vehicle of communication, a Facebook page, has attracted a little over 2700 likes. The focus of the group’s anger shifted in September when the mass arrivals of irregular migrants forced the state government to identify new housing options. Late last month, the government decided to build makeshift housing for 500 new arrivals on a former carpark near the airport. Work on the buildings has already begun and is scheduled to be completed next month.

It’s hard to say how many of Klotzsche’s residents were among the protesters last week. But I’m sure the Sächsische Zeitung was wrong about the overall numbers; rather than 300 people, as the newspaper reported, at least twice as many demonstrators gathered in front of the Rathaus. I suspect that most of them were locals, because few seemed to arrive by car or public transport and many appeared to know each other. Men aged between twenty and seventy dominated, but there were also many couples and some families with small children. Some of the protesters had the flag of Saxony or the German black, red and gold. I didn’t see anybody wearing a neo-Nazi outfit.

André Wendt told the crowd that extremist placards or slogans would not be tolerated. He and other right-wing populists are keenly aware that Germany’s penal code includes a provision against Volksverhetzung – the incitement of hatred against ethnic, religious or national groups, or the violation of a person’s human dignity by abusing them because they belong to such a group – and that these crimes carry a prison sentence of between three months and five years.

Wendt is a demagogue whose speech condoned and incited hatred. But it was the style of his speech, rather than its substance, that was particularly objectionable. For him it was important to stress that what the AfD was doing that evening was perfectly legal. It was Merkel who had broken European and German law, he argued, by inviting irregular migrants to enter Germany in early September. He also portrayed the AfD as defenders of the rule of law and of the German constitution, ignoring the fact that Article 16a, which guarantees the right to asylum, is an integral part of the constitution’s bill of rights.

The organisers also took issue with one of the other rights guaranteed by the constitution, freedom of the press. While the crowd was waiting for the event to start, Wendt asked any journalists present to make themselves known to the organisers. They would not tolerate journalists taking close-ups of demonstrators, he said, because such photos would contravene German privacy laws. The demand that journalists report to the organisers conveyed a thinly veiled threat that unauthorised reporting would have negative consequences.

One freelance photographer ignored the warning. When he was observed taking pictures of the demonstration, an altercation ensued, and stewards handed the journalist over to the police. The state police sided with the demonstrators – after all, they told the journalist, he had not obeyed the organisers’ directions. It was only when federal police arrived on the scene that the journalist was told that he had every right to document the protest.

Not all media representatives were unwelcome. The protesters clapped and cheered when Wendt announced that a camera crew from Russia Today, a Russian television network broadcasting in German, was covering the proceedings. This was no surprise. On a poster advertising the rally, Dresden–Klotzsche sagt nein zum Heim had demanded that Germany leave NATO and that the United States end their “wars of aggression.” In East Germany, the government’s right-wing critics side with Russia against Ukraine and admire Vladimir Putin (although since August their undisputed hero has been Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, whom they believe to be defending Europe against invading refugees).

Stewards explained to me that some of the protesters were afraid of repercussions (for example, at their workplace) if photos of them were published; despite their assertions that they were upholding the rule of law, they seemed to be conscious that their protest could easily be seen as entirely inappropriate. But the antipathy towards German media representatives was also reminiscent of the chants “Lügenpresse, Lügenpresse” (“the press are liars”) that have been a feature of the Pegida demonstrations. In fact, the protest in Klotzsche was in many respects a suburban version of the resurgent Pegida rallies in the centre of Dresden.

Early this year, I was one among many observers who were convinced that Pegida – its full name is Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) – was on its last legs. The charismatic founder of this xenophobic populist movement, Lutz Bachmann, had been forced to surrender his leadership when a newspaper revealed he had used the derogatory term Viehzeug (animals) to refer to refugees, had suggested prominent Greens politician Claudia Roth be shot, and had posed as Adolf Hitler and posted the picture on Facebook. And even during Pegida’s heyday in the last northern winter, the counter-demonstrations tended to be larger than the Pegida rallies themselves.

Now Bachmann is back, and Pegida is again attracting large crowds. On the organisation’s first anniversary, 19 October, around 20,000 supporters rallied in Dresden. A crowd of 20,000 protested against Pegida that evening. Given that many organisations and individuals, including Dresden’s mayor, had condemned Pegida and called on Dresden’s citizens to join one of the six counter-rallies, the number of anti-Pegida protesters was smaller than might have been expected. And this time around, there are no large anti-Pegida demonstrations in other German cities. That’s despite the fact that Pegida is increasingly attracting right-wing extremists, and despite the fact that most of those who – like Social Democratic vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel – advocated a dialogue with Pegida earlier this year are now convinced that the movement needs to be isolated. (A demonstration by the islamophobic HoGeSa – which stands for Hooligans against Salafists – in Germany’s fourth-largest city, Cologne, on Sunday attracted only 1000 Hogesa followers, while 10,000 people protested against them; in Dresden the next day, Pegida marshalled at least 10,000 supporters but no more than 1300 people attended a protest organised by its opponents.)

The federal government is increasingly alarmed by Pegida’s radicalism and the support it enjoys, particularly in Saxony. At the rally on 12 October, one demonstrator carried two symbolic gallows, one for Merkel and one for Gabriel. The public prosecutor in Dresden is investigating – and has already been threatened by Pegida supporters. The outcry following the publication of an image of the gallows helps explain why André Wendt was anxious to avoid saying – or providing a platform for – anything that could be interpreted as unlawful.

Pegida’s provocations didn’t stop with the 12 October demonstration. A week later, one of the speakers, the writer Akif Pirinçci, said that concentration camps “are unfortunately currently out of action.” Again, the prosecutor is investigating, and Pirinçci is likely to be charged with Volksverhetzung.

The government, civil society organisations, the mainstream media and many ordinary Germans are increasingly alarmed by the fact that the arrival of hundreds of thousands of irregular migrants has provided oxygen to xenophobes and right-wing extremists. Two developments are of particular concern. Increasingly, particularly in East Germany, it is difficult to distinguish protesters with irrational and diffuse fears of foreigners from neo-Nazis. Several protests have turned violent, with the kind of people who protested in Klotzsche last week providing cover for hooligans and far-right extremists intent on attacking asylum seeker accommodation. So far, these protests have been largely confined to East Germany.

Several public protests have also taken place in smaller centres in West Germany. In the small town of Bad Marienberg in Rhineland-Palatinate, for example, 300 people demonstrated last week against plans to build accommodation for 3000 refugees. But on that occasion, 2000 others, including the state premier, joined a simultaneous rally under the catchcry “bunt statt braun” (“colourful instead of brown”), to demonstrate that most Bad Marienbergers were welcoming refugees.

The other issue concerns the numerous arson attacks on buildings designated to house asylum seekers, and the credible threats of violence against refugees, their supporters and political leaders who are held responsible for the welcome extended to refugees. In the first nine months of this year, according to the Bundeskriminalamt, Germany’s federal criminal investigation agency, there were 461 attacks on buildings designed to accommodate asylum seekers. According to the agency, most of these attacks were perpetrated by locals, most of them young men.

The threats against individuals have so far largely remained just that: threats. But a local politician, Henriette Reker, was stabbed and critically injured by a man who claimed that he acted because he was opposed to the arrival of refugees. Reker had been in charge of the accommodation of refugees in Cologne, and stood as an independent for the office of mayor of Cologne in elections held on 18 October. The attack happened on the day before the elections, and she was in an induced coma in intensive care when Cologne’s voters went to the polling booths. She was supported by the Christian Democrats, the Free Democrats and the Greens, and won the elections resoundingly ahead of her opponent, a Social Democrat. But the outcome of the vote tells only part of the story: about 60 per cent of the electorate didn’t bother to cast a vote – even though it was obvious that a high participation rate would have sent a strong signal.

The protests against the arrival of asylum seekers are supported by the AfD, which polls suggest would comfortably exceed the 5 per cent threshold for representation in federal parliament if elections were held now. More importantly, the protesters are egged on by numerous bloggers and on countless Facebook pages. That’s what distinguishes these anti–asylum seeker protests from those in the early 1990s, when Germany accommodated hundreds of thousands of refugees from the former Yugoslavia. Then, social media played no part in mobilising xenophobic sentiments.

In the early 1990s, unlike now, politicians who belonged to the mainstream political parties joined the chorus of those who claimed that most refugees were bogus asylum seekers, and that Germany was being swamped by a flood of foreigners. Those sentiments were also shared by commentators in the mainstream media, including the mass circulation tabloid Bild, which at the time had a daily print run of approximately 4.5 million.

The current angst in Saxony, however, resembles the hysteria of the early 1990s. Arguably, Saxony is a hotbed of right-wing populism and anti–asylum seeker rhetoric in 2015 partly because the established parties here – and particularly the Christian Democrats – have not been prepared to distance themselves from the likes of Pegida’s Lutz Bachmann. Earlier this year, interior minister Markus Ulbig met with Pegida’s then spokesperson, Kathrin Oertel. And Saxony’s premier, the Christian Democrat Stanislaw Tillich, defended Pegida against its critics by saying that “Islam does not belong to Saxony.” At the same time Tillich criticised Angela Merkel, who in January had told the Turkish prime minister, “The former president Christian Wulff once said, ‘Islam belongs to Germany.’ That’s right. I share that view.” Significantly, while Rhineland-Palatinate’s premier and members of her cabinet joined the “bunt statt braun” rally in Bad Marienberg on 22 October, Tillich and Oertel did not take part in the anti-Pegida demonstration three days earlier.

Those concerned about the growing resentment towards refugees find it difficult to counter the propaganda on the internet. Newspapers and radio and television programs try to dispel some of the myths being peddled online – that the crime rate is higher among asylum seekers, for instance, or that school students aren’t able to do sports because refugees are being accommodated in gymnasiums. Sometimes those opposed to the government’s refugee policy draw on isolated incidents to make claims about the behaviour of all asylum seekers. A few months ago, for example, an asylum seeker in the small Rhineland town of Lindlar was accused of having stolen and then slaughtered a goat. This has led to rumours that asylum seekers are routinely stealing animals, including pets, to butcher them.

Today, Bild is supporting Merkel and actively campaigning against racists and xenophobes. Last week the tabloid published the names and photos of dozens of people who had written hateful comments about refugees on Facebook. Are such attempts at outing racists legitimate? Shouldn’t those who are trying to counter racist propaganda play by the rules? But what exactly are these rules? Do they oblige the public broadcaster to provide an opportunity for the AfD to air its concerns on talk shows? Or would it be more appropriate – and would it be entirely legitimate – to ostracise the AfD and exclude it from discussions about how to tackle the refugee crisis?

The protesters in Klotzsche and the Pegida demonstrators are aggrieved because they believe that “the media” are not telling their side of the story. They feel isolated and misunderstood. “Lügenpresse, Lügenpresse,” they chant, and “Wir sind das Volk” (“We are the people”). The latter was the battle cry of the East German civil rights movement in October 1989, which was soon drowned out by a different assertion, “Wir sind ein Volk” (“We are one people”).

This time, “Wir sind das Volk” conveys two messages, namely that Merkel and the German government are neither representing the people nor acting in Germany’s interest, and that the Syrians, Eritreans, Afghans and Albanians who are entering the country in large numbers are not – and must not become – part of the German people.

Germans who support the populist far right and who join the weekly Pegida protests in Dresden say they are opposed to welcoming refugees because they fear that Germany as they know it will change beyond recognition. They invoke “unsere Heimat” (our home, or homeland) and say that it is under threat from people who speak other languages, were socialised in foreign cultures and have non-Christian religious beliefs. The problem of the Klotzsche protesters is that while their Germany still exists in much of Saxony it has been superseded in most other parts of Germany, perhaps even including Leipzig, the largest city in Saxony.

Pegida demonstrators and members of the Dresden–Klotzsche sagt nein zum Heim group fear that their idea of Germany is under threat. Their fear is real – not because of the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees, but because of the multicultural fabric of most of German society. According to the Federal Statistics Office, at the end of last year just over 10 per cent of German residents were non-citizens. In Saxony, the proportion was 3.1 per cent, and in rural eastern Saxony, where the support for Pegida is particularly strong, the figure is less than 2 per cent. The Federal Statistics Office counts only those people as Ausländer (non-Germans) who aren’t German citizens. For many people in monocultural Saxony, however, Ausländer include naturalised Germans; if they were included in the statistics, the difference between the southeast of Germany and the rest of the country would be even more pronounced.

But the xenophobes in Dresden and its hinterland aren’t just afraid of the kind of people they have hardly ever met. They are also resentful of Germans in Hamburg and Munich, Berlin and Cologne who don’t seem to mind foreigners, including those who come to Germany as refugees.

Right-wing extremists who torch asylum seeker hostels are probably as common elsewhere in Germany as they are in Saxony. Everywhere in Germany a sizeable proportion of the population disagrees when Merkel says that the constitution’s Article 16a doesn’t allow an upper limit to be put on the number of asylum applications Germany accepts. And everywhere, many Germans are afraid of foreigners, and fearful of the changes that might result from the arrival of a large number of refugees. Thus far, however, xenophobes in Hamburg or Cologne are far less likely to go public with their views. In West Germany, at least, there is still a consensus that a welcoming, cosmopolitan and tolerant Germany is desirable and that xenophobia, parochialism and jingoism would signal a return to the Nazi past. •

The post Germany divided appeared first on Inside Story.

All this has changed in recent weeks, and suddenly Merkel is barely recognisable. It’s not easy to pinpoint the date when the merkeln stopped, but the new Merkel was definitely on display as early as 31 August, during the traditional Sommerpressekonferenz – an extended interview during the summer break with members of the Berlin press gallery. Most of that press conference was taken up by a discussion about the refugee crisis, which Merkel initiated before inviting the first question.

The number of asylum seekers reaching Germany via Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary and Austria had risen sharply over the previous two months. On 19 August, interior minister Thomas de Maizière said he expected 800,000 asylum seekers to arrive in 2015 – about twenty times as many as five years ago, and more than four times as many as last year.

On 21 and 22 August, a racist mob protested against a decision by the state government of Saxony to accommodate more than 500 asylum seekers in a former hardware store in Heidenau, a small town just south of the state capital, Dresden. During one of the violent demonstrations, thirty-one of the police protecting the asylum seeker accommodation were injured, one of them seriously.

When Merkel’s deputy, Social Democratic Party leader Sigmar Gabriel, visited Heidenau on 24 August he referred to the racists who had tried to attack the facility as Pack (scum) and demanded that they be locked up. He told reporters that it was important not to concede even one millimetre to “the most un-German characters I could imagine.” This was all the more important a signal because it came from a politician who only six months earlier had empathised with some of the concerns articulated by Pegida, a far-right protest movement that was particularly strong in Dresden.

Merkel too condemned the riots in Heidenau that day, declaring that Germany respected the dignity of all human beings and that she was appalled by the xenophobia of the demonstrators. But it took her another two days to visit Heidenau, where she told locals opposed to the asylum seeker accommodation that there would be “no tolerance towards those who question the dignity of others.”

During the Sommerpressekonferenz, Merkel repeated that sentence, and added: “There can be no apologies… The key is not to show even the slightest bit of understanding. No biographical experience, nothing that happened in the past, nothing, absolutely nothing justifies [their] stance.” These comments could be read as a belated criticism of Gabriel and others from her own party who had sought the dialogue with the protesters from Pegida despite its ultra-nationalism and xenophobia. They could also be read as a reference to lessons learnt by West German Christian Democrats in the early 1990s, when attempts to accommodate some of the positions advocated by the far-right Republikaner party resulted not only in boosting support for that party but also in a significant weakening of the Christian Democrats in the 1992 state elections in Baden-Württemberg.

By the end of August, thousands of refugees were arriving in Germany every day. Merkel said that she was proud of and grateful for Germans’ overwhelmingly positive response. She praised the journalists who were reporting that response in great detail, and urged them to keep doing so as a means of encouraging their audiences. And then she, too, provided the words of encouragement that shaped the discussion about Germany’s response to the refugee crisis. Commenting on the challenges posed by the unprecedented numbers arriving in Germany, she said, “Germany is a strong country. Our mantra… has to be: we have been able to do so much – we are able to do this.”

Who inspired Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das” (“We are able to do this”), which she has repeated many times since? The Economist tweeted, tongue in cheek, that Merkel’s optimism is that of Bob the Builder, who routinely asks his motley crew of helpers, “Can we fix it?” to which they respond in unison, “Yes we can!” Others have sought to credit Barack Obama with Merkel’s line. But neither the hero of the British animated television series nor the US president had a specific task in mind; their “yes we can” applies to all manner of challenges. Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das,” on the other hand, is very specific: Germany, she has been telling her somewhat sceptical domestic audience, will be able to cope with what is undoubtedly its biggest challenge in this century: the influx of possibly over a million irregular migrants this year.

I suspect Merkel hasn’t been referencing Obama but words used by former German chancellor (and her erstwhile mentor) Helmut Kohl on the last occasion that Germany was faced by an almost impossible task: German reunification. On 1 July 1990, in a televised address to a nation that did not yet include the formerly communist East of the country, Kohl acknowledged the problems experienced by East Germans during the transition to a united Germany, and asked them not to let themselves be discouraged by these difficulties. “If you look optimistically towards the future, if everybody gives a hand,” he said, “then you and we together will be able to do it.” And then he, too, referenced another, historical challenge, this time addressing Germans in both East and West: “We will be able to do it [‘Wir werden es schaffen’] – if we draw on the skills we employed more than forty years ago, in a much more difficult situation, to build the Federal Republic of Germany out of the rubble of our cities and villages.”

Four days after the Sommerpressekonferenz, Merkel and her Austrian counterpart, Social Democrat Werner Faymann, agreed to open their countries’ borders temporarily to irregular migrants arriving via Hungary. Later, Merkel justified this by saying, “There are… situations when it is necessary to make decisions. I could not have waited for twelve hours and contemplated the issues.” In other words, merkeln was not an option.

Was Merkel, and were the Germans who welcomed refugees at Munich’s central railway station in early September, moved to act as they were watching footage of large numbers of Syrians stranded at the central railway station in Budapest shouting, “Germany! Germany!”? The Economist thought so: “Hearing their name cried out neither in fear nor in a football stadium but in gratitude and hope touched the public enough to turn them, at least for now, in favour of a Willkommenskultur (‘welcome culture’).”

There are other credible explanations. To what extent was Merkel trying to undo the damage done to Germany’s reputation in July, when her government insisted on humiliating and unrealistic conditions in the negotiations between Greece and its European creditors? Was she perhaps trying to shake the image of being an Eiskönigin, the German title of the 2013 Walt Disney film Frozen, which was an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s story about a heartless snow queen? Merkel had earned that epithet in July when she seemed unable to empathise with a fourteen-year-old Palestinian refugee, Reem Sahwil, at a school in the north German city of Rostock. Or did Merkel suddenly remember her roots as the daughter of a Protestant pastor? Or was she perhaps genuinely moved by both the plight of refugees and the overwhelmingly warm response of Germans to their arrival?

Whatever the reasons, Merkel has dug in despite the fact that, over the past three or four weeks, it has become evident that most Germans don’t share their chancellor’s optimism, and that many disagree with her response to the refugee crisis. Refugees keep arriving in large numbers, and an end to the mass influx is not yet in sight. Federal, state and local government institutions are struggling to cope. Some of their difficulties reflect incompetence and poor planning, but many of them are the result of an unprecedented logistical nightmare.

Merkel has also lost support among her own troops. At a party room meeting on 13 October, several backbenchers openly contradicted her – something that supposedly had never happened before. At a regional party meeting in Saxony, a couple of days later, she was heckled. Horst Seehofer, premier of Bavaria and the leader of the Christian Democrats’ sister party, the Christian Social Union (which exists only in Bavaria), has repeatedly criticised the federal government’s response to the refugee crisis. Like others, Seehofer has made Merkel personally responsible for the large number of arrivals during September – more than 270,000, according to the Bavarian state government – and claimed that she should never have agreed to open Germany’s borders on 3 September.

Interior minister de Maizière, Merkel’s former chief of staff and confidant, also appeared to follow her only reluctantly – and on 7 October the chancellor responded by relieving him of his responsibility for the federal government’s response to refugees.

Merkel’s immense popularity had long rested on the fact that she has always managed to articulate the views of a majority of Germans. They did not follow her; rather, she followed them. For six weeks now, Merkel has been leading from the front – a position neither she nor the electorate is accustomed to. It’s not surprising that her popularity has plummeted.

The Merkel of old would probably have tried to backtrack. At least she would have remained silent and waited for developments in her favour. She would have done what she used to do: merkeln.

The new Merkel has been trying to take the electorate with her. She has set out to convince them with arguments, but she has also been prepared to make known her very personal views. In a joint press conference with the Austrian chancellor on 15 September, she again referred to the riots in Heidenau and contrasted them with the hospitality afforded to refugees elsewhere in Germany. In response to a question that suggested she and Werner Faymann had made a mistake in early September, she became emotional: “Honestly I have to say: if we now have to start apologising for showing a friendly face in an emergency situation, then this is not my country.”

Merkel has had very little experience in the art of convincing a sceptical electorate. But so far she has acquitted herself surprisingly well. She has been urging Germans to trust her; but rather than relying on promises and slogans, she has tried to convey a realistic assessment of a complex situation. She has countered Seehofer’s demand that Germany close its borders by explaining that it is impossible to stop refugees entering Germany from Austria (unless, of course, Germany were to build Berlin Wall–like fortifications along its 3000 kilometre border).

In the first half of October, she used every available opportunity to communicate directly with the electorate – something she normally doesn’t do, if only because there has been no need to. On 4 October, she gave a long interview on national radio in which she said that nobody makes the decision to leave one’s home lightly, and that those who need Germany’s protection will receive that protection. On 12 October, the tabloid Bild published a four-page interview with Merkel. With more than two million copies sold each day, Bild is Germany’s most influential newspaper; once in the forefront of those campaigning against asylum seekers, it has been surprisingly uncritical of Merkel’s approach in recent weeks.

On 7 October, she was interviewed for an hour by Anne Will, the host of one of Germany’s premier television talk shows – the first such interview in four years. Rather than trying to qualify some of her earlier optimism, she insisted that it was possible to get a chaotic situation under control without resorting to the kinds of measures adopted by Hungary. Germany will be able to accommodate a very large number of refugees, she told viewers, and it will soon be able to do so in an orderly fashion.

If she was worried by her waning support in both the party and the electorate at large, she didn’t show it. She was calm, demonstrating that she had worked things out – not in the sense that she knew what to do to manage the influx of irregular migrants, but in the sense that she had made up her mind that she had made the right decision. And she again showed some passion when she told Will that she was not in favour of a race to the bottom in devising measures to deter refugees.

In her attempt to be realistic and principled, Merkel further alienated Seehofer and other critics. She told Will that it was impossible to predict how many more refugees Germany would have to accept because there were no provisions in Article 16a of the German Constitution, which guarantees the right to asylum, that allow the government to cap the number of applications that are processed or the number of positive outcomes.

Merkel is probably right to say that she had little choice in early September. Closing the border to Austria was never a realistic option (although there have been plenty who have demanded just that – on Sunday, the chief of the Police Union demanded that Germany build a fence along its Austrian border). The refugee crisis was not of her making; it’s the result of the conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, of the dire human rights situation in Eritrea, and of the lack of opportunities for young people in the impoverished countries of the Western Balkans.

Merkel has been justly applauded for encouraging Germans to welcome refugees, and for telling them that Germany would be able to accommodate hundreds of thousands of irregular migrants at very short notice. That is not to say that she would have foreseen her government’s current predicament. She could not have known that Europe as a whole would leave Germany, Austria and Sweden – the only EU countries that have openly welcomed refugees – in the lurch. She could not have foreseen that her fellow Christian Democrats, who owe her numerous election victories at federal, state and local levels, would abandon her so quickly.

Germans are now asking two questions: “Schaffen wir das?” (which Merkel tried to pre-empt when she declared, “We are able to do it”) and “Schafft sie das?” (“Is she able to do this?”).

Obviously an answer to the second question largely depends on the outcome of the challenge posed by the arrival of perhaps as many as 1.5 million irregular migrants this year. How quickly will the authorities be able to return to an orderly and predictable process? Tens of thousands of arrivals have not yet been registered. If only for that reason, there are no reliable figures as to the exact number of arrivals. At the latest count, 42,000 people are still accommodated in tents, some of which are not heated, and the authorities in several states have admitted that they will not be able to move them out before the onset of winter (which, incidentally, has already arrived early this year, with snow briefly blanketing parts of Germany last week).

Much will also depend on whether fewer refugees will arrive in the coming months. That in turn will depend on providing significantly more funding for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and for NGOs working with refugees in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and on making the Dublin III agreement, whereby asylum seekers are the responsibility of the EU countries where they first arrive (that is, principally Italy, Greece and Hungary), work. It is likely that the cooler temperatures will also discourage refugees from risking the passage to Greece or Italy.

Perhaps most importantly, a reduction in the number of asylum seekers reaching Europe will depend on whether Germany and the European Union can strike a deal with Turkey. This is a delicate issue. Turkey has already used the refugee crisis to extract significant funding and political concessions from its European partners. At the same time the Turkish government has been using the war in Syria as a smokescreen for its own war against Kurds who are demanding more autonomy. In fact, Turkey itself is a refugee-producing country. And according to the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, the EU-wide recognition rate for asylum seekers from Turkey last year was 23.1 per cent.

Merkel’s stance has a hard edge. Not only is she willing to make concessions to Turkey and its autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, indirectly lending support to his current Turkish election campaign. She has also endorsed a proposal by Bavaria’s Horst Seehofer to establish “transit zones” at Germany’s borders, where those likely to be granted asylum would be separated from others, with the idea that asylum seekers from the Western Balkans, for example, would be promptly deported.

A series of harsher measures will be implemented from 1 November. On 15 October, the Bundestag passed the Asylverfahrensbeschleunigungsgesetz, a government-initiated law that allows for speedier removal of failed asylum seekers while providing more federal funding for integrating refugees whose applications are likely to be successful. Both Amnesty International and the German umbrella refugee advocacy organisation Pro Asyl had urged parliament to vote against the bill, but their appeals were in vain.

So far, there is no challenger to Merkel waiting in the wings. Seehofer is fighting for his own survival in Bavaria (where the far-right Alternative für Deutschland is gaining in strength) and has no ambitions to dethrone the chancellor. Besides, most of his demands for a tougher policy couldn’t possibly be implemented even if the government had the political will to try. The only Christian Democrat with a stature approaching that of Merkel is Wolfgang Schäuble, but so far he remains a loyal supporter. The Social Democrats, Merkel’s minor partner in the federal government, seem to be divided about how to respond to the refugee crisis, and are not offering a credible alternative. In fact, many Social Democrats believe that Merkel is a better choice as chancellor than Gabriel because the latter couldn’t be trusted to uphold the right of asylum. Importantly, Merkel still enjoys the qualified support of most of the media.

The Greens, one of two opposition parties in federal parliament, also support Merkel. Many of their followers admire her principled stance and are prepared to put up with her willingness to make a deal with Turkey, and to tolerate the unsavoury measures contained in the new legislation. Most of the Greens MPs abstained in the Bundestag, and on the following day the Bundesrat, the state-based German Senate, passed the legislation with all eight states in which the Greens are in government voting in favour or abstaining. The other opposition party in the Bundestag, the Linke (the former Party of Democratic Socialism), is more critical, but it too has been willing to side with Merkel against the likes of Seehofer. In recent days I have talked to many people who have never voted for Merkel or her party but confided that they were surprised to suddenly find themselves in the role of Merkel admirers.

Merkel’s supporters hope that she remains steadfast. If Merkel were to say, “Wir schaffen es nicht” (“We won’t be able to do this”), or admit “Ich schaffe es nicht” (“I am not able to do it”) and resign, the consequences could be catastrophic. It would encourage the far right, which in the East German states – and particularly in Saxony – is already a force to be reckoned with. If Merkel were to raise the white flag, the thousands, if not millions, of Germans who work as volunteers, teaching newly arrived refugees German, accommodating them in their homes and providing them with moral support, might feel sufficiently discouraged to give up.

The work of countless volunteers means it is possible that Merkel’s “Wir schaffen es” might become a reality. Without their visible presence, the many Germans who now openly question the dignity of asylum seekers and refugees might gain the upper hand.

The stakes are high. Many Germans are fearful – some because they believe that refugees will take their jobs or that many refugees are rapists or terrorists, and others because they fear that right-wing populists will be allowed to shape Germany’s policies, not only vis-à-vis refugees. The latter desperately want Merkel to be right (“Wir schaffen das”) and to succeed: “Sie muss das schaffen” (“She has to be able to do this”). •

The post Merkel’s high-stakes stand appeared first on Inside Story.

A Wikipedia entry would presumably be titled “Frederick Rose (anthropologist).” It would provide the key dates of Rose’s life (born 22 March 1915, died 14 January 1991). It would mention that he grew up in London, studied at Cambridge, left England in 1937 to become an anthropologist in Australia, and worked as a government meteorologist from 1937 to 1946, and then as a Canberra-based public service research officer for the next seven years.

A Wikipedia entry might tell us that Rose did ethnographic research in northern and central Australia, some of it while working for the Bureau of Meteorology, and that he published several books about Aboriginal culture. We might also learn that he was a committed communist, that he was implicated in the spy scandal that followed the defection to Australia of Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov in 1954, and that he then left the public service, worked as a wharfie for a couple of years, and in 1956 emigrated to the German Democratic Republic, where he became a professor of social anthropology.

I first heard of Fred Rose around thirty years ago, soon after I embarked on a PhD in the Department of Pacific and Southeast Asian History at the Australian National University. A young East German anthropologist wanted to come to Australia to do research, one of my supervisors told me. Could I tell the department whether, in my opinion, she was a bona fide scholar? She had two articles in an East German anthropology and archaeology journal to her name, one of them about bark paintings and the other about the nineteenth-century Tasmanian Aboriginal woman Truganini.

The applicant came with recommendations from Dymphna Clark, the wife of the university’s larger-than-life emeritus professor of history. It was Rose who had elicited Clark’s support for the young East German, but it also seemed to be Rose who was responsible for the fact that the request was being dealt with by Pacific historians rather than by anthropologists. Rose had co-authored her academic papers, but the correspondence with my university suggested that he was perhaps more than just a mentor. The matter was evidently delicate.

I was intrigued. Why would the East German authorities allow Rose’s young colleague to visit Australia – not for a brief visit to attend a conference, but for several months? In the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev had just been elected general secretary of the Communist Party. In Poland, martial law (imposed after the conflict between the state and Solidarity) had been lifted in 1983, and the communist party seemed willing to tolerate a gradual liberalisation of Polish society. In the German Democratic Republic, however, Erich Honecker and the Socialist Unity Party governed with an iron fist and rejected all suggestions for reform. For many East Germans, reform would have been synonymous with the ability to travel to Western countries, but apart from pensioners, who were allowed to visit relatives in West Germany, only a select few were granted exit visas. They included the country’s top athletes, artists and scientists – provided, of course, they could be trusted to return. Rose’s protégé didn’t fit any of these categories.

Fred Rose photographed with Manning Clark in Ellery Crescent, Canberra, on 5 April 1962. ASIO/National Archives of Australia

I seem to recall that a visiting fellowship was offered to the young woman despite rather than because of the politics involved. The university’s Pacific historians believed that they were doing a good deed by allowing an anthropologist writing about Australia and the region to gain some first-hand knowledge of the peoples she purported to study. I still remember clearly the day we broke the news to her by phone. After one of the department’s senior researchers had failed to make himself understood – speaking very slowly but with the strongest Australian accent – it fell to me to tell her that, yes, the ANU would accommodate her, and that we were hoping that her government would allow her to come.

I was in Papua New Guinea doing fieldwork during the time she spent in Canberra, and didn’t meet her until soon after the Berlin wall came down. I was visiting her home town of Leipzig to see for myself what the Wende – the East German transition to democracy – was all about. I was impressed by the civil rights activists who had occupied the Leipzig office of the Stasi secret police and who told me about its repressive practices and its paranoia, and amazed when I learnt about the extent to which the Stasi could rely on a network of informers. But I was also taken aback by the fact that everyone else I talked to identified as a victim of communism, and was eager for capitalism’s supposed material benefits.

In Red Professor, the young East German anthropologist is called “Anna Wittmann.” I’m not sure why the authors have chosen to conceal her identity, but I’ll follow their lead. “Wittmann” isn’t the only person from Rose’s life given a pseudonym: a “Heidi Manne” plays a marginal role as a junior Australian diplomat; she went on “to become UNHCR Assistant High Commissioner,” so her real name is not hard to guess.

Monteath and Munt confirm what those dealing with Wittmann’s application to visit ANU suspected: that she was Rose’s lover. He had met her when they were both living in Leipzig and working for the local Museum of Anthropology. They possibly had a child together.

Fred Rose had an “innate ability to compartmentalise his life,” according to Monteath and Munt. He was a passionate campaigner for Aboriginal rights yet a dispassionate empiricist when writing about Aboriginal cultures. He was a conscientious Canberra public servant and an active member of the Communist Party. He was caught up in relationships with women (frequently with more than one at a time) but kept his private life separate from his politics.

The compartment that receives particular attention in Red Professor is Rose’s interaction with intelligence agencies, both in Australia and in East Germany. Did he spy for the Soviet Union while working as a public servant in Australia? The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, or ASIO, clearly thought so, but the evidence is inconclusive. He was most likely the man codenamed “Professor” in Soviet cables decrypted by the United States during its Venona program. But the Petrovs had never met him and were not able to implicate him, and despite a lengthy and detailed investigation he was not charged with betraying government secrets.

The accusations levelled against him in Australia eventually precipitated Rose’s move to East Germany. They also prompted him to identify as a victim and to exaggerate the importance ASIO assigned to him. In 1954 and 1955, his role was investigated by the royal commission set up by the Menzies government in response to revelations about a Soviet spy network in Australia. The commission “profoundly affected Rose’s life,” Monteath and Munt write. “It left psychological scars that never fully healed… Rose found it increasingly difficult to clear his mind of the possibility that he was being watched.”

Rose’s paranoia was matched by that of Australia’s spymaster, ASIO director-general Charles Spry. Spry was forever suspicious, and often his suspicions were unfounded. Somebody like Rose, who made no secret of his allegiance to the communist cause, confirmed Spry’s bifurcated view of the world. In fact, as Monteath and Munt observe, “It is tempting to view [Spry] as an inverted image of Fred Rose.”

While Rose’s involvement with Soviet intelligence was never proven, there is little doubt about the unsavoury role he would play as an informer for the East German state security agency Stasi, reporting on his colleagues, his students, his wife and his son Kim. In Rose’s view, it was all for a good cause. I wonder how much his unwavering commitment was influenced by the treatment he received, or thought he received, at the hands of a fiercely anti-communist Australian government.

Perhaps we could better understand Rose’s role as a Stasi informer, and his identity as a communist, if we compared his life in East Germany with those of three of his contemporaries. The first is Walter Kaufmann, a German Jew who arrived in Sydney in 1940 on the infamous Dunera. Like Rose, he became a communist in Australia and, again like Rose, he left Australia in the 1950s to live in the German Democratic Republic. Kaufmann seems never to have fully assimilated to life in the GDR; perhaps his coming-of-age in Australia proved as formative as his childhood in Germany. Then there was John Peet, an English journalist who moved to East Germany in 1950, became a propagandist for the communist regime and remained a communist until he died in 1988, but who was nevertheless able to be critical (and, to the best of my knowledge, never offered his services to the Stasi). And finally, there was Wolfgang Steinitz, the subject of an excellent biography by the German historian Annette Leo. Like Rose, he was a prominent anthropologist in East Germany who remained loyal to his communist ideals; unlike Rose, he grappled with the contradictions between these ideals and the socialist reality.

Fred Rose preceded his young colleague to Canberra in 1986, and I was introduced to him one day in the Coombs Building’s tea room. He seemed to blend in with the overwhelmingly white, male, middle-aged, cardigan-wearing crowd. I would have been too shy to engage somebody who was evidently holding court in conversation. But I also told myself that I had little interest in him. Having checked out his anthropological writings when I’d been asked to report on his protégé’s scholarship, I had found his observations about Aboriginal kinship on Groote Eylandt too dry and his ideas about anthropology antiquated.

Now I much regret that I didn’t get to know Fred Rose when I had the opportunity – if only because I am now curious about his status as an anthropologist. Was he “certainly a poor anthropologist, inadequately trained (in spite of his Cambridge degree) and intellectually arrested,” as the ANU’s inaugural chair in anthropology, Fred Nadel, thought in 1950? Or did he do “highly original work” and make contributions to kinship studies that “rate comparison” with the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, as another Australian-based anthropologist, Kenneth Maddock, wrote after Rose’s death?

In one respect at least, he appeared to be ahead of his time. In a book about Aboriginal Australia published in German in 1969, he wrote about the impact of European settlement on Aboriginal societies:

How have their views of the environment changed…? At the same time the interesting question arises: How have European settlers’ perceptions of Aborigines changed during the same period? The relations between Aborigines and white settlers have always been marked by the mutual influence they had on one another.

In the 1960s, most Australian anthropologists would have been baffled by Rose’s idea of exploring the influence Aboriginal people had on settler-colonial society.

Neither Rose’s reputation as an anthropologist nor his putative role as a spy for the Soviets would have warranted a full-length biography. Both in his professional life, and as a true believer in communism and the party that claimed to be best positioned to work towards it, Rose comes across as obsessive, conservative and somewhat dour – although I concede that my reading of Red Professor may have been shaped by memories of my fleeting encounter three decades earlier. It’s interesting that he emigrated to a communist country, but his role as a Westerner in Walter Ulbricht’s and Erich Honecker’s East Germany seems surprisingly unremarkable, particularly compared with the activities of his fellow countryman, John Peet.

That leaves one compartment of Rose’s life: his relationships with women. Monteath and Munt treat this aspect of his biography with kid gloves – or maybe they think it incidental to Rose’s persona as a researcher and writer, as a communist and as a spy. Often we have to rely on inferences, and very often we are invited to rely on Rose’s version of events. Occasionally comments about Rose’s sex life smack of a false sense of camaraderie (“Put colloquially, Rose was a dog inclined to stray from the porch”). Potentially, however, the contradictions between the personal and the political are what make Rose a fascinating biographical subject.

Take his early years in Australia, for example, when he was engaged to Edith Linde, a German woman he had met in England who would later join him in Darwin and eventually become his wife. According to Monteath and Munt (who rely on Rose’s draft memoirs), while working as a government meteorologist in Darwin, Rose became concerned that his ethnographic moonlighting could be interpreted as a cover for having sex with Aboriginal women. To “forestall any such accusations… he resolved to establish a relationship with a white woman” (who turns out to be the married manager of a local hotel, and “a keen golfer”).

Edith too was a communist. She would precede her husband to East Germany, where she too willingly worked for the Stasi and provided information about her husband, among others. Throughout most of Fred and Edith’s relationship, her allocated role was as mother of their children; other women in Rose’s life were lovers, former lovers and potential lovers.

There is nothing dour about Fred Rose’s relations with women. With his keen interest in the opposite sex, Rose presented himself as a likeable and lively character. Political scientist Coral Bell, who worked in the Department of External Affairs in Canberra in the second half of the 1940s, remembered Rose as “a great charmer who always seemed to be at everyone’s parties.”

And despite all his compartmentalising, his private life and his work as an anthropologist sometimes seemed to intersect. As he grew older, he was often more than twice the age of his lovers. At the same time, the aspects of Aboriginal society that seemed to hold particular interest for him were polygyny and gerontocracy, which he considered to be “reciprocally dependent.”

Biographers have to make do with the sources at their disposal. In this case, many of the sources were written by Rose himself. We know nothing about the Darwin woman whose role it was to provide proof that Rose’s relations with Indigenous women were purely professional. We know little about how Edith experienced the relationship with her husband. And, more’s the pity, Anna Wittmann’s side of the story is missing altogether. •

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Contrast this with Germany. Last weekend alone, around 15,500 displaced people crossed the border from Hungary. The German immigration service expects a total of 800,000 new asylum applications this year, and many of the new arrivals will be allowed to stay.

Those figures don’t put Germany in the same league as Turkey, Lebanon or Jordan, which are accommodating close to four million displaced Syrians between them. But 800,000 is a frighteningly large number, and taking in that many people will stretch the capacity of Germany’s local governments and welfare organisations. In comparison to other affluent countries, Germany can claim with some justice to be doing more than its fair share.

What explains the willingness of the German government, and also of the majority of Germans, to welcome such a large number of displaced people? The reception is all the more remarkable because it’s not too long since the arrival of a smaller number of asylum seekers triggered a public outpouring of hatred and eventually prompted the German parliament to water down the right to asylum enshrined in the national constitution, the so-called Basic Law.

This was during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of people fled to Germany from the former Yugoslavia. Refugees were frequently referred to as Scheinasylanten – “pseudo asylum seekers” – and told to go back where they came from. On at least two occasions, angry mobs tried to burn down hostels in which asylum seekers had been housed.

We shouldn’t idealise Germany’s reaction to the latest surge in numbers. Arson attacks and xenophobic demonstrations have occurred this time, too, particularly in the southeastern state of Saxony, and there has been much racist chatter online. But these responses have been dwarfed by an overwhelmingly welcoming attitude.

Germany has good reason to welcome refugees – particularly those who are young and have transferrable skills. It has an ageing population, and there are real concerns that the age pension system will become unsustainable. It also has a perennial image problem. Most recently, it has made itself unpopular among some of its European neighbours by vetoing Greek requests for debt relief. Opening its doors to refugees highlights Germany’s credentials as a good global citizen.

But pragmatic reasons alone can’t explain why most Germans seem relatively relaxed about the large number of non-German-speaking foreigners being allowed across the border. Nor do they explain why Germany’s response contrasts so sharply with Australia’s: after all, Australia, too, has the opportunity to make its neighbours forget, once and for all, about the White Australia policy by leading the way in providing security to forcibly displaced people in the Asia-Pacific region.

Anyone looking for the reasons for the differences – between then and now, and between Germany and Australia – could do worse than have a close look at a recent statement by chancellor Angela Merkel.

For months, while a small minority of xenophobes had become increasingly vocal and violent, Merkel did what she does best: she adopted a policy of wait-and-see. Or – to use a term that is likely to be voted the 2015 Jugendwort (youth slang word) – she merkelte, appearing to dither about an appropriate response both to the refugee crisis and to the racist reaction among some Germans.

Last week, she finally spoke up. And when she did, she didn’t mince words: “Es gibt keine Toleranz gegenüber denen, die die Würde anderer Menschen infrage stellen.” (There will be no tolerance towards those who question the dignity of others.)

The key word here is Würde, or dignity. It had also been used by interior minister Thomas de Maizière, who said that three principles ought to guide the approach to refugees: dignity, security for those seeking Germany’s protection, and decency.

Würde resonates powerfully in Germany. Article 1(1) of the Basic Law of 1949 begins with the words, “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar” (“Human dignity shall be inviolable”). This and the next eighteen articles of the Basic Law constitute a German bill of rights; for West Germans, in particular, the rights enshrined in the Basic Law have been an important part of what it means to be German.

Merkel’s and de Maizière’s emphasis on Würde signals that any debate about how to respond to the thousands of migrants arriving every day in Germany will not just be about Germans’ compassion or anger or fear but will also be about the rights of the new arrivals.

This is the vital difference between the current discussions in Germany and Australia, where an outpouring of public support for Syrian refugees didn’t happen until viewers and readers were shown the heart-wrenching image of a drowned boy on a Turkish beach.

The second sentence of the Basic Law’s Article 1(1) is also relevant: “To respect and protect [human dignity] shall be the duty of all state authority.” Merkel – as well as just about every other mainstream political leader in Germany – has been unambiguous: the government will come down hard on anybody who does not respect the human dignity of those seeking Germany’s protection.

German political leaders agree that in dealing with xenophobes there is no alternative to the zero tolerance approach. Not least, this consensus is the lesson drawn from the racist rhetoric and violence of the early 1990s. The genie of a populist xenophobia was briefly let out of the bottle when mainstream politicians empathised with Germans who said they were afraid of being swamped by foreigners. It took many years and the concerted efforts of the political establishment and civil society groups to put it back in.

Merkel is afraid the genie could be unleashed once more. She knows the importance of not kowtowing to the populist far right. She was asked how to respond to xenophobes, racist thugs and people regurgitating the ideologies of right-wing extremists. Did she think it was important to establish a dialogue with people on the far right? She replied:

We need to clearly distance ourselves. There can be no apologies… The key is not to show even the slightest bit of understanding. No biographical experience, nothing that happened in the past, nothing, absolutely nothing justifies [their] stance.

In the second half of the 1990s, Pauline Hanson claimed to speak for millions of disaffected Australians when she railed against asylum seekers and Indigenous people. Australia’s mainstream leaders tried to accommodate some of the views of her followers, and publicly empathised with those who feared that “boat people” would take their jobs or that their front gardens would become subject to native title claims.

Unlike in Germany, racist innuendo and the demonisation of asylum seekers arriving by boat still have a place in mainstream political debate in Australia. Politicians are still suggesting that seeking Australia’s protection is illegal. Shock jocks still have licence to make inflammatory statements directed at people on account of their religion or ethnicity.

As long as the Australian conversation about refugees and asylum seekers is guided by feelings rather than by a human rights framework, and as long as mainstream political leaders try to gain electoral mileage by condoning views and policies that don’t respect the dignity of all human beings, citizens and non-citizens, Australia’s response will differ starkly from that currently on show in Western Europe. •

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For Greece, the agreement is unlikely to improve the lives of ordinary citizens in the short to medium term. With a large proportion of government resources servicing and repaying the country’s debts, economic recovery is likely to be slow and incremental at best. Unemployment will remain high. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman put it in the New York Times: “No matter how willing a nation is to suffer, no matter how willing to run primary surpluses on a scale that is very rare in history, trying to pay off high debt through austerity without any kind of monetary offset is basically a recipe for debt deflation and failure.”

The Tsipras government was given just two days to draft a host of laws and have them debated and passed – and this was just one of the conditions imposed on a government that had been bullied and blackmailed into submission. Others include a new trust fund to allow Greece’s creditors to sell some of the country’s assets, including ports and airports, to repay its debt.

In return for agreeing to these conditions and passing the legislation demanded by eurozone leaders, all that Greece gains is an undertaking that its creditors will consider a new bailout package. Whether there will be negotiations for that package, which would probably last weeks, is not yet certain. First the parliaments of several eurozone member states must agree to talks about a third bailout. The German Bundestag will meet this Friday; its president Norbert Lammert had warned parliamentarians “not to swim too far out” when farewelling them at the beginning of the summer break.

On Monday, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis told Late Night Live’s Phillip Adams that the deal struck earlier that day amounted to a new Versailles, the peace treaty designed to punish and humiliate Germany after the end of the first world war. But Greece didn’t invade its European partners, and was not responsible for the deaths of scores of their citizens, so the comparison makes little sense. A more apt analogy came from Antje Vollmer, a former Bundestag vice-president and a widely respected Green Party politician. She recalled that after the Prague Spring was put down by Warsaw Pact forces in August 1968, Alexander Dubček and other Czech leaders were made to sign protocols denouncing their own reforms.

For Europe, the agreement reached early this week privileges an economic over a political solution, and conveys the message that the selfish interests of individual eurozone members trump the common good. The political project of a united Europe, built on solidarity rather than the presumed interests of individual countries (and banks and other corporations based there), may not survive this blow.

The humiliation of Greece is also a terrible result for Germany. Finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, with the tacit support of Angela Merkel, has destroyed Germany’s reputation (not entirely undeserved) as generous, environmentally progressive, socially innovative and largely benevolent. He has revived the image of the ugly German. Rather than collaborating with their French counterparts to lead Europe out of the current crisis, German government ministers joined the nay-sayers, led by the Netherlands and the Baltic states, and turned their backs on the idea of a Europe that transcends nationalistic interests.

Within Germany, Schäuble and Merkel provided licence for racist comments, including from prominent members of their own party. On Tuesday, Thomas Strobl – deputy leader of the Christian Democrats, party leader in the state of Baden-Württemberg and, incidentally, Schӓuble’s son-in-law – told reporters, “Der Grieche hat jetzt genug genervt” (“The Greeks have been getting on our nerves for too long”).

How did it come to this? The first grave errors were made a decade and a half ago. It was obvious then that the Greek government had manipulated official statistics in order to qualify for admission to the eurozone, and that its economy and political culture were marked by a level of corruption and clientelism that was incompatible with other members’ approaches.

It was also a mistake to insist that the eurozone would not be a transfer union, in which wealth would be shared between the comparatively rich countries in the north and the poor countries in the south. After all, countries such as Germany, Finland and the Netherlands were benefiting from the introduction of the euro because the value of the new currency was lower in relation to countries outside the zone, creating a huge bonus for national economies that relied heavily on exports.

After the global financial crisis hit, and with Greek insolvency looming, the institutions and governments responsible for the bailout packages of 2010 and 2012 decided to shield irresponsible lenders (namely, European banks) from the fallout. Rather than recognise that most of Greece’s debts had to be written off, they prescribed an austerity regime that all but crippled the Greek economy.

When the first two bailout packages proved insufficient, new negotiations became necessary – this time with the leftist Tsipras government. But by this stage the negotiators representing the two key players, Greece and Germany, were preoccupied with domestic agendas. Alexis Tsipras was concerned to keep his own MPs and party members on side and hold onto wider popular support. To rally public backing he announced a snap referendum at a point when a compromise solution seemed imminent. The wait for the outcome of that vote cost Greece the billions of euros of extra funds now needed to recapitalise its banks. After the referendum, to placate her own party members who were reluctant to support another bailout, German chancellor Angela Merkel insisted on measures that were far harsher.

Tsipras and Merkel both seemed to be oblivious to the fact that the other was performing for a domestic audience. Tsipras failed to recognise that Merkel felt she couldn’t back debt relief without losing support at home, and Merkel seemed personally affronted when Tsipras called the referendum and campaigned for a “no” vote.

The resulting personal animosities poisoned the negotiations. Schӓuble and some of his Eurogroup colleagues were incensed by the approach taken by the Greek negotiators; their insistence on humiliating and punitive conditions seemed informed by vengefulness.

Where to now? Significant debt relief is vital. While the eurozone leaders (with the exception of France’s François Hollande, Italy’s Matteo Renzi, and Nicos Anastasiades of Cyprus) have ruled out this option, the International Monetary Fund has already said that a solution without a significant “haircut” for Greece’s creditors is unrealistic.

History is full of examples of countries defaulting on their loans, receiving debt relief, and then returning to prosperity – and the best example of all is provided by postwar West Germany. In 1953, the Adenauer government negotiated a deal with its Western creditors, including Greece, which resulted in a very significant reduction of German debts and an extension of the grace period for their eventual repayment. As far back as three years ago, Tsipras told members of the European parliament that the 1953 deal should be the blueprint for a similar arrangement with Greece. He invoked it again in his speech in the Greek parliament on Thursday morning, prompting applause not just from members of his own party.

Europe’s leaders would do well to support Tsipras, irrespective of the ideological differences they have with him and his party. Unlike previous Greek prime ministers, who kowtowed when confronted with demands by Greece’s creditors and who lost the respect of most Greeks, Tsipras may yet be able to promote a compromise solution that is acceptable to the peoples of Europe and allows the Greek economy to recover.

Finally, Germany, more so than any other European country, must come to Greece’s rescue, possibly through bilateral assistance. This might seem unrealistic in the light of Schäuble’s and Merkel’s pettiness and lack of leadership over the past week, and of vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel’s hostility. (The latter prompted one German commentator to say that Gabriel had lost all credibility as an alternative to Merkel.) But such assistance is not out of the question, particularly given the developments of the past week and their toxic fallout for Germany.

The vast majority of Germans still support the political project of a united Europe. A party that advocates Euroscepticism has never managed to gain more than the 5 per cent of votes nationally that are required for representation in the Bundestag. And, according to a recent poll, most Germans empathise with the Greeks, supported Tsipras’s decision to hold a referendum and want Greece to remain in the eurozone. While Germany’s largest tabloid, Bild, has advocated a Grexit, the majority of published opinion has been critical, if not scathing, of the hard line taken by the German government, particularly in the last few days.

Germans may also be open to the concept of a transfer union. After all, they have a lot of experience with such a union. Since 1990, there has been a significant transfer of wealth from West Germany to the new Lӓnder (which previously made up the German Democratic Republic). Many West Germans were initially reluctant to agree to such transfers, but the long-term benefits for both sides soon became apparent. (Few Germans, however, would have fond memories of the entity the proposed Greek trust fund appears to be modelled on, the Treuhandanstalt, which administered and tried to sell off former state-owned enterprises in East Germany.)

Similarly, the European Union has transferred wealth through its system of grants for disadvantaged regions in Europe. For decades Germany has been the main donor, without too much adverse public reaction in Germany.

Merkel does favour austerity measures. But that’s not because she is beholden to a neoliberal school of thought. A Christian Democrat by name, she is a Social Democrat by persuasion. Unlike in Britain, neoliberalism was never particularly popular in Germany, and Merkel and her predecessors have been wary of implementing policies that could be seen to imitate those of Reagan and Thatcher. If German politicians advocate austerity, it is because they fear inflation. This is not only because of its anticipated impact on the German economy; the hyperinflation Germany experienced in the 1920s wiped out savings and traumatised those who lived through it, leaving the fear of inflation deeply rooted in German collective memory.

Germany’s leaders undo the damage done by Merkel and, in particular, Schäuble, by entering into negotiations about repaying the money owed to Greece as a result of financial transfers during the German occupation, which I discussed in a previous Inside Story essay. These would be loan repayments rather than reparations, but reparations for the suffering Greece endured at the hands of Nazi Germany could also come into the picture.

Again, this might seem farfetched. Aren’t the events of the second world war now too far in the past to warrant reparation payments? Well, it was only last week that Germany officially recognised for the first time that the murder of thousands of Herero and Nama people of southwest Africa between 1904 and 1908 amounted to genocide. Reparations to Namibia, which seemed out of the question just months ago, now seem a distinct possibility.

And while Germany may not want to call bilateral assistance to Greece “reparations” because it would then invite other Nazi-occupied countries to lodge claims, such a decision could recognise the special relationship between Germany and Greece. Many Germans have little difficulty acknowledging this relationship, and might appreciate it if Merkel at last extends a helping hand to a government that can’t be held responsible for Greece’s current predicament.

The damage is done – to Greece, to the idea of a solidary Europe, and to the reputation of Germany. The next weeks and months will show whether some of it can be undone. The ball is in Angela Merkel’s court. •

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In Australia, news of the pogrom strengthened the position of organisations arguing for a liberalisation of the country’s immigration policy. In fact, support for the admission of Jewish refugees now came from an unexpected quarter: on 18 November the NSW Trades and Labour Council, which had traditionally opposed immigration, passed a resolution asking the government to accept Jewish refugees and, if necessary, to support them financially.

From London, Australia’s high commissioner, former prime minister Stanley Bruce, told the government on 21 November that “strong feeling is rapidly developing” that an unprecedented international effort was required to deal with Jewish refugees from Germany, and that Australia might find itself in an “embarrassing situation” if it did not make a statement regarding its approach. He was not so much guided by humanitarian considerations as by concerns about Australia’s reputation, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. He suggested that Australia announce a quota of 30,000 refugees over three years.

Cabinet agreed to Bruce’s proposal in principle but halved the figure. On 1 December interior minister John McEwen announced the new policy (which had been approved by cabinet the previous day) in parliament. He said that Australia would admit up to 15,000 refugees from Europe over three years. “The government feels that, if a solution of this problem is to be found, countries must be prepared to receive a proportion of those to be expatriated, in relation to the capacity of the countries to assimilate them,” he explained.

But McEwen’s announcement came with two important provisos. The first was that refugee policy was not to trump Australia’s broader immigration policy:

Although the refugee problem is one quite apart from the general question of immigration, in that it deals with the specific question of the amelioration of the conditions of oppressed people, at the same time it is essential that it should be considered in relation to the general question of immigration so far as the Commonwealth is concerned.

The second proviso was that the specific circumstances of applicants were not to be taken into account: “Desperate as is the need of many of those unfortunate people, it is not the intention of the government to issue permits for entry influenced by the necessity of individual cases.”

There was some grumbling among McEwen’s colleagues and in the press, but in federal parliament the new policy had bipartisan support, although it was obvious that the government and the opposition agreed to the admission of refugees for different reasons; in response to the minister’s announcement, opposition leader John Curtin declared: “Australia is a place where lovers of liberty should be welcome.”

While McEwen made Australia’s quota public, he did not provide any detail about its likely composition; most importantly, he did not reveal that the government had also agreed to limit the number of Jewish immigrants accepted under the quota to 4000 per year, and that it had decided that the quota “may be exceeded in admitting approved Aryans.”

Bruce was disappointed by the government’s decision to halve the numbers suggested by him, but thought 15,000 was a “respectable” figure. The announcement received a positive response in London, as Bruce had intended. The Times referred to a “characteristically generous contribution” and opined in an editorial that “[t]he Commonwealth government have certainly done their full share.” According to the paper, “A great part of their wide territory is uninhabitable; their chief cities are crowded, and the majority of the immigrants are unlikely to be acquainted with agriculture or stock­raising.” In a similar vein, the Observer wrote that the decision was a “striking illustration of how noble compassion can circle the globe.”

Both in Australia and overseas the announcement was read as an indication that Australia was now making a significant contribution to alleviating the refugee crisis caused by Nazi Germany’s racial policies. Observers did not draw attention to the policy’s double­edged nature, which allowed for the admission of 15,000 refugees but also effectively restricted the number of refugees entering Australia by setting an upper limit on the number of applications that would be approved from people identified as refugees, irrespective of how many of them met all of Australia’s criteria.

After the war, the newly formed immigration department established that 1556 refugees had arrived in 1938, and 5080 the following year. These figures are an underestimate because the government statistics only captured the number of migrants entering Australia who were identified as refugees. Given that the chances of applicants being issued with landing permits were greater if they managed to hide their precarious circumstances, there were probably scores of people from Central Europe who entered Australia disguised as “ordinary” migrants. Others ostensibly arrived as tourists.

Taking into account the overall migrant arrivals from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland between 1933 and 1939, I estimate the number of refugees admitted by Australia in the 1930s to be closer to 10,000. That number is significant when compared to Australia’s intake of non­British migrants in the aftermath of the Great Depression, but small when considered in the context of the size of the refugee problem in Europe.

In comparison with other countries, Australia was not particularly miserly; in fact, it was a little more generous than others. New Zealand, whose population at the time was slightly less than a quarter of Australia’s, admitted only about 1100 refugees from Europe. The Canadian government only let in refugees with farming credentials, which excluded almost all Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria; between 1933 and 1945, Canada admitted fewer than 5000 Jewish refugees.

Australia was reluctant to admit Jewish refugees, and opposed to the immigration of Jewish refugees from countries other than Austria and Germany. In that, too, it was not alone; in fact, Australia’s reservations were mild in comparison to those of Canada. According to the historian Paul Bartrop, Canada’s policy was partly shaped by an “anti-Semitic director of immigration, a disinterested minister [and] an indifferent prime minister with anti­Jewish leanings.”

It is often assumed that a government’s refugee policy comprises two elements: its approach towards the alleviation of refugee crises by providing financial or material assistance (for example, by funding emergency relief administered by the Red Cross), and its approach towards the resettlement of refugees. It is easy to lose sight of another option governments might have: namely, to tackle refugee problems at their source.

Thus, in recent years the Australian government, which has tried to deter Tamils from attempting to seek asylum in Australia and has collaborated with the Sri Lankan government to prevent prospective asylum seekers from leaving Sri Lanka by boat, could have instead focused its efforts on persuading the government in Colombo to afford ethnic Tamils the same rights, privileges and recognition that are enjoyed by ethnic Singhalese. Yet successive Australian governments have often appeared to condone human rights violations in Sri Lanka, perhaps in the interest of maintaining a friendly relationship with their Sri Lankan counterparts.

Australia’s response to the German refugee crisis might also be evaluated in this light. Particularly after the pogroms of November 1938, the Australian government received many letters from individuals and organisations demanding that something be done to make Nazi Germany desist from persecuting Jews. The government’s standard reply was that “the Commonwealth government considers that no good purpose would be served were a formal protest to be made to the German government in connection with the treatment of Jews in Germany.” In that respect, too, Australia was in good company; other governments were also most reluctant to respond in ways that could be seen as interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation.

The suggestion that such interference might be necessary, however, was widely discussed. In December 1935 James G. McDonald, the League of Nations high commissioner for refugees, resigned from his position, having become increasingly frustrated by the constraints within which he had to operate. He used a carefully crafted letter of resignation to demand that the root causes of the forced displacement of Jews from Germany be addressed.

The Australian government’s approach ought to be seen also in the context of the overall Australian response to the European refugee crisis. Refugees had their lobbyists, but these did not wield much influence and represented only a small minority of Australians. As the Hungarian refugee Emery Barcs (who migrated to Australia in 1939 after the introduction of anti­Semitic racial laws in his native Hungary) observed, the anti­refugee sentiment was pervasive, even though Australians displayed “little overt hostility” towards refugees. The newspapers – with one notable exception, the Sydney Morning Herald – were largely unenthusiastic about the admittance of refugees.

Some key professional organisations were opposed either to letting European refugees in or to letting them use their qualifications and skills. The Musicians’ Union of Australia, for example, opposed the admission of refugees outright. Their secretary conceded that Australia might benefit from the immigration of a select number of orchestral musicians, but declared that his union only approved of musicians from Britain. In a recent book, Kay Dreyfus has told the story of the Weintraub Syncopators, who became famous as the on­stage band in the 1930 von Sternberg film The Blue Angel, and who arrived in Australia in 1937. All bar one were Jewish, and were therefore not able to return to Germany, where most of them had grown up. According to Dreyfus, the Musicians’ Union fought a long and bitter battle to prevent the Weintraubs from securing employment in Australia or even becoming permanent residents.

The Australian Dental Association, on the other hand, did not object to the immigration of European refugees, but required German and Austrian dentists to enrol in the third year of a four­year dentistry degree. A spokesman for the association justified this measure by saying that he had been “amazed at the low standard of dentistry required in Germany.” One of Vienna’s leading dental surgeons, who practised his profession without registration, commented dryly, “I have neither the time nor the money to attend their silly school, which is fifty years behind the times, anyway.”

Self­interest drove some Australians to welcome the arrival of refugees. In January 1939 the general secretary of the United Graziers’ Association of Queensland wrote to the government “to ascertain what percentage of female domestics would be amongst these refugees and whether any would be available for country districts in Queensland to serve in the capacity of domestic servants.” Such exceptions aside, the general public and the press were overwhelmingly not in favour of the admission of sizeable numbers of refugees, particularly if they were Jewish. Frequently, the papers reported xenophobic or anti­Semitic views without dismissing them as inappropriate.

Some political leaders, when complaining about the admission of Jewish refugees, employed the same kind of language that German Nazis used. For example, in 1939 Frank Clarke, president of the Victorian Legislative Council and a former state government minister, referred to Jewish refugees as “weedy East Europeans” and “slinking, ratfaced men under five feet in height.” Still, public sentiment before the outbreak of the war never resembled anti­alien hysteria; most Australians simply did not care.

In 1938 the government had tried to impose limits on the number of Jewish refugees arriving in Australia by the same ship. In April it had allocated 500 places for Jewish immigrants to the Australian Jewish Welfare Society, “with the proviso that no more than twenty sponsored cases arrive on any one ship.” Also that year, the government advised German travel agents not to accept more than twenty bookings per ship from refugees, but it knew it could not enforce this policy.

The attempt to restrict numbers was motivated not so much by the government’s unwillingness to accommodate refugees as by the expectation that mass arrivals would prompt a public backlash: “When large numbers arrive by boat… Press immediately gives prominence to the fact and strong representations for curtailment of issue of permits are made,” the Prime Minister’s Department advised the office of the Australian high commissioner in London in November 1938. “It would be in the interests of the Associations connected with the refugees that they do everything possible to prevent large numbers arriving by one boat.”

As the number of refugees issued with landing permits increased in 1938, it was obvious that passenger ships arriving from Europe would often carry far more than twenty people fleeing Germany and Austria. A ship with a particularly large contingent of refugees on board was the mail liner Strathmore, which docked in Fremantle on 16 May 1939. The Perth Daily Mail noted that the ship brought “320 aliens,” many of them “fleeing refugees,” to Australia, and singled out three of them on account of their skills or fame. Other papers were more specific, providing information about the number of Jews among the aliens. In a later edition, the Daily Mail published a feature article about Nazi policy and fashion in Germany, which drew on information provided by one of the refugee passengers. In other newspaper articles, individual refugees were featured among other, British or Australian, passengers.

The overwhelmingly positive response gave way to a more ambivalent attitude when, a few days after the ship’s arrival, eight of the Strathmore’s Australian passengers wrote an open letter in which they complained about the refugees on board the ship. They claimed their encounters during the voyage had made them revise their “sympathetically inclined views towards European refugees.” According to the letter, the refugee passengers were able “to spend extravagantly upon luxuries for themselves,” which was inconsistent “with their poverty­pleading appeals,” most of them had no intention of “becoming Australians at heart,” and they were “definitely not the type of citizen Australia requires.”

This letter was reported without comment in several newspapers, but the response to these allegations varied. They prompted at least one letter to the editor whose author, another Australian Strathmore passenger, refuted them, and the Sydney Sun, rather than reporting them, published a detailed and sympathetic article about one of the refugees on board the Strathmore, who expressed his joy at having arrived in Australia.

It is important to keep the overall response to the ship’s arrival in perspective. The allegations neither triggered nor accompanied a broader debate about the admission of European refugees to Australia. Compared to the controversies prompted by the arrival of “boat people” in 2001 and between 2008 and 2013, public discussions about the arrival of European refugees in the late 1930s were remarkably low­key. They also paled in comparison to the public outcry that accompanied the arrival of Jewish Holocaust survivors in late 1946 and early 1947.

After the war, the Strathmore once again plied the route between Britain and Australia. With shipping capacity limited, Australian servicemen’s war brides and their children were among those given scarce berths.

In October 1946 it was widely reported that the vessel, then on its way to Australia, was delivering more of the long­awaited British war brides. “Five servicemen’s wives and five children and thirty-five fiancées of servicemen will disembark at Melbourne,” the Argus noted ten days before the ship’s expected arrival in Fremantle, its first port of call in Australia. “Record batch of fiancées,” the Adelaide News announced in a headline, and provided the names of all seventeen Adelaide­bound British fiancées on board.

After the Strathmore had disembarked passengers at Fremantle and Melbourne and docked in Sydney, newspapers around the country reported that some of the ship’s Australian passengers were upset about the fact that it had also brought about 200 migrants, supposedly from Eastern Europe, to Australia.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, many of these migrants “were women who wore peasant­type shawls draped about their heads. Others wore jackets gaily decked with patterns worked in silver wire.” Not only did their dress sense offend some of the Australian passengers, but these non­British migrants also reportedly spat on the decks, failed to properly dispose of fruit peelings, “hung their washing across the promenades” and spoke seventeen different languages, including Hebrew, “Egyptian,” “Czechoslovakian,” German and “Austrian.” According to their critics, the ship should not have carried any non­British passengers in the first place.

One of the Australian passengers, a Melbourne car importer, was quoted as saying, “It staggers me that Australia should have to rely for its population on the type of people that this ship brought.” He believed that “70,000 Australian and British people were on the waiting list for the earliest possible passages to Australia,” but that they had been denied accommodation on the ship.

According to subsequent reports, the decision to allocate 200 places to refugees embarking at Port Said had been made by the Australian high commission in London. Some newspaper articles suggested that some or all of the passengers taken on board in Egypt were Jewish. The Goulburn Evening Post, for example, said the fingerprinting of “200 alien Jews” was responsible for delays in the disembarkation of British passengers in Sydney. Most of the reports, however, did not specifically mention whether any of the passengers were Jewish – but many readers would have equated non-­British European immigrants with Jewish refugees.

In Sydney and Melbourne a lively debate ensued on the letters pages, with recent European immigrants defending the refugee arrivals and ridiculing their critics. But elsewhere in Australia the reports were not contested. Immigration minister Arthur Calwell remained silent until two weeks after the papers had carried reports of “Austrian”-speaking and “Jewish”-speaking aliens, when his nemesis, former NSW premier Jack Lang, raised the matter in the House of Representatives. Calwell explained that the disembarkation of 151 passengers at Port Said had made it possible for the Strathmore to take extra passengers on board. He also claimed that all non-Australian passengers had been sponsored by close relatives in Australia, that 180 of them were Greek, and that they had all waited a long time for an opportunity to make the journey to Australia.

Calwell also anticipated a line of argument he would use repeatedly after the arrival of the first displaced persons, or DPs as they were known, in late 1947: “We shall have to get aliens as well as British subjects to come here if we are to populate the country.” But he also took a swipe at the tone of the criticism: “The prevailing anti-alienism is a form of racial prejudice which is almost indistinguishable from Nazi-ism.”

The issue was kept alive by Lang and by reports in the papers. On 16 November the secretary of the Air Force Association claimed to know that 17,000 aliens had already been granted landing permits, and that “a large number was packed ready to leave Port Said.” In parliament, Henry “Jo” Gullett accused the government of having reserved berths on the Strathmore for Jewish passengers at the expense of the wives and children of ex-servicemen. “We are not compelled to accept the unwanted of the world at the dictate of the United Nations or any one else,” he said, anticipating a line of argument used decades later against Australia’s acceptance of asylum seekers arriving by boat.

Gullett’s attempt to justify why Australia shouldn’t admit Jewish immigrants also echoed the language of the Nazis: “Neither should Australia be the dumping ground for people whom Europe itself, in the course of 2000 years, has not been able to absorb.” He claimed not to be anti-Semitic, and that his opposition to Jewish immigration was informed by the behaviour of refugees who had been admitted to Australia immediately before or after the second world war. They “have been notorious exploiters of labour… have cornered houses, and evaded income tax,” he said.

Outside parliament, Lang had an ally in Ken Bolton, the NSW state president of the Returned Services League, who claimed that the postwar refugee migrants were “German Jews of the same ilk as those who came before,” and that they would work for their own, rather than Australia’s, benefit. He claimed his opposition to “Australia being flooded with undesirable immigrants” was not informed by racial prejudice; he merely objected to “those who are past their prime of life and steeped in the traditions of a decadent old world.”

Three weeks after the exchange between Lang and Calwell in the House of Representatives, parliament again debated the issue. This time Calwell provided very different information about the composition and provenance of the Strathmore’s passengers. He said that “not all of them are of the Jewish faith” – which confirmed, rather than contradicted, the suspicion that the passengers embarked at Port Said included many refugees.

The left-wing independent Doris Blackburn had initially seconded Lang’s request that the government make the papers related to the Strathmore’s passengers public. Now she distanced herself from Lang’s anti-alienism, saying that some of the passengers “are the remnants of scattered families, many members of which did not escape the bestial attacks of Nazi-ism, and who are coming here in an effort to forget the horrible past,” and that some had been imprisoned in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Calwell also tried to refute claims that a large number of British war brides were still waiting to secure a berth on an Australia-bound ship: he pointed out that non-British immigrants were not allowed to travel to Australia from British ports, that 3500 wives of Australian servicemen had already arrived, and that the 137 women still in Britain had decided to postpone their departure.

Similar information had already been provided in the press, but it had failed to silence allegations that refugee migrants were taking away places from the British wives, fiancées and children of Australian servicemen. The idea that refugees who were arriving in Australia under their own steam, as it were, were putting themselves at the head of the queue and taking away places from other, more deserving, prospective immigrants, including refugees selected for resettlement off-shore, would resurface again and again. •

This is an edited extract from Across the Seas – Australia’s Response to Refugees: A History by Klaus Neumann, published by Black Inc. Books. It was launched in Melbourne by David Manne in June and will be launched in Sydney by Andrew Riemer on Wednesday 8 July.

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In Libya alone, tens of thousands of people are believed to be waiting for an opportunity to make the dangerous voyage to Europe. Some estimates put the number at one million – but as the University of Queensland’s Phil Orchard has pointed out, we should be wary of figures like these. What we know for certain is that some 31,500 “boat people” arrived in Italy in the first three-and-a-half months of 2015. Another 1500 drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea.

About 80,000 irregular migrants are accommodated in Italy’s reception centres, with thousands of others living in the community. But many of those reaching Italy – or Greece, for that matter – are intent on lodging their claim for asylum in countries further to the north. Under the present EU arrangements, though, someone who arrives by boat in Italy but applies for asylum in Germany, for instance, will be sent back to Italy, which then has to deal with the asylum claim.

At least, that’s how the system is meant to work. But the Italians have been known to look the other way when migrants refuse to be fingerprinted after disembarking; and without fingerprints there is no way to prove where somebody entered Europe. And even if it’s certain that an asylum seeker entered Europe via Italy, he or she won’t necessarily be sent back there. Last month, the Council of Aliens Law Litigation, a Belgian administrative court, ruled in favour of two asylum seekers who claimed that they shouldn’t be sent back to Italy because their applications would not be handled correctly there.

A similar European Court of Human Rights ruling four years ago, in a case involving an asylum seeker sent back to Greece from Belgium, prompted several EU governments to suspend deportations of asylum seekers to Greece. Germany renewed its moratorium on such deportations four months ago because, as interior minister Thomas de Maizière told a Bundestag parliamentary committee, “The treatment of asylum seekers [in Greece] does not always meet European standards.”

The ability to return asylum seekers to where they first landed matters for Germany in particular, which currently hosts many of the irregular migrants arriving via the Mediterranean. Last year, it received 202,834 applications for asylum. A few days ago, the Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, the government’s refugee agency, predicted that this year’s numbers will be twice as large. (By comparison, in the 2012–13 financial year, at the height of the influx of asylum seekers to our shores, Australia received a total of 26,427 applications for a protection visa, 18,119 of them from people who had arrived by boat.) On Friday, in an emergency meeting chaired by Angela Merkel, de Maizière promised the German state premiers that the federal government would fund an extra 2000 positions for the agency assessing asylum seeker claims, 750 of them in this financial year.

Four days after a migrant boat capsized on 19 April, killing more than 800 of those on board, the European Union convened a special meeting of the European Council, which brings together the heads of all EU governments. In a statement released afterwards, the Council said that the European Union “will mobilise all efforts at its disposal to prevent further loss of life at sea and to tackle the root causes of the human emergency we face.” Its “immediate priority,” the Council emphasised, “is to prevent more people from dying at sea.”

Fewer people died last year, when Italy used its navy to scour the waters south of Italy for migrant vessels in distress. Between October 2013 and October 2014, according to Italian Ministry of Defence statistics, the navy rescued a total of 150,810 people in 421 operations. The Italian government called this undertaking Operation Mare Nostrum (“our sea”) after the name given to the Mediterranean at the time of the Roman Empire, which was used again last century, perhaps more significantly, by Mussolini and the Italian fascists. But even such unsubtle references to a period of Italian geopolitical grandezza did not convince Italians to support the extension of the costly one-year operation, and so, in October last year, search and rescue operations again became the responsibility of individual European and North African countries and of the European Union. The latter, in an effort to replace Operation Mare Nostrum, established Operation Triton, a comparatively poorly resourced effort led by the EU border control agency Frontex.

The EU heads of government meeting on 23 April decided to triple the resources allocated to Triton and Poseidon (another Frontex operation in the Aegean Sea). But even that increase doesn’t match the resources allocated by the Italians to Operation Mare Nostrum, and is not enough to mount comprehensive search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean. And apart from the extra funds, the European Council had little to show: it promised to step up its fight against trafficking, to “tackle the cause of illegal immigration” and “set up a new return program for the rapid return of illegal migrants from frontline member states,” and to provide more assistance to the EU countries that were receiving most of the irregular migrants.

The Council’s announcement prompted a joint response from António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Peter Sutherland, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for International Migration and Development, and the International Organization for Migration’s William Swing. They welcomed some of the proposed measures as an “important first step” but argued that these did not go far enough. They were also critical of what they perceived to be the Council’s prioritising of border security over human security. “Law enforcement measures,” they said, “must be accompanied by efforts aimed at reducing the need for migrants and refugees to turn to smugglers in the first place.”

Some of the NGOs advocating for refugees and other irregular migrants were far less diplomatic. The European Council on Refugees and Exiles, or ECRE, concluded that “European leaders are shutting their eyes and refuse to see the refugee crises raging in our neighbourhood.” It was particularly critical of the European Union’s focus on people smuggling, arguing that it refuses “to see that refugees use smugglers in desperation, because they have no other option and barely have any legal means to reach safety.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Katie Hopkins, who shot to fame as a contestant in a British reality television show, went on to poll 0.6 per cent of the votes as an independent in the 2009 European elections, and has since become a columnist for the London Sun, likened irregular migrants trying to reach Europe to cockroaches. “They might look a bit ‘Bob Geldof’s Ethiopia circa 1984,’” she wrote, “but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb. They are survivors.” For Hopkins, there was a proven recipe to deal with such survivors:

It’s time to get Australian. Australians are like British people but with balls of steel, can-do brains, tiny hearts and whacking great gunships. Their approach to migrant boats is the sort of approach we need in the Med. They threaten them with violence until they bugger off, throwing cans of Castlemaine in an Aussie version of sharia stoning. And their approach is working. Migrant boats have halved in number since Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott got tough… Bring on the gunships, force migrants back to their shores and burn the boats.

Even the architects of Australia’s deterrence policies would have cringed when they read Hopkins’s diatribe. But that did not stop them from recommending that Europe emulate Australia’s approach. In the Australian two weeks ago, retired major-general Jim Molan poured scorn on the “incompetent policy reaction by European authorities.” Having played a key role in designing and implementing Australia’s current policies, Molan offered this advice:

Europe needs to make a very big decision and to make it soon. If it does not want to control its borders then it should establish a sea bridge across the Mediterranean, let everyone in who wants to come, and not let these people die… European governments should realise that border control can be done and start showing a bit of leadership. It may involve some tough policy from European governments who appear weak on many issues, but borders can be controlled, they can be controlled to the benefit of all, and there is a moral obligation to control them.

And who better to counsel the likes of Angela Merkel and François Hollande than prime minister Tony Abbott? “Plainly, there is a terrible, terrible tragedy unfolding in the Mediterranean right now,” he told journalists ahead of the 23 April meeting of the European Council. “I suppose we must grieve for the loss but at the same time we must resolve to stop this terrible problem and the only way you can stop the deaths is to stop the people smuggling trade. The only way you can stop the deaths is in fact to stop the boats.”

For Australia, the combination of turning back, handing over, mandatory detention and extraterritorial processing has proven to be an immensely costly yet deceptively neat solution. But as the evidence from the hellholes of Nauru and Manus, and from countries of origin such as Sri Lanka and transit countries such as Indonesia, shows, these policies have not offered a solution for people seeking the protection of governments other than their own. And while Operation Sovereign Borders may have saved the lives of people who would have otherwise drowned in an attempt to reach Australia by boat, Australia’s policies simply shifted the problem out of sight: either forcing people in search of protection to embark on other, no less risky, journeys, or compelling them to stay where they are and continue to be exposed to persecution. As tempting as it may be for Australia to try exporting $200,000 disposable life-boats to Europe for use in the Mediterranean Sea, it is unlikely at this stage that the European Union would want to emulate the Abbott government’s approach.

Not that the Europeans would need to study the Australian case to understand why the answer doesn’t lie simply in stopping the boats (and turning them back, or handing their passengers over to the authorities of another country without properly assessing their protection claims). After all, this was the approach Italy adopted under Silvio Berlusconi. Irregular migrants were pushed back towards Libya under a policy of respingimenti, made possible after the Italian government signed an agreement with the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Three years ago, the European Court of Human Rights condemned Italy’s policy in a ruling on the treatment of a group of Somali and Eritrean asylum seekers who had been intercepted by the Italian coastguard in May 2009, transferred onto an Italian naval vessel, and then handed over to the Libyan authorities. In 2013, the Italian government launched Operation Mare Nostrum not least because respingimenti had been utterly discredited.

What, then, is the solution to the current crisis in the Mediterranean? In April ECRE put forward a ten-point plan. Among other things, it calls for a much-expanded search and rescue operation (of at least the size of Operation Mare Nostrum); an increase in the number of refugees resettled in Europe; an opportunity for refugees to apply for protection at EU embassies; the facilitation of family reunion; an expansion of “legal channels for migration beyond highly skilled workers”; voluntary return programs; “genuine solidarity” with the member countries where asylum seekers disembark; and the development of a “comprehensive cooperation agenda with countries of origin and transit to build resilient protection systems in close cooperation with UNHCR, enhance efforts to address root causes of refugee flight and support migration and mobility through development cooperation.”

In essence – and much like the approach agreed on by the European Union’s heads of government – this is an attempt to manage the current crisis. Neither plan offers a sustainable, long-term solution. That’s not because responses propagated by NGOs are as fraught as those implemented by the European Union through Frontex, but because there will be no solution to a problem caused by the lack of human security in much of the Middle East and Africa, or by blatant global inequality, until these causes no longer loom large. Policy responses that pretend to be solutions, including Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders, only appear successful because their promoters have managed to hide some of their human costs.

While there seems to be little prospect of successfully tackling the root causes of irregular migration in the short to medium term, it is crucially important to respond effectively to the current crisis in the Mediterranean. While ECRE’s proposals are a step in the right direction, the European Union’s action plan is disappointing, not least because it naively assumes that it is possible to curb mobility beyond Europe’s borders.

Both ECRE and the EU leaders realise that it is important for EU members to take equal shares of the burden created by the spontaneous arrival of hundreds of thousands of irregular migrants. Angela Merkel has gone so far as to say that Dublin III, the EU regulation that makes the countries of arrival responsible for asylum seekers, needs to be scrapped.

While the European Union and ECRE demand a greater commitment to solidarity, they mean solidarity between member states. Refugee lawyers Mariagiulia Giuffré and Cathryn Costello have noted that the EU statement does not refer to solidarity with refugees. It is important to make that point. But solidarity between European nations (say, Britain vis-à-vis Malta) does not prevent other forms of solidarity. In fact, it might be that in Europe a broader notion of solidarity – with refugees fleeing persecution and with irregular migrants from war-torn or impoverished countries – will be strengthened by an increased emphasis on solidarity among EU member states.

In what was presumably a gesture of intra-European solidarity, German defence minister Ursula von der Leyen has ordered a navy frigate and a supply ship to be redeployed in the Mediterranean to assist the search-and-rescue effort. So far, they have rescued 419 men, women and children in three separate operations. France and Britain have also sent ships to the Mediterranean. Last week, the Royal Navy’s HMS Bulwark plucked 110 migrants from a sinking dinghy, and the Commandant Birot, a French patrol boat, rescued another 217 people off the coast of Libya.

These deployments have not been part of the package agreed to by the European Council in April. Their significance is probably best understood by recalling an incident that happened four years ago in the same waters in which European frigates and patrol boats are now searching for vessels in distress. According to a Guardian investigation, a boat carrying seventy-two irregular migrants had left Tripoli for the Italian island of Lampedusa, run into trouble, and drifted for sixteen days in open waters. All but eleven of its passengers died. Four or five days into its journey, when it had long run out of fuel, the boat encountered an aircraft carrier the Guardian identified as the French ship Charles de Gaulle. “According to survivors,” the newspaper reported, “two jets took off from the ship and flew low over the boat while the migrants stood on deck holding the two starving babies aloft.”

The German government’s decision to dispatch two navy ships to the Mediterranean was designed to send a message not only to the Italian government but also to a domestic audience uncomfortable with the European Union’s half-hearted approach. Support in Germany for an Operation Mare Nostrum mark II extends into the government’s ranks. Two weeks ago, the conservative Christian Social Union’s Gerd Müller, who has responsibility for Germany’s foreign aid in Merkel’s cabinet, demanded an immediate recommencement of Mare Nostrum. In countries like Germany, the Italian operation captured the imagination because it epitomised solidarity – with irregular migrants literally dying to reach Europe.

Some have associated that latter kind of solidarity with the very idea of Europe. They include the Pope, who called for a “Europe which cares for, defends and protects man, every man and woman” in a speech to the European parliament last year. He has, of course, been at the forefront of those demanding that solidarity – rather than pity – should be extended to irregular migrants. He strikes a chord with significant sections of “Europe” when he tries to link a European cultural identity with Europe’s response to migrants.

The exhortation “to get Australian” clearly hasn’t convinced admiral Donato Marzano, who heads the Italian navy, either. “I am a sailor who has spent twenty years on boats. If I find a boat adrift, I’m sorry, but I don’t turn away,” he said last week after being asked what he thought about Australia’s approach. “I intervene to help people at sea. I don’t know if this reflects my Italian culture but I do know it is law.”

As long as the boats keep coming, though, the temptation to look towards Australia will remain, particularly for populists in search of votes. It won’t be possible to counter that assertion simply by pulling an alternative quick-fix out of the hat. The challenge is to convince European governments and civil society that there is no easy solution.

And if, for the time being, people in Europe advance a more humane approach to irregular migrants because they believe that solidarity is intrinsically European (or Italian, for that matter), why would we want to quibble anyway? •

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Even now, the public debt of Europe’s largest economy stands at around €2 trillion. While Germany’s public-debt-to-GDP ratio is less than Greece’s, it is still well above the 60 per cent stipulated in the Treaty of Maastricht as the upper limit for countries joining the eurozone. And while, debt-wise, Germany is performing well relative to many other countries, most Germans think their country’s liabilities are far too large. But these days Germany isn’t tardy in repaying its foreign debts, and doesn’t match most people’s image of the untrustworthy debtor perennially on the verge of insolvency.

Germany’s €2 trillion liability only includes debt racked up by federal, state and local governments and recognised as liabilities by creditors and debtors alike. It doesn’t include the money that Germany purportedly owes the most unlikely of creditors, Greece. For months, as a committee of the Greek parliament has trawled through the records and calculated the interest, all sorts of figures have been put on that debt. But now it’s official, at least as far as the Greeks are concerned. Earlier this month, deputy finance minister Dimitris Mardas announced that Germany owes Greece €278.7 billion (A$385 billion) – enough to allow Greece to repay its debts to the European Union, and about five times the amount Germany contributed to the Greek bailout. The Greek government claims that the bulk of the German debt is made up of outstanding reparations for suffering and material damages inflicted on Greece during the second world war.

Angela Merkel and her government are not amused. “Frankly, I think that’s stupid,” was vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel’s comment last week when Greece attempted to tie a discussion about debt relief in 2015 to what happened in the early 1940s. For Gerda Hasselfeldt, leader of the Christian Social Union in the Bundestag, Greece’s calculations were a “cheap diversionary manoeuvre” and the Greeks needed reminding that “you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.” Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister and the Greek government’s bête noire, delivered what the genteel Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called a Wutrede – an angry tirade – in which he categorically ruled out linking the Greek debt to “somehow-construed German obligations dating back to the second world war.”

At first glance, the Greek tactics seem all too transparent. Faced with the prospect of again being reprimanded for tardiness in repaying loans and having to grovel to their European partners for further extensions and “haircuts,” Alexis Tsipras and his government have gone on the offensive. They intimated that Germany might soon be swamped with Islamist refugees courtesy of Athens, they threatened to turn to Russia for financial help, and they accused Greece’s largest creditor, Germany, of having an outstanding debt dating back to its 1941–44 occupation of Greece.

The first two elements could indeed be described as “stupid” and “cheap.” The idea of issuing visas to jihadists among the asylum seekers accommodated by Greece was first mooted, in early March, by the Greek defence minister, Panos Kammenos (a member of Syriza’s coalition partner, the right-wing Independent Greeks), as retaliation for the supposed mistreatment of Greece by Germany. “If Europe leaves us in the crisis, we will flood it with migrants,” the London Telegraph reported him as saying, “and it will be even worse for Berlin if in that wave of millions of economic migrants there will be some jihadists of the Islamic State too.” Within three days, though, the Greek government backtracked, with Kammenos’s colleague Anastasia Christodoulopoulou issuing a statement assuring the European Union that Greece would abide by the rules of Europe’s asylum seeker regime.

During last week’s visit to Moscow, Tsipras threatened to defy warnings not to break ranks with his EU partners. “Greece is a sovereign country,” he told journalists, “with an unquestionable right to implement a multi-dimensional foreign policy and exploit its geopolitical role.” But in the end he fell short of declaring that Greece would breach Europe’s economic sanctions against Russia. He no doubt knew that this act of defiance might cost him dearly but pay no dividends: Russian president Vladimir Putin might have offered Tsipras moral support but he didn’t commit Russia to helping Greece with its economic woes. (As this article is published, however, unconfirmed reports say that Russia will pay Greece €5 billion as an advance on the transit fees for a yet-to-be-built gas pipeline.)

The third claim – that Greece is owed money by Germany – is not as fanciful as it might appear. Nor is it something dreamt up recently by Greece’s leftist government to hold one of its creditors at bay, although reiterating the claim does come in handy at this point in time.

A Conservative foreign minister (and later Greece’s prime minister), Antonis Samaras, raised the issue of German reparations as far back as 1990. His New Democracy government asked for a total of US$7.4 billion at the time, a request widely reported in the German media. Germans may not have taken much notice of demands made by Samaras and others in the early 1990s, or of an official claim lodged by the Greek ambassador in 1995, but they certainly took note in 2000. In July of that year a Greek bailiff tried to impound a prime German asset in Athens – the building that houses the Goethe Institute – to facilitate the payment of reparations ordered by the Greek courts; the Greek justice minister intervened and the process was stopped. Over at least the past fifteen years, successive German governments have kept the issue alive, commenting in great detail on Greek demands for reparations when asked to do so by members of the German Bundestag.

Which brings us to Dimitris Mardas’s €278.7 billion, a figure that includes €10.3 billion to cover funds Germany forced the Greek central bank to lend it during the second world war. There is no disagreement about the fact that between 1942 and 1944 Germany “borrowed” a large amount of money from Greece. Nor is anyone disputing that, in early 1945, German officials calculated the overall liabilities resulting from these “loans” at RM476 million (the Reichsmark being the German currency at the time). And recent German and Greek calculations to establish current liabilities aren’t that far apart either: according to Der Spiegel, the research service of the Bundestag estimated the current value of the loans to be US$8.25 billion.

The origins of these liabilities are complicated and their exact nature is complex. And the recent discussion has not been helped by the fact that Greek and German government representatives and the media – with very few exceptions – have claimed that the RM476 million was the amount of a one-off payment made by the Greek central bank to Germany in 1942. In a book published in 2006, historians Hagen Fleischer and Despina Konstantinakou explained that the Germans forced the Greek central bank to make monthly payments to Germany. It had long been common practice for occupiers to charge the costs of military occupation during times of war to the occupied country; in fact, according to the 1907 Hague Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, this practice was perfectly legal. But the monthly Greek payments were to cover more than just the regular costs of occupation; they were also used, for instance, to pay for the expenses of Rommel’s campaign in North Africa.

When wartime German officials calculated Germany’s liabilities, they took into account the total amount of the monthly payments, the costs incurred by Germany as an occupier in Greece, and German repayments. As surprising as it may seem, Germany did actually try to repay some of the money it owed to Greece during the war; according to Fleischer and Konstantinakou, the last repayment was made on 6 October 1944, more than a month after Germany began withdrawing its troops from Greece and just over a week before the liberation of Athens.

Although the transfers seem to have been well-documented, the German and Greek governments disagree over their nature. Was the RM476 million liability identified by German financial experts in 1945 a loan, as the Greeks claim? More accurately, was it the amount that remained outstanding at the end of the war after the costs of German occupation and repayments had been deducted from the money transferred by the Greek central bank, as suggested by Fleischer and Konstantinakou? Or was it merely part and parcel of the pillage that accompanied Nazi Germany’s rule in countries it occupied during the war? (To complicate matters further: was some of it, as the historian Götz Aly claimed a couple of months ago, money owed not to Greece but to Serbia, Bulgaria and other countries that were forced by Germany to supply goods to Greece to offset the German liability?)

If it was an ordinary loan, then it would need to be repaid. The Federal Republic of Germany is the legal heir of the Third Reich, and as such is obliged – in principle, at least – to honour commitments made between 1933 and 1945. The German government, however, has argued that the 1942–44 transactions did not involve two sovereign nations. Rather, Greece was occupied by Germany, the Greek central bank had no choice but to comply with Germany’s request, and Greece could not be considered a sovereign actor. Therefore, according to the official German interpretation, the Greek demand for the payment of the equivalent of RM476 million is a demand for reparations rather than one for the repayment of a loan.

While in the eyes of the German government the wartime transfers were not loans, they were treated as such at the time, and – at the time – constituted part of Germany’s overall foreign debt. Similar “loans” were provided by other countries occupied by Nazi Germany. In fact, the amount extracted from Greece was comparatively small. The overall liabilities incurred in this way by Germany from France, Denmark and Belgium totalled RM14 billion, almost thirty times the sum provided by Greece. The German central bank did not envisage repaying these loans, but it knew that they had to be extinguished eventually; thus, in 1944, it drew up plans for a peace conference following the Endsieg, or ultimate victory. At this conference, the creditor nations would be presented with invoices detailing the costs Germany had incurred during the war; these costs would then be used to offset the loans.

If the funds requisitioned from Greece and other countries had been ordinary loans that needed to be repaid with interest, they would have added to Germany’s already substantial foreign debt. That debt was largely a result of the first world war and the reparations demanded by its victors. And so, when the second world war ended with Germany’s capitulation, the country was faced with a mountain of current and future liabilities: debts incurred by Weimar Germany before 1933, debts incurred during the war through payments extracted from the central banks of occupied nations, costs generated by the Allied occupation of Germany, possible reparations related to the second world war, and the enormous costs of rebuilding a Germany whose infrastructure had been almost totally destroyed.

After the first world war, confronted with Germany’s inability to meet its obligations under the Treaty of Versailles, France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s industrial heartland, in order to extract reparations directly. French plans to do so again after 1945 were vetoed by the United States and Britain. But the victors of the second world war targeted industrial machinery, locomotives that had survived the Allied bombing campaign and other assets, and shipped them home. They also confiscated patents and other German intellectual property in an operation that amounted, according to an American official quoted in a contemporary Harper’s Magazine article, to “the first orderly exploitation of an entire country’s brainpower.” With the beginning of the cold war, however, deindustrialising West Germany and crippling its economy by forced repayment of debts was no longer in the interests of the Western Allies. Instead, they wanted an economically robust Germany that could serve as an eastern bulwark against communism.

With some minor exceptions, the Nazi government had defaulted on Germany’s external debt. The situation did not substantially change at the end of the war, if only because Germany had been carved up and its constituent parts were either occupied or had been incorporated into neighbouring countries, and it was thus not in a position to service any debts. But in 1951, the newly established Federal Republic of Germany agreed in principle that it was liable for debts incurred by the German Reich before the second world war. It did so with a proviso: in a letter to the Allied High Commissioner, German chancellor Konrad Adenauer noted that he expected a repayment plan would “take into account the general economic position of the Federal Republic, notably the increase of its burdens and the reduction of its economic wealth” and would not “dislocate the German economy through undesirable effects on the internal financial situation nor unduly drain existing or potential German foreign-exchange resources.” The Adenauer government also conceded that it would eventually need to reimburse the United States, Great Britain and France for the expenditure incurred in propping up West Germany after 1945.

What motivated the West German government to agree to resume repaying debts incurred by a very different Germany, most of them not serviced for almost twenty years? Adenauer’s letter provides a clue: the settlement plan had “the objective of normalising the economic and financial relations of the Federal Republic with other countries.” Germany (and German banks and companies) needed to borrow large amounts of money to rebuild a country ravaged by war. Having defaulted on its foreign debts, Germany was in the unenviable position of not being trusted to repay a loan. To win back the confidence of foreign banks and governments, it needed to demonstrate that it was willing to honour its financial obligations, even if these had been incurred by the Weimar Republic or Nazi Germany. West Germany, which by 1951 had its own constitution and an elected government but was still under Allied occupation, was also anxious to normalise its political relations with other countries. By showing that it was trustworthy in its business dealings it wanted to suggest that it could also be a reliable political partner.

For Germany to start repaying its prewar debt and postwar liabilities, the Western Allies recognised, its creditors needed to make concessions. In 1952, delegations from Germany and twenty-two Western countries (including Greece) met in London to discuss ways of reducing German liabilities. These included debts incurred by the Weimar Republic, by municipal authorities and other public borrowers, and by German-owned companies and other private entities. The outcome of these negotiations was the 1953 Agreement on German External Debts, often referred to as the London Debt Agreement.

Deferred liabilities: Hermann Josef Abs signing the 1953 London Debt Agreement on behalf of the Federal Republic of Germany. Wikimedia Commons

The text of this agreement (including its numerous appendices) runs over hundreds of pages, prescribing individual solutions for different types of debt. In essence, it reduced Germany’s overall pre- and postwar debts by more than 50 per cent, extended the deadlines for repayment, and linked the amounts to be repaid in any given year to Germany’s capacity to repay (which was tied, in turn, to Germany’s ability to produce a positive trade balance). Liabilities incurred through Germany’s policies or actions in occupied Europe between 1939 and 1945 could be deferred until the “final settlement of the problem of reparation,” which was understood to mean the conclusion of a peace treaty between Germany and the Allies. That last point meant that Germany was not required to pay reparations for the time being.

The 1953 agreement was a coup for the Adenauer government. Two years before the Western Allies formally ended the country’s military occupation, the Federal Republic of Germany was effectively given the status of a sovereign nation. At the same time, the agreement allowed the West German economy to grow unencumbered by crippling debt repayments. The country’s Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) would have been unthinkable without it. And the payment of reparations was left to the Bonn government’s discretion; in this way, the agreement effectively ruled out – for the time being – any claims by countries or individuals who had suffered at the hands of Nazi Germany. It didn’t extinguish these claims, however; it merely provided Germany with the opportunity to get back on its feet before having to pay reparations.

The Federal Republic saw itself as the rightful successor of prewar Germany. It even accepted responsibility for debts incurred by Prussia (the largest state within Weimar Germany), which had ceased to exist in 1945, and most of whose former territory was now part of the German Democratic Republic, Poland and the Soviet Union. At the same time, the Adenauer government was allowed to dodge the issue of how to redress wrongs committed in the name of Nazi Germany. In 1953, the prospect of a “final settlement of the problem of reparations” – which was premised on the reunification of the two German states and on a reconciliation of viewpoints between the former and now bitterly divided Allies – seemed remote; successful claims for reparations therefore appeared unlikely in the near future.

The man credited with achieving what was, for West Germany, a very favourable outcome was Hermann Josef Abs, the chief German negotiator at the talks leading to the 1953 agreement. He had never been a member of the Nazi party but had arguably been responsible for some of the very wrongs whose redress he had now helped to indefinitely postpone. As a member of the board of directors of Deutsche Bank, the largest German financial institution, and of some forty other banks and corporations, Abs was one of the most influential bankers in Nazi Germany. The companies in which Abs was prominently involved included IG Farben, then the world’s largest chemical manufacturer, which profited directly from slave labour sourced from Auschwitz. He was also implicated in “aryanisations,” the de facto expropriation of Jewish-owned companies. After the war, the Allies detained Abs for a few months but then classified him as entlastet (“exonerated”). He resumed his role as a banker, and in the 1950s and 1960s was one of the most powerful men, and certainly the most powerful banker, in West Germany.

Abs was an adviser to German chancellor Adenauer, and had enormous influence on the Bonn government’s policies. In one important respect, however, the views of Abs and Adenauer diverged. In 1951, as Timothy Guinnane, Professor of Economic History at Yale University, explains, Adenauer agreed to Israel’s demand for a reparation payment of a total of US$1.5 billion to Israel and to the World Jewish Congress, “much to the disgust of Abs” and Adenauer’s finance minister. According to Guinnane, Adenauer’s concession undermined Abs’s strategy at the London negotiations. Abs had tried “to present Germany’s ability to transfer payments as the binding constraint, effectively forcing the various creditors to compete against each other for every Mark of payment”; the creditors assembled in London regarded Adenauer’s willingness to pay reparations to Israel “as evidence of bad faith, a greater ability to pay, or both.” Notwithstanding the reparations paid to Israel and to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, though, the German government insisted that under the 1953 London Debt Agreement it was not obliged to pay reparations to anybody, and German courts consistently upheld this interpretation when it was challenged by former forced labourers.

For two reasons, the London Debt Agreement has loomed large in discussions about Greece’s current liabilities and its claims for reparations owed by Germany. First, commentators have frequently invoked the 1953 agreement to suggest that Greece, too, ought to be cut more slack by its creditors, and more specifically, that the kind of generosity extended by Greece and others to Germany in 1953 should now be extended by Germany to Greece.

The parallels between Germany’s situation in the early 1950s and Greece’s malaise in the past five years are suggestive. As early as three years ago, Alexis Tsipras told members of the European parliament that the London Debt Agreement should be the blueprint for a similar deal with Greece. Earlier this year, Giannis Milos, a Marxist economist at the National Technical University in Athens and an influential adviser to Tsipras’s Syriza, told Der Spiegel that “Greece, too, agreed to allow Germany to catch its breath” in 1953 “and thus make it possible to build a strong economy.”

The second reason for the London Debt Agreement’s prominence is the Greek government’s claim that Germany was permitted to defer paying reparations only until the Federal Republic, the German Democratic Republic, France, Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States concluded the Treaty on the Final Settlement with respect to Germany, the so-called Two Plus Four Agreement, in 1990.

The Greek government has argued that the Two Plus Four Agreement was the equivalent of a peace treaty (the “final settlement” mentioned in Article 5 of the 1953 London Debt Agreement), and that therefore countries and individuals should have been able to lodge claims for reparations as soon as it took effect. But reparations are not mentioned in the Two Plus Four Agreement. According to the German side, that is because it was assumed in 1990 that reparations were no longer payable. In a statement published in 2006 and reiterated last year, the German government claimed that the 1990 treaty contained the final settlement of any legal issues arising from the war, and that the parties to that treaty did not expect that there would be further settlements, including an agreement concerning reparations.

This may be so, say the Greeks, but we didn’t sign the Two Plus Four Agreement. That might be so, counter the Germans, but as a member of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe you signed the 1990 Charter of Paris for a New Europe, which endorsed the provisions of the Two Plus Four Agreement. No, the Greek side counters, the Paris Charter only says that the signatories “note with great satisfaction the Treaty on the Final Settlement with respect to Germany signed in Moscow on 12 September 1990,” not that the Charter’s signatories explicitly signed off on the terms of that Treaty. To complicate the argument further, the Two Plus Four Agreement doesn’t resemble other peace treaties (such as the 1947 Paris peace treaties between the Allied powers and Italy, Romania, Finland, Hungary and Bulgaria); rather, it is an agreement in lieu of a peace treaty.

Two lessons can be drawn here. First, the dispute over whether or not the reunified Germany incurred obligations towards Greece and the Greek victims of Nazi Germany will not be decided simply by recourse to international law; rather, if there is to be a solution, it will have to be a political solution – just as Adenauer decided in 1951 that it made political sense to pay reparations to Israel. And second, if the German and Greek governments want a political solution, they need to properly talk to each. To quote a 1972 ruling concerning disputed reparations Greece demanded of Germany in relation to the first world war: “[The negotiations] shall be meaningful and not merely consist of a formal process of negotiations. Meaningful negotiations cannot be conducted if either party insists upon its own position without contemplating any modification of it.”

Let’s leave aside for the moment the issue of the RM476 million loan, and focus instead on the arguments for and against reparations. In order to understand the debate about reparations after the second world war, we need to turn once more to what happened after the first world war.

That war had been extremely costly for all participants, but particularly for the nations on whose territories it was fought. Germany was one of them, because Tsarist Russia had invaded East Prussia in the early stages of the war. But the destruction wrought by Russia in Germany’s eastern provinces paled in comparison with the impact of the fighting in France and Belgium. It was understandable that Germany, when it concluded a peace treaty with Bolshevik Russia in 1918, and the Allies, when they negotiated with Germany at Versailles, demanded reparations. For France, in particular, substantial reparations were an obvious outcome of the peace negotiations because, after the 1870–71 Franco–Prussian war, it had been made to pay Germany a total of F5 billion over five years as well as cede Alsace and Lorraine.

After the Franco–Prussian war, though, the French were able to pay the money demanded by Germany ahead of schedule. There was no way Germany could have similarly discharged its financial obligations to France and its allies after the first world war. In fact, the reparations demanded of Weimar Germany were so substantial that Germany was rarely able to raise the full amount of the required instalments. In order to pay the Allies, it borrowed money, only to be unable to repay the debts it thus incurred.

Largely for these reasons, the overall economic benefits of the reparations regime to the victors of the first world war were far smaller than expected. For the losers, though, and for Germany in particular, the economic and political effects were huge. According to many contemporary observers and to some historians, the unforgiving terms of the Treaty of Versailles resulted in the rise of political extremism in Germany, eventually led to Hitler becoming chancellor, and in the final analysis brought about the second world war.

Some of the victors of the second world war – particularly the United States and Britain – wanted to heed what they considered to be the lessons of Versailles: namely, that excessive demands for reparations were counterproductive. They belatedly recognised the validity of an argument made by a Treasury official and member of the British delegation at the Versailles negotiations, John Maynard Keynes, whose 1919 book The Economic Consequences of the Peace had predicted the economic malaise that followed the imposition of substantial reparations. (France, the Soviet Union and Poland, on the other hand, each of which had suffered greater losses in the second world war, were inclined to replicate Versailles rather than forgo the spoils of war.)

In the event, the negotiators in London endorsed what Keynes had written in 1919:

The policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable… even if it enriched ourselves… [N]ations are not authorised, by religion or by natural morals, to visit on the children of their enemies the misdoings of parents or rulers.

But this did not mean that Germany and its allies were not required to pay reparations after the second world war. The Allies confiscated patents and trademarks and dismantled entire factories. The French seized the coal-rich Saar region, and continued to commandeer its coal production even after the region was reunited with West Germany in 1957. Elsewhere in West Germany, the Germans were forced to sell coal and timber to the Western Allies at below world market prices. In the Soviet zone, which became the German Democratic Republic in 1949, the enforced “export” of German raw materials, products and machinery significantly weakened the economy well beyond the occupation period. But while the four Allied powers helped themselves liberally to reparations from Germany (arguably in contravention of international law, because no peace treaty provided for such reparations), other countries, including Greece, went largely empty-handed.

Although Germany may not have been required to pay reparations that had been negotiated as part of a peace treaty, its allies were. Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Finland had to make payments to several other countries, including Greece, which was entitled to a combined total of US$150 million from Italy and Bulgaria.

While West Germany was not obliged to pay reparations as a result of Article 5 of the London Debt Agreement, it was under considerable political pressure to reach bilateral agreements with nations whose citizens had suffered at the hands of Nazi Germany. Thus, on 18 March 1960, the Federal Republic of Germany and the Kingdom of Greece signed a treaty that provided for the payment of DM115 million (the Deutsche Mark being Germany’s pre-euro currency) to Greece that the Greek government was to use – at its discretion – for the benefit of Greeks who had been persecuted by Nazi Germany on account of their race, religion or political views, or of their descendants. According to the treaty, the payment amounted to a final settlement. At the time, the Federal Republic concluded similar treaties with eleven other Western countries.

If Germany and Greece had already agreed on a final settlement in 1960, why then did the Greek government insist on further reparations after 1990? I’d suggest three key reasons. For one, the 1960 treaty was about the suffering of individual Greek citizens. It did not cover material losses. Thus the Greek government could argue that Greece and West Germany had not negotiated reparations in the broader sense of that term.

Second, the German government had left it to the Greeks to distribute the DM115 million. As a result, many individual victims or their surviving relatives didn’t actually receive any financial assistance from the Greek state, which used the money as it saw fit (presumably including for purposes not envisaged by the treaty).

Third, and most importantly, the payment negotiated in 1960 was never considered sufficient in view of the deprivations suffered by Greece. The German occupation had terrible consequences for many individuals, particularly Jews. Approximately 60,000 Greek Jews (between 80 and 90 per cent of Greece’s Jewish population) were murdered in the Holocaust. They included the vast majority of Jews living in Salonika (Thessaloniki), the second-largest Greek city and home to the largest community of Sephardic Jews in Europe.

Greeks also suffered because the occupation by Italy, Bulgaria and Germany, and their economic strangulation of the country in conjunction with a British blockade, precipitated what in Greece is referred to as megálos limós, the “great famine.” Estimates about the number of people who perished vary; most historians now agree that the death toll was in the order of 250,000.

Besides, much like the inhabitants of other countries occupied by Germany during the second world war, Greeks fell victim to brutal reprisals against the civilian population. The most infamous case concerns the village of Distomo near Delphi, where in 1944 an SS unit massacred 214 men, women and children in response to an attack on that unit by partisans. It is this massacre, above all, that is evoked to support claims for German reparations. In 1997, relatives of the victims took the German government to court, claiming that they were owed reparations. In 1997, a local court ruled that their claims were valid and ordered €28 million damages in favour of the plaintiffs. This ruling was appealed by Germany but eventually upheld by Greece’s highest court, the Areopagus. It was in response to this ruling that a Greek bailiff entered the Goethe Institute in 2000 to seize German property.

As the German government didn’t recognise the authority of the Greek courts, the plaintiffs also pursued legal action in Germany, which they lost. In June 2003, the Bundesgerichtshof, the German federal court, ruled that the claim was invalid, citing, among other things, the 1960 treaty between Greece and West Germany. A few months earlier, the European Court of Human Rights had declared an application filed against Germany and Greece inadmissible. The Bundesverfassungsgericht, the German high court, also declined to get involved. And in 2012 the International Court of Justice ruled in a related case that civil courts in Italy (and Greece) had been wrong in assuming that they could order Germany to pay reparations for gross violations of international human rights law.

The Greek claim for reparations is thus underwritten by several injustices: the fact that Germany, unlike some of its wartime allies, was not required to pay reparations to Greece after the war; the fact that the Allied powers successfully demanded German reparations for themselves while allowing Germany to effectively postpone “a final settlement of the problem of reparations” for decades; the fact that when reparations were paid they did not benefit individuals who had experienced suffering; and the fact that individuals who were the victims of a German war crime were never granted satisfaction, although Greek courts upheld the validity of their claims.

When members of Die Linke, the successor to the East German communist party, raised the issue of reparations in the Bundestag in 1995, the government of Helmut Kohl responded that reparations were no longer relevant “fifty years after the end of the war and after decades of peaceful and productive relations based on trust between the Federal Republic and the international community.” Last year, responding to another query by Die Linke MPs, the government of Angela Merkel was more specific:

Almost sixty-nine years after the end of the war and after decades of peaceful and productive relations based on trust between the Federal Republic and the international community, including the NATO ally and EU partner Greece, the question of reparations is no longer legitimate. Since the end of the second world war, Germany has provided substantial reparations which the states concerned were expected, in line with international law, to use for the compensation of their citizens.

The government also drew attention to the fact that Germany had paid reparations that amounted to several times the US$20 billion envisaged at the conference of Yalta, and concluded: “Besides, reparations more than sixty-five years after the end of hostilities would be unprecedented.”

That is probably true for hostilities that are dealt with in a peace treaty. It is certainly not true for reparations provided to victims of persecution. In Spain, for example, the 2007 Law of Historical Memory provided for the payment of compensation to Republican victims and their heirs – sixty-eight years after the end of the Spanish civil war. And Germany continues to pay compensation to victims of the Holocaust; two years ago, for example, the German government agreed with the Jewish Claims Conference to pay €772 million over four years for the home care of some 56,000 Holocaust survivors.

Arguably, the Merkel government’s claim is also not true for reparations as a result of wars. For years, descendants of the Herero in Namibia, against whom Germany waged a genocidal war between 1904 and 1908, have sought reparations from Germany. While Germany has so far refused to pay monetary reparations, in 2004 a German government minister travelled to Namibia to issue an official apology. This apology, which was accompanied by a foreign aid package, could be interpreted as a means of symbolic reparations. And in recent years there have been calls in Germany itself for reparations from Poland for the expulsion of ethnic Germans in the aftermath of the second world war (while there are Polish demands for German reparations).

The Merkel government’s claim that Germany has paid reparations well in excess of what was envisaged towards the end of the war is true. And for good reason: as the German historian Constantin Goschler pointed out in an interview last month, the material and physical damages for which Germany was responsible “exceed anything imaginable.”

Obviously, the German government does not want to create a precedent. Giving in to the demands of the Herero – or of the descendants of massacred Greek villagers, for that matter – would invite others to file claims against Germany, the overall amount of which might make the €278.7 billion look like pocket money. But the argument that claims for reparations have a use-by date is purely legalistic. It does not take into account the longevity of some injustices, which endure either because they are remembered or because their consequences continue to be felt. And anyway, what would such a use-by date be? Ten years? Twenty? Or perhaps forty-four – which would mean that the Two Plus Four Agreement came just one year late?

So far, the Merkel government is holding out – and probably bracing itself for another attempt at seizing German properties in Greece. But its position is not uncontroversial, even in Germany. Individual Germans have already paid what they consider to be their share. For example, in March two German tourists handed €875 to the mayor of the Greek town of Nafplio, where they had spent their holidays. And it’s not only Die Linke that is siding with Greece. Prominent members of the Greens are also demanding that the government show some flexibility. Gesine Schwan, a prominent Social Democrat who was twice her party’s candidate for the position of federal president, recently called for a political solution and said that it is important to make concessions to Nazi Germany’s Greek victims and their relatives, and to recognise “that we have committed gross injustices in Greece.” She also indirectly responded to the government’s claim that the crimes in question happened too long ago when pointing out that “the victims and their descendants have a longer memory than the perpetrators and their descendants.”

A political solution might be similar to that used to mend the relationship between Germany and the Czech Republic. In that case, a generously endowed future fund pays for projects that benefit survivors of German persecution. As part of a political solution, the German government might also want to pay back the money “borrowed” from Greece in the 1940s. For the Germans, €10.3 billion is a significant but easily manageable amount of money; for the Greeks, it would be a very substantial payment.

Would the latter gesture confuse the issue of the Greek bailout with that of reparations owed for wartime atrocities? It might, but why should that be a problem? After all, the relevant histories are entangled. And for many German speakers, the two issues are intimately connected, for the term Schuld has at least two meanings: “wrong,” and the guilt associated with that wrong, on the one hand, and “debt,” on the other.

The Greek government is already drawing a connection between wrongs and debts, of course, by demanding that Greece be afforded a solution similar to the London Debt Agreement, and insisting that Germany pay the reparations which, according to that same agreement, they once did not have to pay. It may be more productive for Greece to focus attention not so much on what happened in the early 1950s as on what happened in the 1920s and early 1930s, when attempts to make Germany pay its debts repeatedly failed, illustrating the German proverb, “Einem nackten Mann kann man nicht in die Tasche greifen” (you can’t empty a naked man’s pockets).

While Germans need to understand why Greek memories of the German occupation are still raw, Greeks need to understand the German obsession with saving rather than spending money. As I argued in an earlier article for Inside Story, Germans are haunted by the memory of hyperinflation in the early 1920s, which wiped out ordinary people’s savings. The crisis of the 1920s was a direct consequence of the government’s attempts to balance its attempt to engineer an economic recovery and the demands to meet its obligations under the Versailles treaty. Perhaps Greeks’ empathy with Germany’s position after the first world war could prompt Germans to keep their own experience of trying to repay massive debts in the 1920s and early 1930s in mind when trying to enforce austerity measures and repayment plans. •

The post Debts and other legacies appeared first on Inside Story.

Pegida’s full name is the Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West). Its founder claims that the culturally loaded term Abendland in the organisation’s name, which means “the West” or, literally, “the Occident,” merely echoes a slogan used by the Christian Democrats during an election campaign more than fifty years ago: “Rettet die abendländische Kultur!” (Save Western culture!). At that time, of course, the Abendland was supposedly under threat from Soviet communism. But this rather quaint term harks back further, to a time when a Christian Abendland felt under threat from a Muslim Morgenland (Orient). It also references Oswald Spengler’s hugely influential book Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), published between 1918 and 1922, an early precursor of Samuel Huntington’s 1996 book The Clash of Civilisations.

The political establishment’s response to Pegida has been remarkably loud, clear and swift. Federal president Joachim Gauck called Pegida’s followers Chaoten – a term usually reserved for football hooligans and violent demonstrators on the far left – and used his traditional Christmas address to affirm Germany’s commitment to welcoming migrants of all kinds. For once, chancellor Angela Merkel has not been her usual noncommittal self: on New Year’s Eve she was uncharacteristically forthright in her televised address to the nation, urging Germans not to join demonstrations organised by Pegida. A couple of weeks later, at a joint press conference with Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, the chancellor endorsed a controversial statement first made by interior minister and prominent Christian Democrat Wolfgang Schäuble in 2006 and paraphrased by Gauck’s predecessor as president, the Christian Democrat Christian Wulff, four years later: “Der Islam gehört zu Deutschland” (Islam is part of Germany).

Foreign affairs minister Walter Steinmeier has accused Pegida of damaging Germany’s reputation. Former chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Gerhard Schröder lambasted the xenophobia of the Pegida movement, with the latter calling for “an uprising of the decent.” Church leaders, representatives of migrant groups and many other civil society organisations, and prominent artists, actors, writers and sportspeople have criticised Pegida for inciting racism and defended German’s multicultural identity. Numerous anti-Pegida rallies have been held: last Friday, for example, some 20,000 people took to the streets of Freiburg, a city of just over 200,000 people in Baden-Württemberg in the southwest of Germany, to protest against Pegida.

Pegida’s creation is fairly recent: in October last year, forty-one-year-old Dresden resident Lutz Bachmann, who had not previously been politically active, set up a closed Facebook group under the name Peaceful Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West. The ostensible trigger was a rally by supporters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which is considered a terrorist organisation in many Western countries, including Australia and Germany, but has gained many admirers in recent months because of its much-needed military support in the fight against the Islamic State in Syria.

Pegida was incorporated as an association in December, with Bachmann as its chairperson. Only twelve people have so far been identified as actively involved in the organisation – the same group that was part of Bachmann’s Facebook group in October, it appears. It is not known how many additional members Pegida has signed up since December.

Considering the barrage of fire the organisation has drawn, non-Germans could be forgiven for assuming it is the nucleus of a powerful new party on the far right, a kind of German equivalent of the Front National, which won almost a quarter of the French votes at last year’s European election. Or that Pegida is a particularly violent movement, whose followers torch mosques and hostels for asylum seekers. Far from it: Pegida does have a reasonably strong following in Dresden, the capital city of Saxony and the second-largest city (not counting Berlin) in former East Germany, but outside Saxony it has attracted little support. And its leaders have not condoned violence, nor – publicly, at least – peddled extremist views. In fact, what’s remarkable is not so much Pegida’s strength or the depth of racism expounded by its leaders, as the backlash it has attracted.

Pegida’s official positions are comparatively innocuous, and hardly explain the outrage and fear the movement has prompted. According to a catalogue of demands published in December, it wants existing laws to be used to deport unsuccessful asylum seekers, demands an immigration regime modelled on the policies of Australia and Canada, calls for Swiss-style plebiscites, would like the German constitution to be amended to refer to the right and duty of non-native Germans to integrate, asks for additional resources for the police, and calls for more social workers to care for asylum seekers.

Pegida’s leaders have tried to distance themselves from the far right. “We are normal people,” Bachmann told the Financial Times in a rare interview, claiming that less than 1 per cent of Pegida’s followers were “right-wing madmen”. The association’s public Facebook page makes extensive use of a symbol associated with the campaigns of left-wing anti-fascists: the image of a swastika in a rubbish bin. But there is no doubt that some of Pegida’s leaders have spouted Islamophobic and racist rhetoric in the past, that its followers have done so on numerous occasions over the past couple of months, and that at least some of its leaders have toyed with, if not wholeheartedly embraced, ideas from the far right. One of the key terms used by Pegida’s followers has been Lügenpresse (lying media), a term, popular with the Nazis, that a panel of academics recently selected as the Unwort (non-word) of 2014.

At other times, Pegida’s leaders have advocated positions that have at best been confused. They say, for example, that they have been vindicated both by the recent siege in Sydney and by the Charlie Hebdo murders in France, and have claimed that Germany’s leaders were unfairly criticising Russian president Vladimir Putin’s policy in Ukraine. And while the Pegida leadership has been anxious to avoid the impression that the organisation sits on the far right, they have not been able to avoid endorsements from leading neo-Nazis or a growing racist, Islamophobic and xenophobic following.

The Pegida leadership has tried to disown those endorsements. Last week, it went further and tried to disown its founder. In December it was reported that Bachmann had a string of convictions including robbery, assault and drug trafficking. Another of Pegida’s twelve-strong steering group, Kathrin Oertel, became the association’s public face, with Bachmann remaining as chair. But last week he was forced to surrender Pegida’s leadership when a newspaper revealed he had used the derogatory term Viehzeug (animals) to refer to refugees, had suggested prominent Green politician Claudia Roth be shot, and had posed as Adolf Hitler and posted the picture on Facebook with the caption, “He’s back.”

Since then, Pegida’s leadership group has been further eroded. On Wednesday, Oertel and four other members of the twelve-strong steering group resigned in protest at moves by Bachmann to retain a decision-making role. “I don’t want to have anything to do with all this Nazi stuff and right-wing statements,” former Pegida vice-chair René Jahn told the tabloid Bild. Yesterday, Jahn and Oertel announced that they would try to set up a new organisation designed to appeal to a more moderate audience. In the meantime, next Monday’s weekly demonstration in Dresden has been cancelled.

So far, Pegida’s public activities have been largely confined to organising weekly rallies. The first took place in Dresden on 20 October last year. A mere 350 people attended. Five weeks later, on 24 November, the number of protesters in Dresden reached 5500. The biggest Pegida demonstration so far took place on 12 January, when, according to the police, 25,000 people joined the weekly march through Dresden’s city centre. The weekly attendance figures have been anxiously anticipated, and closely scrutinised, with the police estimates proving controversial. On 12 January, for instance, a team of researchers from the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin counted only 18,400 protesters.

Pegida’s rallies began at a time when Germans were publicly remembering the so-called Montagsdemonstrationen, the Monday evening rallies in East German cities in autumn 1989 that eventually led to the collapse of the communist regime. Pegida says that its protests resurrect the Montagsdemonstrationen tradition and, like the demonstrators of twenty-five years ago, its followers claim that “Wir sind das Volk” (We are the people). Their appropriation of the East German civil rights movement has been condemned and ridiculed. It is curious also because the 1989 protests did not originate in Dresden; in fact, Dresden was arguably one of the strongholds of the East German government at a time when it was already on the nose almost everywhere else.

One of the explanations for the fact that Dresden residents joined the 1989 protests comparatively late is that they were living in the Tal der Ahnungslosen, the “valley of the clueless,” one of two comparatively small areas of East Germany where it was not possible to receive West German television. In fact, the acronym of the leading West German public broadcaster ARD (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Rundfunkanstalten Deutschlands) was sometimes rendered as Ausser Raum Dresden (anywhere but in the Dresden region).

Today, nobody in Germany could claim to be ignorant about what has been going on in Dresden since October. The ARD and other television channels have reported extensively on the Pegida rallies, whose organisers clearly hoped that, inspired by the televised images, Germans in other parts of the Federal Republic would follow their example.

Yet nearly all attempts to mobilise anti-migrant sentiments in other German cities have failed. On 5 January, a mere 300 people responded to a call by Pegida associate Kögida (Cologne Against the Islamisation of the West). A week later, 200 demonstrators identifying themselves as followers of Hagida (Hanover Against the Islamisation of the West) took to the streets of Lower Saxony’s capital city (which is about the same size as Dresden). Only in Leipzig, the largest city in Saxony, have attempts to imitate the Dresden example been moderately successful. There, police estimated a 15,000-strong crowd of Legida demonstrators last Wednesday. (Researchers from the University of Leipzig counted no more than 4850 attendees.)

Counter-demonstrations have dwarfed these efforts. On 12 January, 200 Hagida followers in Hanover were met by 17,000 anti-Hagida protesters. The 300 people who had responded to a call by Saargida in Saarbrücken were confronted by 9000 protesters. In Frankfurt last Monday, seventy Pegida sympathisers were outnumbered by some 12,000 anti-Pegida protesters. Even in Saxony, Pegida and Legida demonstrations have been smaller than those organised by their opponents. On 10 January in Dresden, 35,000 people rallied for “open-mindedness and tolerance”; another 22,000 attended an anti-Pegida event earlier this week. In Leipzig, 30,000 anti-Legida demonstrators assembled on 12 January, and another 20,000 last Wednesday. Some anti-Pegida protests have been highly symbolic: on the evening of 5 January, local authorities in Berlin, Cologne, Dresden and other German cities turned off the lights illuminating iconic landmarks, including the Brandenburg Gate and the Cologne cathedral.

Some of those opposed to Pegida are acting out of self-interest. In Dresden, local politicians and business leaders fear that the organisation will scare off tourists. The chair of the Federation of German Industries, Ulrich Grillo, condemned Pegida’s anti-immigration message because, in his words, “Germany really benefits from skilled immigration.” In early January the head of the German Employers’ Association, Ingo Kramer, told the news magazine Focus, “We need immigration for our labour market and so that our social system can also function amid a shrinking population of employable age in the future.” Others are concerned about Germans’ or Germany’s reputation.

Ulrich Grillo’s statement didn’t end there, however. “As a wealthy country,” he added, “and simply out of Christian love of thy neighbour we should welcome more refugees.” And most of those attending the demonstrations in Freiburg and elsewhere are not primarily voicing their opposition to the rabble demonstrating on a weekly basis in Dresden or taking issue with their irrational fear of the introduction of sharia law in Germany. They are taking to the streets to affirm their commitment to a multicultural Germany that welcomes strangers, particularly those seeking refuge from war and persecution. They are rallying for, rather than against, an idea of what it means to be German.

Pegida’s followers, conversely, while claiming to defend “German” values against Muslims and other foreigners supposedly swamping the country, are making a statement about fellow citizens who take issue with the government’s refugee and asylum seeker policies only because these aren’t sufficiently generous. They feel threatened and are enraged by those who want Germany to be a country of immigration, who would like Turkish Germans to be able to take out German citizenship while retaining their Turkish passports, and who cherish the multicultural flair of most large German cities.

Unlike the Front National’s Marine Le Pen, Pegida’s Kathrin Oertel and Lutz Bachmann can’t pretend they are speaking in the name of a silent majority who would like Germany to be reserved for ethnic Germans. Pegida’s followers are also motivated to protest because they – correctly – identify as a marginalised minority. Not one member of federal parliament has spoken up in their defence. The mainstream media have had nothing good to say about them; even Bild, which is otherwise quick to lend its voice to right-wing populist causes, has not only distanced itself from Pegida but also actively campaigned against its ideas. Admittedly, Pegida’s Facebook page has attracted more than 160,000 likes. But let’s put that into perspective: that’s less than a quarter of the number of people who have watched a hilarious YouTube clip poking fun at “Pegida girl” Oertel.

In the 1980s and 1990s, it was not uncommon to see young German men, usually sporting crew cuts or shaved heads, wearing t-shirts with the slogan “Ich bin stolz ein Deutscher zu sein” (I am proud to be German). Then it was safe to assume that these men sympathised with the far right. Many Germans who abhorred such sentiments expressed shame at being German.

At that time, people like Lutz Bachmann could claim to own German patriotism. They no longer can, and that would be another reason why they are deeply aggrieved. Unlike the Pegida and Legida demonstrators, those rallying last week against Pegida in Freiburg did not carry German flags. But their protest was also patriotic. They are proud of a new Germany: one that welcomes refugees and promotes open-mindedness and solidarity. The identity of this new Germany is partly negative (which probably makes German identity unique): on Wednesday, speaking at a special session of the German parliament to mark the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Joachim Gauck said that “there can be no German identity without Auschwitz.” But unlike twenty or thirty years ago, there is more to a non-nationalistic German identity than a recognition of what Auschwitz stands for. And Germans who acknowledge the past and oppose a parochial nationalism are no longer ashamed to be Germans.

I bet many of those attending the anti-Pegida demonstrations no longer have a problem with the emblems of German nationalism per se. There might be occasions when they too wave German flags. And most likely, such occasions involve football. More than anyone else, Germany’s national football team has made national symbols respectable. But the Germany that the footballers represent includes people of different ethnic backgrounds – in the same way that the team of Jogi Loew includes Turkish Germans, Polish Germans, Germans of North African ancestry and Germans who hail from Bavaria or Hamburg. Lutz Bachmann would find it increasingly difficult to identify with that team; the vast majority of Germans don’t. Bachmann might also feel aggrieved because Oliver Bierhoff, manager of the national team and an exceptionally successful player in the 1990s, was prominent among those to publicly denounce Pegida. “We have become world champions with many players who have a migrant background,” Bierhoff said earlier this month. “We in the national team live integration without thinking twice about it; that should also work in society.”

Posing as Adolf Hitler is socially unacceptable. But I suspect many Germans would have been more affronted when it emerged that Bachmann had not only used derogatory language to refer to refugees and politicians, but had also called Jogi Loew Bundesschwuchtel (national poofter). The inability to embrace Loew and the national football team irrespective of their success on and off the field is an indication of the extent to which Bachmann and his followers feel they are on the outer. In fact, the German win in Brazil – and the sense that Germany is now well represented by people like Thomas Müller and Mesut Özil – would have contributed to the anger and resentment on display at the Pegida demonstrations. As I suggested in an earlier essay in Inside Story, the significance of Germany’s success in Brazil can hardly be overstated: it, more so than the arrival of thousands of refugees from Syria, has been responsible for the polarisation of which Pegida is merely the most visible symptom.

In 1989, Dresden was exceptional on account of its isolation: because its residents weren’t able to watch the ARD news. Now, Dresden is back in a valley of the clueless. Its residents have far less first-hand experience of non-German migrants and of multiculturalism than the people of West German cities of a similar size, such as Frankfurt, Stuttgart or Hanover. At the end of last year, less than 5 per cent of Dresden’s residents were non-Germans, compared to Hanover’s 13 per cent, Stuttgart’s 21 per cent and Frankfurt’s 24 per cent.

That in itself does not explain the emergence of anxieties and deep-seated anger that drive tens of thousands of people to take to the street. Both Dresden and Leipzig are exceptional because they are located in Saxony. That is one of three states, all of them in East Germany, where the far-right National Democratic Party has received more than just a handful of votes in recent elections (in Saxony, it won 4.9 per cent in the 2014 state election and thus only narrowly missed the 5 per cent threshold necessary to enter parliament). Saxony is also one of only three states (again, all of them in the former East Germany) where the Eurosceptic Alternative for Germany scored enough votes to be represented in state parliament.

Most importantly, however, Saxony’s government of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats is the only one in Germany that has shown some empathy for those afraid of foreigners. In November, state premier Stanislaw Tillich, a Christian Democrat, announced that the police would form a special unit to investigate crimes committed by asylum seekers, even though there was no evidence that suggested asylum seekers have been more prone to fall foul of the law than other residents of Saxony. Earlier this month, Saxony’s interior minister arranged a secret meeting with Pegida leaders. And Tillich has contradicted Merkel’s recent statement about Islam’s role in Germany; he was adamant that Islam does not belong to Saxony.

Unlike their counterparts in neighbouring Austria and France, Germany’s mainstream politicians seem to have agreed over the past fifteen years or so that right-wing populists cannot be effectively countered by appropriating some of their positions. As a result, Germany’s far right is weak. Meanwhile, the political spectrum has moved to the left. Merkel promotes positions that traditionally belonged to the Social Democrats, and – exceptions such as Tillich aside – she has taken her party with her. The only state ruled by a genuinely conservative party in its own right (the sister party of the Christian Democrats, the Christian Social Union, or CSU) is Bavaria, but there too the government has usually been careful not to take up an agenda promoted by the far right. Last year, the CSU demanded that non-native Germans be required to speak German at home, but quickly backtracked and claimed it had been misunderstood.

In Austria and France, by contrast, conservative politicians have tried to stem the rise of right-wing populist parties – Marine Le Pen’s Front National and Heinz-Christian Strache’s Freedom Party of Austria (which once campaigned with the slogan “Abendland in Christenhand!,” The West belongs to Christians!) – by appropriating some of their key positions, particularly on immigration. That hasn’t stopped the rise of the populists. To the contrary: Le Pen has a realistic chance of becoming France’s next president, and Strache’s party sits currently on around 20 per cent. On top of that, xenophobia and anti-immigration sentiments have become respectable in Austria and France. It seems Saxony’s government is falling into the same trap – which, incidentally, should also be familiar to Australians, who may remember that in the late 1990s, John Howard’s Liberal Party tried to stop the rise of the One Nation Party by adopting some of the positions advocated by its leader, Pauline Hanson.

It may well be that Pegida, bereft of much of its former leadership, will implode. But it seems unlikely that that will be the end of the story. Other political groups – whether it’s the far right National Democratic Party or the Alternative for Germany – might try to harvest Pegida’s 160,000 Facebook followers. Senior representatives of the latter have already held meetings with some of Pegida’s leaders to identify common ground. Oertel and Jahn may succeed in setting up a new organisation that mobilises supporters in Dresden. Pegida or its successors will be able to draw on comparatively reputable public figures such as prominent former Social Democrat Thilo Sarrazin and the Social Democratic mayor of the Berlin district of Neukölln, Heinz Buschkowsky, who have written books that put forward seemingly reasonable arguments suggesting that “foreigners” are not willing or able to integrate and that Germany is a deeply divided society because it has allowed the emergence of ethnic enclaves. Fears that Germany will move to the right and close its borders to asylum seekers, however, would be unjustified.

Pegida represents people who have every reason to feel marginalised. In today’s Germany, their ideas are increasingly anachronistic. That won’t stop them. And it won’t prevent people from embracing these ideas to justify violence: against Muslims, against asylum seekers or against those seen to be responsible for their marginalisation, including journalists or politicians. Last year, racist violence, including thirty-five incidents of arson in hostels for asylum seekers, has been on the rise. Saxony has seen a good deal of that violence; it recorded the comparatively largest number of racially motivated assaults on refugees.

The demonstrations of the last three months have shown that Pegida and Legida followers are a force to be reckoned with in Dresden and, to a lesser extent, in Leipzig. We might well be seeing an increasing polarisation of Germany. Dresden, a largely monocultural city in the far southeast, and the traditionally conservative state of Saxony, whose government believes that right-wing populism is the best antidote to right-wing populism, stand for one side. Multicultural Freiburg, the first German city ruled by a mayor from the Greens, and the traditionally equally conservative state of Baden-Württemberg, which is governed by a coalition of Greens and Social Democrats in which the latter are the junior partner, stand for the other side.

In 2015, most German cities resemble Freiburg rather than Dresden. Overall, Germans are now more likely to demonstrate their solidarity with refugees than protest against their presence. But that’s a fairly recent development. Only twenty-five years ago, Germans were anxious that they were being swamped by “economic refugees” and Scheinasylanten (bogus asylum seekers). In 1991 and 1992, rioting “ordinary Germans” in the East German towns of Rostock and Hoyerswerda were trying to burn down asylum seeker hostels. So it is perhaps understandable that the response to Pegida has been overheated. Many of those demonstrating in Freiburg would not even be able to remember Hoyerswerda, which is anyway a world away from Baden-Württemberg, but Gauck and Merkel, both of them from East Germany, surely do. It is to be hoped that they are determined to prevent a repeat of that particularly dark chapter in postwar German history. I suspect they know that one way of doing that is by depriving racists of oxygen, not entering into a dialogue with them and not showing them any compassion, even if that strategy runs the risk of making them only more angry. •

The post Who is afraid of Pegida? appeared first on Inside Story.

It was in December 1976, after the arrival of the third boat, that the earliest signs of panic appeared in the major newspapers. Melbourne’s Sun-News Pictorial, for example, warned of a “tide of human flotsam” lapping the shores of northern Australia, and speculated about an invasion of Australia’s far north “by hundreds, thousands and even tens of thousands of Asian refugees.”

But even after another 167 “boat people” arrived in Australia during the first nine months of 1977, they were still only a major topic of conversation in Darwin. And even there, most people seemed unperturbed. In fact, if the local newspaper is any indication, the feat of steering small fishing boats from Southeast Asia to Australia sparked admiration rather than fear. “Eight Brave Sea to Achieve Dream,” read the headline of a front-page article in the Northern Territory News on 26 September. It’s possible that people in Darwin were kindly disposed towards these boat arrivals because earlier that month they had closely followed the exploits of the Can-Tiki, a boat made from beer cans, which a group of local residents sailed from Darwin to Singapore to promote tourism to Australia’s Top End.

But then the pace of unauthorised boat arrivals picked up. After 102 Indochinese arrived in October and two more boatloads reached Darwin in the first half of November, concerns about exotic diseases and doubts about the effectiveness of the authorities’ surveillance of the northern coastline grew louder – particularly after a boat was found to have entered Doctor’s Gully in Darwin under the noses of the Australian military. Even in the southern states, the public discussion intensified.

On 16 November, for the first time, the immigration department didn’t immediately grant thirty-day temporary entry permits to passengers on a newly arrived boat, and initially refused to allow them to disembark. Immigration minister Michael MacKellar announced that his department would now “assess the implications of unauthorised entry as a matter of urgency.”

Three weeks earlier, prime minister Malcolm Fraser had ended the pre-election speculation by announcing that Australians would go to the polls on 10 December. Although Fraser had favoured admitting more refugees from Indochina in the months before the previous election, in 1975, boat arrivals had barely figured in a campaign overshadowed by the death throes of the scandal-ridden Labor government of Gough Whitlam. Fraser’s Coalition had won power because a majority of voters didn’t trust Labor to steer Australia through a time of economic crisis.

Initially, it seemed the 1977 campaign would be no different. It began badly for the government when Fraser was forced to demand the resignation of the Treasurer, Phillip Lynch, who had been implicated in shady land deals in Victoria and criticised for the use of a family trust to minimise his tax obligations. These issues dominated the first half of the campaign, and Fraser later confided that he would not have called an election had he known about Lynch’s troubles. (Lynch was subsequently cleared of any improper conduct.)

Halfway through the campaign, however, boat arrivals seemed set to play a major role. On 20 and 21 November – less than three weeks before the election, and coinciding with the Coalition’s formal campaign launch – six boats arrived in Darwin with 218 people on board. In one newspaper report, they were dubbed “the second fleet.”

One of them was the VNKG 1062, called Tự Do (“Freedom”) by its owner. It was less than twenty metres long and had thirty-one people, including seven children under the age of ten, on board. Today that boat is in the collection of the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney. In 1977, it was owned by a thirty-year-old businessman, Tan Than Lu, who had meticulously planned his escape from Vietnam and had had the boat built specifically for that purpose. Together with family, friends and neighbours, he left Vietnam on 16 August 1977. The Tự Do initially made landfall in Malaysia, from where Tan Than Lu unsuccessfully sought resettlement in the United States. After a month in Malaysia, he decided to push on towards Australia. The boat made another landfall in Java, where the refugees were reprovisioned by Indonesian officials, who then told them to move on. Off Flores, they encountered another refugee boat, which had run aground, and they towed it across the Timor Sea all the way to Darwin.

News of the first two vessels came as MacKellar and Labor’s acting immigration spokesman Tony Mulvihill, a former chair of the Commonwealth Immigration Advisory Council, were discussing refugee issues on ABC Radio’s The Policy Makers. The immigration minister took the opportunity to promise a new committee to assess claims for refugee status. Such a committee had been on the cards since 24 May that year, when MacKellar had announced plans for Australia’s first comprehensive refugee policy.

Mulvihill flagged Labor’s intention to limit the number of refugees Australia would take and criticised the government for accepting boat arrivals indiscriminately. He also claimed that many refugees in Latin America were “under worse political duress” than the people fleeing Indochina.

The next day, NT Labor senator Ted Robertson urged the government to “spread the word” that Vietnamese refugees arriving by boat were unwelcome. The government must “make it clear,” he said, “that Australia is not going to open the floodgates… We will have to try and find a way of showing our sympathy while stopping the flood of what basically are illegal immigrants.” In the NT Legislative Assembly, both sides of politics – including the Country Liberal Party’s majority leader Paul Everingham and Labor’s Jon Isaacs – deplored the unchecked arrival of boats. So did the mayor of Darwin, Ella Stack. “I think some of the last boatload of refugees are pseudo-refugees,” she told ABC Radio’s AM. “They just don’t look like refugees or people who have suffered, or have had the trauma of that long trip.”

Australians in the southern states read uncritical reports of this and other alleged first-hand testimony in their newspapers. In one case, the Australian quoted an unnamed “health department official,” involved in processing boat arrivals in Darwin, who observed that they looked “as though they’ve been on an excursion cruise” and commented that he had “seen people in much worse condition after the Sydney to Hobart yacht race.” At that stage, four or five days after the arrival of the six boats on 20 and 21 November, neither journalists nor the immigration department seemed interested in challenging statements of this kind. The majority of the first media reports suggested that Australians had good reason to be alarmed about the boat arrivals; only the Sydney Morning Herald published an editorial that bucked the trend. “Australia must take all that it can,” the paper argued. “These people deserve our admiration, our compassion and our help.”

The belief that people who weren’t destitute and weren’t visibly suffering could not possibly be refugees also featured prominently in statements made by officials from the Waterside Workers’ Federation, which had called on its members in Darwin to strike in protest against “preferential treatment” for refugees. A resolution passed by the federation’s Darwin branch immediately after the arrival of the six boats referred to the Vietnamese arrivals as “illegal immigrants” and cast aspersions on their “moral fibre” because they supposedly had been able to “finish up at the end of a very long war with gold bars and servants.”

On 24 November, the federation’s president, Curly Nixon, declared that the recent boat arrivals were not refugees because they had “pressed trousers, gold, and in one case three servants.” Nixon also claimed to know why the “boat people” were able to afford all this. “Who makes money out of a civil war?” he asked. “Black marketeers, dope runners, and brothel keepers. You’ve got the lot here. If they said good morning to me, I’d put my pyjamas on and go to bed, that’s how far I trust them.”

The same day, Mulvihill repeated Nixon’s claim that the recent arrivals were wealthy and included brothel owners. Darwin waterside workers proved responsive to such incitements. According to a Times correspondent, some of them hurled insults at “boat people.”

Much of what Nixon and others said was based on little more than hearsay and speculative gossip. An article in the Northern Territory News used a “reliable” (but unnamed) source to suggest that the movement of Indochinese refugees from Thailand to Australia was part of a racket. In the Legislative Assembly, Labor’s Isaacs said that “there is concern that the refugees are part of a well-orchestrated organisation” because some of the boats had new engines and modern navigation instruments. (It was later established that only one of the boats had a new engine, taken from an American tractor owned by one of the refugees.)

Fraser’s government was unprepared for the strength of the reaction. Detailed speaker’s notes compiled earlier that month by the Liberal Party’s federal secretariat referred briefly to the government’s “far-reaching and humanitarian” refugee policy, but otherwise didn’t mention either refugees or unauthorised arrivals. The government nevertheless presented a united front. In the first panicky week after the arrival of the Tự Do and the other five boats, the senior Liberal politicians who commented publicly on the issue echoed the concerns voiced by unions, Labor, and political leaders in the Northern Territory. Fraser and his colleagues appeared intent on placating anxiety about boat arrivals and determined not to let Labor exploit the issue.

On 22 November, immigration minister MacKellar responded to the resolution passed the previous day by the Darwin wharfies. While he stressed “Australia’s obligation to deal in the most sympathetic terms with people who, to the best of the ability to determine the facts, were genuine refugees,” he seemed anxious not to appear to be too critical of the waterside workers’ outlandish claims. He “well understood that there could be differing views held about the movement of refugees into Australia by these means,” MacKellar said, and “[t]here was no question that a rising flow of small boat migration would require a continuing review and tightening of the surveillance procedures.”

MacKellar’s half-hearted defence of the admission of “boat people” who were found to be refugees, coupled with his professed empathy with Australians who voiced strong and evidently irrational objections to unauthorised arrivals, anticipated a position taken by Labor prime minister Julia Gillard in the 2010 election campaign. By repeatedly assuring Australians hostile to asylum seekers that she fully understood their concerns she legitimised objections similar to those made in 1977 by unionists and local leaders in Darwin.

Also on 22 November, in a speech to the NSW branch of the Institute for International Affairs, MacKellar warned that “no country can afford the impression that any group of people who arrive on its shores will be allowed to enter and remain.” He painted a dire picture of the consequences of an unchecked arrival of refugee boats. “We have to combine humanity and compassion with prudent control of unauthorised entry, or be prepared to tear up the Migration Act and its basic policies,” he said.

Foreign minister Andrew Peacock said that Australia could not “continue to indefinitely accept Asian refugees arriving unannounced by sea” and should not be regarded as “a dumping ground.” Both Fraser – who had reportedly been warned by his advisers that the issue could be a campaign “sleeper” – and MacKellar flagged that asylum seekers arriving by boat would not necessarily be resettled in Australia, and could indeed be sent back. “Limit on Refugees Says PM,” read a front-page headline in the Brisbane Courier-Mail.

The government was rattled partly because it had also been told that more boats were on their way. On 23 November, the immigration department informed its minister that at least twelve boats were already en route to Australia, another forty boats were feared to be about to set out from Thailand, and some 2000 people wanted to head for Australia from Malaysia.

The increase in boat arrivals in Australia was partly due to a hardening of the position of Southeast Asian nations. In Thailand, which then housed the largest number of Indochinese refugees, refugees were being pushed back across the border, wherever possible, under a policy introduced on 15 November. Only when that proved impossible would claims be investigated by district-level committees. According to Australia’s ambassador in Bangkok, who toured Northern Thailand a month later, those found to be refugees were housed in camps that were not supervised by the UNHCR; the others were “prosecuted for illegal entry and then sent to one of the three new camps on a ‘temporary’ basis pending return to their country of origin whenever that becomes possible.”

MacKellar and his department recognised that in order to get an anxious Australian public off the government’s back, it was important to stop, or at least slow, the arrival of boats, and that would require a substantial increase in Australia’s intake of Indochinese refugees from camps in Southeast Asia. Up to that point, the intake had been comparatively low (with a total of 2,958 Indochinese refugee arrivals, including those who had come by boat, in 1977).

On 23 November, the Ministers for Immigration and Health, MacKellar and Ralph Hunt, announced that a team of immigration officials would be dispatched immediately to Malaysia and Singapore. Just two days later, the Department of Foreign Affairs was able to tell its minister that the strategy seemed to be working: according to information provided by representatives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, three boatloads of refugees had decided to postpone their departure from Malaysia following the announcement of an increase in Australia’s resettlement program.

MacKellar and Hunt’s statement didn’t mention how many refugees Australia would be prepared to resettle. Although a senior immigration bureaucrat told a meeting of immigration and foreign affairs officials that Australia ought to be resettling 10,000 Indochinese in the 1977–78 financial year, the department had been instructed to select just 1000 refugees from Malaysia and 500 from Indonesia.

The two ministers also announced that “urgent consideration was being given to surveillance requirements essential to safeguard Australia against unauthorised entry,” but they didn’t say how such surveillance could have an impact on unauthorised entry. Surveillance would simply provide the government with more advance notice and prevent a repeat of the embarrassment caused when the authorities became aware of refugee boats only after they had entered Darwin Harbour.

In fact, none of those who demanded that “boat people” be stopped from entering Australia made any practical suggestions as to what a “stop the boats” policy could look like. “Would not some of them be likely to sink on the return voyage?” the Sydney Morning Herald asked in an editorial in early December that was scathing of the policy promoted by Mulvihill and others. “Would any government risk the hostile public reaction which would be bound to follow?”

Meanwhile, sections of the media and senior Labor politicians continued to throw petrol on the flames. “Illegal immigrants masquerading as refugees should be returned to their countries of origin – and billed, where possible, for the cost of their passage home,” the Courier-Mail demanded in a 24 November editorial. Tony Mulvihill called on the government to “make an example” of some of the unauthorised arrivals: “We have to turn a few of them around, and send them back to Southeast Asia under naval escort.” Although he had a long record of championing the rights of migrants, Mulvihill knew that recently arrived migrants were concerned about the potential impact of the boats on Australia’s family reunion program, and he was aware that their representatives were likely to oppose admitting people who had not applied through the usual channels.

The next day, the Australian suggested that “troublesome political arrivals” should be sent “straight back” and that “criminal bully boys (it is said that some recent refugees slit throats to get the riches they are arriving with) should be sent packing, too.” Labor leader Gough Whitlam claimed that Australia needed to do more to police its northern borders if it wanted to prevent unauthorised immigration, drug importation and the spread of infectious diseases, subtly associating asylum seekers with illicit substances and dangerous viruses. He also doubted the legitimacy of refugee claims made by Vietnamese, suggesting that it was “not credible, two-and-a-half years after the end of the Vietnam war, that these refugees should suddenly be coming to Australia.”

Three days later, Whitlam conceded that “genuine refugees” should be accepted but warned the government not to put boat arrivals ahead of applicants “in the queue” who were sponsored by their relatives. Labor politicians portrayed themselves as speaking on behalf of people who would be disadvantaged by Australia’s acceptance of boat arrivals. The imaginary queue was soon to become one of the most powerful images in the anti–“boat people” discourse; it served to distinguish “good” from “bad” prospective immigrants.

For almost a week, the government said nothing to contradict Labor. Nor did it challenge journalists reporting the hostile views of unnamed government officials, including “authorities in Darwin” and an officer in Bangkok who had used the term “armada” to describe the number of boats on their way to Australia. “Reports say at least sixty boats are on the way to Darwin,” the Sun-Herald claimed, but it did not reveal who had written these reports.

Then, on the weekend of 26–27 November, the tenor of the public debate began to shift. MacKellar denied that an “armada” was on its way, and pointed out that the combined value of the possessions of the latest 220 Vietnamese boat arrivals was estimated at just $10,000. Church leaders and fifty-seven Sydney academics wrote an open letter to the government in which they invoked Australia’s obligations “as a stable and relatively prosperous nation,” highlighted the responsibility of individual Australians “to receive refugees and other migrants into the community,” and called for a substantial increase of the country’s refugee intake. The leader of the recently established Australian Democrats, former Liberal MP Don Chipp, became the first prominent politician to speak up against the idea that the boats could be turned back.

Some newspaper editors now remembered that journalists were obliged to assess claims critically before publishing them. An editorial in the Hobart Mercury on 28 November ridiculed suggestions that the Vietnamese had somehow been able to bring substantial quantities of gold to Australia without attracting the attention of the customs department. Some Labor figures, said the paper, were “seizing on the refugee question with the same sort of enthusiasm formerly reserved for extremists propounding the danger of the Yellow Peril to our North.” (The editorial didn’t mention that earlier Labor leaders had been prominent among those extremists too.) Both the Mercury and the Sydney Morning Herald warned against making the refugee problem into an election issue. The Herald also questioned claims of a “flood” or “horde” of Vietnamese descending on Australia: “How many hundreds of refugees are there in a flood or a horde?”

While the government was scrambling to deal with the influx of refugees who had arrived on 20 and 21 November, it was also monitoring the movements of a vessel bound to pose bigger problems than any of the boats that had arrived thus far. The Song Be 12 was a refrigerated trawler that had been nationalised after April 1975 by the Vietnamese government. To prevent its crew from using it to escape Vietnam, armed soldiers had been placed on board. The ship’s crew had seized control of the ship after overpowering and imprisoning the guards, however, and set course for Australia.

The Song Be 12 carried 181 people – the largest number arriving in a single boat that year – including three soldiers who initially insisted on being repatriated. As much as it could, using sketchy intelligence from local sources in Indonesia and from the US State Department, the Australian government monitored the progress of the ship through the Indonesian archipelago. On 17 November, the Song Be 12 was reported anchored at Surabaya; local church groups were said to be providing food and medicine to its passengers and crew. The ship left the Indonesian port on 22 November, and a week later HMAS Ardent escorted itinto Darwin Harbour.

The Song Be 12’s arrival added another argument to the repertoire of those anxious about the arrival of “boat people”: not only were they too well-fed and too wealthy to qualify as refugees, they were also no less ruthless than the regime whose clutches they supposedly escaped. The Australian government was now under pressure from two sides: domestically from a Labor Party trying to capitalise on fears about the unchecked invasion of “boat people” and from hostile journalists purporting to represent public opinion, and externally from the government in Hanoi, which claimed that Australia was harbouring pirates.

At last, the Fraser government went on the offensive. At a joint press conference in Adelaide on the day the Song Be 12 arrived, Peacock and MacKellar appealed to their fellow politicians “not to subordinate the issues [raised by the arrival of Vietnamese asylum seekers] to electoral considerations, not to exaggerate the dimensions of the problem, not to attempt to exploit the assumed fears of sections of the Australian public, and not to forget the human tragedy represented by these few small boats.” Their statement suggested that the government was concerned about how the parochial Australian debate would be perceived in Southeast Asia and intended to take on the panic-mongers. Referring to Mulvihill’s earlier statement, the two ministers vowed that their government would not “make examples” of the refugees “by indiscriminately turning some of them back” and would not “risk taking action against genuine refugees just to get a message across.” Doing so, they said, “would be an utterly inhuman course of action.”

Why did the government change tack? From the perspective of 2014, it is tempting to believe that Fraser was concerned that the fear of “boat people,” if condoned by his government, would get out of control – that the genie of xenophobia, once out of its bottle, could not be put back in. But Fraser could not have known about what would happen in 2001, when the nation seemed to be gripped by a collective paranoia that was stoked by the government of John Howard and largely unchallenged by the Kim Beazley–led Labor opposition, or in 2013, when a desperate Labor prime minister signed a deal with his Papua New Guinean counterpart for the processing and resettlement of asylum seekers who had sought Australia’s protection.

By 1977, the argument Fraser had used two years earlier in favour of admitting Vietnamese refugees – that Australia had the moral duty to help its former allies – had lost much of its traction. Politicians and commentators who defended the indiscriminate admission of “boat people” certainly invoked the need to be compassionate, but given that the majority of Australians had never been swayed by this argument it’s doubtful that Fraser would have risked a voter backlash in order to be able to claim the high moral ground.

Following MacKellar and Peacock’s statement, Father Jeff Foale of the Indo-China Refugee Association, the key advocacy group that had been lobbying the government to admit more Indochinese refugees, heaped praise on the immigration minister. “Australia is emerging as a country of compassion and good sense,” he said. “The Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs stands as something of a hero, being the only politician who did not lose his cool under fire.” But the archival evidence suggests that MacKellar couldn’t claim the credit for the press conference on 29 November. The fact that it was not Fraser, nor MacKellar by himself, who announced that the government would maintain its approach towards “boat people” indicates that Peacock and his department were the driving force behind the government’s stance.

It was also Peacock who rejected suggestions that the government ought to be guided by public opinion on the issue. On 1 December, in response to a radio interviewer’s suggestion that Darwin residents had expressed concerns about the numbers of refugees arriving by boat, he said, “Indeed they have, but they are not the government.” And when asked, “You have no suggestions at all that we should be stopping these boats from coming in?” his response was unequivocal: “None whatsoever.”

Peacock and MacKellar’s statement suggests that the government decided to take on the panic mongers out of a concern about how the Australian debate was being perceived in Southeast Asia. “The problem is a regional problem and the validity of Australia’s credentials as a good neighbour will depend largely on a willingness to meet our regional obligations by bearing part of the burden,” the ministers’ statement read. The potential diplomatic fallout of a policy of the kind favoured by senior Labor politicians was also noted by other informed observers at the time. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Southeast Asia correspondent, Michael Richardson, for example, whose reports about the refugee crisis in Southeast Asia had tried to convey the complexity of the problem to his readers, wrote on 29 November that the decision to turn back refugee boats “would raise a chorus of protests from neighbours whose friendship Australia wants to retain.”

In fact, news of the response of the Australian public to boat arrivals in the last week of November had already generated unfavourable headlines in the region. And on 25 November, Thailand’s ambassador to Australia, Wichet Suthayakhom, had issued a statement in which he defended Thailand’s response to Indochinese refugees while deploring the Labor Party’s stance. He was particularly incensed by Mulvihill’s suggestion that Australia cut its foreign aid to Thailand to discipline the Thai government for refusing to accommodate more Indochinese refugees.

The Fraser government also had reason to be concerned about the damage being done to Australia’s reputation as a defender of human rights and advocate of humanitarian solutions. On 29 November, the deputy high commissioner for refugees, Charles Mace, and the UNHCR’s acting director of assistance, Franz-Josef Homann-Herimberg, called on Australia’s ambassador in Geneva to express the organisation’s concern that Australia might be willing to turn back Vietnamese boats. They argued that such a course of action would be irresponsible on two counts. For humanitarian reasons, the boat arrivals could neither be sent back “nor sent on elsewhere,” even if they were not, strictly speaking, refugees. And turning boats back would weaken the position of the UNHCR, which was appealing to Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines to allow “boat people” to land.

Some of Australia’s allies were also concerned about the public hostility to the landings in Darwin, and about the mixed messages sent out by the Fraser government. In December, the Australian embassy in Washington, for example, warned that Australia risked “being singled out in Congress, and elsewhere, as a country which is lagging in humanitarian concern for Asian refugees.”

Judging by the indignation it engendered, the negative publicity in London and Washington that was, or threatened to be, generated by the government’s seeming capitulation to vox populi troubled Fraser and his ministers. One scathing newspaper column in particular, published on 30 November in London, caught their attention. It appeared in the Times, whose viewsAustralian governments tended to take more seriously than those of any other media outlet. And to make matters worse, its author was Britain’s most famous columnist at the time, Bernard Levin. Although his thoughts were published after MacKellar and Peacock’s joint press conference, it was obviously written before the Australian government had clarified that it would not turn back Vietnamese refugee boats; thus Levin’s criticism was directed at what appeared to be the government’s pandering to popular opinion.

Levin didn’t mince his words. Fraser’s warning to Indochinese refugees was an unparalleled “swinery” designed to placate the xenophobic vote. And while Australia was not alone in telling Indochinese “boat people” that they were not welcome, it had no excuse – unlike its poor Southeast Asian neighbours – because it did not lack the capacity to accommodate refugees. “What is more,” Levin wrote, “there would still be no excuse for Australia if the Vietnamese refugees were counted in hundreds of thousands, instead of in ones and tens.”

The impact of Levin’s article can be gauged by the fact that two of Fraser’s former colleagues rushed to his defence on the letters pages. Gordon Freeth, a former foreign minister and in 1977 Australia’s high commissioner in London, and Malcolm Mackay, a former navy minister, both tried to rebut Levin’s arguments: the former by drawing on the statement issued by MacKellar and Peacock on 29 November, and the latter by claiming that Australia was a “country with enormous problems… torn by fire, drought and exotic cattle disease, as well as the man-made problems of industrial upheavals.” No doubt Mackay’s defence would have confirmed Levin’s view that Australia was “apparently determined to retain, and indeed strengthen, her reputation as the armpit of the Southern Hemisphere.”

When Peacock and MacKellar jointly committed the government to hold the line, they had reason to be confident that the Coalition would be returned with a majority at the 10 December elections. The government may have thought that it could afford to let Labor play to Australians’ fears of an Asian invasion while hoping that Whitlam and his colleagues would temper their rhetoric after the elections. It was concerned about the mood in Darwin, however, where Stack and Everingham continued to paint alarmist pictures and demand that the government stop the boats from landing. MacKellar eventually dispatched a senior immigration official, Derek Volker, to talk to local leaders in Darwin. The report of this visit must have reinforced the government’s view that the situation could not be allowed to spiral any further out of control. Darwin people were genuinely concerned about an invasion from Indochina and Southeast Asia, Volker found. The local response to “boat people” was uninformed, even at the highest level, and tended to be exacerbated by the sense that Darwin was isolated from and neglected by the rest of Australia.

Emboldened by the government’s somewhat belated shift, senior Labor figures continued to try to exploit the arrivals for electoral gain. Bill Hayden, who was touted as the next Labor leader (and who would indeed succeed Whitlam within two weeks of the election), told the Perth Press Club that sailing into Darwin was as easy as crossing Sydney Harbour on a Manly ferry. But of all senior Labor politicians, it was Labor Party president and trade union leader Bob Hawke who was most openly opposed to the admission of the Indochinese. Campaigning in Hobart on 28 November he demanded that they should be subject to normal immigration requirements and that those who failed to meet such requirements ought to be deported. On 1 December he suggested that Australia should only accept refugees selected offshore.

Hawke also anticipated two lines of argument made famous by John Howard during the Tampa crisis in 2001. He said that Australians were renowned for their compassion, and would willingly accommodate refugees “who have gone through our formal process of screening and… meet our requirements.” Unauthorised refugee arrivals, however, did not have “a total monopoly on our compassion.” In Hawke’s view, Australia had the right as a sovereign nation “to determine how it will exercise its compassion and how it will increase its population.” Hawke’s attempts to make the boat arrivals into a key election issue were half-hearted, however, and after a few days in which “boat people” dominated the front pages of newspapers around the country, the issue lost traction.

Three days out from the election, there was one last attempt to exploit Australians’ fear of uncontrolled boat arrivals. This time it was not made by a senior opposition figure, but by a government minister. As if to underline the fact that not everybody in the government agreed with the line adopted by Peacock, MacKellar and Fraser after 29 November, transport minister Peter Nixon, a National Country Party MP, announced that henceforth “boat people” would only be allowed to land in Australia if they had been cleared by Australian immigration officials in refugee camps in Thailand or Malaysia. “If they leave the camps without going through Australian immigration checks, then their boats will be sent back to where they came from,” he was reported to have said in Darwin. The next day, MacKellar flatly denied that the government would turn back boats, and Nixon’s office scrambled to retract his statement. By then, however, it had been widely reported, both in Australia and overseas, and elicited another concerned response from the UNHCR in Geneva.

Political scientists agree that Nixon’s intervention didn’t influence the election outcome. The fact that there were no further boats in the last week before the polls might have helped take the issue off voters’ minds. Yet it had been an otherwise dull campaign, and in the light of subsequent federal election campaigns – including those of 2001, 2010 and 2013 – it is striking that the debate died almost as soon as the government defended its policy.

After all, Labor could have used the refugee issue more vigorously to distinguish itself clearly from the government and to seek electoral gain by appealing to xenophobic sentiments and a latent fear of invasion. Labor was clearly hesitant to do so – perhaps because most of its leaders knew the dangers of fear-mongering, and because both sides of politics had traditionally taken a bipartisan approach to immigration matters and they were hesitant to abandon that.

On 10 December, Fraser’s Coalition government lost two seats to Labor in Queensland but won a comfortable majority overall. In the House of Representatives its primary vote dropped by almost 5 per cent, but Labor’s primary vote dropped too because Chipp’s Australian Democrats, contesting their first federal election, attracted over 9 per cent of the primary vote. The Coalition’s election win, the approaching summer silly season and the fact that there was a lull in the arrival of refugee boats defused the issue that had excited politicians and commentators in late November and early December.

The campaign was the first in Australian history in which one of the major parties appealed to the public’s unease about unauthorised boat arrivals. It was the moment when much of the rhetoric to which Australians would become accustomed during the Howard, Rudd/ Gillard and Abbott years made its first appearance.

During the Tampa election of 2001, and then again in 2010 and 2013, Labor assumed that it would suffer disastrously if it didn’t try to match the anti–asylum seeker rhetoric of the Liberals and Nationals. It worried that a considered and principled stance, like the approach adopted by Don Chipp in 1977, and eventually taken by Fraser, Peacock and MacKellar, would severely damage its standing at the polls. It would be fascinating to see one of the major political parties test this orthodoxy. The experience of 1977 suggests that it might not be as risky as Labor leaders from Kim Beazley to Kevin Rudd have assumed. •

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Much of the reporting, particularly outside Papua New Guinea, emphasised the potential for large-scale destruction. At close quarters, however, the eruption seemed less catastrophic than it appeared on television and in newspapers. Some villagers living downwind from Tavurvur lost their food gardens and had to leave their homes, but the town of Rabaul, at the foot of the mountain, was not evacuated. Most residents are accustomed to the volcano’s violent rumblings.

Tavurvur is not strictly a volcano in its own right, but a cone formed by vents of the Rabaul Volcano, which is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, along which two-thirds of the earth’s 1300 visible volcanoes are located. When the last major eruption of the Rabaul Volcano began – twenty years ago, on 19 September 1994 – vents were active in two locations: at Tavurvur, which lies about four kilometres to the southeast of the centre of Rabaul, and at Kalamanagunan (or Mount Vulcan), eight kilometres south of the town. Kalamanagunan, more than 200 metres high, was formed by an earlier eruption.

Until late last month, the twentieth anniversary of the 1994 eruption was bound to be overshadowed by another event: the commemoration on 11 September of the one-hundredth anniversary of the so-called Battle of Bitapaka, where an Australian expeditionary force overcame German resistance to seize control of the Gazelle Peninsula, the economic and political heart of German New Guinea. The renewed activities of the volcano, called kaia by the local Tolai people, has refocused attention on the catastrophic eruption twenty years ago.

Compared to that previous eruption, the current volcanic activity at the edge of the Rabaul caldera is comparatively benign. The 1994 event was big, both in geological terms and in terms of the impact it had on the local population. Some 80,000 people were displaced, and if that figure is used as a yardstick, the Rabaul eruption of 1994 was the most significant volcanic disaster in the South Pacific in at least one hundred years. It led to the destruction of most of Rabaul, a bustling port town and the political and commercial powerhouse of the New Guinea Islands region.

But the 1994 catastrophe was remarkable not just for its sheer size. It also caused relatively few casualties; it displaced Rabaul; and it led to a forced exodus of people characterised as vaira, or foreigners.

The Rabaul Volcano’s last major eruption had occurred in 1937. It began on 28 May through a vent on the western side of Rabaul Harbour, lasted only four days and created Kalamanagunan. At least 507 people, about half of them from two Tolai villages close to the new mountain, Tavana and Valaur, died in the eruption. Rabaul, which was then the administrative capital of the Territory of New Guinea, held by Australia under a League of Nations mandate, received only moderate ash fall and escaped major damage.

Between 1983 and 1984, increased seismic activity – including 1717 earthquakes in a single day – suggested that another eruption was imminent. The authorities issued a stage two alert, which meant that an eruption was thought to be only “months to weeks” away. On 25 January 1984, the Post-Courier, one of Papua New Guinea’s dailies, announced on its front page: “Big Eruption Soon.” A month later, the cover of Australia’s Bulletin magazine depicted an erupting volcano under the heading, “Rabaul’s Killer Volcano.” Seven thousand of Rabaul’s residents were sufficiently worried about their safety to leave the town. But by 1985, the seismic activity had subsided, and life in Rabaul and its hinterland returned to normal. The thirteen month emergency had come at a huge cost to the local economy, however, and long-time Rabaul residents took two lessons from it: that the volcanologists, who staffed an observatory overlooking Mount Tavurvur, were not particularly good at predicting an eruption, and that evacuation ought to be only a measure of last resort.

Although there were fewer earthquakes after 1985, the scientists working at the Rabaul Volcano Observatory, or RVO, knew that the Rabaul Volcano would erupt sooner rather than later. The last major eruption before 1937 had been in 1878; if the volcano’s apparently cyclical behaviour continued, another eruption would occur in the mid 1990s.

Two major earthquakes – in such close succession that they were experienced as one – shook the northeastern Gazelle Peninsula in the early morning of Sunday 18 September. After a deceptive twelve-hour lull, seismic activity increased significantly from mid-afternoon. Shortly after six o’clock, as night fell, the Provincial Disaster Committee, on advice from the RVO, issued a stage two alert, which was broadcast on the 6.30 pm national news. Throughout the evening, the local radio station, Radio East New Britain, relayed an appeal by the disaster committee for residents to remain calm and stay put.

By then, though, many of Radio East New Britain’s listeners were on the run. In villages surrounding Rabaul, elders counselled people to evacuate. The spectacle of thousands of villagers passing through Rabaul on their way to safety alerted town residents. At around 1.00 am, the volcanologists advised the disaster committee to declare a stage three alert, which assumed that an eruption was “weeks to days” away. News of the impending change in the alert was broadcast by Radio Australia and picked up by listeners in East New Britain. The disaster committee decided to delay a declaration until first daylight, and set about organising the evacuation of Rabaul and advising airlines to withdraw their planes from Rabaul airport, situated at the foot of Tavurvur. The highly unusual roar of planes taking off in the middle of the night was perceived by many in Rabaul and nearby villages as an indication that something was seriously amiss and that the kaia was about to come alive.

At 6.06 am on Monday morning Tavurvur erupted. Seventy-one minutes later, a new vent opened on the northeastern flank of Kalamanagunan. A pilot flying over the area later that morning estimated its eruption column to be more than fifteen kilometres high.

By the time Tavurvur and Kalamangunan began spewing lava, rocks, ash and smoke, most of Rabaul and all the villages that had suffered in the 1937 eruption were deserted. A few people remained on the island of Matupit, just opposite Tavurvur. In the early morning, they saw the ash plume rising out of Tavurvur and heard the local radio announcer, cocooned in his soundproof studio on the outskirts of Rabaul and oblivious to what was happening outside, exhort his listeners on behalf of the Provincial Disaster Committee not to panic or flee.

Papua New Guinea’s last major eruption had occurred in 1951 at Mount Lamington in Papua. Despite a sparser population than on the Gazelle Peninsula, approximately 3000 lives were lost. Remarkably, only five deaths directly resulted from the 1994 eruptions, four of them in Rabaul.

Town residents and Tolai villagers didn’t wait for the local authorities to tell them to evacuate; they moved to safety when it was still possible to leave. None of the villagers living adjacent to Kalamanagunan would have survived if they had remained; their houses were buried under metres of mud. Because of a shortage of transport, people broke into the Department of Works pool and commandeered dozens of government vehicles to ferry residents to safety. The fact that almost 20,000 Rabaul residents and tens of thousands of villagers evacuated without major incident, in the dark and on roads that could be hazardous at the best of times, was miraculous.

Afterwards, the provincial authorities tried to take credit for the smooth evacuation. And it may be that an official order to evacuate would have triggered a panic. But Rabaul residents and Tolai villagers, rather than RVO scientists and the disaster committee, knew when it was time to leave, and accurately predicted that a major disaster was only hours away.

One explanation gave credit to local villagers who, it was said, observed natural warnings that an eruption was imminent. While people certainly identified such signs (the barking of dogs or the strange behaviour of birds, for example) retrospectively, I am not aware of more than isolated cases of people leaving their homes after observing such signs rather than because of the earthquakes on the day before the eruption. Tolai people who had witnessed the 1937 eruption recognised that these tremors were very similar to those that preceded the earlier eruption, and urged their fellow villagers to heed the warning.

Rabaul, nestled between a natural harbour and the volcano’s northern caldera wall, was founded by German colonial authorities in the early twentieth century and became their administrative headquarters. When Australia became the colonial power it retained Rabaul as the seat of government. After the 1937 eruption, a report commissioned by the Australian government recommended that the administrative centre should be moved and Rabaul, with its excellent port facilities, retained as a commercial hub. When the volcano remained quiet after the end of the Pacific war (which had all but wiped out most of Rabaul), however, the Australian colonial authorities failed to act on that report.

Rabaul suffered significant damage in 1994 – not so much as a direct consequence of the eruption, but because looters had almost free reign once the town had been abandoned by its residents. Initially, the police even condoned some of the looting. “I gave a certain instruction then,” the regional police commander recalled, “that if people are going for food, let them loot.”

Much of the looting was done by young Tolai men, but other sections of the population, including expatriates, were also implicated. Once the contents of buildings had been removed or vandalised, the houses themselves became targets. Looters took everything that could be reused as building material (and a lot that could not be put to any use), from louvre blades to sheets of fibro. And the looting was not confined to private houses and businesses, extending also to government buildings, including schools. It affected not only Rabaul but also surrounding villages, where school buildings were vandalised.

The smooth evacuation had been a testament to the ability of town residents and local villagers to organise themselves. Society was functioning, it seemed, even with minimal government intervention. But the post-eruption destruction indicated the opposite: a dysfunctional society in which many were no longer able to distinguish right from wrong or recognise that communal facilities belonged to everyone and needed to be cared for by everyone.

We remember the 1994 eruption because it resulted in the destruction of what was considered one of the most beautiful towns in the South Pacific. Probably more so than any other town in Papua New Guinea, Rabaul was held in great affection by the people who lived there as well as by people living in surrounding villages. “Rabaul yu swit moa yet… maski mi go na mi tingim yu yet” (Rabaul, you are so sweet… even if I left I would still think of you), the Papua New Guinean band Barike sang in their 1994 hit “Rabaul Town.” Yet that affection did not translate into an effective resolve to protect the town – by clearing the roofs of buildings from ash to stop them from collapsing, and by stopping the looters.

Unlike after 1945, Rabaul did not have a phoenix-like rebirth following the 1994 eruption. The provincial authorities moved to nearby Kokopo (once called Herbertshöhe, and the seat of the German colonial government before the establishment of Rabaul) and the airport was moved to the east of the Gazelle Peninsula. Much of Rabaul has been rebuilt, but the pre-1994 Rabaul has gone.

The northeastern Gazelle Peninsula is home to the Tolai people, one of Papua New Guinea’s most prominent and influential ethnic groups. Tolai also lived in Rabaul, but Rabaul had never been a Tolai town. It was home to Chinese, Europeans, Australians and vaira, “strangers,” the term Tolai use to refer to Papua New Guineans from other parts of the country. For more than a hundred years they had come to East New Britain to work, or to stay with relatives who were working. Most of them lived either in Rabaul or on one of the plantations. They had not all come voluntarily: many vaira were cajoled into working in or near Rabaul during the colonial era. Those who had arrived more recently to work on copra and cocoa plantations sometimes regretted having come, but did not have enough money to pay for their trip home.

Tolai were ambivalent about the vaira living in their midst. Demands to repatriate all unemployed vaira were popular and resurfaced regularly in the lead-ups to elections. Tolai-dominated provincial governments tried to restrict squatting by vaira in Rabaul. In the months preceding the 1994 eruption, the government ordered the eviction of many squatters and the bulldozing of their settlements. Squatters were held responsible for any lawlessness in town.

Tensions between vaira and Tolai go back a long way. Conflicts could be triggered by Tolai women eloping with a vaira, vaira squatting on Tolai land, or vaira helping themselves to food grown in Tolai gardens. But the relationship between Tolai and vaira was also marked by a successful symbiosis that contributed to the prosperity of the Gazelle Peninsula and to Rabaul’s vibrancy. For many Tolai, the sale of garden produce and betel nuts has long been an important source of cash income. And as most vaira living in town had insufficient garden land to grow their own food, Rabaul’s substantial vaira population accounted for a large proportion of customers at the Rabaul market.

After the eruption, the non-Tolai residents of the area affected by the volcano were expected to go “home.” Some policy-makers in East New Britain thought that the repatriation of vaira was the one positive result of the eruption. To prevent squatters from moving back into town, they had been quick to flatten what remained of the squatter settlements in Rabaul after the eruption. Police were instructed to evict squatters from derelict houses in Rabaul. They were supported by a neighbourhood watch committee, which patrolled the town at night and reported people occupying abandoned buildings.

Chartered ships and planes took the vaira to their home provinces. For those who had been in Rabaul for only a few years and had lost their houses and their jobs, repatriation seemed a sensible enough solution. It provided a welcome opportunity for plantation labourers who did not have much of a stake in East New Britain. But many of Rabaul’s vaira had known only one home: Rabaul. Their parents or grandparents had migrated to East New Britain more than twenty years earlier and they identified as pikinini bilong Rabaul, Rabaul’s children. They had rarely been to the places they were now told to return to. This was particularly true for the so-called Sepiks, people from East Sepik and Sandaun Provinces in northeastern New Guinea, who formed by far the largest contingent of Rabaul’s vaira.

In October 1994, East Sepik’s premier Alex Anisi addressed the Sepik evacuees at the Kokopo Showground. He promised them free transport back to Wewak, the capital of East Sepik Province, and urged them to make use of the offer. He waved aside questions of how second and third generation Sepiks in Rabaul would settle back “home”: “You will be all right. You will fit in. The important thing is you must come home. We will sort out those things at home.” When the ships from Rabaul arrived in Wewak, trucks and buses provided by the local authorities took the evacuees straight to various government and mission stations. The authorities in Wewak did not provide any assistance to the repatriated Sepiks beyond paying for their transport. Generally, people in East Sepik Province were not overly enthusiastic about those people from Rabaul suddenly turning up on their doorsteps.

Returning to their ancestral lands in mainland New Guinea proved to be a disappointment for many of the repatriated Sepiks. The land they once owned had long been taken over by others. They were made welcome but not for long. “Why should we give you food or let you sleep in our house?,” their relatives often asked. “After all, you never thought of us when you lived in comfort in Rabaul.” Because they came from Rabaul, the new arrivals were expected to have money. Sometimes, people in the village would call them vaira or say: “You Tolai better go back to where you have come from.” “Mipela hangamap nating tasol” – “we are lost” – many of them summed up their situation after having returned “home.”

Papua New Guineans have had their share of terrible natural disasters. The 1998 earthquake and tsunami near Aitape in northeastern New Guinea, for instance, claimed more than 2000 lives, and Cyclone Guba in November 2007 killed more than 200. On 19 September 2014, they won’t think back to the catastrophe of September 1994 with a huge human death toll in mind. But its impact extended far beyond the destruction of infrastructure, buildings and crops.

Tolai will commemorate their resilience. They have learnt to live with a volcano that has barely stopped rumbling during the past twenty years. They have rebuilt their society, and extended its reach beyond the territory they traditionally occupied, when villagers from communities close to the volcano were resettled on land in the south of the Gazelle Peninsula.

On 19 September, people across Papua New Guinea will mourn the passing of the old Rabaul. But Rabaul was more than scenic Mango Avenue, the various clubs and hotels, or its sprawling market. Rabaul was living proof that a polyglot multicultural Papua New Guinean town can coexist successfully with ethnically homogenous and prosperous villages. It was home to vaira who weren’t born in Rabaul, and to Tolai who did not even live there. The spectacular footage of lava and ash plumes may make us forget that a volcanic eruption is not just a natural disaster. •

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On 20 April 2005, the German tabloid Bild splashed three words across its front page: “Wir sind Papst!” The headline – which literally means “We are Pope!” – celebrated the election of a Bavarian cardinal as successor of Pope John Paul II. Bild readers were expected to pride themselves on the fact that “our Joseph Ratzinger” had been chosen to head the world’s one billion or more Catholics. But the headline also subtly reminded them of what “we” were not: Weltmeister (world champions). By then it had been fifteen long years since a German team had lifted the only trophy that truly matters to Bild readers and Bild haters alike, the football world cup.

Nine years later, at last, the collective sense of underachievement was put to rest. On Sunday 13 July 2014, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the most earnest and proper of all German broadsheets, announced in its online edition, “Argentinien ist Papst – aber Deutschland ist Weltmeister.” The first person plural and the exclamation mark would have been beneath the Frankfurter Allgemeine, but in this instance it was happy to pay homage to Bild’s 2005 headline.

The global media had been unanimous in its response to Brazil’s 1–7 loss in the semi-final. The result was said to be a terrible blow to a nation that was football-mad like no other, and whose past exploits on the field symbolised all that was admirable about the game. There was broad agreement that the loss against Germany was worse than the 0–1 defeat at the hands of neighbouring Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup final. The result of the game on 8 July left an entire nation in tears, headlines around the world suggested.

Brazil’s players feared that they would be scarred for life, that nothing could ever quite take away the shame they felt after their lacklustre performance at the Estádio Mineirão. Analysts predicted that the national team’s defeat would have dire consequences for the country’s economy and would lead to an immediate slump on the São Paulo stock exchange. When the share market rallied instead, observers assumed that it was because stockbrokers had anticipated another fallout, the end of left-leaning Dilma Rousseff’s presidency. And it’s true that pundits around the world, irrespective of the extent of their knowledge of Brazilian politics, had been quick to point out that the semi-final loss might well cost Rousseff the elections scheduled for October.

Long before the 2014 World Cup began, commentators had conjured the spectre of the Maracanazo, the tragedy of 1950, when Brazil lost in the final. Anything but a win for the host nation would have grave consequences, sports writers and political analysts forecast. And ideally that win would be against arch-rival Argentina.

By contrast, little attention was paid outside Germany to the possibility that the Nationalmannschaft would exit at the group stage, or not progress at least to the semi-finals. That wasn’t because the national team was expected to win – it was considered a strong contender, but by no means the favourite – but rather because the experts assumed that Germany would cope well with another failed tilt at football’s highest reward, as it had in 1994, 1998, 2002, 2006 and 2010.

Yet I suspect that Germany has been just as fixated on football, and particularly on the performance of its national team, as South American nations. It is difficult to imagine what would have happened if Germany had lost its opening match to Portugal by the same margin, 0–4, by which Cristiano Ronaldo’s team succumbed to the Germans. Or, worse still, if Brazil had thumped Germany 7–1. Joachim “Jogi” Löw, the German coach who led the national team to the final of Euro 2008, and to the semi-finals of the 2010 World Cup and the 2012 European championship, would have almost certainly lost his job if Germany had had to play once more for third place.

If his team had lost the game against Brazil by a big margin, Löw would not have been the only one to be held responsible and sent packing. The consequences would also have been dire for Angela Merkel who, after some initial reluctance, has happily assumed the role of the current team’s mascot. Her fortunes have been at least as entwined with those of the German national side as Rousseff’s have been with the success, or lack thereof, of the Seleção Brasileira. And unlike the Brazilian share market, the DAX index of leading shares at the Frankfurt stock exchange would not have easily recovered following a defeat in the semi-final. Predictably, the DAX rose after Germany’s win in the final.

Ever since the birth of the German Federal Republic in 1949, the nation and its football team have evolved (and regressed) in tandem. The team has reflected not just the national mood, but even the state of the economy. Conversely, success on the football field has inspired Germans with confidence, and poor performances by the Nationalmannschaft have sometimes been the harbingers of more profound social and economic woes.

West Germany played no part in the first World Cup after the war, the 1950 tournament in Brazil. Its representatives had been expelled from the world football federation, FIFA, in 1945, and its team had not been eligible to play in the qualifiers.

By 1954, the Federal Republic’s football federation had rejoined FIFA and qualified for the finals of the world cup in Switzerland. In the group stage, it was drawn to play against the tournament’s favourite, Hungary. It didn’t just lose to Hungary, but suffered an 8–3 shellacking, although it needs to be said that the German coach had decided to rest some of his key players, including goalkeeper Toni Turek. In the quarter finals, the German team faced Yugoslavia, which expected to account for the Germans easily and thereby progress to the next round. But Germany took the lead 1–0 after only ten minutes, thanks to an own goal by Ivica Horvat (who later in life became a successful Bundesliga coach). For the remaining eighty minutes, the German team defended doggedly and, with the final score 2–0 in its favour, successfully.

In the semi-final, Germany played highly fancied Austria. Again the Germans won against the odds. The final score of 6–1 suggested that the win was the work of its strikers and midfielders; however, Germany retained the upper hand not least thanks to the heroics of Turek, who had already starred in the win against Yugoslavia. The defeat of Austria set up a final between the German team and that of Hungary, which had last lost a game in 1950.

The 1954 World Cup final in Bern began in even a worse fashion than had been expected by German supporters. After only eight minutes, Germany was down by two goals. Turek was partly to blame, but in the opening phase he was only one member of a hapless team that looked destined for another drubbing by the world-class Hungarians. Yet in the end the Germans won 3–2, with two goals scored by the man they called “The Boss,” Helmut Rahn. The second of them fell six minutes before full time.

The game, which became known as the “miracle of Bern,”, was called for German radio by Herbert Zimmermann. The words he used to call for and celebrate the winning goal became the most famous piece of radio sound in German history. “Schäfer nach innen geflankt. Kopfball. Abgewehrt. Aus dem Hintergrund müßte Rahn schießen. Rahn schießt! Toooor! Toooor! Toooor! Toooor!” (Schäfer puts in the cross. Header. Cleared. Rahn should shoot from deep. Rahn shoots! Goal! Goal! Goal! Goal!)

Zimmermann’s call also included an infamous moment. In the second half, while the scores were level, Turek denied the Hungarians a seemingly certain goal. Zimmermann was ecstatic: “Turek, du bist ein Teufelskerl! Turek, du bist ein Fussballgott” (Turek, you are a hell of a guy! Turek you are a football god!) He instantly realised he had crossed a line, and apologised to his listeners for being overly enthusiastic. But he nearly lost his job over the “Fussballgott” reference and had to issue a public apology. The station broadcasting the game asked Zimmermann to re-record part of his call; the offending words, “du bist ein Fussballgott,” were replaced by “du bist Gold wert” (you are worth gold). For many years it was assumed that the edited version in the broadcaster’s archive was authentic; it was not until much later that another copy of the original recording resurfaced.

There were other instances of public embarrassment. After the game, a brass band played the German national anthem. Many of the Germans among the crowd sang along, but using the words of the banned first verse (Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles) rather than the officially sanctioned third verse (Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit), which prompted Swiss radio to abruptly cut its live broadcast.

All three verses of Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s “Song of the Germans” had been Germany’s national anthem during the Weimar Republic. Under the Nazis, only the first verse was sung; the Nazi Party’s “Horst Wessels Lied” became the unofficial national anthem. While the latter was banned after 1945, the “Song of the Germans” was simply not used. Most of West Germany’s political elite thought it was too compromised. In 1950, West Germany’s president, the Free Democrat Theodor Heuss, commissioned a new national anthem, but failed to have it adopted. In the meantime, a host of other songs were used at official functions as substitutes. During a football game between Germany and Belgium, for instance, the Belgians played “Wir sind die Eingeborenen von Trizonesien,” a song composed for the 1948 carnival in Cologne. It was not until 1952 that Heuss reluctantly agreed to the proposal to reinstall the Weimar Republic’s anthem, but to use only its third verse.

Two weeks after the final in Bern, Heuss welcomed the German team at the Olympic stadium in Berlin. He read out the words of the anthem’s remaining verse to the 80,000 strong crowd, then invited them to sing it. He also chided Peco Bauwens, the president of the (West) German Football Federation, for jingoistic comments he had made when Germany won the cup. West Germany’s political elites were anxious that the miracle of Bern not be misunderstood at home – and they were even more concerned that the victory would not be seen as an attempt to reassert German superiority.

The miracle of Bern didn’t end with the final whistle on 4 July 1954. It marked the beginning of West Germany’s economic miracle and the de facto emergence of the Federal Republic as a political entity. For the first time since the end of the war, West Germans felt they were entitled to identify proudly as Germans. The statements, “Wir sind Weltmeister”, which the 2005 Bild headline referenced, and “Wir sind wieder wer” (We are someone once more) encapsulated that pride.

The final on 4 July 1954 and the return home of the victorious team became the most significant mass events in Germany’s postwar history, larger in size and with a more enduring legacy than those in November 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. From the town of Spiez in the Bernese Oberland, where the Germans had been accommodated during the tournament, a special diesel train, the Weltmeisterzug, took the team back to Germany. Perhaps a million people cheered the players in the small southern German towns the train passed on its way to Munich. Individual players were feted in their home towns. In Essen, 100,000 people greeted Rahn at the train station and then in front of the town hall. Düsseldorf organised a parade for Turek, physio Erich Deuser and team doctor Franz Loogen; almost 200,000 locals welcomed them home.

The enthusiasm was spontaneous rather than (as many patriotic demonstrations had been between 1933 and 1945) orchestrated. It was as if the win allowed Germans to release long-repressed emotions. As Paul Legg observed in a recent article, the Berlin correspondent of the Manchester Guardian was among the few contemporary outside observers who was able to make empathetic sense of what was happening in Germany in 1954. His assessment has stood the test of time: “One must remember both the giant load of bewilderment beneath which this nation has been staggering since one type of German pride came to its catastrophic fall nine years ago and also the zeal for an emotional release to lift minds out of the ever-present spectacle of surrounding ruin.”

The German media mostly avoided gloating over Hungary’s loss; newspaper editors tried to emphasise to their readers that the win was, after all, only something that had happened on a football field. That didn’t stop their colleagues in France and Britain warning of a new German arrogance and grab for power. In the interest of European rapprochement, it was probably fortunate that the West German team lost most of its matches in the two years following the miracle of Bern.

Although 1954 marked a new beginning, it was one burdened by the recent past. Sepp Herberger, the coach of the West German team, had been in charge of a regional West German team in 1932 and 1933, and then assistant to Germany’s coach Otto Nerz. He joined the Nazi party in May 1933. In 1938, he was appointed Reichstrainer (national coach). When West Germany fielded a national team again in 1950, its first outing was a friendly match against Switzerland in November, which Germany won in front of 115,000 people. The former Reichstrainer was once more in charge – only his title, now Bundestrainer, had changed.

In hindsight, Herberger’s decision to entrust Turek to keep goal was inspired. By 1954, Turek was the oldest player in the German team; he had fought in the second world war, had been wounded, and still had a splinter from a shell lodged in his skull. He had also been a prisoner of war. Thus he represented a generation of German men who were desperate for recognition and rehabilitation.

Turek was also an excellent goalkeeper. But many sports writers at the time thought that he was not the best German goalie of his generation. Arguably, that was Bernd Trautmann. He too had fought in the war. The British took him prisoner in 1945, and he ended up in England. After his release from a POW camp, he declined to be repatriated, working first as a farm labourer and then with a bomb disposal unit. Besides, he played for a local football club, and married the daughter of its secretary. In 1949, Manchester City recruited Trautmann, who by then was known as Bert and attracted attention for his skills as a goalkeeper. He became one of the best of his era, but was not called on in 1954 because Herberger and the German football federation insisted that no German playing outside Germany would be nominated for the national team.

Herberger’s team was known for virtues that had been celebrated as supposedly distinctly German by the Nazis: endurance, tenacity, strategic nous and physical strength. They did not play elegant football (as the Hungarians did). They were defensively strong, and able to exploit their opponents’ weaknesses when launching counter attacks. They were popular because they won and because they were ordinary men rather than aloof stars. They did not charm fans with their technical finesse. Herbert Rahn was no German Pelé or Messi. And while Rahn may have been the boss on the field, the players in all other respects obeyed Herberger, who was a stern, if not authoritarian, father figure.

After the miracle of Bern, other tournaments and individual games shaped postwar German history. And German history continued to shape German football. This isn’t the place to provide a detailed account of the past sixty years of German (footballing) history, but a few snippets will suffice to illustrate my proposition that what happens on the football field is relevant to broader social and political developments, and vice versa.

Germany’s next major win had to wait until the European championship in 1972, long after Herberger’s day. Playing with flair, the 1972 Nationalmannschaft was perhaps the best ever to represent West Germany in a tournament. Günter Netzer, Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Müller and twenty-year old Paul Breitner defied the stereotype of the hard-working, tenacious and methodical, but somewhat boring, technically deficient and unimaginative, German player. Headstrong young men with long hair, one of them a Maoist, they symbolised the era of Willy Brandt, the socially progressive chancellor who made peace with Poland and, having emigrated between 1933 and 1945, could claim to represent a Germany that made a genuine effort to break with its Nazi past.

Then there was the 1974 World Cup in Germany, which West Germany won despite Holland fielding the better team and playing more attractive football. Unlike the Dutch, the West Germans actually lost a game in the group phase – against none other than the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. Jürgen Sparwasser kicked the winning goal in what was the only match ever played between the two national teams. How could West Germans after that most painful loss in the history of the Nationalmannschaft warmly welcome their long-lost relatives from the other side of the iron curtain twenty-five years later? But that’s another story. The immediate consequences, however, favoured West Germany: during the so-called Night of Malente (named after the Institute of Sport where the team traditionally had its training camp), captain Franz Beckenbauer took command of a disparate group of opinionated individuals and thereby ensured that the team won the cup. The East Germans, having topped the group, faced the Dutch in the next round and were eliminated.

Eight years later, at the World Cup in Spain, Germany made the final but lost to Italy. But few Germans cared, because the road to the final had been too embarrassing. First there was the Schande von Gijón (“disgrace of Gijón”), when the German and Austrian teams conspired to effect a 1–0 win for West Germany, which allowed both teams to progress to the next round at the expense of Algeria, which had earlier beaten Germany. Then came the semi-final against France. Arguably, this was one of the most thrilling World Cup games ever, but it was tainted by German goalkeeper Toni Schumacher’s collision with a French player, Patrick Battiston. The latter was knocked out cold and lost two teeth. Schumacher may not have committed a foul (none was given at the time), but he was clearly guilty of showing a lack of compassion for Battiston. Many Germans swore off the national team and claimed that from now on loyalty had to be earned.

Loyalty was also in short supply a few months later when the Free Democrats left the coalition with Helmut Schmidt’s SPD, bringing the conservative Helmut Kohl to power. He won the subsequent elections in 1983, but failed to win most Germans’ respect, thus sharing the fate of the national team that made the final in 1982 but could not make Germans forget their inadequacies.

But the Nationalmannschaft’s worst performance was yet to come. At the European championship in 2000, Germany came last in the group phase. The Nationalmannschaft lacked cohesion and was as uninspiring as Gerhard Schröder’s coalition government of Social Democrats and Greens. Reunification had turned out to be more costly than anticipated, and many Germans wished, eleven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the barrier had never gone.

The disastrous end to Euro 2000 was a wake-up call. Huge investments were made, particularly in youth development, to help German football catch up. The better-than-expected result at the 2006 World Cup in Germany (when the team lost its semi-final against Italy, which went on to win the tournament), and an impressive performance at the World Cup in South Africa (when Germany once again lost its semi-final against the eventual winner, Spain), were the direct result of these investments. So was the win this month.

The 2014 Nationalmannschaft represents a country that has come a long way since the doldrums of Euro 2000: one that is open to the world, innovative and, with the exception of parts of former East Germany, multicultural.

In 1954, Bernd Trautmann was not German enough because he played for Manchester City. Sepp Herberger, if he were still alive, would no doubt be scandalised about the composition of the current German team. It includes a Berlin-born defender, Jérôme Boateng, whose brother, also born in Berlin, plays for Ghana. Another defender, Shkodran Mustafi, also born in Germany, long wanted to play for Albania, the country his family hails from, and as late as January 2014 was said to be on call for Albania’s next friendly (Albania did not qualify for the World Cup). Like Mustafi, Lukas Podolski plays his club football outside Germany, which would have made him ineligible for selection in 1954. He was baptised Łukasz, and, like veteran striker Miroslav Klose, comes originally from Poland. Real Madrid midfielder Sami Khedira grew up in Germany but has a Tunesian as well as a German passport.

No German players represent the essence of the current German team as much as midfielders-cum-strikers Mesut Özil and Thomas Müller do. The former is a third generation Turkish German who grew up in Gelsenkirchen, home of the legendary Schalke 04 football club. He is a truly international footballer, having played for several German clubs, for Real Madrid and now for Arsenal. Müller, by contrast, is as rooted in his native soil as can be: he was born and grew up in Bavaria and has played for Bayern Munich since the age of ten.

Their style of football bears no resemblance to that of the German players who engineered the miracle of Bern. Twenty-five year old Özil is a genius on and off the ball, and like many a genius he is a capricious contributor. In Brazil, he performed well below expectations throughout the tournament, but was never in danger of losing his place in the starting line-up because of his ability to turn around a match single-handedly when he is on song. Müller, a year younger than Özil, is a more reliable performer. Like Özil, though, he is unpredictable. For Özil, the ball often seems to be an organic part of his body; he stuns opponents with his elegant moves. Müller, on the other hand, befuddles them with his unorthodox and seemingly nonsensical play and body language. “Shambling, angular, shaggy-haired forward Müller,” the Guardian’s Barney Ronay enthused about the recent Portugal–Germany game, at times resembled “a pitch-invading dentist out for a job who has somehow strayed in among all those sleekly groomed professional athletes.”

They call him “Radio Müller” because he likes to talk. He doesn’t babble, mind you. In an interview in 2011, Müller created a neologism to describe what he does on the football field. He said that he is a Raumdeuter, an interpreter (Deuter) of space (Raum). The term is reminiscent of, and rhymes with, a well-established compound noun, Traumdeuter, an analyst of dreams. But not only was Müller able – at the age of twenty-one – to articulate intelligently what is innovative about his preferred style, he has also been able to dazzle observers by being exactly where his opponents aren’t looking for him. His play is not nearly as stylish as Özil’s, but it is at least as effective. While Özil was the leading goal scorer during the world cup qualifiers, Müller netted a total of ten goals in only two world cups.

Özil and Müller were the most eye-catching German players in South Africa in 2010. The football exhibited by the Nationalmannschaft on that occasion was a sight to behold, but it lacked the rigour and pragmatism that is necessary to win the World Cup. Exceptions aside (the first half of the game against Portugal and the first half of the thrashing of Brazil), in 2014 the German team did not play as beautifully as it had done four years earlier. That is not to say, however, that there is much danger of Germany reverting any time soon to a style of play that won them the Cup sixty years earlier.

The win in 1954 was a miracle; it was unexpected and it wasn’t followed up by a series of further wins. In 1966, West Germany should have won (and perhaps would have, had it not been for the referee and that goal), but didn’t dare to think that it could beat England at Wembley. In 1974, the West German team won not least because it played at home. The 1990 World Cup, in which West Germany played Argentina in the final and won 1–0, is not remembered for the quality of its teams or matches. The German win in 2014 differs from those in 1954, 1974 and 1990 because it was more deserved, more convincing and more likely to be the beginning of a new era in world football.

In 1954, Germany’s economic performance was miraculous – not because it outshone its competitors but simply because of the speed with which it was recovering after the war. By the time of the 1974 World Cup, Willy Brandt had been replaced by Helmut Schmidt, the reformist energy of 1972 had largely dissipated, and Germany no longer appeared likely to drive a European agenda for social change. In 1990, reunification seemed a logical and desirable outcome, but even then it was obvious that its costs would be huge and that it would set (West) Germany back for years. In 2014, there is no doubt that Germany is calling the shots in Europe, and that it is likely to do so for some time yet. It no longer sees itself as a vassal of the United States (the Merkel government recently expelled a high ranking CIA official, much to the irritation of Barack Obama). It has come of age.

In 2006 and 2010, non-German audiences found it easy to admire the Nationalmannschaft because it played an attractive – yet ultimately unsuccessful – brand of football. Few teams in the history of the World Cup have been as ruthless as Germany was in the 2014 semi-final, when it scored five times within the space of eighteen minutes. Yet the players wanted to be liked rather than feared. Their celebrations after the 7–1 win appeared subdued because they seemed to be so intent on consoling their opponents.

On and off the field, Germans are now confident of their ability to win. They worry, though, that they will be liked less for it. “Gauchogate,” some German newspapers cried when, in front of 400,000 fans at the victory party in Berlin, six players performed a dance that poked fun at their Argentinian opponents. Was it a harmless joke? Or was it disrespectful, and an indication of an unhealthy nationalism? The opinions have been divided, but just to be on the safe side the president of the German Football Federation sent off a letter of apology to his Argentinian counterpart.

As far as I know, Angela Merkel didn’t comment on “Gauchogate.” I imagine she wasn’t impressed by the players’ behaviour, if only because it reflects on her. Now that Germany has won the World Cup, she is safer in her job than ever before. There are rumours, though, that she will resign in order to inherit Ban Ki-moon’s job. For that to become a reality, she would need to be seen internationally the way many Germans see her: as Mutti, the nation’s rather harmless and inoffensive mum, rather than as a ruthless leader (who belittles her opponents, to boot).

The 2014 win has reignited German debates about national identity and its symbols. Not that long ago, in West Germany at least, the waving of the national flag and the singing of the national anthem were considered to be dubious relics of the old (Nazi) Germany. Gustav Heinemann, West German president from 1969 to 1974, once famously spoke for many when he said: “I don’t love nation states, I love my wife.” It wasn’t until the 1980s that the flag and the national anthem lost the odour of Nazi Germany. That was in no small part due to Franz Beckenbauer who, having taken over as manager of the German team after the disgraceful performance in 1984, told his players that he expected them to sing along when the anthem was played before games. Once again, football led the way.

In 2014 it would still be unthinkable for a large crowd to celebrate a win of the German team by singing the anthem’s old first verse, as had happened in Bern sixty years ago. In fact, many Germans might feel more comfortable with something as silly as “Wir sind die Eingeborenen von Trizonesien” than with the pathos of the “Song of the Germans.” The flag is a different matter: it now adorns everybody and everything – including toilet brushes in the colours black, red and gold.

Patriotism might have become respectable, but nationalism is still frowned on, as if the latter could be easily divorced from the former. In 2001, another German president, the Social Democrat Johannes Rau, explained the difference thus: “A patriot loves his country. A nationalist despises the countries of others.” Germans’ ambivalent feelings for their country are exemplified by the popularity of the word “Schland”, which supporters of the German team have been chanting since the World Cup in 2006. But does the use of the – in itself meaningless – term “Schland” (instead of “Deutschland”) mean that the feelings aroused in 2014 are very different from those of 1954?

This question is difficult to answer partly because many Germans, from the chancellor down, are reluctant to talk in any detail about their emotions, their relationship with the nation, and the aspirations they have for Germany. Do Germans want their country to be a leader in a global economy no longer reliant on fossil fuels and driven by innovation primarily because they want Germany to excel and perhaps even dominate others, or because they are concerned about the effects of climate change?

I must admit that I can’t shake off my suspicions. Are Germans really as adverse to jingoism as election results, opinion polls, public discourse and their behaviour after 13 July suggest? Or are the somewhat strained attempts to be scrupulously multicultural and tolerant and to be an exemplary global citizen indicative of something lurking beneath the veneer of the new Germany? Maybe the next game will tell us more. •

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This war is unlikely to end soon. But the lack of realistic prospects for either a negotiated peace or a decisive military victory during the next few months hasn’t stopped international bodies and organisations associated with the Syrian opposition from planning for the time after the Ba’ath regime is removed.

More than eighteen months ago, the Public International Law & Policy Group, or PILPG, released a report outlining “recommendations for measures that an interim Syrian government could take in the days immediately following President Bashar al-Assad’s departure.” According to its website, PILPG “provides legal assistance to states and governments with the negotiation and implementation of peace agreements, the drafting of post-conflict constitutions, and the creation and operation of war crimes tribunals.”

PILPG operates in a crowded marketplace. Over the past two years, there have been numerous such proposals, many of them put forward by parties that are, much like PILPG, hoping to play a role in Syria’s transition to democracy. Perhaps the best known, and certainly the most experienced, of these is the New York-based International Center for Transitional Justice, or ICTJ, which in September published a briefing paper by its vice president, Paul Seils, titled “Towards a Transitional Justice Strategy for Syria.” Seils argues for the creation of a “nationally owned and respected process that embraces and promotes the possibility of engendering a rights-respecting society through truth, justice, reparations, and reform.”

Seils’s recommendations are in line with the approach advocated by the ICTJ elsewhere. In its view, countries ought to adopt a combination of four transitional justice measures in the aftermath of gross human rights violations or violent conflict: truth commissions; courts or criminal tribunals; symbolic and material reparations; and institutional reforms. Together, Seils writes, these measures will “restore belief in the idea of fundamental human rights as a basis for the social contract between the citizen and the state.”

When they argue for a particular approach in post-conflict Syria, Seils and the ICTJ are drawing on past cases in which it can be argued that transitional justice measures failed to produce the desired results, either because they didn’t reflect the needs and wishes of the communities involved or because they were applied selectively.

Take the case of Cambodia. Under the Khmer Rouge, which governed Cambodia from 1975 until 1979 but controlled parts of the country for much longer, about two million people, or a quarter of the population, were murdered, disappeared, or starved or worked to death. Since the defeat of the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese in 1979, Cambodia has gone through several periods of transition, each of them with its own mix of transitional justice measures. Initially at least, these were hardly “nationally owned and respected,” as they were implemented under the tutelage of Vietnam (which occupied Cambodia between 1979 and 1989) and then, from 1989 until 1993, the United Nations Transitional Authority.

Cambodia has experimented with a range of measures to deal with human rights violations in its recent past, including amnesties, trials, memorial museums, an annual day of remembrance, and a historical commission. Thirty-four years after the end of Khmer Rouge-led Democratic Kampuchea, however, transitional justice is far from complete. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia, which were set up in 2006 after lengthy negotiations between the Cambodian government and the United Nations, have so far only concluded just one of four scheduled cases: last year, a court of appeal sentenced Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, to life imprisonment after finding him guilty of crimes against humanity and breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

Only a handful of prominent Khmer Rouge leaders have been prosecuted. Duch was the senior Khmer Rouge cadre in charge of the regime’s security apparatus, including the infamous Tol Sleng prison. Also facing the Extraordinary Chambers was the regime’s deputy prime minister, Ieng Sary, who had been one of only two defendants before the People’s Revolutionary Tribunal set up in 1979. He had been sentenced to death in absentia, but later pardoned by King Norodom Sihanouk. He was indicted again in 2007, this time by the Extraordinary Chambers, but died earlier this year before the case against him could be concluded.

“Ordinary” perpetrators, who carried out the killings ordered by Duch and other leaders, or who denounced neighbours to the Khmer Rouge, have so far not been prosecuted. Also, the transitional justice measures have focused on the four years when the Khmer Rouge formally ruled all of Cambodia, and thereby exclude human rights violations perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge before 1975 or after 1979, and by other parties, such as the security apparatus of General Lon Nol’s Khmer Republic, which directly preceded Democratic Kampuchea.

When they attempt to assess the effectiveness of historical justice, the United Nations and international organisations such as the ICTJ tend to focus on the big picture, which does indeed look comparatively positive. Today, Cambodia is a constitutional monarchy with regular parliamentary elections (although, as Human Rights Watch notes, “Prime Minister Hun Sen has kept himself in office more than twenty-seven years through force and intimidation”). While Hun Sen is a former Khmer Rouge cadre, there is no indication that the Khmer Rouge, or a regime resembling that led by Pol Pot, Ieng Sari and others, could make a comeback in the short or medium term. The Extraordinary Chambers work slowly, but they are prosecuting at least some of the worst perpetrators who were in power in the second half of the 1970s. History books have been rewritten to reflect the reality of Khmer Rouge rule, and memorials and museums built that commemorate the suffering of Cambodians during that period.

WHAT the big picture doesn’t reveal, however, is how historical justice plays out on the ground. It pays scant attention to the regional differences within Cambodia, and to the fact that the impact of the Khmer Rouge on city-dwellers was different from its impact on people in rural areas. It says nothing about how ordinary Cambodians experienced the terror of the Khmer Rouge and the justice-making that followed it.

In 2002 and 2003, Eve Monique Zucker did fieldwork in a remote village in the highlands of Cambodia’s Kompong Speu province, in the southwest of the country. In her book Forest of Struggle, she calls that village O’Thmaa. For the people of O’Thmaa, the four years of Democratic Kampuchea were just one chapter in a thirty-year period marked by extreme violence and displacement. In fact, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that the villagers of O’Thmaa were able to finally return home.

From 1970 until the late 1980s, the mountainous region where O’Thmaa is located was known as Prei Brâyut or the Forest of the Struggle. It was here that the Khmer Rouge established a stronghold before taking control of the rest of the country, and it was here that they found a refuge during the civil war following the collapse of Democratic Kampuchea.

From 1970 until the mid-1990s, all able-bodied men of O’Thmaa, as well as many of its women, were made to fight with or against the Khmer Rouge. Some of them fought first on one side, and then on the other. Nearly all the adult men were killed during that time, most of them by the Khmer Rouge.

Families were split, with some of the men fighting with Lon Nol, and others with the Khmer Rouge. But that was not the worst of O’Thmaa’s thirty-year war. Because the Khmer Rouge couldn’t identify enemies solely by their appearance, they could never be sure that people “were who they said they were or who they appeared to be.” When in doubt, the Khmer Rouge executed those who could be suspected of being enemies. Given their paranoia about the allegiances of ordinary Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge was receptive to denunciations. “Villagers informed on other villagers, accusing them of being unfaithful to revolutionary movement,” Zucker writes. “Those accused would be taken away by the Khmer Rouge to be killed.”

Much of Zucker’s book is about a man she calls Ta Kam, who was one of the very few male O’Thmaa villagers to survive the terror of the Khmer Rouge. He owed his good fortune not to luck but to his denunciation of many of his neighours to the Khmer Rouge, who appointed him village chief.

In the early stages of her fieldwork, Zucker perceived Ta Kam not as a killer but “as a warm, grandfatherly, and revered elder.” The idea that people whose husbands or fathers had been delivered to the Khmer Rouge would allow the perpetrator to live in their midst seemed inconceivable. But while the people of O’Thmaa didn’t seek revenge against Ta Kam, they did exclude him from their affairs.

Zucker believes that Ta Kam served an important function in O’Thmaa. He was the embodiment of “all the betrayals by his generation.” But they ascribed immorality to his acts rather than to his person, and considered him amoral rather than innately evil. In conversation, it became clear to Zucker that Ta Kam saw himself in much the same way: as a pawn who could not be held responsible for serving powerful outside forces.

Ultimately, the villagers of O’Thmaa sought to forget the violence that tore their community apart, and the individual actions that triggered and fanned that violence. They have pretended to themselves and to outsiders that they live in harmony with one another, and have tried to contain the immorality of the past to the actions of someone who, by supposedly lacking morality, could not be blamed for the deaths of neighbours and kin.

According to Zucker, the villagers’ attempts have only been partly successful: “gaiety and communal spirit were rare in O’Thmaa. Hardship, distrust, and fear… crippled social interactions… [I]t seemed that few people went far out of their way to help a neighbour in need.” While they could contain memories of betrayal, Ta Kam’s presence reminded them of a time when social ties were ruptured. Given that he was the only man of his generation still alive, they were also prevented from gaining knowledge about O’Thmaa’s traditions and about a time when the villagers were able to trust each other.

If, for the villagers of O’Thmaa, “immorality is ideally to be removed or erased rather than recorded and inscribed,” then their strategies for mending the social fabric are very different from those advocated by the ICTJ and like-minded organisations. The people of O’Thmaa don’t seek the truth, and they don’t see the point in memorialising a past in order to guard against its recurrence. But while the transitional justice measures adopted in Cambodia privilege the inscription of injustices over their erasure, they resonate with local practices in one respect: the Extraordinary Chambers also try to contain the immorality of the past by attributing the genocide to a handful of individuals.

Zucker’s ethnography is a useful reminder that there is more to the aftermath of violence than can be successfully managed with the help of transitional justice instruments designed by the ICTJ or the PILPG. Forest of Struggle is also evidence of the strength of ethnography: competent ethnographers pay very close attention to the life worlds of people, and often concern themselves particularly with those who tend to appear on the West’s radar either as statistics or as mute images.

Zucker is able to derive meaning from what she saw during her fieldwork in O’Thmaa: the effects of a destructive past on people who were often not even born when neighbours and kin turned on each other. I would have liked to know more about how the villagers of O’Thmaa felt and talked about the predicament of living with a known perpetrator in their midst. How painful was it for those who lost husbands or fathers to ignore Ta Kam? Didn’t they imagine taking revenge? And if they did: how much of an effort was it not to act?

It might be unfair to Zucker to end on that note, because my response to Forest of Struggle must surely have been influenced by the fact that I read it as one of a pair of books I chose to review, and the other half of that pair, Kimberly Theidon’s Intimate Enemies, is one of the most moving and thought-provoking works of non-fiction I have read in long while.

THEIDON’s approach is very different from Zucker’s. While Zucker makes sense of tangible features of social life – such as the presence of Ta Kam – in present-day O’Thmaa, Theidon seeks to understand how the people she worked with were experiencing the past and the various attempts to come to terms with it.

Theidon writes about the aftermath of the violence that gripped Peru between 1980 and 2000. Like in Cambodia – or in Rwanda or Bosnia, for that matter – the conflict in Peru often pitted neighbours against each other. In other South American countries – most notably Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil – human rights violations were perpetrated by agents of the state, sometimes following a period in which left-wing armed guerrilla groups (such as the Tupamaros in Uruguay) had resorted to assassinations to bring about an overthrow of the government. The military juntas governing Chile (1973–90), Argentina (1976–83), Uruguay (1973–85) and Brazil (1964–85) targeted mainly people identified with the political left, including student activists and trade unionists. In Chile and Brazil, indigenous people asserting their rights were also persecuted. But the violence did not amount to anything resembling a civil war, and the vast majority of the population was not affected by disappearances, torture and extrajudicial killings. In fact, at times at least, the military juntas enjoyed broad popular support.

Peru’s was an entirely different story. That country had experienced military dictatorships for much of the twentieth century. The Peruvian left had also suffered repression under military rule, particularly in the early 1930s and 1940s. But in 1979, at a time when other countries in South America’s Southern Cone were ruled by military juntas, the Peruvian general Francisco Morales Bermúdez, who had been in power since 1975, presided over a return to democratic rule. Presidential elections, the first in sixteen years, were scheduled for 18 May 1980.

On the eve of these elections, the Maoist group Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, burned the ballot boxes in the small town of Chuschi in the Andean highlands province of Ayacucho. Sendero had been active for a few years, particularly in Huamanga, the capital of Ayacucho, where its founder Abimael Guzmán taught philosophy at the local university. The symbolic burning of the ballot boxes marked the beginning of an armed conflict that eventually involved four parties: Sendero; a second and smaller group of insurgents, the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement; the Peruvian military; and so-called rondas campesinas, self-defence groups that were set up to protect rural communities from the Senderistas. As the conflict escalated, the government resorted to increasingly unlawful measures and, under president Alberto Fujimori, Peru joined the list of countries governed by authoritarian regimes.

While people in the remote mountain villages of Cambodia’s Kompong Speu province experienced violence and displacement for far longer than the residents of Phnom Penh, nobody living in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 remained unaffected by the Khmer Rouge’s terror. The twenty-year violence in Peru, on the other hand, had a huge impact on some segments of the population but barely affected others. Almost four in five of the recorded 69,280 people killed between 1980 and 2000 in Peru lived in rural areas, and three in four were native Quechua speakers. In other words, the vast majority of victims were indigenous campesinos living in the Andean highlands. These were people who had long been considered to be at the bottom of a racially informed social hierarchy.

Unlike in Cambodia, Peru’s peace process and transitional justice instruments were not prompted by outside intervention. Also unlike in Cambodia, the conflict was largely over by the time the regime changed, with both the Túpac Amaru and Sendero Luminoso militarily defeated and their leaders dead or imprisoned. In 2000, president Fujimori, not long after winning an unconstitutional third term in rigged elections, resigned and fled the country. His successors supported a reversal of his anti-terrorist legislation and a revoking of his amnesty laws. Alejandro Toledo, who was elected president in 2001, was himself a Quechua speaker and sympathetic to those who had suffered most during the violence. The truth and reconciliation commission set up under interim president Valentín Panigua had Toledo’s full support.

When that commission announced its findings in 2003, many Peruvians were shocked to learn of the extent of the violence and the number of fatalities. Not only had Ayacucho and neighbouring Andean regions borne the brunt of the terror inflicted by Sendero and the military. The fact that tens of thousands had been killed had not registered in the country’s capital Lima, because, as Theidon observes, the dead “were people who – in the national imaginary – had counted for little during their lives and went largely unaccounted for in their deaths.”

The fratricidal nature of the violence in O’Thmaa between 1970 and the late 1990s also characterised the twenty-year war in the provinces of Ayacucho where Theidon has done her research since the mid-1990s. The violence split families and village communities, pitting neighbours and kin against each other.  Remembering what is referred to in Quechua as the sasachakuy tiempo – the difficult time – one of Theidon’s informants said that: “We were terrified of our projimos – terrified of our neighbours, of our brothers.”

Both in O’Thmaa and in many places in Ayacucho, the perpetrators and their victims came from the same communities, with the former often remaining in close proximity to the families of those they had murdered or had denounced to Sendero or the Khmer Rouge. This made it difficult for these communities to collectively identify as innocent victims after the end of the violence. The “lack of strongly distinguished categories of victims and perpetrators,” Zucker observes, contributed “to the difficulties in reconstituting the social and moral community in O’Thmaa village.”

Like Zucker, Theidon wanted to know how ordinary people try to repair a social fabric that has been torn to shreds by extreme violence. What happened after the violence had stopped, with “ex-Senderistas, current sympathisers, widows, orphans, rape survivors, and army veterans” now having to live side by side? Both Zucker and Theidon were interested in the rebuilding of a moral order. Theidon was also asking how “moral discourse is embodied,” and how people recovered access to emotions and sentiments, such as caridad, the compassion for fellow human beings, that were lost during the violence. She explored how Ayacuchanos, after years of dehumanising violence, once more attempted to learn how to be human.

Theidon does not idealise this rehumanising process and the reestablishment of order that preceded it. Some former Senderistas were invited to confess and repent, and were then forgiven and allowed to remain in the community. Others were killed – not out of rage, but in order to reconstitute communities. One of Theidon’s informants described these killings calmly and matter-of-factly: “[W]e started cleaning our communities. We cleaned them – all of the people who’d been with those guerilleros.”

Like the villagers of O’Thmaa, the campesinos of the Peruvian highlands have tried to forget. “My memories suffocate me,” several women told Theidon. “What we need most are pills to make us forget,” one of them said, summarising the views of a group of women who had been asked which health care services were a priority in their community. Another woman told a team gathering information for the truth and reconciliation commission: “When I forget, I’m well. Remembering, even now, I just go crazy.” “Forgetting is not simply a strategy of domination employed by the powerful against the weak,” writes Theidon. “Rather, it may be a state that is fervently desired by those who suffer from the afflictions of memory and seek relief from the heavy weight of a painful past.”

Like Zucker, Theidon is intrigued by the lack of spontaneous revenge killings after the end of the violence, which is remarkable if only because some of the violence directed against neighbours would have been prompted by vengefulness. “I have been working with these villages since 1995 and no one has picked up a rifle to kill someone in anger,” she writes. But we should not assume that all victims have simply renounced revenge and hatred and the desire for retribution.

Those most keenly interested in revenge – and least in a position to effect it – are women and adolescent boys. For some of the women, especially the widows who witnessed the murders of their husbands, “reconciliation [sits] like a lump in their stomach and a constant irritant in their heart.” These lumps often make them physically ill: “So many years swallowing their rage, and so many ulcers.” After all, they have had to live with people who not only murdered their loved ones but also are often better-off than they are after the loss of the family’s breadwinner.

“When I see them or remember, I feel sulphur flow through my veins,” one widow told Theidon, describing her experience of encounters with perpetrators living in her village. “Enduring conditions of social and economic inequality are not conducive to the reconstruction of social life and sociability,” writes Theidon. Her book is also an argument for some form of redistributive justice, to alleviate the material inequalities created or exacerbated by the violence and perhaps to address the fact that reconciliation sits like a lump in the stomach of those who lost loved ones and livelihoods.

According to Theidon, redistributive justice ought to involve more than the distribution of material compensation: “One thing that could be redistributed is the shame that has been unjustly apportioned to women; this shame should belong to the rapists, who have enjoyed total impunity.” Truth telling is widely considered essential in the transitional justice context. For women who were the victims of rape, this often means “narrat[ing] their experiences in an idiom of sexual vulnerability and degradation.” The gang rapists’ silence “is left undisturbed,” Theidon comments. “I have never heard anyone ask a man: ‘Did you have blood on your penis?… Did you penetrate her vagina or her anus?… How many times?’”

Theidon is more than an advocate on behalf of rape victims and widows. Her rage and her despair are palpable, and that is appropriate in a book that deals with violence and with the emotions of those who experienced it. Commenting on how women conveyed their experiences through their body language, Theidon writes: “What they said verbally was complementary, at times secondary, to the body language they used: what made me feel their words were their gestures. My body would serve as one of my ‘key informants’.” That describes the anthropologist’s methodological approach. But it could also be read as symptomatic of the author’s admirable ethical stance.

Theidon felt her informants’ words, and she makes us, her readers, feel these words – as they are translated and communicated in Intimate Enemies – and feel with those who uttered them. That results in a book that is both hard to read and difficult to put down. It is perhaps no surprise that an earlier, Spanish-language version of Theidon’s account inspired Claudia Llosa’s remarkable 2009 feature film La Teta Asustada (The Milk of Sorrow) about a woman who had been raped during the sasachakuy tiempo and transmitted memories of her suffering to her daughter with her breast milk. Theidon is aware of the effects of her words. Towards the book’s end, she says, “I realise that readers might feel emotionally taxed by the time they reach this afterword.”

TRANSITIONAL justice “is not the monopoly of international tribunals or states,” Theidon writes. “[I]ndividuals and collectives also mobilise the ritual and symbolic elements of these transitional processes to deal with the deep cleavages left – or accentuated – by civil conflict.” Surely, then, there is a need for tribunals and states to take note of the stratagems employed by those most affected by conflict, particularly when these stratagems seem to work.

But often, “‘transitions to democracy’ and ‘national reconciliation’ are simply the reworking of elite pacts of governance or domination,” Theidon finds. “To date there has been scant ethnographic research on the points of disjuncture between popular notions of justice, pardon, and reconciliation and the ways in which these concepts are deployed by transitional and successor regimes.” My sense of the scholarship, particularly work published over the past five years, is that her bleak assessment is no longer true; there have been numerous detailed ethnographic studies of vernacular concepts of justice in places such as Rwanda, Uganda, Liberia, Nepal, Guatemala – or Cambodia, for that matter. But they seem to have had little impact on how NGOs and governments see transitional justice proceeding. The prescriptions offered for Syria don’t seem to be informed by ethnographic research, and make little mention of the need to find solutions that assist the people most affected by the violence to repair relationships within their communities.

Zucker’s and Theidon’s work suggests that one dogma of transitional justice, in particular, needs to be challenged. “There is one equation that infuses the work of truth commissions: more memory = more truth = more healing = more reconciliation,” Theidon writes. “[I]t is the logic that guides these commissions and the politics of memory that characterise our époque.” In fact, there is no convincing evidence for this equation, or for the claim that “more memory” would inoculate people and prevent a repeat of violence. In questioning the validity of the equation, I am not suggesting that the salvation lies in forgetting as much as possible. In fact, to forget usually means remembering something else. Conversely, “more memory” often implies that we become more oblivious to aspects of the past that are not recounted in truth commissions and memorialised with the help of state-sponsored ceremonies and monuments.

The “politics of memory that characterise our époque” have been largely shaped by attempts to come to terms with the Holocaust and the crimes of Nazi Germany, particularly in postwar West Germany. Truth commissions are now often modelled on what seemed to work well in South Africa. I am not arguing that we should ignore such precedents, but merely suggesting that more attention be paid to their historical and cultural contingency. In fact, much could be learned from Kimberly Theidon’s work in Peru. Even those jockeying for a lucrative consultancy contract in the new Syria may find it useful to know how the campesinos of Ayacucho tried to put their lives together after they had stopped killing each other. “What may serve national goals – amnesties, top-down ‘reintegration’ of former combatants in staged reconciliation ceremonies, and militarily enforced pacification campaigns,” writes Theidon, “may unintentionally complicate local processes of social repair.” •

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Over the past fifteen years, Australia has granted asylum to more Hazaras from Afghanistan than to any other ethnic group. Shouldn’t that prompt some curiosity about the situation in their homeland, or in Iran and Pakistan, the two countries that have hosted millions of Afghan refugees since the late 1970s? Such a question suggests that the parochialism of the Australian debate about refugees may be temporal as well as geographical.

Perhaps it is easier not to think about the past, nor to look beyond the jetty in Christmas Island’s Flying Fish Cove, if the arrival of “boat people” is conceived of as a crisis. If we believe people are pouring into Australia through carelessly opened “floodgates,” then what occurred in Afghanistan in the late 1970s, or even what is happening there now, seems to matter very little. But if we take account of the broader context, then we can compare what is happening here and now with what was happening then and there, and Australia’s asylum seeker “crisis” may turn out to be little more than an inconvenience.

That broader context even puts very large figures into perspective. At the end of last year, according to estimates by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, about six in every 1000 people living on this planet had been forcibly displaced as a result of persecution, generalised violence, conflict or human rights violations. Clearly, today’s levels of displacement are alarmingly high. But there is no need to be nostalgic about earlier, supposedly less conflict-ridden times. “It is easy to be seduced into thinking that the tectonic plates shifted fundamentally towards the end of the twentieth century,” Gatrell writes, “but the extent of the upheaval can be exaggerated.” He shows that in the aftermath of the second world war the ratio of displaced to non-displaced people was more than ten times higher than it is today: in the second half of the 1940s, seventy-six in every 1000, or 175 million people, were displaced.

Ninety million of those people were displaced within China as a result of the Sino-Japanese conflict and the Chinese civil war. Another twenty million people were displaced in the Indian subcontinent as a result of the partition of the British Indian Empire – and the simultaneous creation of the sovereign states of India and Pakistan – in August 1947. The vast majority of Chinese displaced people returned home or were resettled in China, but following the creation of the People’s Republic in 1949, some 700,000 Chinese refugees fled to the British crown colony of Hong Kong. Over time, Muslim refugees from India were integrated in East and West Pakistan, and non-Muslim refugees from Pakistan made new lives for themselves in India.

In continental Europe, sixty million people were displaced in the course of the second world war. The vast majority of these displaced people – referred to at the time as DPs – returned home as soon as the circumstances permitted. Often they were assisted by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, or UNRRA, the organisation set up in 1943 to deal with the upheaval caused by the war. A significant number of these DPs were repatriated to the Soviet Union – and often, on their return “home,” disappeared into Stalin’s Gulag archipelago. Their fate should be borne in mind whenever repatriation is touted as the preferred solution to a refugee crisis. Since the end of the cold war alone, the UNHCR has assisted with the voluntary repatriation of about twenty-five million refugees. In a recent report commissioned by the agency, Katy Long points out that in some instances the word voluntary may need to be placed in inverted commas. “In the worst cases,” she writes, “employing the notion of ‘voluntary’ repatriation is arguably a manipulation of language that is used to legitimise politically expedient returns that do not meet basic protection criteria.”

In 1947, the repatriation of DPs to communist Eastern Europe was suspended except in cases where a DP clearly wanted to go home. Their local integration did not appear to be feasible at the time, given that the countries hosting the majority of the DPs – Germany and Austria – had been ravaged by war. Germany was also trying to accommodate twelve million ethnic German refugees from its former eastern provinces and from Czechoslovakia. The International Refugee Organization, which gradually took over from UNRRA after 1946 and assumed responsibility for solving Europe’s refugee dilemma, therefore promoted the resettlement of DPs who were unwilling to return home. In the space of about five years, it facilitated the resettlement of more than a million people. In 1949 alone, Australia resettled 75,486 European DPs under the organisation’s aegis. The fact that Australia, only four years out from the war, was able to resettle the equivalent of one per cent of its own population puts into perspective recent suggestions by leading Coalition politicians that the resettlement of 20,000 people – less than a tenth of a per cent of Australia’s current population, and about a tenth of its annual migrant intake – would be stretching the country’s resources.

Today, the UNHCR advocates three “durable solutions” for refugees: resettlement, local integration and voluntary repatriation. But for many refugees, none of them is a realistic option. More than ten million people now find themselves in what the UNHCR calls “a long-lasting and intractable state of limbo.” Almost half of these are Palestinians. The origins of their plight can also be traced back to the late 1940s, when at least 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes or were expelled in the course of the creation of the state of Israel.

Gatrell’s numbers also throw light on the geography of the refugee problem in the late 1940s and the origins of international refugee law. The perceived need to resettle Eastern European refugees languishing in German and Austrian camps weighed on the minds of at least some of the drafters of the 1951 Refugee Convention – more so, I suspect, than the fact that potential countries of asylum closed their borders against Jewish refugees in the late 1930s. The mainly Western diplomats negotiating the Convention thought of Latvian or Polish DPs when discussing the criteria according to which somebody could be recognised as a refugee, rather than of, say, Chinese refugees in Hong Kong or Bengali Muslims in East Pakistan, who were left to fend for themselves. Gatrell quotes India’s relief and rehabilitation minister, who commented on the West’s lack of interest in what was happening during Partition. At the same time as a massive relief effort was under way to deal with European DPs, he observed, “the powerful tide of international help flowed past the vast area of our own tragedy without as much as lapping at its fringes.”

Just as the authors of the 1951 Convention didn’t want to know about refugee movements in the Middle East, South Asia and China, the institution they helped to create, the UNHCR, did not concern itself with non-European refugees until about ten years after its establishment. Even when refugee crises involved Europeans, the UNHCR was initially not directing the traffic. Western resettlement countries, including the United States and Australia, set up a rival organisation, the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, for fear that the United Nations refugee agency would interfere with their immigration policies. The UNHCR was kept on a short leash and starved of funds; during its first years, the organisation was, Gatrell writes, “a sickly creature with a limited life expectancy.”

HISTORY is useful when it alerts us to the differences between the past and the present, and to the unique challenges the present poses. History can be equally useful when it draws attention to parallels and similarities. “Looking back in time shows that current practices often uncannily echo earlier formulations, whether in relation to ideas around security or to problem-solving,” Gatrell notes in his introduction. The perspectives he provides by looking back in time make his book immensely useful – and not just for fellow historians.

As his argument unfolds, Gatrell revisits the major refugee crises of the twentieth century. While we may have largely forgotten some of them, the responses they prompted are eerily familiar. In one case, he writes, British newspapers – which were initially sympathetic to the arrival of this particular group of refugees – “soon began to describe a refugee ‘stream’ that might yet become a ‘cataract.’” They weren’t talking about Afghans or Bosnians (although the same language was later used to describe both these groups), but Belgians during the first world war. How many of those currently writing about the impending centenary of that war mention that about one million Belgians fled the invading German army to the neighbouring Netherlands, and another 200,000 to Britain? The first world war and associated events, including the Russian Revolution and the Armenian genocide, were responsible for the displacement of vast numbers of people. Leaving aside a handful of notable exceptions, such as Annemarie Sammartino’s recent book The Impossible Border, the challenges posed by refugees in the interwar years have received little attention. Histories of Weimar Germany, for example, rarely mention that in the early 1920s every tenth resident of Berlin was a Russian refugee. As Gatrell accurately observes, “Refugees have been allowed only a walk-on part in most histories of the twentieth century.”

Gatrell is intrigued by the “general absence of refugees in historical scholarship” and the marginal role of history in much of the academic writing on refugees. He identifies three gaps. He emphasises how central a role refugee movements have played in recent history. He explores the role history plays for refugees: how they have “helped to fashion themselves by recourse to history” and how “the past has been a means to express their predicament and a channel for articulating and validating the possibilities of collective action.” And he seeks to demonstrate that refugees make history, as much as they are being made by it. “They are habitually portrayed as if they are without agency,” he notes, “like corks bobbing along on the surface of an unstoppable wave of displacement.”

Although Gatrell successfully impresses on the reader the need to think of refugees as agents, he is only occasionally able to demonstrate how they have exercised their agency. He shouldn’t be blamed for this shortcoming: a book that tries to cover a global story extending over a century is not the ideal place to delve deeply into the dynamics of refugee movements and demonstrate how refugees, far from being passive pawns, often display initiative and sometimes exercise power.

THIS is where Adam Seipp comes in. He has written a history of Wildflecken, a village of about 3000 people in the north of Bavaria, in the Rhön Mountains. The Rhön is only slightly to the south of the geographical centre of today’s Germany, but was long one of the most remote and economically isolated parts of Germany. Seipp’s history begins in 1937, when several nearby villages were displaced to make way for a large army training facility. From 1940, Wildflecken hosted a munitions factory employing hundreds of forced labourers from France, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. In 1945, it became the final destination for hundreds of German refugees, and the temporary site of a DP camp set up by UNRRA. Then, when the DPs left, the American army turned the Wehrmacht’s training facility into an army base; Wildflecken became “Wild Chicken.”

The last Americans departed in 1994, and today Wildflecken and nearby villages are not unlike what they were in the early 1930s: remote and comparatively marginalised places in the heart of Germany. But I suspect they have changed in one important respect: the idea of what it means to be local has been challenged both by interactions with forced labourers, DPs and

American GIs, and by the fact that those who now consider themselves locals include both former German refugees and new immigrants from Eastern Europe, with the latter making up almost 30 per cent of the population.

In Strangers in the Wild Place, Seipp is mainly concerned with the history of the local DP camp. By 1947, there were 416 such camps in American-occupied Germany alone. Wildflecken was not just any DP camp, however. Its life span, from 1945 to 1951, was unusually long, and with a population of around 15,000 it was also comparatively large. But its prominence in accounts of DP camps in postwar Germany is probably mainly due to Kathryn Hulme, an American who worked there for UNRRA from 1945 to 1947 and then, in 1953, published The Wild Place, an award-winning memoir about her experiences in the camp. More people no doubt read The Wild Place after the success of Hulme’s next book, which was inspired by the experiences of another UNRRA worker at Wildflecken, the former Belgian nun Marie Louise Habets, who became Hulme’s life-long partner. In 1959, that book, The Nun’s Story, was made into a box office hit starring Audrey Hepburn.

It is to Seipp’s credit that he treats Hulme’s observations with great caution. A history that relied on her account would most likely be an American history, or at least one that foregrounded the perspective of UNRRA staff. In such a history, refugees would likely be “mere flotsam and jetsam, moving ‘spontaneously’ in search of safe ground,” to use a line from Gatrell’s book. In order to include the perspectives of local Germans, German refugees and the inhabitants of the Wildflecken DP camp, Seipp draws on German and American published and archival sources, and on some oral histories. “This book is an international history of a very small place,” Seipp justifiably claims.

It is also a Polish history. From 1946, Wildflecken’s population was almost exclusively made up of non-Jewish Poles, many of whom had no intention of returning to Poland (and some of whom had been repatriated, only to return to Wildflecken). For them, Wildflecken became Durzyń, “a legally incorporated Polish town with its own government that paralleled the apparatus of UNRRA.” The name was meant to refer to a tribe of Slavs who had supposedly lived in that part of Bavaria some 1500 years earlier.

UNRRA kept the camp supplied with basic necessities, but left the camp’s internal administration to the DPs themselves. Not surprisingly, Hulme and her fellow aid workers knew little about the politics of Durzyń. When the Western Allies had crossed into German territory towards the end of the war, they had to secure and then administer the territory they occupied. They had to disarm regular soldiers who had been taken prisoners of war but also the police and members of paramilitary organisations. They had to disband Nazi organisations and hunt down, lock up and eventually prosecute their leaders. And they needed to identify Germans who had not been compromised by twelve years of Nazi rule and who could serve as local administrators. The Allied armies struggled given the size of the task, but comparatively speaking, they were well-prepared for their role as conquerors.

They were less prepared for their role as liberators: of concentration camp inmates, prisoners of war, and forced labourers. Millions of people needed to be accommodated, fed, provided with medical care, and eventually repatriated or resettled. While the advancing American, British and Canadian army units were accompanied by interpreters to facilitate the communication with German prisoners of war and civilians, they couldn’t readily draw on Polish or Czech or Russian speakers and often had to rely on using German in their interactions with people they had liberated. A history of DPs in occupied Germany needs to be cognisant of the lack of understanding, and sometimes the mistrust, between the DPs and their liberators, and the resulting relative autonomy enjoyed by DPs.

Seipp captures this aspect of the relationship between the rescued and their rescuers well. “UNRRA, even with support from the [American] army, left a tiny footprint in the camps,” he writes. “Inside the perimeter, increasingly contentious debates over repatriation seriously threatened UNRRA’s ability to fulfill its mandate.” Those in charge of Durzyń didn’t want to be repatriated, and they used their influence to impress their view on fellow Poles. Disagreements over repatriation led to sometimes-violent conflicts among the DPs and with UNRRA staff. Thus the history of Wildflecken also needs to include an account of the political projects of its inhabitants and of the “prewar political lines” and “wartime fractures” that shaped these projects.

By early 1947, with the onset of the cold war and the growing demand from countries such as Australia for immigrants, repatriation no longer suited the West. But it would be a mistake to write the history of the DP camps without taking into account the agency of the DPs themselves. “The radicalisation of politics within the camp helped shape its future,” Seipp writes, and “that of its increasingly impatient residents, and of the wider structures of refugee life in the post-1945 world.”

The history of Wildflecken is also a German history – or rather, two German histories: that of the locals, and that of the Heimatvertriebenen (literally: people driven from their homeland), the ethnic Germans who fled the advancing Red Army or were expelled from territories that ceased to belong to Germany. Because villages and small country towns offered more to eat and had more housing than the bomb-damaged cities, a comparatively large proportion of these German refugees settled in rural areas, particularly in Bavaria and other eastern regions of West Germany. It is one of the central arguments of Seipp’s book that the presence of foreigners, including DPs, “sometimes had the entirely unintended but very important effect of catalyzing the integration of expellee populations into pre-existing communities,” not least because “in a hierarchy of foreignness, the expellees at least appeared closer to the locals than the DPs ever could.”

But that is not to say that locals, German refugees and DPs lived side by side without engaging with each other. On the contrary: as it provided access to food, the DP camp was the centre of the local economy. The camp’s status as a “hub of commercial activity” is not something that could be gleaned from Hulme’s memoir, in which, as Seipp notes, Wildflecken’s “residents appear sparingly and as an undifferentiated mass.” The local Germans were as much a part of the DP camp as the DPs had become a part of Wildflecken: “the camp and the people living around it developed a mutually dependent, unequal, and often antagonistic set of relationships.”

For the local Germans, the camp was a source of much-needed provisions. But it also posed a threat. After the war, many DPs who had suffered as prisoners of war, forced labourers or concentration camp prisoners didn’t wait for reparations to be paid to them, but rather helped themselves by pillaging the houses of Germans. Particularly in the early days after their liberation, they could often do that with ease; in Wildflecken, for example, some of the DPs had guns, while initially not even the local German police were allowed to carry arms, and the Americans were less concerned about marauding DPs then about German war criminals. Germans were fearful not only because they actually experienced vengeful DPs, but also because they expected DPs to take revenge, knowing all too well how badly most of them had been treated.

ADAM Seipp’s book puts refugees – Heimatvertriebene and DPs – at the centre of postwar German history. Unless we recognise the interactions between local Germans, American occupiers, displaced people and German refugees, with their “very different hopes, expectations, and fears for the future,” he argues, “we cannot understand the processes that underlay the construction of a workable society in post-war West Germany.” In this way, Seipp’s “international history” not only is a particularly appropriate means of understanding the history of the Wildflecken DP camp, but also provides new insights into “German” history – which may in fact be less German than many historians of postwar Germany assume.

In many respects, Seipp has written the kind of history Gatrell is calling for in his book: one that casts refugees in the lead roles and emphasises their agency. Seipp could perhaps have gone further by trying to be a historical ethnographer as well as a historian. As Gatrell suggests, “Writing refugees back into history means asking questions about the sources at the disposal of the historian.” The historical evidence is lopsided: organisations such as UNRRA documented their operations, and people like Hulme wrote memoirs, while the voices of refugees are often mediated by immigration officials or refugee advocates. Such lopsidedness requires historians to read their sources against the grain. Seipp does that well, and his example could entice historians to broaden their scope. I only wish he had been less sceptical about the usefulness of oral histories, and also tried to harness the admittedly skewed perspectives of those who in the second half of the 1940s grew up in Durzyń and Wildflecken.

Both books are recommended for anybody frustrated by the parochialism of the debates about refugees and asylum seekers: Gatrell’s because he emphasises the importance of the global and historical context, and convincingly sketches it for us; and Seipp’s because it draws attention to the messiness of a past in which refugees and the people with whom they interact make history. •

The post Refugees making history appeared first on Inside Story.

St Pauli Football Club played in front of a home crowd at Hamburg’s Millerntor stadium on 25 October. The team was fifth on the ladder, and its fans were probably dreaming of promotion to the Bundesliga, the top German league, which St Pauli has joined only once in the past ten years. Almost 28,000 were there that Friday night to watch their team take on low-ranked SV Sandhausen. After ninety minutes, though, St Pauli could probably count itself lucky that the game ended in a nil-all draw.

If it hadn’t been for what happened next, the evening would have quickly been forgotten. Thousands gathered outside the southern stand wielding placards and banners, some of which had been unfurled during the game. From the stadium they marched to St Pauli, the church that gave the suburb – and hence the football club – its name. The demonstrators leading the march carried a large banner with a text in English that read, “We are here to stay.” The police, who had anticipated the march but expected no more than 1000 demonstrators, estimated the crowd at 5000. The organisers claimed 10,000 people joined the march.

Given that it’s not long since St Pauli was relegated to the third division, “We are here to stay” might have reflected fans’ feelings about the club’s mixed fortunes on the football field. The demonstrators were not calling for the sacking of coach Michael Frontzeck, however; what they wanted was the resignation of Olaf Scholz, the head of Hamburg’s state government. But mostly they were chanting in support of those carrying the banner at the head of the protest march: a group of African men who have been threatened with removal by the state government.

In June I wrote about 300 irregular migrants who had arrived in Hamburg after they were reportedly released from a reception centre by Italian authorities and each given €500 and a temporary residence permit valid for all Schengen countries. According to an Italian newspaper report, at least some of the migrants were also given train tickets to Germany. The people who ended up in Hamburg – mainly from Mali, Ghana, Togo and Ivory Coast – had left jobs in Libya after the situation of sub-Saharan Africans in Libya became increasingly perilous following the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi. Their first port of call was the Italian island of Lampedusa, which lies only about 300 kilometres north of the Libyan coast.

The authorities in Hamburg made the Italian practice public in May. By then, the Africans had been in Germany’s second-largest city for almost three months. Until April, they had been supported by a winter relief program funded by the state government, but now they were homeless and living on the street. Their money had long run out, and their three-month residence permits were about to expire. For the authorities in Hamburg, the solution was obvious: Italy was the first country of asylum, and it was obliged to look after them. After some diplomatic wrangling, the Italians conceded as much, and on 30 May the German interior ministry announced that the Italian government had agreed to take the Africans back.

For the past six months, however, the Africans have been seeking support for their demands to remain in Hamburg. On 22 May, a delegation unsuccessfully tried to meet with Olaf Scholz. On 29 May, their plight occasioned heated debates in the Bürgerschaft, Hamburg’s state parliament, when the Left Party and the Greens accused the governing Social Democrats of violating the Africans’ human rights.

Following Italy’s offer to take them back, the state government announced that it would accommodate the Africans in a vacant school, where their identities would be checked by the police. This plan was immediately condemned by the leaders of the Protestant Church, who argued that the offer was designed to make it easier to process them and facilitate their removal.

On 4 June, the parish of St Pauli, with the support of the church hierarchy, offered shelter to eighty of the migrants. Asked by a journalist how long they would be allowed to stay in the church, St Pauli’s pastor said, “A host welcoming guests must not immediately ask, ‘When are you going to leave?’” He also clarified that his church was not offering asylum to the migrants, and that the willingness to help ought to be seen as an act of hospitality. Although the church didn’t invoke its traditional right to grant asylum to fugitives, so far the police haven’t attempted to enter its premises to question or detain the migrants.

Several trade unions have also come out in support of the Africans, some of whom have joined Ver.di, Germany’s largest and most powerful union, which represents public servants. The unions, the churches, refugee advocacy organisations, and a large number of locals support the Africans’ demand that they all be given residence and work rights, and reject the state government’s compromise plan for their cases to be assessed on an individual basis. While the African men are often referred to as “refugees,” that term is used in a loose sense, without any reference to the legal definition in the 1951 Refugee Convention.

The protests over the government’s handling of the case have intensified since June. With the onset of autumn, the church hosting the Africans applied for a permit to erect accommodation containers. The state government refused to grant the permit, but it was outmanoeuvred by the local council, which sided with the church. Some of the Africans have agreed to reveal their identities in return for a Duldung, a temporary stay of removal until their cases have been investigated, but a majority of them still insists on a political rather than an administrative or juridical solution. Public support for the migrants remains strong. Another protest march on the 2–3 November weekend attracted twice as many demonstrators as the protest after the St Pauli–Sandhausen game.

THE drowning of hundreds of irregular migrants near Lampedusa in early October invited comparisons between European and Australian responses to “boat people.” Sociologist Claudia Tazreiter, for example, writing for the ABC’s Drum, judged “the reactions to the human tragedies of lives lost at sea attempting to find refuge” to be “shockingly divergent in the European and Australian case.” And it is certainly true that the rhetoric of European leaders after the tragedy in the Mediterranean starkly differs from that of Australian leaders after similar events off our shores. But both the European Union and Australia are committed to preventing the arrival of irregular migrants, irrespective of whether they turn out to be refugees as defined in the 1951 UN Convention. The Australian government has put a high-ranking military commander in charge of its attempts to thwart the arrival of asylum seekers, and the European Union’s equivalent efforts have been coordinated by the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union, or Frontex, which was created in 2004 to block irregular access to member states. Neither in Europe nor in Australia has the militarisation of border control resulted in fewer deaths at the border.

Yet the events unfolding in Hamburg couldn’t have occurred in Australia. Why is that? First, the rhetoric of Hamburg’s political leaders is different from that of Australia’s leaders. In Australia, politicians from both major parties have been guilty of condoning, if not eliciting, irrational fears of “boat people” in the interest of electoral gain. In Germany, since the pogroms of Hoyerswerda (in 1991) and Rostock-Lichtenhagen (in 1992), in which rioting neo-Nazis tried to burn down asylum seeker hostels, German politicians seem to know that the vilification of asylum seekers releases a dangerous genie that can’t easily be put back into its bottle. Political and community leaders are usually quick in condemning local protests against asylum seekers, which still happen frequently, particularly in East Germany. Last weekend, for example, residents of the small town of Schneeberg in Saxonia rallied against the accommodation of asylum seekers in a former army barracks. As has been the case elsewhere, the protests were engineered by the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany. Perhaps surprisingly, the zero tolerance approach to overt xenophobia among all parties in federal parliament has not resulted in a vacuum on the right of the political spectrum; in the recent federal elections, the National Democrats won just 1.3 per cent of the vote.

Inner-city Hamburg is a world away from Schneeberg. Radical political positions that could exist only on the fringes in Australia enjoy the support of a significant section of the community, reflecting well-established political cultures that allow radical critiques to flourish. The metamorphosis of St Pauli FC is a good example of what that makes possible in some German cities. A few years ago, the club deliberately embraced an alternative political and cultural agenda, which enabled it to attract a new fan base. While other clubs in the Bundesliga struggled to control fans who heap racist abuse on opposition players and supporters, St Pauli fans pride themselves on their commitment to anti-racism and anti-sexism.

Hamburg is not the only German city that provides an environment conducive to protests by and in support of irregular migrants. In Berlin, some 200 asylum seekers – most of whom also entered Europe via Lampedusa – have been camping for more than a year at Oranienplatz in Kreuzberg. While Berlin’s state government would like to send them back to Italy, the local council has so far refused to play ball. Much like St Pauli and neighbouring suburbs in Hamburg, Kreuzberg has a vibrant alternative political and cultural scene; the gulf between it and mainstream Germany became obvious at the last local elections when the Greens and the Pirate Party shared half the vote while the Christian Democrats attracted only about 8 per cent.

Perhaps the most important difference between Germany and Australia, however, is not so much to do with Germans or Australians as with the irregular migrants themselves. The Africans in Hamburg, much like similar groups in other German cities, have been able to articulate their own agenda. It was they, rather than their supporters, who first demanded that a political solution be found that allows all 300 Africans to remain in Germany. Admittedly, it is difficult to view that kind of agency in isolation – it only becomes possible in a cultural context in which the voices of people without rights are listened to, and in which these voices can then be amplified.

Because the people sleeping in the St Pauli church speak for themselves, the relationship between the Africans and their German supporters resembles a coalition (albeit with a junior partner whose resources are limited). In this case at least, refugee advocates cannot represent migrants as voiceless and sufferers, and have to respect the fact that the migrants’ political demands may differ from their own.

While refugee advocates in Australia are often driven by their own compassion, and then try to elicit compassion, if not pity, in their campaigns, much of the European response to irregular migrants is marked by a sense of solidarity. Even the Pope, discussing irregular migrants during his visit to Lampedusa in July, seemed to rate solidarity more highly than compassion. In the short term, the emotions directed towards the suffering victim can be immensely powerful. But such emotions are fickle, and they don’t offer a long-term perspective. In comparison to the surge of feeling associated with compassion, the energy generated by a sense of solidarity may be weak, but unlike compassion, solidarity anticipates a viable future relationship between partners.

In her book On Revolution, Hannah Arendt, who believed that solidarity could – and ought to – “inspire and guide action,” put her finger on why sentiments are of dubious value in the fight for social and political justice:

[W]ithout the presence of misfortune, pity could not exist, and it therefore has just as much vested interest in the existence of the unhappy as thirst for power has a vested interest in the existence of the weak. Moreover, by virtue of being a sentiment, pity can be enjoyed for its own sake, and this will almost automatically lead to a glorification of its cause, which is the suffering of others.

The supporters of the African migrants recently argued their case in their St Pauli Manifesto. They took a stance, they say, “because we want to, because we are able to, and because we have to… We are confident that what we do can, could be done by any neighbourhood in Hamburg or anywhere else in this country. We want to set an example, one example of many. Anybody could follow it.” While that might not apply to Schneeberg or Western Sydney, it seems worth keeping a close watch on what is possible in St Pauli. Maybe the unconventional success story of the local football club could be replicated in an arena where people are fighting for what Hannah Arendt called “the right to have rights.” •

The post We are here to stay appeared first on Inside Story.

FOR AN election campaign to be of interest to anyone apart from politicians, political scientists and pollsters, two conditions need to be met: the outcome must be unpredictable, and there must be a genuine contest between personalities, policies and visions for the future.

Not even diehard Liberal supporters got excited about the recent Australian federal election. Tony Abbott’s win had been anticipated for at least the past couple of years – except, perhaps, during two weeks in late June and early July immediately after Kevin Rudd’s third and finally successful attempt to oust Julia Gillard. In the final weeks of the campaign, the only person who seemed to believe that Labor could win the election was Rudd himself; in fact, his concession speech suggested that his belief didn’t waiver even after the votes had been counted.

Predictable election outcomes seem to be the order of the day. Well before Norwegians cast their votes in last week’s parliamentary election, all observers were agreed on the result. The Labour Party’s popular and competent Jens Stoltenberg, who had presided over a booming economy, would be defeated, and Erna Solberg of the Conservative Party would become the country’s next prime minister. The results duly confirmed the expectations.

In Germany, the campaign leading up to this weekend’s election has been as uninspiring as Australia’s. That’s not least because everybody assumes that the incumbent, Angela Merkel, will remain Bundeskanzlerin. Her challenger, the Social Democrat Peer Steinbrück, has performed well during the campaign, but his approval ratings still lag by at least fifteen percentage points. The Christian Democrats – the Christian Democratic Union and its sister party, the Christian Social Union – will undoubtedly win the largest share of the votes.

But the situation in Germany is quite different from that in Norway, where Solberg was always expected to form government with the help of the populist, right-wing Progress Party. It’s different from Australia, too, where Tony Abbott was always expected to be the prime minister of a Liberal–National coalition government – even in the unlikely event that the Liberal Party had won a majority of seats in the House of Representatives. While Merkel may be Germany’s next chancellor, the make-up of her government is difficult to predict.

Merkel currently presides over a governing coalition of Christian Democrats and the Free Democratic Party. Together, they hold 320 of 620 seats in the Bundestag, the German lower house. The Social Democrats (146 seats), the Left Party (seventy-six seats) and the Greens (sixty-eight seats) form the opposition.

According to the most recent opinion polls, the Free Democrats and Christian Democrats will win about as many seats between them as will the other three parties currently represented in the Bundestag. If the governing coalition has fewer seats than the Social Democrats, Left Party and Greens combined, however, the latter won’t necessarily be able to form a coalition; Steinbrück has ruled out governing with the help of the Left Party, an amalgam of former left-wing Social Democrats, in West Germany, and the successor party of the communist Socialist Unity Party in East Germany. The government’s position would become much more difficult, however, if the vote for the Free Democrats, which currently sits on between 5 and 6 per cent, falls below 5 per cent. In that case, the Free Democrat vote would be below the threshold needed for its representatives to enter parliament.

The situation may become even more complicated if Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) wins more than 5 per cent of the vote and thus enters parliament. Formed as recently as February by a former World Bank economist, Bernd Lucke, and Konrad Adam, a former editor of the conservative broadsheet Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the party’s sole aim is the abolition of the Eurozone. But although Lucke and Adam want to get rid of the common currency (not just for Germany), they aren’t eurosceptics; in fact, they argue that the euro hinders rather than advances European integration. As I observed previously in Inside Story, Germans are committed to the idea of Europe but fond of dreaming about a return to the Deutschmark. Until very recently, opinion polls predicted around 3 per cent for the new party, but the most recent polls have reported a surge in support. While Alternative for Germany is still predicted to fall short of the required 5 per cent, it wouldn’t be the first time that pollsters have underestimated a new party’s pulling power, as the performance of the Palmer United Party in the Australian election demonstrated.

All that means that a continuation of the current government is just one of several scenarios. The second-most-likely scenario is a coalition between the two major parties. Steinbrück has been finance minister in a Merkel-led government once before, between 2005 and 2009, so there is certainly a precedent for that option. Or the Greens could become a junior partner in a Merkel-led government. Or Steinbrück could resign and open the door for a coalition between Social Democrats and Greens and Left Party, or for a minority government tolerated by the Left Party. In other words, Merkel’s chances of not having to vacate her current position are fairly good, whereas a Bundeskanzler Steinbrück is a rather unlikely prospect.

Germans have experienced all manner of coalitions in the past, including one between Christian Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats (between 2009 and 2012 in Saarland). Currently, only one state out of sixteen is led by a government comprised of members of only one party: Hamburg, where the Social Democrats rule in their own right. In five states, Social Democrats and Greens form the government; in one of these, Baden-Württemberg, the Social Democrats are the junior partner. In Schleswig-Holstein in Germany’s far north, Social Democrats and Greens rule with the help of a minor party that represents the state’s Danish minority. Five states are run by coalitions between Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, with the former in the driving seats in two cases. Brandenburg is governed by a coalition of Social Democrats and Left Party. Finally, in three states the government is currently a replica of the federal government in Berlin – although that is about to change, as the Christian Social Union won an absolute majority of seats at yesterday’s elections in Bavaria, while its partner, the Free Democrats, failed to reach the 5 per cent threshold.

So even if most commentators and the majority of Germans were right in predicting another Merkel-led government, the outcome of the elections on Sunday – the make-up of the next government – is uncertain. Why, then, hasn’t there been more interest in the current contest? Before answering that question, I return once more to Australia.

Much of the reason why the Australian election campaign was a rather tepid affair was that in key areas, the two major parties embraced each other’s policies. “Stop the boats,” Tony Abbott repeated ad nauseam, and as soon as he returned to the prime ministership Kevin Rudd announced a policy that was more draconian than anything ever contemplated by the Liberals. “We’ll scrap the carbon tax,” Abbott promised – and a few weeks before the election, the government, too, said that the carbon tax would be abolished from next year. Labor prided itself on the Gonski school funding reforms and on DisabilityCare; despite its misgivings about Gonski, the opposition agreed not to reverse the reforms should it win government. DisabilityCare always had bipartisan support.

When shadow treasurer Joe Hockey finally announced where an incoming Liberal–National government would make cuts, he singled out the foreign aid budget. But here, too, the Labor government’s policies had set a precedent. Under Labor, Australia had deferred the millennium development goal target five years in a row. And last year, the government decided to divert at least $375 million of the foreign aid budget to pay for the accommodation of asylum seekers in Australia – strangely enough, without contravening OECD guidelines about the expenditure of foreign aid. At the time, the opposition’s foreign affairs spokesperson, Julie Bishop, pointed out that the diversion would make the Gillard government “the third-largest recipient” of Australian foreign aid after Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

Germany’s election campaign has been a lacklustre affair for much the same reason. Like last time around (and reported in Inside Story), disagreements between the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats about key policy directions have been rare. While Labor Party policies have resembled those traditionally associated with the Liberals in Australia, the opposite has happened in Germany: the Christian Democrats have become the larger of two social democratic parties. The Christian Democrats have also embraced policies that were traditionally associated with the Greens: most importantly, the Merkel government has moved Germany away from its dependence on nuclear energy, and has implemented policies designed to result in a significant reduction of Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Compared with positions now held jointly by the Labor Party and the incoming Coalition government in Australia, the German government’s position is radical. Although last year CO2 emissions went up by 2 per cent, and a significant reduction of emissions over the past twenty years was largely due to the restructuring of East Germany’s economy, Germany is on track to further reduce its ecological footprint. All parties represented in the Bundestag are in favour of further steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Germany and worldwide.

In 2012, according to the UNHCR, Germany received 64,540 asylum applications, or 13 per cent of such applications worldwide. (Australia received 3 per cent.) Recently, Der Spiegel reported that Germany is on target to receive more than 100,000 asylum seekers this year; close to a third of them are likely to be recognised as refugees or otherwise allowed to remain in Germany. Despite the increased number of asylum applications, in March the government offered to accommodate 5000 refugees from Syria for at least two years. They will have work rights and will be entitled to attend free German language classes. Last week, the first 107 Syrians arrived from Lebanon in a plane chartered by the government, joining about 30,000 Syrian asylum seekers and refugees already in Germany. Opposition parties have criticised the Merkel government over its response to Syrian refugees – not because they don’t want them to come to Germany, but because they believe Germany ought to take in more than 5000.

The Australian case couldn’t be more different. The PNG solution and the Liberals’ “turn-back-the-boats” policy have signalled to the rest of the world that Australia is unwilling to live up to its legal obligations and moral responsibilities. Most Australians would not countenance anything else, according to both major parties. But this is a chicken-and-egg situation. While neither Labor nor the Coalition were prepared to challenge anxieties such as the one articulated by the Liberal candidate for the seat of Lindsay – that asylum seekers contribute to traffic congestion in Western Sydney – all parties represented in the Bundestag condemned the views of the organisers of a campaign against asylum seekers in Hellersdorf, a suburb in outer East Berlin. (In socioeconomic terms, Hellersdorf is comparable to some of the suburbs that make up Lindsay.) In Australia, for the past twelve years, the majority of Liberal, National and Labor politicians have condoned, if not encouraged, irrational fears of asylum seekers (which makes Chris Evans’s unruffled period as immigration minister, 2007–10, all the more remarkable). In Germany, even conservative politicians have been careful to avoid a similar response. Perhaps they know that the racist genie, once let out of the bottle, isn’t easily coaxed back in.

AS ANGELA Merkel has turned the Christian Democratic Union into another, albeit more effective, social democratic party – with green credentials, to boot – it has become difficult for the Social Democrats and the Greens to distinguish their policies from hers. It matters little that Merkel’s policies are not necessarily the same as those of the government, since she has had to accommodate the views of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, which has traditionally always been more conservative than her own party, and of the free-market Free Democrats. In some parts of Germany, the Social Democrats are no longer one of two major parties: in three East German states they rank third (behind the Left Party), and in Baden-Württemberg they have been overtaken by the Greens.

The seeds of the social-democratisation of the Christian Democrats were sown during 1998–2005, when Gerhard Schröder, a Social Democrat chancellor, presided over economic liberalisation and a partial dismantling of the German welfare state. Thanks to Schröder, Merkel didn’t need to shift too far when she made the policies of the Social Democrats her own. She managed this particularly effectively during her first stint in government, when the Social Democrats were the junior partner in a coalition with the Christian Democrats. But it was also easy for Merkel to occupy positions that had traditionally been associated with the left side of politics because, unlike her predecessors, including Helmut Kohl, the former East German research scientist was unencumbered by ideological ballast.

In Australia, the opposite has happened. During the reign of John Howard, Labor felt compelled to embrace Liberal policies in key areas (with the significant exception of industrial relations). During Kevin Rudd’s first term as prime minister (2007–10), Labor’s claim that its policies were distinct from those of the previous Coalition government had to rely largely on the symbolism of the apology to the Stolen Generations. Like Merkel, Rudd and, albeit to a lesser extent, Julia Gillard came to office without major ideological commitments; the election of Bill Shorten to lead Labor in opposition would continue the trend. Where Merkel turned the Christian Democrats into a social democratic party that is in many respects more credible than the original, Rudd and Gillard only managed to create a poor copy of John Howard’s Liberals.

What is particularly interesting about the respective realignments in Germany and Australia is the fact that the retreat from traditional Labor positions (in Australia) and from traditional conservative positions (in Germany) doesn’t seem to have crowded out other parties on the right in Australia or on the left in Germany. To the contrary: in Australia, there still seems to be room for Hansonites to the right of the Liberal Party. In Germany the Left Party remains a viable force on the left side of the political spectrum, and the Pirate Party may well have managed to successfully navigate the Bundestag’s 5 per cent threshold if it hadn’t been for its inexperienced leadership. The Pirates are currently represented in four state parliaments, including in North Rhine-Westfalia – by far the most populous German state, with 17.5 million people – where they won 7.8 per cent of the vote in 2012. In Sunday’s election, they are likely to benefit from Germans’ continuing unease about the surveillance by American, British and German intelligence agencies, which has featured prominently in the news since June and has been a sore point for Merkel’s government. At the other end of the spectrum, the neo-Nazis of the National Democratic Party of Germany, which is represented in two state parliaments in East Germany, can count themselves lucky if they get more than 1 per cent of the national vote on Sunday.

This suggests that the realignments overseen by Merkel, on the one hand, and Rudd and Gillard, on the other, reflected a shift in the electorate’s overall mood. That shift can’t easily be measured on the old “left-right” scale. But given that climate change is indeed, as that otherwise largely forgettable Australian prime minister once said, “the greatest moral, economic and environmental challenge of our generation”, labels such as “left” and “right” are not particularly helpful anyway – and neither are they when assessing the response to refugees and asylum seekers. •

The post Two countries, two elections appeared first on Inside Story.

JUST over a year ago, in the hope that the government and the opposition would endorse a bipartisan response to the arrival of asylum seekers, independent MP Rob Oakeshott introduced the Migration Legislation Amendment (The Bali Process) Bill into federal parliament. The debate in both houses was emotionally charged, with tears shed for people who had drowned while trying to reach Australia by boat. But government and opposition could not agree on the best means of deterring asylum seekers from embarking on the dangerous voyage from Indonesia, and the bill failed. Soon after, Julia Gillard appointed a three-man panel of experts to advise her on how to stop the boat arrivals. Following their recommendations, the government reintroduced the offshore processing of asylum seekers on Nauru and in Papua New Guinea, and established a “no advantage” rule whereby asylum seekers found to be refugees must wait for as long as they would in the imaginary queue until they are resettled by Australia.

Despite those harsh measures, the number of asylum seekers arriving by boat increased. So far this year, more than 15,000 “boat people” have arrived in Australian waters or been intercepted by Australian customs or navy vessels – almost as many as during all of 2012. Since offshore processing began, possibly hundreds of people have drowned in the attempt to reach Australia by boat, including nine on 12 July, after their vessel sank near Christmas Island, and another four on 16 July, after a boat capsized while it was being escorted by Australian customs vessels.

These deaths in Australian waters prompted calls for yet-tougher deterrence measures. Last Friday, Australia’s biggest-selling paper, the Melbourne Herald Sun, depicted eleven small children on its front page under the headline “Save Boat Babies.” That same day, prime minister Kevin Rudd announced a new policy: any asylum seekers arriving by boat would be processed in Papua New Guinea. Those found to be refugees in the terms of the 1951 Refugee Convention would then be resettled in Papua New Guinea.

Would the Herald Sun’s “boat babies” be better off in a country like Afghanistan, where the lives of members of ethnic and religious minorities are not safe? Or in Indonesia, where many asylum seekers, including children, are detained under appalling conditions in Australian-funded camps? Or on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, where “the living conditions for all asylum seekers [are] harsh,” according to a new report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and “the remoteness of the location, the nature of the facility (on a naval base) and the difficult living conditions appear to contribute to the all-pervasive sense of frustration and despondency which, if left unresolved for a protracted period, is likely to lead to increased levels of psycho-social and physical harm of those affected”?

On the day of the announcement, reflecting the prevailing view among refugee advocates, Greens leader Christine Milne argued that Kevin Rudd had “leapfrogged Tony Abbott on cruelty.” The government would hardly contest this claim. The new policy is meant to be cruel – in fact, cruel enough to be a successful deterrent. It is also unjust and unworkable, as the box below shows.

Kevin Rudd prides himself on being compassionate, and tries to reassure Australians that compassion is one of their attributes as a nation. In this respect he resembles prime minister John Howard at the time of the Tampa crisis. In late August 2001, while the Tampa and its cargo of 438 “boat people” was in waters near Christmas Island, Howard told Fran Kelly, “We are a decent, generous, compassionate humanitarian country, but we also have an absolute right to decide who comes to this country.” On Friday, prime minister Rudd insisted that “we are a compassionate nation and we will continue to deliver a strong humanitarian program.”

In drawing attention to the hypocrisy of Australian prime ministers, I am not trying to suggest that genuine compassion ought to dominate Australia’s response to asylum seekers, nor that a truly compassionate response would be a viable long-term answer to forced migration. As I have argued in Inside Story, in some circumstances compassion may allow us to recognise suffering in the first place and motivate us to address it, but in the end Australia’s response ought to be guided by its responsibilities as a regional power, its capacity to accommodate refugees, and its recognition that those approaching by boat have rights according to international legal principles and that Australia has obligations arising from those same principles.

The trouble with the dominant conversation about “boat people” is not that Australian politicians and other public commentators don’t feel for people who are languishing in refugee camps or detention centres, or who are embarking on dangerous journeys to countries that seem to offer the prospect of a new life. Rather than the absence of compassion, it’s a surfeit of fear and anger that is the problem. Canberra’s politicians may not be afraid of “boat people” as such, but they do nothing to assuage the fears and anger of the electorate. Both the opposition and the government either take these fears for granted, or they stoke them in the expectation that heightened anxieties will deliver them electoral gains.

GIVEN that the outpouring of compassion – unlike the granting of rights – presupposes an unequal relationship between the one who is compassionate and the one who is shown compassion, it is perhaps just as well that the compassion invoked by Kevin Rudd and others is fake. But many of those pontificating about the “problem” of asylum seekers are not just lacking compassion. They are indifferent. The policy initiatives of the current Labor government are informed, on the one hand, by self-interest – it wants to win the forthcoming election, or at least not lose in a landslide – and, on the other, by indifference about the people at whom their initiatives are directed.

Sure, Australia’s politicians don’t want to see yet another asylum seeker boat sink in Australian waters. They don’t want another asylum seeker to die trying to reach Christmas Island, Ashmore Reef or the coast of Western Australia. To give Kevin Rudd and his colleagues the benefit of the doubt: they may be genuinely troubled by the fact that “boat people” have perished trying to reach Australia, rather than merely by the sight of them drowning in front of their and other Australians’ eyes. They may be particularly concerned about the death of women and children. But for the government, it has become almost irrelevant who is arriving by boat and why they are paying people smugglers to bring them to Australia while knowing full well the risks involved.

On Friday, Kevin Rudd impressed on the Australian public his credentials as a diplomat. He had talked to the UN secretary-general and to Indonesia’s president, and then fronted the cameras with Papua New Guinea’s prime minister to announce an agreement the two men had reached. His predecessor, by contrast, hadn’t tried to pose as a diplomat, but rather as an Australian Joan of Arc. Very soon after her successful coup in June 2010, Gillard let herself be photographed on board HMAS Broome, one of the ships that patrol Australia’s borders; it was obvious that that’s how she liked Australians to see her.

Both Rudd, the perennial diplomat, and Gillard, the defender of the nation’s borders, talked endlessly about asylum seekers, but neither prime minister ever talked to them. The idea of an Australian prime minister visiting a detention centre or greeting so-called irregular maritime arrivals on the wharf at Christmas Island’s Flying Fish Cove may seem far-fetched.

But sometimes it is useful to remember that not everything taken for granted in Australia is universally considered self-evident. Or, as one reader mused when commenting on an article reporting Friday’s policy announcements in Le Monde: “Ils sont étranges ces Australiens, étrangers au Monde.” (They are strange those Australians, strangers to the world.) In fact, as two alternative responses to irregular migrants make clear, the approach taken by Kevin Rudd, and others of his predecessors, is anything but self-evident.

SOMEBODY who has been preoccupied by the problem of irregular migration and to whom the idea of talking to “boat people” would not have appeared strange is the Pope. On 8 July, in what was one his first forays out of Rome, Pope Francis visited Lampedusa, an Italian island that lies some 110 kilometres north of the Tunisian coast. Lampedusa is the principal destination of thousands of predominantly African irregular migrants who are trying to enter the European Union. The Pope insisted that he be accompanied by only one politician, namely the local mayor. After his arrival he boarded a ship of the Italian coast guard to throw flowers into the sea in remembrance of the thousands of people who have drowned in the Mediterranean in recent years, including more than 1500 in 2011 alone. He then said mass on the island.

In his homily, Francis exhorted his listeners to be sensitive to the suffering of others. He said what one might expect the Pope to say: he invoked God’s questions to Adam, “Where are you?,” and to Cain, “Where is your brother?,” and talked about the parable of the Good Samaritan. At one point, he mentioned compassion, lamenting that our society had forgotten how to experience it. But two other terms appeared far more often in his homily: “solidarity” and “indifference.”

According to Francis, migrants such as those landing on Lampedusa fail to find understanding, acceptance and solidarity. Unlike compassion, I’d suggest that solidarity is not reserved for the deserving. Unlike compassion, solidarity does not presuppose a power differential between the person who suffers and the one who alleviates her suffering. It is not a gift that places the burden of an unrepayable debt on the recipient. Twice in his homily, Francis singled out the Lampedusani, the islanders of Lampedusa, for offering their solidarity. Lampedusani – and Christmas Islanders, for that matter – have had a conflicted relationship with irregular migrants. As Olly Lambert’s brilliant 2011 BBC documentary, The Invasion of Lampedusa, shows, Lampedusani are unlikely Good Samaritans; in fact, many of them deeply resent the fact that their island has become a first port of call for tens of thousands of African irregular migrants. Nevertheless, over the years they have been remarkably welcoming and have on occasion offered solidarity to those arriving on their shores – irrespective of whether these arrivals were refugees in the terms of the 1951 Refugee Convention. (Most of them, in fact, were not.)

Most importantly, Pope Francis condemned what he called “la globalizzazione dell’indifferenza,” the globalisation of indifference. According to Francis, indifference is the result of an empty illusion, a soap bubble, which is created by our “cultura del benessere,” a culture that privileges material comfort and a sense of contentedness. Trying to take this argument out of the theological context in which it is couched, we could say that this cultura del benessere not only encourages indifference; it also promotes the kind of benevolent generosity that is expressed in terms of compassion.

Other statements by the new Pope suggest that he considers the cultura del benessere a key flaw of twenty-first-century Western society. But it would be too easy to think of the indifference he spoke about on Lampedusa as a weasel word invoked in the services of a distinctly evangelical cultural critique, for Francis was clear about what should replace indifference: not compassion, as one could have expected given the role played by it in the Church’s teaching, but rather attentiveness. “We are no longer attentive to the world we inhabit,” he said, and provided an example of the kind of attentiveness required. Before he had come to Lampedusa, he explained, he had listened “to one of those brothers of ours,” an irregular migrant. Whether it was a result of that man’s story, or a result of making himself knowledgeable about the people who cross from the African coast by boat, his homily made two references to irregular migrants as agents: they were “journeying towards a better future,” he said, and they were “looking for a means to sustain their families.”

After celebrating mass, Francis met with a select fifty “boat people.” The newspapers did not report exactly what Pope Francis said during that meeting. I would like to imagine that the Pope was curious about those he met – that once more he himself was anything but indifferent to their stories. One of the migrants read out a joint letter, in halting Arabic, in which he explained that they had left their homelands for political and economic reasons, and that they had survived a dangerous journey.

I OWE my second example to Rob Walker’s remarkable BBC radio documentary, The Man Who Fell to Earth, which was recently broadcast on ABC Radio National. The documentary follows the investigation into the death of a man who in September 2012 fell out of the sky and onto a suburban road in Mortlake, a suburb of southwest London. Walker interviewed local residents who had seen the body lying in the street, along with the coroner, a mortuary technician, a pathologist and the police officer in charge of the case. The dead man was evidently from sub-Saharan Africa but did not carry any identification. His face had suffered horrendous injuries on impact. He did, however, have a mobile phone, two SIM cards and some Angolan currency in his pocket.

The local residents recalled that they were not surprised. As one told Walker, “When I saw the body and the way it was lying, the immediate thought was, he had fallen out of a plane… because previously there had been instances in this area where stowaways had fallen out of planes.” “We are in a flight path,” another added by way of an explanation. It was, indeed, not the first time that a man had fallen from the undercarriage of a plane on its approach to Heathrow. The police quickly established that a British Airways flight from Luanda, Angola, had been passing overhead at the time of the death.

“So the question,” Rob Walker says on the program, “was why he took this extraordinary risk, and who he was.” In the Australian context, such questions are not self-evident. None of the journalists reporting the death of the “boat people” on 12 and 16 July, and none of the politicians commenting on them, asked who they were and why they had made the journey to Australia. But Walker was not the only one asking those questions. “What must have been going through his mind to do that,” one of the residents wondered, “I would really like to know why he did it.” “What makes people take such big risks to get out of their country?” asked another of the residents who had seen the shattered body lying in the street.

To establish the man’s identity, the police began by asking a technician to reconstruct the man’s face. They then provided a photo of the reconstruction, together with the man’s DNA and dental records, to the Angolan authorities – without any success. But they were able to unlock one of the dead man’s SIM cards. It led them to a mobile number in Switzerland, which belonged to a woman who had lived in South Africa two years earlier. She identified the man as a Mozambican national whom her family had employed as a gardener. She was also able to describe him: his personality, his appearance, and his personal interests. “It was lovely to have him around,” she told Walker. She and the man had been very close – “he was like my family.” Upon her return to Europe, she tried to sponsor him for a visa, but he had no prospects of getting one through regular means, and therefore tried to use money she sent him to obtain false papers. After a corrupt Mozambican official disappeared with all his money, the man travelled to Angola, from where he’d heard it was easier to get to Europe. When he arrived in Luanda, his Swiss friend was not able to send him more money, and that’s where, in Rob Walker’s words, “the trail went cold.”

The coroner who heard the case had dealt with “five or six” stowaways falling from planes. For her, these cases were upsetting because “you feel they had such high hopes of finding a different life here” and because “you just don’t know what the background is.” Like the police, she was determined to find out as much about the man as possible. She told Walker: “We owe it to the family, who we may someday discover, that we ask all the right questions now.” In this case, the family has not yet been found, but given that everybody involved in the case was attentive to the world they inhabit, it will be possible to provide answers should the opportunity arise.

What is remarkable about the story is the interest shown in the dead man – by the documentary maker, the coroner, the pathologist, the people living in the street where he was found and, most significantly, the police officer in charge of the case. They kept asking who he was, where he came from, and why he risked his life by stowing away in a plane’s wheel-well.

Attentiveness of this kind doesn’t automatically lead to answers. After all, the Metropolitan Police were never able to establish the circumstances under which the man found lying in a suburban London street climbed into a Boeing’s wheel housing at Luanda Airport. But attentiveness has the potential to add to our understanding of the world.

The policy changes announced by Kevin Rudd on Friday are informed by a thorough understanding of the Australian electorate’s voting behaviour, but I doubt that they are informed by a similarly thorough understanding of the complex issues of forced migration in the Asia-Pacific region. In fact, in my view, the frequent references to the purported drivers of forced migration, the profiteers once labelled by Rudd “the vilest form of human life,” demonstrate that the issues’ complexity has been conveniently reduced to a tableau peopled by heroes, villains and victims. Friday’s policy changes may rely on assumptions about what asylum seekers holed up in Indonesia will or will not do, but they are not informed by an understanding of why millions have left their homes in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka or Iran in the first place.

“Attentiveness to the world we inhabit” could mean listening to the Hazara man who paid a people smuggler to take him to Australia. But it could also mean paying closer attention to what we, living in the affluent West, think and do. It could mean detecting the self-interest inherent in our compassion for the sufferer, or being critically aware of the indifference that comes with our cultura del benessere. •

Why Australia’s decision to send asylum seekers to Papua New Guinea is wrong

The measures announced by Kevin Rudd last Friday can be criticised on at least eight grounds.

First, Australia is dealing with only a tiny fraction of the world’s displaced people, and is now shirking its responsibilities under the Refugee Convention by off-loading asylum seekers to an impoverished neighbouring country.

Second, there is no guarantee that Papua New Guinea will be able either to process or to resettle a large number of people who have – in terms of their culture, language, ethnicity and religion – little in common with Papua New Guineans. The country – which is currently ranked 156, 154 places below Australia, on the UNDP Human Development Index – does not have the resources required for such a task. Nor does it have the requisite experience. It is politically unstable, and therefore unlikely to provide a long-term solution. Even in the short term, the agreement signed by PNG prime minister Peter O’Neill may not gain the political support in Papua New Guinea that is needed to implement it. According to ABC journalist Sean Dorney, whose knowledge of Australia’s northern neighbour is second to none, a lot of communities in Papua New Guinea will be asking, “Well, what about us?”

Third, by taking on some of Australia’s asylum seekers, Papua New Guinea would add to its own longstanding refugee problem: thousands of refugees from West Papua, who fled to Papua New Guinea in the 1980s. Earlier this year, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reached an agreement with PNG that makes these people the sole responsibility of the PNG authorities – after a period of twenty-eight years, during which the High Commissioner had been responsible for their welfare. According to a recent United Nations report, despite the length of their stay in Papua New Guinea, the vast majority of these West Papuans have not been able to become citizens, and some still have no work rights and no full access to services. Although they – unlike the “boat people” Australia is now sending – come from similar cultures as Papua New Guineans, for many of them a durable solution has not yet been found. Papua New Guineans who are being asked to come to the aid of their affluent southern neighbour may also recall that Australia has not once offered to resettle refugees from West Papua who sought asylum in Papua New Guinea.

Fourth, asylum seekers who are deterred from coming to Australia may try their luck elsewhere. Australia’s new policy may close one route, but it doesn’t stop people from following routes at least as dangerous as the boat journey from Indonesia to Christmas Island. (As I reported last month in Inside Story, some New Zealanders are concerned that “boat people” would try to reach their country rather than Australia; they needn’t be concerned: boats that are barely seaworthy enough to make the 500-kilometre trip from Java to Christmas Island are unlikely to keep going until they get to New Zealand.)

Fifth, Papua New Guinea is exacting a high price – which, if the Nauruan experience is any indication, will only keep going up. As the Nauruan example also suggests, the injection of very large amounts of money into Papua New Guinea’s economy will not necessarily benefit ordinary Papua New Guineans; thus the argument that the deal with Australia will lead to the improvement of health and education services in the country as a whole is shaky.

Sixth, Australia’s reputation, particularly in the region, will suffer, not least because it will be accused of breaching its international legal obligations and its responsibilities as one of the wealthiest nations on the planet.

Seventh, the government’s response will encourage Australians to think that they have every right and reason to be concerned about the arrival of “boat people”; by panicking in response to what is objectively and comparatively a manageable problem, the government condones pettiness and xenophobia, and paranoia about Australia’s purported vulnerability to invasion.

Finally, judging by the experience of the past twelve months, the policy may not have the result it purportedly is trying to achieve: namely to stop the flow of “boat people.” (I have, however, little doubt that the policy will meet its principal objective: the neutralisation of the asylum seeker issue until after the forthcoming election.) •

— Klaus Neumann

The post Attentiveness and indifference appeared first on Inside Story.

WHEN the Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung asked Peter Picha about the surveillance practices of the US National Security Agency, or NSA – exposed by contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden in early June – the seventy-five-year-old said he felt disgusted that the United States had breached his trust in this way. Another participant in the German daily’s vox pop survey, fourteen-year-old Lisa-Marie Bögershausen, was similarly appalled: “Germany shouldn’t put up with this behaviour. From now on I will be much more circumspect about which data or statements I publish online.” Seventy-seven-year-old Renate Ulfikowski called for new laws to curtail the activities of intelligence agencies, and told the interviewer, “In my opinion, Edward Snowden ought to be granted asylum in Germany.”

The Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung’s local section doesn’t usually concern itself with events that happen outside Hildesheim, a city of 100,000 in the north of Germany, or its hinterland – or indeed with national or politics in general. (On the same day that it reported the response to the NSA revelations, the lead article in the local section, “The Odyssey of Thaira,” dealt with a burglar, an open door, and a dog that had strayed onto a freeway.) But over the past fortnight, discussions about the NSA have been ubiquitous in the German media, and the Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung’s coverage has been no exception. When they are not writing about the extent of the spy scandal, German newspapers instruct their readers about how to avoid being spied on: by encrypting their emails, for example, or by using the Deep Net.

Like Renate Ulfikowski, many Germans want their government to offer political asylum to Edward Snowden. They include leading representatives of the Greens and of the left-wing Die Linke party, as well as some prominent Social Democrat or Free Democrat politicians, including the leader of the Social Democrats in Schleswig-Holstein, Ralf Stegner, and the justice minister in the Hesse state government, Jörg-Uwe Hahn, a Free Democrat. Hahn went so far as to suggest that the European Union should call on Barack Obama to return his Nobel peace prize.

The German government has ignored Hahn’s intervention. On 2 July, foreign minister Guido Westerwelle, another Free Democrat, decided that Snowden could not be granted asylum in Germany. According to a foreign affairs spokesperson, the decision was made on formal grounds: because Snowden isn’t on German territory, he can’t claim asylum. This argument is shaky – the German embassy in Moscow could send one of its cars to meet Snowden at Sheremetevo airport, where he is holed up, and he could then request extraterritorial asylum, or the government could accommodate him on humanitarian grounds, as suggested by Greens leader Jürgen Trittin – but so far the government of Angela Merkel, with the tacit support of the opposition Social Democrats, has been unwilling to countenance the idea of harbouring the whistleblower.

But that doesn’t mean that the government didn’t budge at all. With national elections in two months, Merkel is obliged to pay close attention to what people like Peter Picha think. On 29 June, the respected EMNID Institute released poll results which suggest that 58 per cent of Germans consider Snowden a hero and only 19 per cent see him as a traitor. According to the same survey, more than half of the population is worried about the surveillance. Earlier this month Merkel called Obama to protest against the NSA’s activities in Germany, and last week she dispatched her interior minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, to Washington to solicit definitive answers and credible assurances from the Obama administration.

THE story began on 6 June, when the Guardian reported that Verizon, the largest mobile telephony provider in the United States, had been ordered to hand over the phone records of millions of its customers to the National Security Agency. The next day, the Guardian and the Washington Post revealed that under the PRISM program, launched in 2007 during the Bush presidency, the NSA had access to the servers of nine internet providers, “extracting audio and video chats, photographs, emails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets.” On 9 June, the Guardian published an interview with Edward Snowden, thereby disclosing the source of its information. By then, Snowden had left his job with NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, moved out of his house in Waipahu, Hawaii, and fled to Hong Kong.

Initially, the German government claimed to know nothing about PRISM and half-heartedly tried to defend the US authorities. On 16 June, interior minister Friedrich told the daily Die Welt: “Anyone who is genuinely responsible for the safety of citizens in Germany and Europe knows that the US secret services have again and again provided us with crucial and correct information.” But Friedrich sounded poorly informed and out of touch, and his sentiments were evidently not shared by other senior members of Merkel’s government.

Growing unease about the NSA’s surveillance overshadowed Obama’s visit in Berlin on 19 June, and seems to have dominated discussions between him and the German chancellor. In a joint press conference with Merkel, Obama defended PRISM, claiming that it had saved lives. “We know of at least fifty threats that have been averted because of this information,” he said, “not just in the United States but in some cases threats here in Germany.”

Snowden, who left Hong Kong for Moscow on 23 June, continued to feed information about the nature of the surveillance to selected media outlets. On 21 June, the Guardian told its readers that the British Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, was tapping fibre-optic cables to access internet and phone communication. Codenamed Tempora, the program was aimed, said the Guardian, “at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible.”

This time, it wasn’t law-and-order proponent Friedrich, but justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, a Free Democrat known for her strong defence of civil liberties, who responded on behalf of the German government. She described the GCHQ’s eavesdropping as a “Hollywood nightmare,” and on 25 June sent strongly worded letters to British justice secretary Chris Grayling and home secretary Theresa May – incidentally on George Orwell’s 110th birthday, as the Guardian noted.

On 29 June, the German magazine Der Spiegel, also relying on information provided by Snowden, claimed that the NSA was monitoring more communications in Germany than anywhere else, and that it was spying on the German government, including Chancellor Merkel. The magazine also reported that the NSA had bugged the offices of the European Union, including its diplomatic posts in Washington and New York. A week later, Der Spiegel followed with a story that has made it difficult for the German authorities to assume the role of innocent victims of American spymasters: not only the NSA and the GCHQ were involved, Der Spiegel reported, but Germany’s own Bundesnachrichtendienst intelligence service, or BND, has also been an active participant in the operation.

The turbulence triggered by the Guardian and Washington Post articles has become a maelstrom. The revelations about the indiscriminate tapping of phones and monitoring of internet-based communications are threatening to get in the way of negotiations between US and European Union representatives about a free trade treaty, which commenced last Monday in Washington. French president François Hollande indignantly demanded that the talks be suspended – three days before Le Monde revealed that the French Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure intelligence agency has a program similar to the NSA’s PRISM.

“There are times when it becomes apparent how the world really works, what its true inner logic is,” said Der Spiegel in last Monday’s issue. “Then the mist lifts, and the world suddenly looks different. These times are now.” For many Germans, things are not what they seemed to be. Germany may be an economic powerhouse, but politically it is a paper tiger whose sovereignty has never been fully restored, notwithstanding the German Treaty that made reunification in 1990 possible. Many Germans believe that their trust in the United States, restored by the election of Barack Obama, has been betrayed – not least by Obama himself, who turned out to be not quite the same man who had been feted in Berlin in June 2008 when he visited Germany during the presidential primaries.

Germans live in a country in which the state has unfettered access to personal details. They are required to register their place of abode and carry an ID card at all times. In the 1970s, the West German federal police pioneered programs designed to identify potential terrorists by comparing data from a host of sources, including utilities such as electricity providers. At the time, the vast majority of West Germans approved of indiscriminate surveillance and the harvesting of personal data – both because they feared the presumed targets of anti-terrorist measures and because they loved the authorities that claimed to protect them from those they feared.

There was less to fear a few years later, when the West German government decided to do a census. Planned for 1981, postponed until 1983, then cancelled because of a successful high court challenge, and eventually held in 1987, the census was controversial because many Germans feared that the state was collecting identifiable data. Many people refused to fill in the forms, and an organisation coordinating the boycott of the census collected more than one million forms that had not been completed.

Twelve years after 9/11, the fear of Islamic terrorism has subsided, the enthusiasm for an Obama-led America has waned, and fourteen-year-olds are afraid that American, British or, for that matter, German spies invade their privacy. Edward Snowden is considered a hero rather than a traitor, and Frau Merkel is trying to distance herself from Mr Obama and denying that she knew all along about PRISM and Tempora and whatever tricks the Bundesnachrichtendienst was up to.

Interior minister Friedrich, who has just returned from talks with US vice president Joe Biden and attorney-general Eric Holder, may have tried to explain to the Obama administration why millions of his compatriots have fallen out of love with the big brother in Washington, and he may have asked Biden and Holder to appease German voters. But Friedrich received only vague assurances during his visit, and had to resort to rehashing his own earlier argument: the snooping is a justified preventative measure that targets terrorism and organised crime.

Friedrich’s boss, who had earlier declared that “bugging friends is unacceptable,” wouldn’t have been bemused by such professions of transatlantic loyalty. Merkel still seems to be a safe bet for a third term of office, but she must be wondering how best to contain potential electoral damage. Maybe she ought to take up a suggestion made a few days ago by George Mascolo in the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He suggested that she demand that the free trade treaty be complemented by a treaty committing the United States not to spy on its European allies, and that, if Obama were unresponsive, she should return the Medal of Freedom he awarded her two years ago. Or maybe she ought to seriously entertain the idea of inviting Snowden to Germany. Given Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald’s claim yesterday that Snowden “has enough information to cause more damage to the US government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States,” even the Americans may prefer dealing with a recalcitrant Germany rather than with a hostile Russia that is presumably offering hospitality in return for access to the information on Snowden’s laptops. •

The post Big brother appeared first on Inside Story.

IN MARCH this year Germany’s interior ministry alerted state authorities to the arrival of thousands of irregular migrants from Africa. According to the ministry, the Italian government had released the Africans from camps it planned to close, handing each of them a three-month residence permit and €500. The permits allowed the migrants to travel freely among the twenty-six European countries that have abolished border controls under the Schengen agreement, and most of them appear to have proceeded to Germany. Some had extra assistance from the Italians: a migrant from Togo told the La Stampa newspaper that he had been given a rail ticket to Munich. Authorities in Hamburg made the Italian practice public in late May, claiming that 300 Africans had ended up in their city alone and reporting that attempts to encourage the migrants to return to Italy (by offering to pay for their travel) had failed.

The Schengen agreement allows Italy to issue residence permits provided the holders have sufficient funds to cover their costs of living for the duration of the permit. By May, the 300 Africans in Hamburg had long since spent their 500 Euros, were homeless, and had to be cared for by Hamburg’s social services when charities weren’t able to provide them with food and accommodation. The European Commission is currently investigating the case.

Because many irregular migrants to Europe make the journey from the North African coast to the Italian island of Lampedusa, Italy has received comparatively large numbers. The migration intensified after Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was ousted and migrant workers from sub-Saharan Africa became the targets of racial violence. Italy has been responsible for feeding and sheltering the growing number of arrivals, and for processing any applications for political asylum.

Italian authorities have tried before to get rid of irregular migrants by issuing residence permits. In April 2011, when Italy was inundated by refugees from Tunisia in the wake of the Tunisian revolution of late 2010 and early 2011, the permits allowed many of them to take the train to France. Eventually the French stopped the trains at the border in contravention of the Schengen agreement. This technique may be unique, but the practice of passing the buck when it comes to asylum seekers and other unwelcome arrivals is common. French authorities have frequently been accused of not doing enough to prevent irregular migrants from crossing to Britain from Calais or via the Eurotunnel, for example, and in 2002 protests from Britain prompted Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then the French interior minister, to order the closure of the Sangatte refugee camp at Calais.

Australia has occasionally been on the receiving end of a similar practice, although not all attempts – by countries in South East Asia – were successful. Following the fall of Saigon in April 1975, thousands of refugees fled Vietnam by boat. Those who reached Singapore were reportedly provided with food and water, and given maps that showed them how to make it all the way to Australia. “Fleeing Vietnamese ships may risk voyage to Australia,” a headline in the Australian reported on 6 May 1975. None of them got as far as Australia – it wasn’t until 26 April of the following year that a boat carrying five Indochinese men arrived in Darwin – but the mere prospect of “boat people” arriving in Australia caused much alarm in Canberra. Australia’s foreign minister, Don Willesee, told prime minister Gough Whitlam that he was “concerned that the question of the Vietnamese refugees in Singapore and the ‘spectre of an armada’ sailing for Australia will now become the issue which will most attract public opinion and potentially present the greatest problems.” Whitlam, who didn’t have much time for Vietnamese refugees generally, authorised a policy whereby any “boat people” arriving in Australia would be disembarked “into custody” in order to be able to return them to their boat “for the purpose of departing them from Australia.”

Australia may consider itself blessed because its borders are less porous than those separating Europe from Africa and Asia, or the United States from Central America. But that also means that the authorities can’t easily move people on by putting them on the next train.

IF IRREGULAR migrants reaching Australia were told to proceed to another country where their asylum claims would be processed, then they would most likely be advised to try their luck in New Zealand. So far, though, the Australian government has never encouraged “boat people” to travel across the Tasman Sea under their own steam and seek asylum.

But Australia has shipped off asylum seekers to New Zealand with the blessing of the government in Wellington. In 2001, John Howard’s government persuaded its New Zealand counterpart to accommodate many of the asylum seekers who had arrived off Christmas Island on board the MV Tampa: 131 of them in September 2001, and another seventy-seven who were resettled to New Zealand after having been processed in Nauru and recognised as refugees. In March this year, in the course of the annual Australia–New Zealand leaders meeting, NZ prime minister John Key made this pledge to Julia Gillard: “New Zealand will work closely with Australia to annually resettle 150 refugees who have arrived irregularly in Australia by boat to seek asylum, as part of a regional approach to irregular migration. The arrangement will be within New Zealand’s Refugee Quota Programme and operate so that irregular maritime arrivals gain no advantage through choosing irregular migration pathways.”

The NZ government’s willingness to take asylum seekers off Australia’s hands has not been uncontroversial. In 2001, the government was lambasted by the National Party opposition for taking in “queue jumpers” from the Tampa, and many New Zealanders agreed with maverick New Zealand First leader Winston Peters’ assessment that prime minister Helen Clark wanted to show a soft heart but did not have the head to match. Following the agreement between Key and Gillard earlier this year, former National Party immigration minister Aussie Malcolm complained that not only was Australia breaching its international obligations but it had also “sucked New Zealand into the mess.”

On at least two occasions, asylum seekers making landfall in Australia have in fact been trying to reach New Zealand. In April of last year, a group of ten Chinese nationals, members of Falun Gong, sailed from Malaysia to Darwin but claimed that Australia was not their intended destination. According to the Australian Financial Review, they planned to travel to New Zealand because, unlike Australia, that country did not have a policy of mandatory detention. Initially, Julia Gillard seemed pleased by their plans to move on; she told the ABC: “They have not asked for asylum in Australia and they are on a seaworthy vessel, so we are not in a position where we could detain them against their will.” Eventually, however, the Australian authorities encouraged the Chinese to make applications for protection visas in Australia.

In April this year, a boat carrying sixty-six irregular migrants from Sri Lanka landed in Geraldton on the coast of Western Australia. According to Michael Pezzullo of Australia’s Customs and Border Protection Service, they had been on their way to New Zealand, having planned “to cross the Indian Ocean, to steer as far as possible from what they presumed to be our patrol areas and the reach of our surveillance, to sort of hook around the south-western corner of Australia across the Bight, to hook around the southern part of Tasmania and then to pop across the Tasman Sea.”

When Pezzullo fronted Senate Estimates hearings in May, Liberal senator Gary Humphries was obviously intrigued by the possibilities the case raised. “If this vessel was on its way to New Zealand,” he asked Pezzullo, “in what circumstances would we have otherwise said, ‘You’re not coming to Australia; you’re going somewhere else,’ and let them pass through? Obviously they were not well on their way to New Zealand if they were going via Geraldton. But if this had happened in, say, the Torres Strait, or somewhere else…” Pezzullo declined to “speak hypothetically.” Humphries’s scenario must be a tempting one for a federal opposition committed to “turning back the boats” while being aware that the government of Indonesia, where most of the boats carrying asylum seekers originate, is scathing about its policy and has ruled out welcoming boats turned back by the Australian navy.

The Sri Lankans who sailed to Geraldton in April, and the Chinese who reached Darwin last year, believed that they would be received more favourably in New Zealand than in Australia. Australians critical of their government’s asylum seeker policies also tend to assume that New Zealand is a model refugee-receiving nation. In the wake of the Howard government’s harsh asylum seeker policies, some Australians said they were ashamed of being the citizens of a country that locked up children in places such as Woomera and Baxter, and some have even talked about emigrating to New Zealand. “My son, who lives in London tells me that Australians living there tell the Poms that they are from NZ,” one contributor told an ABC online forum in January 2002.

New Zealand’s reputation is largely due to its role during the Tampa affair. After the Australian government ordered special forces to board the vessel, the government of Helen Clarke generously offered to take all families and unaccompanied minors and process their asylum claims without locking them up in detention centres. Later, it allowed the thirty-six unaccompanied minors from the Tampa to sponsor more than 200 close family members to join them in New Zealand. But those who applaud New Zealand’s exemplary humanitarian stance tend not to refer to its comparatively paltry refugee resettlement program. Nor do they refer to its response to “boat people,” for the simple reason that New Zealand has never been faced with this kind of arrival.

Nevertheless, the NZ parliament last week passed legislation to deal with irregular migrants arriving by boat. The Immigration Amendment Act allows the authorities to seek a warrant from a district court judge to detain asylum seekers for initially up to six months, and to suspend the processing of protection claims, should there be “mass arrivals” – defined as arrivals of more than thirty people in the same craft – of irregular migrants.

Recommending the legislation to parliament, immigration minister Michael Woodhouse said last week that it was “part of a wider package of measures aimed at deterring people-smuggling ventures from targeting New Zealand.” The bill had been introduced by his predecessor, Nathan Guy, in May 2012, after the arrival of the ten Chinese asylum seekers in Darwin. “Ten illegal migrants may seem like a small number, but once such an arrival has been achieved, New Zealand could be seen as a more attractive option for like-minded people,” Guy warned at the time.

Notwithstanding the recent legislation, New Zealand’s approach seems mild-mannered in comparison to Australia’s. In Australia, asylum seekers arriving by boat can be detained indefinitely. In New Zealand, parliament has agreed on a time limit. Unlike in Australia, the detention of asylum seekers in New Zealand requires a warrant signed by a judge. And asylum seekers will be detained and processed in New Zealand rather than warehoused on a faraway Pacific island.

In Australia, the draconian measures adopted by the Gillard government are comparatively uncontroversial. Mandatory detention and offshore processing have the support of both major parties; in fact, the government and the opposition have tried to outdo each other by proposing even harsher policies. In New Zealand, by contrast, the Immigration Amendment Act has been hotly debated. Not only have Amnesty International New Zealand, the Refugee Council of New Zealand, and a host of other human rights organisations protested against the legislation, but New Zealand Labour, the Green Party and New Zealand First all voted against the bill in parliament last week.

IN THE wake of the Tampa affair, much has been written about Australians’ subconscious fear of being invaded by sea. The deep-seated hostility to “boat people” has been linked to the White Australia policy, which defined Australia for much of the twentieth century. But New Zealanders are hardly more relaxed about “boat people” than Australians. After all, Australia introduced laws to deter asylum seekers after thousands of them had arrived, yet the New Zealand bill was prompted by a declaration of intent by ten people who, in the end, never made it to that country.

The NZ government’s initiative is hardly comparable to the Keating government’s 1992 mandatory detention legislation, which was drafted in response to the arrival of asylum seekers from Cambodia. It is closer, perhaps, to Gough Whitlam’s reaction in 1975 to news that Vietnamese “boat people” might reach Australia. While his fears turned out to be as unjustified then as the NZ government’s concerns are now, it has to be conceded that northern Australia and Western Australia, and Australian territories in the Indian Ocean including Cocos Island and Christmas Island, can be reached quite easily from Indonesia – hardly the situation facing New Zealand. “People, look at the map,” New Zealand Labour MP Phil Twyford implored his parliamentary colleagues in April during the second reading of the Immigration Amendment Bill. “We are one of the most geographically isolated countries on earth. The Tasman Sea is one of the most dangerous stretches of water anywhere. There is no threat, and if there is, the threat is likely to be so small and so unlikely, how can it possibly justify the Draconian measures in this bill?”

The recent legislation is not the only evidence of New Zealanders’ anxieties about unauthorised arrivals by boat. For me, news of the Immigration Amendment Act 2013 brought back memories from when I was living in New Zealand some years ago. One evening in June 1999, the evening news conveyed the distinct impression that the country was about to be invaded. In a grave voice the newsreader announced that parliament had convened for a late-evening session to pass urgent immigration legislation. The National Party–led government had hastily brought on the debate because of rumours that the Alexander II, a ship carrying 102 Chinese irregular migrants, had departed Honiara in the Solomon Islands and was heading to New Zealand. According to the immigration minister, Tuariki Delamere, the vessel had been refuelled and reprovisioned by the Solomon Islands authorities.

The 1999 legislation, the Immigration Amendment Bill (No. 2), also provided for the detention of “mass arrivals.” It was intended to facilitate the immediate application of provisions of the Immigration Amendment Act 1999, which had been passed earlier that year but was not yet in force. Then, as last week, New Zealand Labour opposed the legislation. The Alexander II didn’t materialise in New Zealand waters and the National Party’s panic mongering proved to be entirely unwarranted. The 1999 law was eventually repealed by the Immigration Act 2009, its provisions relating to “mass arrivals” never tested.

Australian politicians may harbour dreams of being able to tell intercepted asylum seekers that they should try their luck in New Zealand. But law-makers across the Tasman aren’t really afraid of New Zealand becoming a dumping ground for asylum seekers told to move on by their powerful neighbour. Their readiness to legislate for the detention of “boat people” is due to two other factors.

First, many New Zealanders are at least as fearful of seaborne invaders, and at least as suspicious of non-European, predominantly Muslim asylum seekers, as are most Australians. It is telling that New Zealand had a hugely popular reality television show about safeguarding its borders two years before Border Security began screening on Australia’s Seven Network. Being seen to be tough on asylum seekers may not be as universally popular in New Zealand as it is in Australia, but at a time when the problem is purely hypothetical, it is perhaps easy for parliamentary critics of the government to be principled.

Second, when they’re trying to imagine what would happen if New Zealand were to experience a “mass arrival” of thirty or more asylum seekers, politicians in Wellington need to look no further than Australia. If Australia, which comfortably accommodates more than 10,000 refugees and other humanitarian entrants each year, can’t deal with asylum seekers arriving by boat, how could New Zealand, which resettles only 750 refugees annually, be expected to cope?

In debates about New Zealand’s response to asylum seekers, Australia has been the obvious reference point. “Australia has had a huge problem. We do not want to have it happen here,” Tuariki Delamere told parliament during the June 1999 debate about the Immigration Amendment Bill (No. 2). Speaking about the more recent Immigration Amendment Bill, the National Party’s David Bennett said, “When we look at the legislation, we look at other countries that are in a similar boat, like Australia.” According to Bennett’s party colleague Mike Sabin, “If we look across the Tasman at our neighbour Australia, and at the challenges that that nation is confronted with when it comes to mass arrivals and this issue of refugees, there is no more salient message for us than seeing what happens there.” Another National Party MP, Jami-Lee Ross suggested, “If the Australian government of the past had listened to that type of criticism and those types of concerns and done nothing, then it would have an even bigger problem than what it has got today… Our nearest neighbour is Australia, and they do have this problem. If we sit back and do nothing, then we will have exactly the same problem.” Australia’s nightmare could have been avoided if they had legislated in anticipation of the arrival of “boat people,” the National Party’s Scott Simpson argued during the bill’s first reading in May of last year. “This is the sort of legislation that Australia should have been considering many years ago,” he said. “The arguments we have heard today are the sorts of arguments we probably heard from people who opposed that sort of thing back then, and who now have lived to rue the day.”

The spectre of finding themselves in the same situation as Australia’s – supposedly inundated by ever-increasing numbers of asylum seekers arriving by boat – and the desire to learn from what are perceived to be Australia’s mistakes, have motivated the New Zealand government to push for a return to the 1999 legislation. It also believes that the harsher Australia’s asylum seeker policies become, the more likely it will be that people smugglers will consider New Zealand an attractive option. It matters little that these views are not necessarily borne out by hard evidence; after all, neither the ten Falun Gong members who sailed to Darwin last year, nor the sixty-six Sri Lankans who landed in Geraldton two months ago, used people smugglers.

GOVERNMENTS in Europe have also been concerned about the different treatments afforded to asylum seekers in different countries. The Africans who left Italy for Germany in the past few months did so because they knew they would be better off in Hamburg or Munich than in Rome or Naples. But the realisation that some EU countries are considered to be softer targets has not led to a further race to the bottom. Last week, the European parliament agreed on new streamlined rules for the treatment of asylum seekers, which will come into effect in 2015. They are designed to force countries such as Greece, which have had particularly harsh policies, to grant asylum seekers basic rights. While Germany and other countries that have been more attractive destinations are able to influence policies and practices in Greece, however, New Zealand is hardly in a position to make Australia relax its policies. John Key’s government therefore believes that New Zealand will need to become a similarly unattractive destination for forced migrants.

New Zealand will not necessarily match Australia’s asylum seeker regime, however, because both sides of the political debate over asylum seeker policies are using Australia as a reference point, though not as a benchmark. New Zealanders often pride themselves on having done much better when it comes to relations between European settlers and Indigenous peoples. Similarly, many New Zealanders believe that their country is more humanitarian than Australia. It therefore becomes an issue of national pride not to stoop as low as Australia in relation to asylum seekers. In last week’s debate about the Immigration Amendment Bill, Catherine Delahunty of the Green Party also invoked an Australian experience: “They have just completely failed, and it comes out of a tradition in Australia, which I remember as an older person, called the White Australia Policy. They do not have a tradition of respect for difference, and that has come home to roost in the most ugly way.”

Maybe Senator Humphries’s idea of moving boats on – to tell them to hook around Tasmania and then to pop across the Tasman Sea rather than turning them back to Indonesia – deserves further consideration. Perhaps if enough New Zealanders could be convinced that the opportunity to expose Australians as a bunch of unreconstructed racists is worth the trouble of accommodating a few thousand asylum seekers, his scenario could still become reality. •

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THE expert panel appointed by the Gillard government to recommend how Australia should respond to asylum seekers arriving by boat has the unenviable task of finding a solution to a wicked problem. The panel has been asked to report on “how best to prevent asylum seekers risking their lives by travelling to Australia by boat,” and must consider the options in the light of their legislative implementation, Australia’s international obligations, and the costs involved. The panel has been given very little time to evaluate proposals that go beyond the quick fix solutions offered recently in parliament; although it has been asked to make recommendations for the short, medium and long term, the government’s main interest is in finding a way out of the current impasse that would lead to an immediate and dramatic fall in the number of “boat people.”

As I’ve argued previously in Inside Story, parliament’s failure to pass the Migration Legislation Amendment (The Bali Process) Bill 2012, with or without the opposition’s amendments, was a good thing. The Oakeshott Bill, which would have allowed Australia to send asylum seekers either to Malaysia or to Nauru, is no less problematic than the opposition’s favourite option, a revival of the Howard government’s Pacific Solution. The stalemate in parliament since the Senate rejected the Bill at least provides some breathing space to take a broader view of the issues.

Let us assume, for a moment, that there was no sense of panic about “waves” of “illegal” arrivals and no federal election around the corner. In such circumstances, the panel would have the time to draw on historical, international comparative and philosophical perspectives to develop a considered response to its brief.

First, the panel could turn to the past. On at least two occasions, Australia was prominently involved in solving similarly difficult problems created by the forced migration of large numbers of people. In the aftermath of the second world war, more than a million displaced people, unwilling to return to their countries of origin, were stuck in refugee camps in war-ravaged Germany, Austria and Italy. The International Refugee Organization, or IRO, the predecessor of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, facilitated their resettlement. Australia accepted a significant share: between 1947 and 1953, more than 180,000 displaced persons arrived on ships chartered by the IRO. Some thirty years later, Australia was a major contributor to solving the Indochinese refugee crisis, when it accepted a large number of refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Second, the panel could turn its attention to other attempts to “stop the boats.” An analysis of two such attempts, in particular, would be instructive. In recent years, European Union countries have tried to stem the tide of irregular migration across the Mediterranean. The strengthening of European border control measures has resulted in a decrease in the number of irregular migrants who have been able to reach Europe by sea, and an increase in the number of border-related deaths. The other relevant case concerns the US government’s attempts to prevent Haitians from trying to sail to Florida. The US policies, too, are instructive not so much because they could serve as exemplars, but because of the dire consequences they have had for the kind of people whose lives Canberra politicians would like to save by stopping them from getting onto boats in Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka or South India.

And finally, the panel could engage with the question of whether Australia ought to stop the boats, regardless of perceived threats to national security or to the social fabric, regardless of international or domestic legal requirements, and regardless of the costs involved.

IF THE expert panellists had more than the next few weeks at their disposal, they could do much worse than to read this new book by Andy Lamey, a philosopher who hails from Canada but now teaches at Monash University in Melbourne. Frontier Justice grew out of a series of radio programs written by Lamey for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. This is not a bad thing, even though the fact that individual chapters had their origins as radio documentaries does make the book at times seem disjointed. Because the text was written for a broad audience, and for listeners prone to switch channels or tune out, its narrative is engaging and conversational. This is actually a book that can be read late at night in bed.

Lamey’s starting point is an idea first developed by Hannah Arendt in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt argued that, in the final analysis, human rights alone amount to very little. They are meaningful only if they are propped up by the rights of citizens. As soon as a state takes away a person’s citizenship, and thereby the rights she can claim as a citizen, she is left with nothing. Other states will not recognise her human rights because she lacks the membership that would entitle her to their protection.

Arendt’s pessimism was based on her own experience. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, she fled Germany via Czechoslovakia and Switzerland to France, and in 1941 sought refuge in the United States. For eighteen years, until she became an American citizen, she was stateless, unable to invoke the protection obligations of any government. Lamey concedes that sovereign nation-states are no easy fit for universally recognised and enforceable human rights. But, unlike Arendt, he argues that the rights of non-citizens do not automatically impinge on the sovereignty of the nation-state, and that it is therefore feasible for such rights to be recognised.

Like Arendt, Lamey tries to make his case by focusing on the refugee who is not able to avail herself of the protection of her own government. What happens if she knocks on the doors of another state, asking for that state’s protection? What would need to happen in order to afford her at least some basic human rights without compromising the host state’s sovereignty?

Lamey suggests that Arendt (and other political philosophers, such as Giorgio Agamben, who extended Arendt’s argument) were too categorical in contrasting a state’s sovereignty with a stateless person’s rights. In Lamey’s view, a right to asylum (which was briefly contemplated by the architects of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights) would indeed undermine the sovereign rights of states. He cites the example of the Federal Republic of Germany, which recognised a right to asylum in its constitution. After the end of the cold war, Germany was inundated by irregular migrants trying to assert their right to asylum, he says, and as a result Germany changed its constitution.

Rather than enshrine the right to asylum in domestic law, Lamey argues that states ought to recognise the right of non-refoulement. Refoulement is a French term used in refugee law to describe an instance where a refugee is returned to the country where she was persecuted. Non-refoulement is one of the key principles of the 1951 Refugee Convention. A person knocking on a country’s door does not have a right to enjoy asylum in that country once her claim to be a refugee has been accepted, and the country whose protection she has sought is entitled to send her elsewhere, but she must not be returned to the place she has fled from.

Lamey names three other entitlements that need to be guaranteed in order to reconcile refugees’ human rights with the sovereignty of nation-states. First, all asylum claimants ought to have the right to an oral hearing. Second, they ought to have the right to be represented by legal counsel. And third, they must not be arbitrarily detained. He calls his model the “portable-procedural approach.”

Arendt’s dim view of human rights for refugees was based on what she witnessed when people fleeing Nazi Germany and territories under its control sought the protection of other countries. Lamey’s optimism is based on his interpretation of Canada’s approach to asylum seekers. He argues that a 1984 decision by the Supreme Court of Canada, in a case involving Sikh asylum seekers whose claims had been summarily rejected, extended the validity of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms to non-citizens. According to that charter, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.” According to the judges in what became known as the Singh case, “everyone” meant everyone, citizens and non-citizens alike. “Canada’s precedent is worth stressing,” Lamey writes. “It shows that our civilization can do better than Arendt thought, and far better than is currently the norm.”

In the Singh case, the appellants had sought the right to an oral hearing. In deciding that they were entitled to such a hearing on the grounds of constitutional rights, the court did not endorse a right of refugees to remain in Canada. According to Lamey, “separating the place of recognition from the place of potential enforcement may be Singh’s greatest breakthrough of all.”

In Lamey’s model, states have the right to deny asylum seekers the right to work. They can selectively detain them. They can send them to an appropriate third country. His solution may be a long way from what Hannah Arendt would have considered acceptable, but “if justice for refugees has to wait for a change on the scale of getting rid of national sovereignty,” he says, then “justice will be a long time coming, if it ever comes at all. It is both more realistic, and more radical, to seek justice for refugees in a world of states.”

According to Lamey, neither the opposition’s Pacific Solution nor the government’s Malaysian Solution could be accommodated within the confines of the “portable-procedural approach.” But his model would allow for “transfers to other advanced countries as long as they are done in a rights-based manner.” He cites one such possible transfer, which was mooted in 2007 by the Howard government. Immigration minister Kevin Andrews proposed to swap asylum seekers who had been sent to Nauru for asylum seekers intercepted by the United States in the Caribbean. According to John Howard, the rationale for such an arrangement was to deter asylum seekers from trying to reach Australia by boat: the planned swap was to send “a message that getting to the Australian mainland illegally is not going to happen.” The scheme never got off the ground.

A refugee swap involving Australia and countries such as the United States or New Zealand would be far less problematic than an arrangement whereby Australia sends asylum seekers to countries that are not signatories to the Refugee Convention and other international human rights instruments, or where there are no adequate facilities for processing asylum seekers and asylum seekers don’t have access to legal counsel.

BUT how realistic are Lamey’s proposals? For a start, for his model to work, Australia would need to recognise some basic constitutional rights for non-citizens. That may require the kind of guarantees that only a bill of rights can provide. Australia is one of only a handful of Western countries that does not have such an instrument at the federal level. As Lamey writes, “It is tantalizing to imagine what an example Australia would set to the world were it to become the first country on earth to introduce a bill of rights that included a constitutional right not to asylum but to non-refoulement.”

In the absence of such constitutional guarantees, we can only hope that the High Court follows up its quashing of the Malaysia Solution with other decisions that uphold the rights of non-citizens. The court is currently hearing a case involving a recognised refugee who cannot be released from detention because of an unfavourable ruling by Australia’s domestic intelligence agency, ASIO. It is not inconceivable that the High Court will revisit its 2004 Al-Khateb decision, in which the court decided that the indefinite detention of a non-citizen is lawful. In fact, a Parliamentary Library analysis was already suggesting that Al-Khateb might be overturned soon after the decision.

So it is conceivable that Australia could meet the conditions that would allow for the implementation of Lamey’s “portable-procedural approach.” But that alone would not make such an approach any more realistic, because it would rely on Australia’s being able to identify appropriate third countries willing to accommodate and process asylum seekers who have made it to Australia.

Because it would have nothing to gain from such an arrangement, the most obvious candidate, New Zealand, would probably rule itself out. Others would insist on offloading at least as many asylum seekers as they agreed to take from Australia. But would Australia be willing to ship its asylum seekers to, say, Italy, if Italy could then send part of its caseload to Australia? Such a solution would work only in instances where Australia could call on the solidarity of its friends around the world to relieve it of a comparatively significant burden posed by asylum seekers. As many of its friends in Europe and North America are dealing with far greater numbers of asylum seekers, Australia’s approach could well be ridiculed. In fact, Australia’s failure to find resettlement options for most of the recognised refugees who were stranded on Nauru suggests that it couldn’t count on other nations’ sympathies, in relation either to the number of “boat people” or to Australia’s capacity to accommodate them.

But all that is not to say that Lamey’s suggestions shouldn’t be taken seriously (or that readers ought to rely on my necessarily crude summary of an argument that he develops over the course of 400 pages). And Lamey’s book would make interesting reading for the prime minister’s expert panel for another reason, too. Much of Frontier Justice is an account of the interdiction of Haitian “boat people” by US authorities, their detention at Guantánamo, and the attempts of lawyers to force the US government to recognise their human rights. He shows that Australia could do much better than following once more the offshore processing solution pioneered by the United States.

And seventy-four years after the conference of Evian, which unsuccessfully tried to identify a global solution to deal with those who, like Hannah Arendt, were desperate for a safe refuge, Australia could indeed do much better than to pursue once again a path that prioritises national security concerns and panders to the fears of those who expect to be swamped by a wave of dark-skinned non-Christians without appropriate visas. At Evian, the Australian delegate told the conference that “it will be appreciated that in a young country manpower from the source from which most of its citizens have sprung is preferred, while undue privileges cannot be given to one particular class of non-British subjects without injustice to others.” Justifying Australia’s decision not to increase its intake of Jewish refugees, he also remarked that “as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration.” •

The post Reconciling rights and sovereignty appeared first on Inside Story.

THOSE who could bear to follow last week’s torturous debate over Australia’s asylum seeker policy would have heard one message loud and clear: the government must respond quickly to an urgent problem; delaying the response – any response – puts lives at risk and jeopardises Australia’s border security.

I have never understood how the arrival of a few thousand asylum seekers could amount to a breach of Australia’s border security. In recent years most boats heading for Australia have been closely monitored once they reached Australian waters. Those few asylum seekers who managed to reach Australian territory without being detected were detained immediately on their arrival. The only irregular cross-border traffic of any significance happens in Australia’s north, between Papua New Guinea and Queensland, because the Torres Strait Islands, whose inhabitants are ethnically closely related to the people of Papua New Guinea, belong to Australia, even though some of them are only a few kilometres from the New Guinea mainland. That traffic involves Papua New Guineans, rather than Hazaras or Tamils. In other words, the argument that the Australian parliament urgently needed to pass new asylum seeker legislation because “border protection to our north has broken down and become dysfunctional,” as one Liberal MP claimed last week, is in my view just plain silly.

The other argument put forward last week – that more asylum seekers will drown unless Australia finds a means of stopping them from trying to reach Australia by boat – makes more sense. It is difficult to arrive at an accurate estimate of the number of people who have perished while trying to reach Australia. Three boats are reported to have sunk this year, resulting in the loss of more than one hundred lives, but there may have been others, setting out from India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia or Indonesia, whose sinking was not reported.

This is by no means a unique problem. People trying to reach the affluent West by irregular means, in inflatable boats or fishing vessels or by clinging to the undercarriages of planes or trains, swimming rivers, walking across mountains or deserts, or stowing away in shipping containers, are risking their lives. Many of them die. Hundreds of people die each year trying to cross the border between Mexico and the United States. An organisation monitoring the deaths of irregular migrants attempting to settle in Europe has counted more than 16,000 such deaths since 1993 – one documented death every ten hours. There are likely to be many more that are never reported.

There is no evidence that the number of people drowning en route to Australia has increased dramatically in the past few weeks. At least 160 asylum seekers drowned when their boat capsized in December last year off the coast of Java. In December 2010 a boat carrying asylum seekers lost engine power, struck rocks just off Christmas Island and crashed in heavy seas against the island’s cliff face. At least thirty of the passengers – and perhaps many more – died. There is nothing new about the fact that asylum seekers’ journeys by boat, irrespective of where they depart from to reach Australia, are perilous.

The realisation that something needs to be done to stop asylum seekers embarking on such perilous journeys comes very late. Australia’s parliamentarians, some of whom wept openly during last week’s debate about the Migration Legislation Amendment (The Bali Process) Bill 2012, may have been spurred to act by the prospect of more drownings. That is the kindest possible interpretation of last week’s emotional scenes in parliament.

But even if we accepted that Australia’s politicians were entirely driven by their concern for the welfare of asylum seekers, last week’s debate made little sense. If it seemed to those intent on fleeing intolerable circumstances in, say, Afghanistan that they would not be able to be allowed to resettle in Australia, even in the event they survived the boat trip, then they would simply try other risky options: via Iran and Turkey to Europe, for example. Or they would take their chances and hope that they would be resettled in Australia after a year or two in the hellhole of Nauru (which, of course, would still require them to attempt to reach Australian territory by boat). Or they would continue risking their lives by staying where they are.

At least on one issue, the opposition and the government now agree: the people smugglers are to blame. They are held responsible for the steadily increasing number of asylum seekers reaching Australia. And they are held responsible for the drownings because they cram too many people onto boats that are ill-equipped for the journey to Australia. So the solutions proffered by both major parties are presented primarily as means to stop the people smuggling trade. Neither the factors that make people leave their homes, nor the circumstances that attract them to come to Australia, are part of the narrative constructed around those profiteers labelled “the vilest form of human life” by Kevin Rudd in 2009. Australia’s politicians also seem to care little about the prospect that desperate people who find that Australia is out of reach will turn to people smugglers who offer to facilitate their irregular migration to Europe.

In last week’s debate, Malcolm Turnbull said: “There are no measures deployed by governments in the battle against people smuggling which are particularly palatable. All of them have great difficulties, contradictions and painful choices associated with them.” Perhaps such a realisation ought to have prompted our politicians to, first, take a step back and look at the broader picture and, second, to ask themselves whether a win in the battle against people smuggling ought to be the ultimate goal. But instead, they beseeched each other to vote for the least unpalatable measure.

In combination, the stalemate reached last week, parliament’s winter break and the fact that at least some MPs on both sides of parliament are genuinely anxious to find a solution that respects asylum seekers’ rights provide a window of opportunity to consider the broader picture. This picture needs to include Australia’s capacity to deal with forced migrants, the situation in the asylum seekers’ countries of origins, and the global movement of refugees. It also needs to include the specific configurations of the refugee regime in our region.

IN THE meantime, more people will risk their lives in an attempt to reach Australia by boat. But the sense of urgency that informed last week’s debate was misdirected for two reasons. First, there is no conclusive evidence that the proposed legislation, with or without the opposition’s amendments, would have led to less suffering overall. In fact, the evidence from Europe and the United States suggests that tougher border security measures result in more deaths. Second, there is no reason why in this instance the suffering of non-citizens outside Australia calls for the government’s intervention, while in other cases Australia and its politicians are content to do nothing. If Australia had a moral obligation towards those boarding unseaworthy boats in Southeast or South Asia, why then shouldn’t it have a moral obligation also to the same people at the point when they flee their homes? In other words, if Australia were so concerned about asylum seekers’ welfare, then why doesn’t it address the root causes of displacement? Could it perhaps be more persuasive in its dealings with the Sri Lankan government, for instance, and insist that the human rights of Tamils are respected?

In a discussion of Robert Manne and David Corlett’s concept of the “ethics of proximity,” Peter Mares once wrote: “Pious promises to help the neediest or to address the root causes of human flight remain comfortably vague and abstract; when asylum seekers and refugees land on our shores, however, we are presented with the direct challenge – some would say opportunity – of providing concrete assistance to a fellow human being.” A reference to the root causes of displacement must not act as an excuse for ignoring some of its consequences. But in this case, the urgency of last week’s debate was not prompted by the proximity of the Java Sea and of Australia’s overcrowded detention centres. It was prompted by concerns for suffering asylum seekers and for the Australians affected by their suffering. Christmas Island, Villawood, Darwin and the Java Sea have become uncomfortably close.

It would of course be desirable if the vexed issues of forced migration could be solved. In our less than ideal world, however, that is unlikely to happen any time soon; in the meantime, we prefer that the suffering of forced migrants is played out in Malaysia or on Nauru, or in the Greek-Turkish borderlands, or, better still, in places such as Afghanistan or Iran, rather than in Australia or on its doorstep.

The proximity of the Java Sea or of Christmas Island has little to do with the actual distance that separates us from those places. They appear close at the moment thanks to the attention they are receiving in the media. The level of the media’s attention depends on the degree to which the story playing out in such places resonates with Australian viewers. Last week some members of parliament knew they would be taken seriously if they claimed that the arrival of a few thousand unarmed people poses a threat to Australia’s security. The story of human suffering in the Java Sea attracts Australia’s attention also because it taps into narratives about White Australia’s vulnerability.

Would Australia’s politicians exhibit a similar sense of urgency in response to any other tragedy that costs numerous lives and is taking place close to home? The maternal mortality rate in Papua New Guinea, our closest neighbour and former colony, is the second-highest in Asia and Oceania. Between 1990 and 2008, the rate at which mothers died in childbirth dropped globally by 34 per cent. In PNG, it doubled. Each day, four of that country’s women die of a pregnancy-related cause.

This is not to say that the existence of other pressing issues close to home means that there is no need to worry too much about another boat with asylum seekers capsizing on its way to Australia. Rather, the appalling maternal health statistics for Australia’s former colony and closest neighbour should make us ask ourselves exactly why the suffering of asylum seekers moved Australia’s parliamentarians to tears last week, and why it was deemed so crucial to pass Robert Oakeshott’s bill now, rather than to take the time to identify a solution that addresses more than just one isolated aspect of the problem. •

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Mladić has also been held responsible for the Srebrenica massacre, the murder of more than 8000 men and boys in July 1995. Since 1992, tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims had sought refuge in the town of Srebrenica, a Bosnian-held enclave in territory controlled by Serbian forces. In April 1993, the UN Security Council declared Srebrenica a “safe area.” Those who had gathered there were under the protection of a small contingent of Dutch peacekeepers who were part of UNPROFOR, the United Nations Protection Force set up in 1992.

In July 1995, Republika Srpska forces under Mladić’s command overran Srebrenica. Mladić’s troops ostensibly agreed to the evacuation of the Bosnian refugees, but detained thousands of able-bodied men, as well as some older men and boys as young as fourteen, and executed them. The Dutch troops were in no position to mount any meaningful resistance; but seven years later a report laid some of the blame for the Srebrenica massacre at their feet, precipitating the resignation of the Dutch government.

In November 1995, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia indicted Mladić and the then president of the Republika Srbska, Radovan Karadžić, for the murders in Srebrenica. Both had already been indicted for genocide, crimes against humanity and violation of the laws of war over other episodes of the war in Bosnia. Mladić was arrested in Serbia in May last year and extradited to The Hague within days. His trial opened in The Hague on 16 May this year.

So far, despite almost a year of preparations, the proceedings have lasted just one day. On 17 May, the trial was suspended after it was revealed that prosecutors had failed to disclose some of their evidence to the defence team, as required under the tribunal’s rules. The judges dismissed the defence’s claim that another six months were needed to study evidence it hadn’t yet seen, but granted a four week adjournment.

The hearings are expected to take several years. The prosecution alone has named more than 400 witnesses. The 7000 exhibits which the prosecution failed to make available to the defence, are said to constitute only 3 per cent of the total material. All this is an indication of how closely the court will examine Mladić’s role in the ethnic cleansing that took place during the Yugoslav wars.

Created by a United Nations Security Council resolution in 1993, the tribunal has indicted 161 people and tried most of them. Its highest profile defendant has been Serbia’s former president, Slobodan Milošević, who died of natural causes in his Dutch prison cell before the conclusion of his trial. The maximum sentence the tribunal can award is life imprisonment. With about 900 staff on its books, it is well-equipped to run complex trials.

In many respects, the tribunal is modelled on the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which tried twenty-three leaders of Nazi Germany between November 1945 and October 1946 and passed twelve death sentences, ten of which were carried out. It too was well-resourced: chief prosecutor Robert Jackson had a staff of 650 at his disposal. The Nuremberg Tribunal was the first of its kind, and is rightly regarded as the ancestor of the International Criminal Court (established in 2002), the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (set up in 1994).

But the Nuremberg Tribunal is not the only available model from the 1940s. The vast majority of convicted Nazi war criminals were tried in courts that operated according to national rather than international rules. The Americans, for example, set up military commission courts, which tried war crimes suspects in 462 trials on the site of the former Dachau Concentration Camp near Munich.

One of the largest of those trials, the first to deal with crimes committed in the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, is the subject of Tomaz Jardim’s book, The Mauthausen Trial. In this case, the prosecution team comprised no more than twenty-two staff at any one time, and the trial of sixty-one men lasted a mere thirty-six days. The prosecution’s closing arguments took no more than half an hour –some thirty seconds per defendant. The proceedings nevertheless resulted in fifty-eight death sentences, forty-nine of which were carried out. No other trial in American history has resulted in as many executions.

Jardim’s meticulously researched book throws new light on a trial that was overshadowed by the proceedings in Nuremberg at the time and barely registered with the public in Germany and Austria or in the United States. It is now all but forgotten, leaving the impression that the trial of the twenty-three Nuremberg defendants was all there was to the Allies’ attempts to put Nazi Germany in the dock.

This lack of attention can’t be attributed to the nature of the crimes for which the accused were being tried. Mauthausen, the largest concentration camp in Austria, had come into operation in August 1938, a few months after the so-called Anschluss, the integration of Austria into Nazi Germany. It wasn’t liberated by American troops until 5 May 1945, three days before Germany’s unconditional surrender. Close to 200,000 people had been imprisoned in Mauthausen; about half of them did not survive.

Reinhard Heydrich, who was in charge of Nazi Germany’s security services, assigned a unique role to Mauthausen: it was reserved for criminals or hardened enemies of the regime who were likely to defy any attempts to re-educate them. Like the death camps in German-occupied Poland, Mauthausen had a gas chamber. But most of those who died in Mauthausen were worked to death, in accordance with the Nazis’ resolve to deal with their enemies by means of Vernichtung durch Arbeit, extermination through work.

Well before the end of the war, the Allies began preparing for prosecutions. But when the judicial arm of the US Army, the Judge Advocate General’s Office, was put in charge of implementing the American government’s war crimes policy, the extent of Nazi Germany’s criminality was still grossly underestimated. Initially, the investigations focused on the mistreatment and murder of American servicemen (including the lynching of air crew shot down over Germany and the execution of eighty-four American prisoners of war near Malmedy in November 1944). It wasn’t until the liberation of the first concentration camp by the US army in early April 1945 that the Americans became convinced of the need to address crimes against civilians, including those who were not American nationals.

The courts set up by the Americans were military commissions comprised of seven to nine officers. All of the officers had to have previously sat on courts-martial, but only one was required to be a trained lawyer. They were to try war crimes, including “offenses against persons or property which outrage common justice or involve moral turpitude, committed in connection with military operations” that had taken place since the United Nations was established on 1 January 1942. This fairly elastic brief made it possible for the courts to try perpetrators for crimes committed outside the theatre of war, even if they had been civilians at the time.

While the crimes carried out by German nationals against fellow citizens didn’t fall under the courts’ jurisdiction, the prosecution was permitted to introduce evidence about such crimes. Because it allowed them to paint a comprehensive picture of the operations of the camp and their murderous nature, that evidence was crucial in trials dealing with the atrocities that had taken place in concentration camps.

The court procedures were designed to be expedient. Even in cases where the court had handed down the death sentence, there were no provisions for a court of appeal. The rules of evidence were less stringent than in a domestic American court of law. According to the procedural guidelines, “Hearsay evidence, including the statement of a witness not produced, is… admissible, but if the matter is important and controverted every effort should be made to obtain the presence of the witness.” That leeway was crucial, too, because sometimes there were no surviving witnesses.

According to Jardim, the military commission courts relied heavily on the novel concept of “common design.” Unlike at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, where the prosecution had to prove the defendants’ role in the planning, preparation or initiation of the crime with which they were charged, the prosecutor in the Mauthausen military commission trial was required “merely to illustrate that the accused had participated in the maintenance of a criminal enterprise that resulted in the death of inmates.”

The concept allowed the Americans to try not just those ultimately responsible for the camps, but all camp personnel — including guards and medical staff, for example — irrespective of whether or not they had personally harmed anybody. The prosecution needed only to provide evidence of the existence of a scheme to commit atrocities and then show that the defendants were aware of and played their part in it. As Jardim explains, “At least in theory, the camp cook was therefore as criminally culpable as the hangman, and could be caught within the same judicial net.” The concept of a common design made the so-called Nuremberg defence, the plea of superior orders, irrelevant. And it didn’t require “illustration of a motive.”

Unlike the Nuremberg tribunal, however, the military commission courts didn’t consider charges such as “crimes against humanity,” which had been introduced specifically in order to try the Nazi leadership. Instead they relied on the fact that the rules of international law, including the Hague and Geneva conventions, had formally remained part of German law.

DESPITE these advantages, thirty-two-year-old Lieutenant Colonel William Denson had a gargantuan task in front of him when he was assigned to prosecute the Mauthausen case. He needed to select a group of defendants whose conviction could serve as a blueprint for any further proceedings brought against Mauthausen personnel. He and his team needed not only to understand the concentration camp system, but also to come to grips with the intricacies of Mauthausen, a massive operation involving hundreds of SS men and a large number of civilians and kapos (prisoner-functionaries).

The trial began less than a year after the camp’s liberation and only twelve weeks after the Deputy Judge Advocate for War Crimes had appointed a prosecutor. Clearly, the job would have been beyond the capacities of Denson and his small staff had they not been able to rely on outside help. That help was provided by those most interested in the defendants’ conviction, survivors of the camp.

As in other concentration camps, prisoners in Mauthausen had been able to establish an underground organisation. When the camp was liberated, that organisation took control of the camp and ensured that many of those responsible for the suffering were detained and protected from acts of summary justice. Camp inmates had kept records of many of the atrocities committed in Mauthausen, and they provided these to the American investigators. Survivors also helped out by tracking down witnesses and translating their statements, and some took part in the interrogation of suspects.

The survivors who played particularly prominent roles in assisting Allied investigators during this period tended to be former political prisoners — often socialists or communists — who had been imprisoned for many years. Many of them conceived of the concentration camps primarily as instruments designed to crush the Nazis’ political opponents. They failed to tell Denson and his team that about a quarter of Mauthausen’s victims were Jews, even though Jews had been sent to Mauthausen in large numbers only from mid-1944. The picture built up during the trial, which relied heavily on the testimonies of a particular group of survivors, was accordingly skewed.

Tomaz Jardim takes the reader through the various stages of the efforts to bring Mauthausen’s perpetrators to justice: the setting-up of the military trial program, the establishment of the rules governing its operation, the investigation of the crimes committed in the camp, and the trial itself. But he barely mentions the broader – and perhaps uncomfortable – questions that his findings raise. How legitimate, for example, are courts staffed by nationals of country A set up to try nationals of country B who are accused of crimes against nationals of country C? Under which circumstances is the creation of a parallel system of law, with rules that differ substantially from those governed by a domestic criminal code, justified? Anybody familiar with survivor testimonies of Mauthausen could be excused for approving of the justice served by the military court in 1946. But how does a military commission court sitting at Dachau in 1946 differ from the very controversial body created under the US Military Commissions Act of 2006 and sitting at Guantanamo Bay?

UNTIL at least the 1960s, West Germans frequently invoked Nuremberg in order to claim that justice had been done when the Allies had dealt with a small clique of criminal masterminds. They could conveniently be held responsible for whatever wrongs were committed between 1933 and 1945. With the conviction of the twenty-three Nuremberg defendants, everybody else could invoke versions of the Nuremberg defence and be miraculously exculpated.

With the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, the responsibility for dealing with war crimes shifted to German courts. Most of those who had been given lengthy prison sentences in the first couple of years after the war were soon released. By the end of 1951, the twelve Mauthausen defendants who hadn’t been hanged in 1946, and were instead serving life sentences, had all been set free. It wasn’t until the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, which began in late 1963, that German courts took seriously the crimes committed in the camps, thereby reminding the West German public of the fact that the Nuremberg defendants represented only the apex of a pyramid.

The Frankfurt trial is a reminder of the fundamental if unavoidable flaw shared by war crimes tribunals now and in the immediate aftermath of the second world war: all have been set up by third parties (rather than by Germans after 1945, or by Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Kosovars after the Yugoslav wars). But the Mauthausen trial, and other proceedings like it, might provide a better lesson than Nuremberg. For one, it proposed that not only those ordering mass murder were responsible, but also many others: those abetting the atrocities, those condoning them, and those who were aware of them but decided to carry out their duties regardless. At the conclusion of the first of the 462 trials held by the Americans at Dachau, Denson reminded the judges that “this case could have been established without showing that a single man over in the dock at any time killed a man.” Then, too, all defendants had been found guilty, and thirty-six of the forty men in the dock had been sentenced to hang.

The Mauthausen trial was also a significant advance over the Nuremberg proceedings because of the role played by survivors, first in the preparations and then as witnesses. While the Nuremberg trial relied on documentary evidence and on the defendants’ willingness to implicate each other, the Mauthausen trial provided a space where survivors could confront their tormenters.

THE International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia prides itself on having individualised guilt. “Leaders and other individuals can no longer hide behind the ‘nation’ or any other group,” according to one of its reports. “They have to take responsibility and answer for their own actions. Accordingly, communities are shielded from being labelled as collectively responsible for others’ suffering.” That is indeed an important achievement. But does it not also allow people who are implicated in actions such as ethnic cleansing, but who could not be charged, to hide behind leaders whose guilt can be proven beyond reasonable doubt?

The judgements given in the Mauthausen trial were contestable – even at the time. They relied on information that turned out to be historically inaccurate, and on the testimonies of survivors rather than on documentary evidence. By contrast, the judgements in the Nuremberg trial, which were meant to be unimpeachable, relied on documentary evidence. By and large, they have stood the test of time.

But ought the standards of justice necessarily always be the same for everybody in all cases? I suspect that for many of the survivors of Mauthausen, justice was served when, on 27 and 28 May 1946, forty-nine of the Mauthausen defendants were executed. For them, it would have been important that the testimonies of several fellow prisoners had been accorded much weight during the trial. The liberated inmates would have felt that they had made the right decision when they handed over kapos and guards to the Americans rather than beat them to death (as happened in other camps).

Reports of the suspension of the Mladić trial last month also seemed to make reference to two standards of justice. The rule of law demanded that the prosecution afford the defence every opportunity to disprove its case. The suspension was a triumph for Justitia, the blind goddess balancing the scales of truth; for her, the video footage depicting Mladić in Srebrenica on the very days the massacres of thousands of Muslim Bosnians took place has not yet been admitted as evidence and is therefore immaterial. But the survivors who had travelled to The Hague to attend the trial may care little for Justitia’s impartiality.

The involvement of survivors as witnesses presents perhaps the most important difference between the Nuremberg model and the tribunal in The Hague. The court that will, over the next five years or so, try to establish whether Ratko Mladić is guilty of the crimes with which he has been charged, sees itself also as an institution with an obligation to survivors: “By displaying exceptional courage in testifying at the Tribunal, [witnesses] contribute to the process of establishing the truth. In turn, the Tribunal’s proceedings provide these victims and witnesses the opportunity to be heard and to speak about their suffering.”

As far as prospective witnesses for the prosecution are concerned, though, I suspect that it was wrong to give Mladić the opportunity to provoke the survivors in the audience repeatedly when the court sat on 16 May. It was unjust that it took seventeen years to bring him to trial. It was not fair that after only one day, the proceedings were interrupted, initially indefinitely, denying those who had lost fathers, sons or brothers in Srebrenica the opportunity, at least for the time being, to testify against the person they know is ultimately responsible for their murder. And who are we to say that the survivors’ sense of outrage is irrelevant, if not illegitimate? •

The post Varieties of historical justice appeared first on Inside Story.

GÜNTER Grass has done it again: he’s put himself on the front page and at the head of the evening news bulletin by styling himself as the lone voice defending the truth and speaking out against an injustice.

On 4 April, Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, Italy’s La Repubblica and Spain’s El País published a poem in which Grass articulated his concerns about Israel’s arsenal of atomic weapons and criticised Germany for selling it a submarine capable of firing missiles armed with nuclear warheads. For more than a week, the poem, or rather the outrage it triggered, dominated the German print and electronic media. Never before in the history of the Federal Republic had a work of poetry caused such a storm.

Most of the response in editorials and from politicians, fellow writers and other public intellectuals was damning. Outside Germany, the reaction was overwhelmingly unfavourable, ranging from irritation to outrage. The Israeli government went so far as to blacklist Grass and ban him from entering the country. Only the government in Tehran, predictably enough, was delighted by his intervention: “I read your literary work of human and historical responsibility,” deputy culture minister Javad Shamaqdari was quoted as telling Grass in a letter, “and it warns beautifully.”

Ordinary mortals who want to voice their concern, indignation or outrage resort to writing to the letters pages of their local paper or to calling talkback radio. They might share their views on blogs, via Twitter or on Facebook. Those more confident of their standing might issue a press release. The eighty-four-year-old author of The Tin Drum and other highly regarded novels, winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, poet, sculptor and graphic artist, a man often portrayed as “the conscience of the German nation” – who is also (and this is important for understanding the response to his words) a former member of the Waffen-SS – penned his thoughts in the form of a prose poem, “Was gesagt werden muss” (“What Must Be Said”) . He would have known that whatever German broadsheet he approached, the poem was going to be printed in full, appear on the front page, and capture Germany’s full attention.

While the text’s content has been controversial, there has been no dispute over its merits as a poem. “A literary mortal sin,” prominent songwriter Wolf Biermann found. A professor of aesthetics, Bazon Brock, believed Grass’s scribbles gave poetry a bad name. Fellow Nobel laureate Herta Müller called Grass a megalomaniac for sending his text to three newspapers in different countries, and said it contained “not a single literary sentence”. Wordy, clumsy and overly didactic, “What Must Be Said” would have to rate among the worst of Grass’s poems. Reminiscent of the didactic poetry of Bertolt Brecht, but without the latter’s rhythm and economy, it is little more than an unedited stream of consciousness. Obviously the editors of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a highly regarded liberal broadsheet published in Munich that has one of Germany’s best arts sections, hadn’t made the decision to publish on the basis of its merits as a work of art.

In the poem, Grass takes issue with the delivery of a German-built submarine to Israel. He objects to the arms deal because the submarine is capable of carrying nuclear missiles which could be used to attack Iran and “wipe out the Iranian people.” He criticises what he regards as the West’s hypocrisy: insisting that Iran not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons, while condoning Israel’s nuclear capability, which, Grass claims, “jeopardises an already precarious global peace.”

Grass devotes much of the poem to pondering his failure to speak out earlier. He says that a German who criticises Israel is likely to be punished, not least by being labelled an anti-Semite. But, in what reads like an act of heroism, he has decided to “break his silence” because the matter is urgent and because “we, who as Germans are already sufficiently encumbered, / could become accessories to a crime / that is predictable, which means that our complicity / could not be erased / by any of the usual excuses.”

Grass has been taken to task, rightly, on several accounts. He misrepresents the situation in the Middle East. The Israeli government has indeed considered a pre-emptive strike against Iran to foil that country’s nuclear program. These plans have been hotly debated in Israel itself, and have engendered critical responses from Israel’s allies. “What must be said,” the Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev noted in Tel Aviv’s liberal Haaretz newspaper, “did not have to be said because it has already been said by many others, in Israel as well.” Such a strike would almost certainly target Iran’s nuclear facilities rather than its people. And the rationale for an Israeli attack would be the declared intention of the Iranian leadership to wipe out the people of Israel – something Iran could conceivably do quite easily once it has built an atomic bomb.

Grass also suggests that it is impossible to criticise Israel in Germany. If by “Israel” he means the Israeli government, then such a claim is patently wrong. German politicians and intellectuals have long criticised Israel for its policies in the Occupied Territories, in particular. In February last year, Angela Merkel called Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu to remonstrate with him on account of Israel’s dilatory approach in its negotiations with the Palestinians. In December, Germany, together with three other members of the UN Security Council – Portugal, France and Britain – condemned Israel’s settlement policy. After a visit to Hebron only last month, the leader of the Social Democrats, Sigmar Gabriel, opined on Facebook: “This is an apartheid regime which cannot be justified by any means.” Gabriel was roundly criticised for this comparison and eventually apologised, but his comment nevertheless is evidence that Grass’s insinuation of a taboo against such criticism was not justified. Incidentally, Gabriel has been one of only a handful of prominent German politicians who has stood by Grass in the current controversy.

GABRIEL’s intervention may have been prompted by loyalty as much as by sympathy for the sentiments expressed in the poem. Grass has long been associated with the moderate left and has often campaigned for the Social Democrats. As a prominent public intellectual of the left, he is intensely disliked by many on the right. The poem presented his political opponents with a golden opportunity to remind the public of Grass’s achilles heel.

In 2006, Grass published his memoirs, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (published in English as Peeling the Onion). A few weeks before the book’s eagerly awaited release, he gave an interview in which he revealed that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS, the elite military units that were formally the armed wing of the Nazi Party and which existed alongside the regular army. While the Waffen-SS was not in charge of concentration camps, some of its units were responsible for war crimes; after the war, the SS as a whole was declared a criminal organisation.

The interview may well have been designed to raise the public’s anticipation ahead of the memoir’s publication. But it set off a discussion about Grass’s war record which also ensured that the 479-page memoir is known mainly for an episode that Grass explores in a little more than a page.

The mere fact that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS should have mattered little. He was born in 1927, and drafted for the Waffen-SS as a seventeen-year-old. He did not join the Waffen-SS as a volunteer (although he had volunteered to join the regular army as a fifteen-year-old). He was not involved in any war crimes.

In Peeling the Onion, he doesn’t try to reinvent himself as a seventeen-year-old anti-fascist: “There is nothing carved into the onion skin that can be read as a sign of shock, let alone horror… I did not find the double rune on the uniform collar repellent.” Nor is he professing innocence: “Even if I could not be accused of active complicity, there remains to this day a residue that is all too commonly called joint responsibility. I will have to live with it for the rest of my life.” When he was taken prisoner by the Allies, Grass didn’t hide the fact that he belonged to a Waffen-SS unit.

The reason that the revelation in 2006 caused a sensation was because it came so late. For sixty years, he had chosen not to own up to the fact that he had once belonged to an organisation that was instrumental in the Holocaust.

Mathias Döpfner, chairman of the board of the Springer Corporation, the publisher of the tabloid Bild and one of Grass’s perennial targets, would have taken pleasure in denouncing Grass in an opinion piece titled “The Onion’s Brown Core,” which appeared in Bild the day after the publication of the poem. His opening sentence identifies why he (and many others on the political right) dislike Grass so strongly: “Günter Grass likes nothing more than to remonstrate with the Germans and appeal to their conscience.” Döpfner draws a connection between Grass’s self-confessed silence before the publication of the poem, and the silence that preceded Peeling the Onion: “‘But why did I remain silent thus far?’, Grass writes. One is inclined to ask in return: Why did he remain silent for sixty years about his membership of the Waffen-SS?… ‘Peeling the onion’… Grass has now arrived at its very centre. And the onion’s core is brown and stinks.”

The claim that Grass forfeited the right to speak out because he was coy about his Waffen-SS membership may be a vengeful ploy by those who have long borne the brunt of Grass’s moral indignation, and a cheap attempt to match the poet’s self-righteousness. But Döpfner and others have also accused Grass of being a Nazi and anti-Semite, suggesting that the seventeen-year-old and the eighty-four-year-old shared a hatred of Jews and a fondness for Nazi ideology. Their argument is anything but subtle: whoever criticises Israel by failing to distinguish between the Iranian aggressor and the Israeli victim is guilty of anti-Semitism.

Yet the suggestion that Grass’s poem reeks of anti-Semitism shouldn’t be dismissed lightly. The poem is remarkable not so much because of its ludicrous claims about supposed Israeli designs to annihilate the Iranian people, but because of its insinuation that a taboo prevents Germans from speaking out against Israel and that anybody violating that taboo would be accused of anti-Semitism. Such an argument is reminiscent of the claim that there is a taboo preventing, say, non-Aboriginal Australians from criticising Indigenous people, or Americans of European descent from criticising African or Native or Asian Americans, and that any violation of such a taboo triggers accusations of racism. It resembles the tactic of the racists who introduce an odious statement with the preamble, “political correctness prevents me from saying this,” and then go on to say exactly what they think. A variant of the “but one of my best friends is Aboriginal/ African American/ …” line also appears in “What Must Be Said”: Grass refers to Israel also as “a country I am and always want to be close to.”

While Grass is no anti-Semite, his poem gestures towards the vocabulary and the mindset with which he grew up. Nazi ideologues successfully conjured a Jewish conspiracy that thwarted legitimate German ambitions and could therefore be held responsible for German ressentiments. Grass does not blame Jews or Israel for feeling resentful – but there is no doubt that his views about the legacy of the Nazi past, both Germany’s and his own, are tainted by resentment. He resents the fact that he has to live with “it” – be it guilt, responsibility or shame – “for the rest of [his] life.” In the poem, he is concerned about potential German complicity in an Israeli pre-emptive strike because the burden Germans have to carry is already heavy enough. Raphael Gross, director of the Leo Baeck Institute in London and of the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, has rightly pointed out it is so difficult to overcome National Socialism precisely because of the failure to recognise the longevity of Nazi mentalities and morals.

Günter Grass is one of the greats of postwar German literature (although, in my view, he does not come close to being the greatest). His reputation as a writer shouldn’t be mixed up with his standing as a public intellectual. In his latter capacity, he did play an important role on many occasions, not least because he could be counted on as somebody who wouldn’t shy away from speaking out in the face of a seemingly overwhelming consensus. Thus he criticised the rushed process of reunification, and he resigned as a member of the Social Democrats when his party agreed to the so-called asylum compromise of 1992, which led to a change of the German constitution’s guarantee of a right of asylum. In both those cases, it was courageous of him to take a stand.

But when it comes to his own past, he has been a troubled soul. And since he has long been convinced that his views deserve a broad audience, the readers of his books and the public at large have been privy to his inner conflicts. Much of his writing, while purporting to be about Germany (or, in the case of “What Must Be Said,” about Israel), is in the last instance about his own demons. It is telling that his controversial poem begins with the words, “Warum schweige ich,” “Why do I remain silent,” and thus with the writer’s “I” (rather than with Israel, which is mentioned only twenty-eight lines later).

The publication of “What Must Be Said” was not the first time that Grass got into trouble in Israel. Only six months ago, in an interview with Tom Segev, Grass opined that “the madness and the crime were not expressed only in the Holocaust and did not stop at the end of the war. Of eight million German soldiers who were captured by the Russians, perhaps two million survived and all the rest were liquidated.” The use of the verb “liquidate” and the (incorrect) reference to six million dead German POWs could be read as saying that there was a German equivalent to the Holocaust and that Germans were as much victims as Jews. At the time, Segev himself excused Grass, saying that the figure of six million German victims came up “in the heat of the moment.” That was a kind interpretation, but perhaps one with more than just a grain of truth to it.

In the poem, Grass refers to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a Maulheld, a loudmouth. It is one of Grass’s mistakes in the poem not to take seriously the man who wants to wipe Israel and its people off the map. If there is a Maulheld in this story, it is Grass himself. He has the tendency to pontificate at the top of his voice, to speak before he thinks, and to exaggerate first and qualify later.

NOTWITHSTANDING his prominence, Grass’s recent intervention, much of it politically silly and artistically of little merit, should not have preoccupied the German opinion pages for many days. Neither should it have prompted Israel’s government to declare him a persona non grata (which then prompted Grass to liken Israel’s interior minister to Erich Mielke, the East German minister responsible for the Stasi, who once banned him from visiting the German Democratic Republic). It is unfortunate, too, that the controversy failed to raise a few issues that are probably worth more consideration than the Nobel laureate’s ill-chosen words.

First, Grass actually made a suggestion in his poem that is worth further discussion: namely that an agency ought to have the right to inspect Israel’s nuclear facilities. In an ideal world, that agency would also have unfettered access rights in all countries, including the United States and Russia.

Second, the spectre of anti-Semitism, raised by Grass himself, deserves closer attention. What is the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, particularly in Germany? And what is the link between anti-Semitism and the rabid pro-Zionism that has long been advocated by the Springer Corporation via Bild?

Third, the controversy over “What Must Be Said” has been remarkable more because of the response to the poem than because of the poem itself. What moved so many of Germany’s public intellectuals to rush into print or onto television shows to distance themselves from Grass? What does it mean when fellow writer Rolf Hochhuth told Grass in an open letter, “I am ashamed as a German of your preposterous silliness”? Did he seriously believe his reputation would be tarnished by Grass’s intervention?

German newspaper editors and talkshow hosts seem to have concluded that this particular debate is over. All those who conceive of themselves as opinion-makers have said their piece. If it was a contest then Grass’s critics seem to have won it convincingly. Besides, Grass himself retired hurt; he fell silent because he was admitted to a Hamburg hospital on 16 April, apparently with heart problems. But a survey of opinion pages and of Germany’s famed Feuilleton, the culture sections of the print media, provides a skewed picture. Grass has had his backers. During the last TV debate about the poem, on 15 April, the studio audience applauded those who defended Grass (and criticised Israel) rather than Grass’s critics. The German blogosphere, the comments sections of news media websites, the letters pages and numerous non-representative opinion polls suggest that a majority of Germans sympathise with Grass’s views.

Some of Grass’s critics, such as the historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen or Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung editor-in-chief Martin Vogler, noted that his views resemble so-called Stammtischparolen, opinions uninhibited by political correctness and informed by prejudice and jingoism. Little attention has been paid to the fact that the Stammtisch, the proverbial regulars’ table in the pub, came out in support of Grass, and that its views appear to be at least as much informed by a deep-seated resentment as Grass’s. Grass himself, by the way, has been surprisingly unconcerned about the applause he has been receiving from unreconstructed anti-Semites, and about the legitimacy he has bestowed on certain Stammtischparolen.

Perhaps the week-long debate, which, as many observers noted, was peculiarly German both in its tone and in its intensity, reflected a realisation that the silly claims of a self-obsessed old man have provided a glimpse of something unpalatable that has no place in how the new Germany likes to be seen by the rest of the world. Today’s Germans have tried hard – building memorials, prosecuting war criminals and paying restitution to former slave labourers – to prove that they have nothing to do with yesterday’s Germans; yet the past tends to catch up with them. Günter Grass seems to have been only too aware of the past’s propensity to insert itself uninvited into the present. “History,” he wrote in his 2002 novel Im Krebsgang, published in English as Crabwalk, “or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising.” •

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Three months earlier, in December 2010, a boat carrying asylum seekers lost engine power, struck rocks just off Christmas Island, and crashed in heavy seas against the island’s cliff face. At least thirty of the passengers – and perhaps many more – died. Two months later, twelve of the victims were buried in Sydney, where they had relatives. The Australian Federal Police footed the bill for the funerals and the federal government paid for close relatives who had survived the disaster and were still in detention on Christmas Island to attend. That’s when Morrison made a serious error of judgement, questioning why the funerals weren’t held on Christmas Island. He told the ABC’s Barbara Miller, “If relatives of those who were involved wanted to go to Christmas Island, like any other Australian who wanted to attend a funeral service in another part of the country, they would have made their own arrangements to be there.” He also called on the government “to understand the value of taxpayers’ dollars in this area.”

On the face of it, these were innocuous comments. But many of those who heard them also saw footage of the first three funerals: of two babies and of a man from Iran, whose orphaned nine-year-old son, Seena Aqhlaqi Sheikhdost, had been flown in from Christmas Island. Seena’s mother and brother had also perished but their bodies had not been recovered. His closest relative in Australia was now a cousin living in Sydney. The television news reported Morrison’s remarks and showed images of the distraught boy. The shadow minister was lambasted not only by refugee advocates but also by a senior member of the shadow cabinet, Joe Hockey: “No matter what the colour of your skin, the nature of your faith, if your child has died or a father has died, you want to be there to say goodbye, and I totally understand the importance of this to those families.” Within a day, Morrison had to admit that the timing of his remarks was “insensitive” and “inappropriate.” While he stopped short of apologising for the comments themselves, he said, in a rare show of self-criticism by an Australian politician, “I had to show a little more compassion than I showed yesterday. I am happy to admit that.”

Morrison’s faux pas and his subsequent contrition would have given the government a chance to score much-needed points – if not for a similar error of judgement by his counterpart, immigration minister Chris Bowen. The minister insisted not only that nine-year-old Seena should remain in detention but also that he should be flown back to Christmas Island after the funeral rather than being allowed to stay with his cousin in Sydney. In a remarkably emotional interview, Melbourne radio host Jon Faine pleaded with the minister to release the boy: “It’s the easiest of cases you’ll ever get. He should be with his family, minister.” Bowen was unmoved, missing the opportunity to highlight Morrison’s lack of compassion. But he relented soon afterwards and, within days of having returned to Christmas Island, Seena was released and reunited with his Sydney relatives.

Maybe Morrison and Bowen should have known better. Ten years earlier, the visible suffering of another young Iranian immigration detainee, Shayan Badraie, also elicited a strong emotional response from the Australian public. Footage depicting Shayan, filmed with a camera smuggled into the Villawood detention centre, was broadcast on ABC TV’s Four Corners. The immigration minister at the time, Philip Ruddock, misread the public’s mood when he tried to blame the parents for the boy’s suffering. The arrival of the Tampa soon shifted the debate; but the “children overboard” lies, which featured so prominently in the last days of the 2001 federal election campaign, could be seen as the government’s belated response to the public relations debacle over Shayan’s detention.

Jon Faine opened his interview with Chris Bowen with a revealing choice of words: “To the politics second, and the compassion first.” The consensus of the Labor government and the Liberal–National opposition – that asylum seekers pose a threat to the integrity of Australia’s borders or to its social fabric, that fear of asylum seekers is legitimate, and that a policy of deterrence is an appropriate response – has been questioned effectively in only two respects: by the courts’ occasional insistence that measures of deterrence must not violate Australian law, and by the public’s occasional show of compassion for individual asylum seekers, particularly children. Another potentially effective response, rational argument, has had very little impact. Who really cares that Australia has to deal with only a tiny fraction of the world’s irregular migrants, that deterrence can’t be a substitute for a long-term solution involving other countries in the region, or that Australia has the capacity to accommodate a much bigger share of refugees in need of resettlement? By contrast, who doesn’t care about young Shayan and young Seena? It seems as if only compassion can trump politics.

Politics and compassion can hardly be separated, of course. In fact, what we have witnessed over the past fifteen or so years is the rise of a politics of compassion: a politics that refers to compassion (rather than, say, rights) for its justification and draws on the language of compassion, and which increasingly informs policy-making. In Australia, it was Kevin Rudd who began championing a greater role for compassion. Two years before he became prime minister, he nominated compassion as one of five values “which might underpin a vision for the nation’s future” (the others were security, competition, fairness and sustainability). As prime minister, he frequently invoked the language of compassion when promoting government policies.

AMONG the handful of scholars who are analysing the growing traction of the politics of compassion is the French anthropologist Didier Fassin. As he writes in his new book, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, “The distinctive feature of contemporary societies is without doubt the way that moral sentiments have become generalised as a frame of reference in political life.” What makes Fassin’s work particularly interesting is the fact that his explanations of how and why people today “often prefer to speak about suffering and compassion than about interests or justice, legitimising actions by declaring themselves to be humanitarian” are based on ethnographic fieldwork and what is usually referred to as discourse analysis. As he writes, “we must ask to what extent the words used contribute to forming (and transforming or even deforming) the objects that constitute the world, and… we must examine the way actors take hold of words to manipulate them.”

One of Fassin’s “fields” is the bureaucracy responsible for regularising the status of illegal immigrants in France. In one of his chapters, he analyses the work of public medical officers in the département of Seine-Saint-Denis in the Île-de-France, northeast of Paris. He charts the shift from the “immigrant” (the source of much-needed labour) to the “foreigner” (whose presence is perceived as an imposition and who is of no immediate use to the French economy). In the 1990s, the state increasingly clamped down on the sans papiers, France’s undocumented migrants. But at the same time, new legislation gave authorities the option of using a “humanitarian reason” when deciding whether a sans papiers would be deported or granted a visa. If they deemed that a foreigner had a serious illness that couldn’t be treated adequately in his or her country of origin, medical officers could recommend that the département’s prefect issue a residence permit. As a result of the new laws, the foreigner’s body has become as much of an asset as the immigrant’s, because it can arouse the compassion that compels the bureaucrat to make a favourable decision.

The fight against AIDS in South Africa is another of Fassin’s case studies. He shows how the death in 2001 of twelve-year-old Nkosi Johnson, who had opened the thirteenth international AIDS conference in Durban the previous year, transformed the debate about AIDS. In Fassin’s words, Johnson’s death “signalled the entry of the theme of childhood” into public discussion of the disease. Subsequently, AIDS campaigners focused on children who were HIV-positive and on AIDS orphans. Fassin shows how their reification as victims removed children “from the social reality in which they lived” by neglecting the historical and social contexts of their situation, and how the mobilisation of compassion for their suffering tended to detract attention from other AIDS victims. Yet representing innocent children as the prime victims of AIDS, faced by an indifferent society and a government in denial, also allowed campaigners to compel the South African authorities and international aid agencies into action.

Did the ends justify the means? In Fassin’s view, “this emotional mobilisation is fragile and ambiguous.” The sentiments aroused by images of abused, dying or abandoned children are fickle. The orphan who deserves compassion can quickly morph into the threatening criminal youth living on the streets.

As Fassin shows, the rise of a politics and a rhetoric of compassion has contradictory consequences. Compassion is the symptom of an unequal relationship between victims and spectators who have the option of becoming good samaritans. In Australia’s case, it is the relationship between the asylum seeker and the person extending compassion as a citizen of a prosperous, peaceful and democratic country. As Fassin observes, “Humanitarian reason governs precarious lives.” By neither questioning inequality nor exposing its root causes, compassion enshrines this inequality. And often compassion’s main benefit is to make the compassionate person feel good about being able to indulge in seemingly unselfish sentiments.

But compassion can also gesture towards, and maybe prompt, a politics of solidarity. “In contemporary societies, where inequalities have reached an unprecedented level, humanitarianism elicits the fantasy of a global moral community that may still be viable and the expectation that solidarity may have redeeming powers,” Fassin writes. “This secular imaginary of communion and redemption implies a sudden awareness of the fundamentally unequal human condition and an ethical necessity to not remain passive about it in the name of solidarity – however ephemeral this awareness is, and whatever limited impact this necessity has.” What if compassion has become the most realistic means of generating such awareness? After all, images of Seena and of Shayan shifted, however fleetingly, public opinion in ways no rational argument could.

The insight that political issues are increasingly read in moral terms and that compassion has the capacity to trump politics makes the kind of critique performed by Didier Fassin all the more important. There is nothing wrong with feeling compassionate towards a suffering child, of course, particularly if the arousal of compassion is then channelled towards changing the policies that make such suffering possible in the first place. But that is neither to say that compassion on its own is the most appropriate response, nor to condone its implications. Studies like this, empirically grounded, theoretically informed and open to surprises born of relentless curiosity, demonstrate the value of scholarship that is truly critical – even if it’s critical of something as “morally untouchable” as the humanitarian reason dissected in Fassin’s book. •

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The other set of images shows “boat people” arriving on the Italian island of Lampedusa and on Christmas Island. Both are outposts of the privileged part of our world: Lampedusa is geographically much closer to Africa than to Europe, and Christmas Island is more than five times closer to Jakarta than to the nearest Australian capital city, Perth. Since the beginning of 2011, just over 2000 “boat people” have arrived in Australia. Over the same period the number reaching Italy – and in most cases that means Lampedusa – has exceeded 50,000.

In Australia, politicians, journalists and many of those who vent their spleen on talkback radio have characterised the arrival of that tiny number of asylum seekers – less than 0.01 per cent of the Australian population – as a crisis. Italian commentators are perhaps more justified in describing the arrival of tens of thousands of refugees from North Africa – mostly people fleeing Libya – as an emergency, but even those numbers should be seen in perspective. Since the beginning of the uprising against the Gaddafi regime about a million people have fled, but it is Libya’s neighbours, rather than European countries, that have dealt with most of those refugees. Between them, Tunisia and Egypt have accommodated more than 900,000 people crossing their borders. While this year’s boat arrivals in Italy amount to less than 0.1 per cent of that country’s population, the number of refugees entering Tunisia from Libya was in excess of 5 per cent of the Tunisian population.

Governments in Europe and Australia have taken drastic measures to respond to crises reputedly brought about by the arrival of asylum seekers and other irregular migrants. The government of Julia Gillard has struck a deal with its Malaysian counterpart to save Australia from responding to protection claims. Barring an adverse decision by Australia’s High Court, the deal would allow the government to deport 800 asylum seekers arriving in Australia – including children and unaccompanied minors – to Malaysia, which is not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention and has a dubious human rights record, particularly in relation to the treatment of irregular migrants.

In Europe, France and Denmark reintroduced border controls and effectively suspended the Schengen Accord, which guarantees passport-free travel among twenty-five European countries with a combined population of more than 400 million. In an attempt to offload refugees from northern Africa, the Italian government issued travel documents to boat arrivals that allow them to move on to other European countries.

When the term “crisis” is applied to the arrival of boat people in Italy or Australia, it refers to the impact of the unauthorised movement of people on those who might be compelled to accommodate them. What is currently happening in the famine-ravaged countries of the Horn of Africa, is also variously termed a “crisis,” an “emergency” or a “humanitarian disaster.” But there, the crisis is clearly being endured by those whose very lives are threatened by famine and conflict.

In Australia, the sense of crisis about boat arrivals can’t easily be justified by televised footage of small groups of asylum seekers disembarking from rickety boats under the watchful eyes of the Australian Federal Police. Instead, it’s the mere mention of unauthorised people entering Australia from countries to the north that reawakens fears of an invasion. The Australian imagination does not rely on actual images to run wild. In Europe, the sense of crisis is generated by media images of overcrowded boats carrying African refugees and hundreds of refugees milling at the wharf in Lampedusa after their disembarkation. Those images provide a highly selective snapshot of the situation in Italy and suggest that the authorities are barely coping with the influx of refugees – that, in fact, chaos reigns.

By contrast, the rows upon rows of white tents in Dadaab convey a sense of order. From the viewpoint of the privileged minority in the West, the crisis is being managed. The rows of tents seem to show that the international organisations providing white tarpaulins for such large numbers of people are also capable of delivering water, food and medicine to the inhabitants of those tents – assistance that makes it unnecessary for them to keep moving. But aerial photographs of neat rows of tents can be deceptive; they say little about the situation on the ground.

It is arguable whether the crisis management currently provided by NGOs and the United Nations for those enduring famine in the countries of the Horn of Africa is successful. Reports about people still dying of starvation and about scores of them moving across eastern Africa in search of survival suggest that the crisis has not yet been contained. But those directly affected by it are. It’s partly thanks to the tents provided by humanitarian organisations in Dadaab and elsewhere in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and South America that the “refugee crisis” we experience in Europe and Australia is imagined rather than real. The vast majority of refugees have little choice but to aim for camps in their own or in neighbouring countries, rather than for Europe, North America or Australia.

THE United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, is currently responsible for more than ten million refugees worldwide, and in excess of fifteen million “internally displaced persons,” or IDPs. To be more precise the UNHCR is responsible for a total of 16,024,620 refugees, “persons in refugee-like situations” and IDPs. That’s 16,022,435 more than the number of asylum seekers who arrived in Australia this year by boat.

There are three main reasons why it is difficult to establish exactly how many of these displaced people live in camps: the United Nations doesn’t publish comprehensive statistics about camp populations; the numbers of displaced people in camps fluctuate; and not all camps are administered by UN agencies and included in their surveys.

A couple of years ago, the UNHCR estimated that about 30 per cent of refugees under its tutelage live in camps. This figure doesn’t include Palestinian refugees, who are the responsibility of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Just under five million refugees are registered with that agency; of those about 1.5 million live in fifty-nine camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza. On the basis of those figures, around 4.5 million refugees live in camps overseen by the two UN refugee agencies. Factoring in also internally displaced persons, and people living in makeshift camps outside the reach of UN agencies, it is probably safe to assume that at least ten million displaced people worldwide live in camps.

Although the UNHCR advocates three “durable solutions” for refugees – repatriation, integration in the country of refuge, and resettlement – none of these options is available to the majority of refugees. They are stuck in permanent limbo, usually without the right to freedom of movement, and often without the right to work. Refugee advocates have referred to the quasi-permanent accommodation of refugees as “warehousing”; according to the US Committee for Refugees, one of the most credible and best resourced refugee advocacy organisations, at the end of 2008 more than eight million refugees had been in camps or settlements for more than ten years.

Some of these camps have existed for decades. Most of the camps for Palestinian refugees, for instance, date back to the late 1940s or early 1950s. The refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria, were set up in the mid-1970s for Sahrawis fleeing from Moroccan forces; they now house approximately 90,000 refugees. A large proportion of the Sahrawis and Palestinians living in refugee camps were actually born there. Most Tibetan refugees living in more than thirty settlements in North India and Nepal, which were established following the Tibetan exodus in 1959, were also born in exile. And there are many other protracted refugee situations around the world: for example, many of the Tamil refugees in the south of India arrived between 1983 and 1987; some of the Karen refugees in Thailand arrived in the first half of the 1980s; and some of the Angolans in Zambia have been there since they fled at the outbreak of the Angolan civil war in 1975.

In Managing the Undesirables, first published in French in 2008 as Gérer les Indésirables, the French anthropologist Michel Agier observes that “camps are indeed the fourth solution of the UNHCR for resolving the refugee ‘problem’ – a massive and lasting solution, and clearly the preferred one in Africa and Asia, to the detriment of the three other official solutions.” Agier refers to those forced to live in refugee camps for lengthy periods as “undesirables.” They cannot return home, are unwelcome in their countries of refuge, and – a few exceptions aside – are not wanted by countries of resettlement such as Australia.

Agier is director of the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in Paris. For those accustomed to Anglophone scholarship, the broad-ranging and radical critique of the humanitarian response to forced migration that is advanced by Agier – as well as by his French colleague Didier Fassin, whose most recent book, La Raison Humanitaire, will be published in an English translation later this year – may come as a surprise. Their critique is informed by ethnographic research as well as by the work of philosophers such as, in Agier’s case, Eleni Varikas, Giorgio Agamben and Federica Sossi.

Managing the Undesirables is based on several years of fieldwork in refugee camps in Africa and the West Bank. Agier advances two broad theses, one of them to do with the dynamics of humanitarianism and the other to do with the response of those who are subject to such dynamics.

The first thesis is well argued and convincing, though not particularly original. Agier observes that “humanitarian intervention borders on policing,” since “every policy of assistance is simultaneously an instrument of control over its beneficiaries.” Humanitarian intervention identifies and classifies target populations, and it aims to contain them. The beneficiaries of humanitarian aid are expected to meet fixed criteria that distinguish refugees from “persons in refugee-like situations” and from non-refugees. A more crucial distinction is that between the victim – the person who is deserving of the humanitarian assistance – and the illegal, who is not: “Refugees are adopted by national or international NGOs and UN agencies in the name of human rights, and these take responsibility for them as pure victims, as if they owed their survival simply to the fact of no longer being present in the world, i.e. being de-socialised and in a state of pure biological life – a life that the representatives of the international community decide to extend rather than let it extinguish.” But the distinctions, between different types of refugees and between victims and illegals, often seem arbitrary because the political contexts that produce them have nothing to do with the people who are being categorised.

Agier’s second thesis is more original and far more interesting. Although it is less developed, it makes his book worth reading for anybody interested in the quandaries posed by irregular migration and displacement. Based on his work in the camps (which was facilitated by Médecins Sans Frontières), Agier questions the assumption that those regarded as “victims” lack the ability to shape the social and political context of life in the camp. He suggests that as “spaces of confinement” the camps “are transformed and become, after a certain length of time, sites of a possible public space,” that “dis-placement” can generate “em-placement.” Camps can become towns. Agier writes: “On the ground of humanitarianism, whose action does not attempt to produce a society or found communities but at most to open spaces that are propitious to emergency intervention, a social order of hybrid formation is created; it founds the new locality (in the sense of local identity) of individuals placed collectively in exile here. It is in this new framework, this new social ordering, that inter-ethnic relationships arise, along with cultural apprenticeship, and possibly political conceptions and projects that are specific to such an order.”

Agier identifies and analyses a fundamental tension – between the camps as realms of confinement, controlling people stripped of the rights of citizens, and the camps as spaces of political innovation that favour the creation of new social orders. The latter becomes possible because of the former. That is not to suggest that the productive and creative energies of warehoused refugees somehow redeem humanitarianism. But this tension may serve as a reminder that the response of the privileged minority to refugees tends to be inadequate. That response is primarily emotional: as pure victims, refugees elicit pity; as illegals, they provoke fear and loathing. These emotions, rather than a reflective engagement with the displaced as fellow citizens of the world, underwrite not just the humanitarian effort, but also the response to the very few who successfully evaded their containment and arrive uninvited on Europe’s, Australia’s or North America’s shores. •

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In Go Back to Where You Came From, a three-part documentary screened last week on SBS television, six people retrace the steps of refugees who came to Australia as onshore asylum seekers or through Australia’s offshore humanitarian program. Over a five-week period, they travel from Australia via several transit countries to two of the main sources of global refugee movements, Iraq and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

At the beginning of their journey, the six stay for a week with refugees in Australia: a family from Burundi and the Congo living in Wodonga, and four Iraqi men living in Sydney. Then, in Darwin, they board what appears to be a leaky and entirely unseaworthy boat. Their next stop is Malaysia, where they are hosted by Chin refugees from Burma; later, they accompany Malaysian immigration officials on a raid to flush out illegal immigrants. Three of them travel on to Jordan and from there to Iraq, and the other three journey to the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya and from there to the Congo. In Jordan and at Kakuma they meet the relatives of the people who had hosted them in Australia.

In SBS’s publicity material for the series, the six participants – three men and three women – are consistently referred to as “ordinary Australians” chosen to represent a cross-section of the Australian community. Five of them embark on the journey with very strong anti–asylum seeker views, and at least three of those five don’t differentiate between asylum seekers and refugees or are antipathetic to refugees as well. Only one of the six, Gleny Rae, a singer and part-time teacher from Newcastle, believes that Australia should welcome refugees and asylum seekers. All six are deeply affected by the five-week journey, and several of them change their views.

The series was aggressively promoted by SBS in the weeks leading up to its first screening, and received a great deal of advance publicity in the media. As SBS’s Anton Enus put it this week, the show produced “nothing short of a phenomenon.” It is the highest-rating program screened by SBS so far this year and triggered an unprecedented response on Twitter and on blogs (including close to 5000 posts, and rising, on the SBS website). During the screening of the first episode, the hashtag #GoBackSBS briefly became Twitter’s number one trending topic worldwide. It is important to keep that in perspective, however; on Thursday, when Go Back to Where You Came From attracted 600,000 viewers in the capital cities, it only came nineteenth on the ratings table. MasterChef Australia, the highest rating show that evening, was watched by two-and-a-half times as many people.

The response to the program was overwhelmingly positive. At least six in every seven comments published on the SBS website praise the show, and these viewers use plenty of hyperbole. Kendall from Melbourne, for example, says: “The most important and topical television program I have ever witnessed.” “The most powerful and brilliant television I have ever seen,” writes Paul from Aldinga Beach. And Tony from Northcote comments: “Thank you SBS!!! I’ll be happy if I never get to watch television again after tonight.”

Many of these viewers liked the show because they found it moving. “Probably the most emotional, thought provoking & moving documentary ever produced on Australian television,” Mark Hearnden from Sydney writes. “This has been the most outstanding, influential, emotional and challenging thing that I have ever seen!” says Sarah from Adelaide. And Kelly from Mulgrave confesses: “I’m in bits here – nothing on tv or any screen has ever moved me as much. It is just so real, so powerful. It’s beautiful watching the changes in these people.”

This brings me to what I consider to be the key issue raised by the series and the public response. In a scene shot in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, Deo Masudi, the brother of the man from Burundi with whom three of the participants had stayed for a week in Wodonga, is talking to those same participants: Raye Colbey, who lives opposite the Inverbrackie detention centre in the Adelaide Hills, Raquel Moore, an unemployed self-confessed “racist” and Pauline Hanson admirer from Western Sydney, and Roderick Schneider, national vice-president of the Young Liberals, from Brisbane.

Deo says, “The big problem of this world is to educate the system to touch heart. If I touch your heart, immediately you are able to understand me. But if I don’t know how to touch your heart – no.” To which Raye Colbey replies, “I highly agree with you. I do think there’s a lot of people out there that do not really see what is happening. They look but they don’t see.”

The hearts of all six participants were touched by their encounters with refugees. In the course of the five weeks, they experienced a rollercoaster of emotions, including fear and anger. Overall, however – as far as I could ascertain on the basis of less than three hours of footage – one emotional response dominated: compassion.

It was their compassion that prompted the six participants to become interested in the issues. Most of them knew very little about asylum seekers and refugees, or about conditions in the countries they hail from or transit through. Their compassion towards the families whose lives they shared briefly in Australia, Malaysia, Jordan and Kenya made it possible for the six participants to look and to see.

Throughout the series, their “guide,” forced migration expert David Corlett, repeatedly refers to the project as a “social experiment.” The experiment demonstrated that the encounter with refugees could turn someone who hated asylum seekers into someone who was able to recognise them as suffering fellow human beings. Raye Colbey, for example, whose response to the Christmas Island boat tragedy of last December had been to say, “It served the bastards right,” wrote an opinion piece sympathetic to refugees that was published in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald on the day the first episode was broadcast.

The experiment wasn’t without its limitations, though. Not only were the refugees who participated in the series carefully selected, they were also put in the position of hosts: it was the refugees’ ability to extend hospitality to the six Australians, rather than the encounter as such, that produced a transformative effect. In The Response, a forum about the series which was broadcast this week, the six participants were asked to reflect on their experience. Raye Colbey said that the refugees she stayed with were “the most beautiful, beautiful people I think I’ve ever met” and later added what could be read as the main reason for her response: “These people, they open their heart to you… They would give you anything. That’s just the type of people they are.” In other words, for the participants in the social experiment to change and open their hearts, the film-makers needed to find refugees who were prepared to unreservedly welcome a group of privileged Westerners.

The other problem with the experiment is that it cannot be easily extended or even replicated. We – non-refugees – can’t all go to Kakuma and live with a refugee family for a week. We can’t invite ourselves into the houses of refugees resettled in Australia. There are, of course, avenues whereby non-refugees can get to know asylum seekers and refugees. But they tend to be used by people who are already sympathetic to refugees. I am sure there are a million or more Raquels out there – and, as the series amply demonstrates, to change their mind requires an enormous effort. To afford every racist in Australia the opportunity to feel for refugees can’t be the solution.

The producers of the series have emphasised the experimental nature of what was happening on screen. The more interesting experiment, however, took place in front of the screen. The series had a profound impact on those watching it.

GO BACK to Where You Came From is the second Australian TV documentary about asylum seeker issues to move many of its viewers to tears. The first was broadcast ten years ago.

The Four Corners program “The Inside Story” was first screened on 13 August 2001 by the ABC. It was largely about the Villawood detention centre in Sydney and about the persecution that three asylum seekers who’d fled to Australia had faced in Algeria, Iraq and Iran. It became famous, however, for its depiction of Shayan Badraie, a six-year-old Iranian boy who by then had been in Villawood for eleven months and had stopped speaking, eating and drinking. “The Inside Story” used footage of Shayan and his parents filmed three months earlier by Aamer Sultan, an Iraqi detainee who was a trained medical doctor, using a video camera smuggled into the centre.

“The Inside Story” became one of the most talked about current affairs television programs ever shown in Australia. After the broadcast, the program website received over 5000 emails, more than twice the previous record. It had the potential to change the dynamics of the conflict between the supporters and the opponents of Australia’s policy of mandatory detention. This was partly because the latter’s campaign had previously been hamstrung by the invisibility and inaudibility of refugees in detention. “These are voices the Australian public have not heard,” the executive producer of Four Corners wrote in defence of the decision to broadcast Aamer Sultan’s video footage. “Asylum seekers have mostly been faceless, voiceless problems. Seeing them as human beings, perhaps for the first time, led many viewers to respond.” But while viewers may have heard the voices of asylum seekers, they saw only one of them who, importantly, was not able to speak. As the journalist Margot O’Neill wrote in her account of the program, “For the first time, the boat people have a human face; a pale, tormented child’s face.”

“The Inside Story” had an immediate and powerful effect because it allowed viewers to extend their compassion to Shayan and, albeit to a lesser extent, his parents. Because the footage of Shayan and his parents was shot by an amateur under visibly taxing circumstances, viewers’ access to Shayan seemed unmediated.

But what to do about that outpouring of emotion? For the previous two years, the Howard government had been uncompromising in its response to protests in Australia’s detention centres – which included many incidents of self-harm – not least because it wanted to win back voters it had lost to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party. For a moment, it looked as if the government was on the defensive. Philip Ruddock, the immigration minister, suggested that it was the fault of Shayan’s parents that their child was suffering, but his argument had little impact. The child was pure. He was being hurt. Deliberately. By the government. Our government. Compassion gave way to shame – that is, to an emotion concerned not with the other, but with self.

Whatever emotions were aroused in mid August 2001 among the majority of those who saw “The Inside Story,” the program had largely been forgotten by the end of the month, when the Tampa arrived off Christmas Island with more than 400 asylum seekers on board – people whose faces remained invisible and who could be perceived as a threat. Another two weeks later, the terrorist attacks in the United States prompted Australians to associate asylum seekers, who at the time were predominantly Muslims from Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan, with terrorists. Seemingly having won the debate, the government didn’t, however, so easily forget the lesson of “The Inside Story.” The “children overboard” lies are, in my view, a direct, albeit belated, response to the Four Corners program.

WHAT’S the difference between “The Inside Story” and Go Back to Where You Came From? The SBS series does not, in the first instance, prompt the viewer to extend his compassion towards refugees in Australia, Malaysia, Jordan, Kenya or the Congo. Of course we (non-refugees) can feel for Deo Masudi, the man in the Kakuma camp who calls for our compassion. But that’s largely incidental. The focus of the viewers’ emotions are the six participants. The day after the third episode, Penny from Perth posted the following comment: “I’ve barely slept a wink over the last three nights. I go to bed churning over the sights that have confronted me in SBS’s unbelievably brilliant show.” And what are those sights? The post continues: “I loooove Gleny – go girl for showing such compassion and cultural awareness ie advising Raquel about wearing more clothes, and covering your head in Jordan (that scarf really suits you). I applaud Rae and Raquel on their changes of heart.”

Like many viewers, Jennifer from Bonnet Bay was deeply moved by the show: “I cried throughout the program as my basic instincts as a human being to sympathise and empathise with all involved just overwhelmed me.” But when referring to “all involved,” she seemed to have very particular people in mind: “It is gratifying to see that individuals with such set and negative views can be moved and changed by contact with others whose experiences are just so different and so abjectly harsh by comparison to our own ‘lucky country’ experiences here in Australia.”

In order to understand the impact the series had on its audience we need to take notice of the relationship that developed between the viewers and the six protagonists. The audience empathised with the protagonists, irrespective of their politics. The audience appreciated the significance of the challenge the six participants faced – not because they visited places that aren’t safe but because from very early on it was clear that they would be different people at the end of those five weeks (in fact, make that three nights). One viewer, who said she loved “watching their transformations,” aptly called the six participants “pioneers.” They went where many in the audience hadn’t dared to go – and again, I am not referring to the Congo or Iraq, but to a preparedness to open one’s heart to strangers and to reflect critically on one’s own prejudices.

“The Inside Story” left its audience lost for words. Shayan was so innocent, so pure and, thanks to television, right in their living rooms – yet also so far away. When the program had ended, viewers could only see themselves, and averted their eyes in shame.

The six “ordinary Australians” of Go Back to Where You Came From are by no means beyond reach. They are my next-door neighbour, the mother of my brother’s best mate, the young woman working at the corner shop.

Racist, ignorant and self-centred Raquel – and not any of the refugees featured in the program – ultimately became the star of the show. When some ten thousand viewers tweeted during the first episode, the main subject matter of their messages was Raquel. She was irritating and attracted a great deal of scorn and derision. It was difficult to empathise with her. But it was Raquel, more so than any of the others, who got the audience emotionally involved. The viewers’ emotional investment paid off when Rachel changed during the third episode. “Three cheers for Raquel. Raquel was amazing,” Peter from Geelong wrote after that episode. Jimmy from Sydney commented: “I love Raquel. From pariah to Princess in my eyes.” David from Perth said: “Fantastic & well done Raquel. Watching you mature and develop a lovely smile over three nights spoke heaps.” “You little beauty Raquel! So proud of how far you have come in this journey,” wrote Marianne from Darwin.

It’s worth remembering, however, that the director and his team were able to fashion characters. Condensing five weeks into less than three hours, they selected a small fraction of the footage they had at their disposal. At least one of the participants, ex-soldier Darren Hassan, felt misrepresented. In the show he played the role of the unrepentant tough guy who is incapable of being emotional. His role was as important as that of “pariah to princess” Raquel.

In fact, some of the characters seemed almost scripted. Matt Granfield had a point when he commented after the screening of the first episode: “The token characters were all represented.” References to what wasn’t broadcast, either in the documentary or in last night’s pre-recorded discussion in Sydney – one member of the live audience complained in a post on the SBS website that “all controversial questions” had been edited out – indicate that the show and its overall presentation were very carefully stage-managed.

While “The Inside Story” made viewers feel bad about their country, the SBS program had the opposite effect. “I feel so grateful living in Australia, especially after watching this show,” Chelsea from Newcastle wrote. While the Four Corners program had prompted viewers to identify with their government (and consequently feel ashamed), Go Back to Where You Came From encouraged viewers to barrack for the six participants as if they had been chosen to represent their country in a contest. “Thank god for SBS this is the most amazing series I have EVER seen on TV so proud to see all of the changes with these average Aussies,” Clinton from Melbourne wrote.

If the emotions triggered by Go Back to Where You Came From are foremostly about the six Australians, how useful is such a program in changing the hearts and minds of those whose votes can be bought with cheap slogans such as the Coalition’s “stop the boats”?

I think that in this respect the format of the SBS series actually worked. Compassion as a motivator for action that benefits those who suffer is overrated. Compassion is entirely dependent on a judgement made by the non-sufferer, and it is for the deserving. Imagine if Bahati Masudi, the host of Raquel, Raye and Roderick in Wodonga, had been pompous, aloof or critical of Australia. Imagine if he had ordered his wife around, screamed at his children, and lectured the three Australians. In that case, viewers wouldn’t have cared much about whether or not he will be reunited with his brother.

Compassion that relies on televised images alone is particularly fickle. Viewers are too cynical to believe every sob story they see on the small screen. And even if they are moved, their emotions tend to be fleeting. But the SBS series allowed viewers to rely on others when extending their compassion. They only had access to the footage broadcast on television, but they knew that the six Australians were there, and if they could show compassion against all odds (because they didn’t like refugees to start with) then those sentiments could act as a reliable yardstick.

According to commissioning editor Peter Newman and director Ivan O’Mahoney the aim of the series was not to make viewers take sides. They wanted viewers to appreciate the complexity of global refugee movements. To that end, SBS has provided a host of excellent material on its website – including a quiz, fact sheets and an online simulation that allows users to take on the role of a refugee fleeing an Australia that has descended into anarchy. The series itself also contained a lot of contextualising information. Viewers were able to learn a lot about the scope and complexity of the problem.

Again judging from the responses on the SBS website, many viewers were receptive. The emotions aroused by the series and the identification with the six participants were crucial in allowing viewers to hear that message (or, to use Raye Colbey’s words again, to look and to see). The audience learned with and through Raye and Raquel and Adam and Roderick and Gleny and Darren. And just as the six participants learned about the complexity of the refugee situation because they felt for and with their hosts, the compassion elicited by the series made it possible that the information – which wasn’t new and has always been readily available – was taken in.

Compassion is an important catalyst, rather than a useful end point. The compassion extended to the refugees featured in the series also allowed the six participants – and, by extension, their audience – to think of rights in a concrete way. The response to refugees and asylum seekers needs to be informed by our obligations and capacity, and circumscribed by their rights. Compassion, which focuses on a perceived need, does not take into account a sufferer’s right to relief. But the right to seek and enjoy asylum is too abstract a concept to have much appeal. Like most Australians, at least four of the six participants have a strong sense of entitlement. It was perhaps that very sense of entitlement that allowed them to appreciate that refugees have the right to have aspirations similar to those of Australians, and that they have the right to be given an opportunity to realise those aspirations.

I believe the moral philosopher Lawrence Blum had compassion’s role as a catalyst in mind when he wrote: “True compassion must be allied with knowledge and understanding if it is to serve adequately as a guide to action.” The knowledge that’s crucial here is about the contexts in which suffering occurs, and about how the non-sufferer may be implicated in the sufferer’s predicament.

Viewers of the SBS series didn’t refer to the Four Corners program about Shayan Badraie in their online posts. But they frequently compared the SBS program with the Four Corners report about live cattle exports to Indonesia, broadcast on 30 May. The response to that program led to a ban on that trade. It was watched by fewer people than each of the three episodes of the SBS series.

Many viewers demanded that Australia’s political leaders watch Go Back to Where You Came From and then respond in a similar manner, namely abandon the Malaysian solution. The contrast between the response to the Four Corners program last month and the SBS series last week is stark. The SBS series generated hardly any public debate in the conventional sense. Chris Bowen, Scott Morrison, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott have not responded to the series; in fact, the only politician I could identify who put out a statement was Lee Rhiannon, the newly elected Greens senator for New South Wales. The commentariat (on both sides of the political fence) was also unusually quiet.

That is not to say that the series hasn’t been intensely debated. But it seems that Go Back to Where You Came From is not so much a subject for parliamentary question time as for discussions at the water cooler or the photocopier. The debate rages on blogs and in the Twittersphere rather than on the opinion pages of newspapers. Those responsible for the program intended this to be something that got “ordinary Australians” talking. This intention was emphasised again in the forum broadcast this week. Combative Jenny Brockie could have hosted the usual experts and politicians; instead, kind, avuncular Anton Enus chaired a gathering of the participants’ family and friends.

I think the creators of the program have been right in not trying to use the show to campaign for a change of policy, but instead focusing on the paucity of the debate, which has been partly responsible for a lot of poor policy in the past. In the unlikely event that the government had responded with a policy announcement (as it did after the program on live cattle exports), such an announcement in itself wouldn’t have changed the parameters of the debate. That debate is marked by a profound lack of understanding (owing to a lack of knowledge of the most basic facts) and by the refusal to acknowledge that some problems are so complex that they defy quick-fix solutions.

It is too early to predict the long-term impact of Go Back to Where You Came From. I would like to see evidence for Peter Newman’s claim that “the series has managed to wrestle back this issue away from the political arena and put it in the hands of the people,” and can’t wait to find out whether or not the emotions aroused by the series will lead to a greater understanding of the complexity of the issues involved in Australia’s response to refugees and asylum seekers. •

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THE federal government’s “Malaysian solution” raises a host of as yet unanswered questions. Under the agreement announced on Saturday by Julia Gillard and her Malaysian counterpart, Najib Razak, Australia will resettle 4000 refugees living in Malaysia, and Malaysia will take in 800 asylum seekers intercepted by the Australian navy. The Australian government hailed the agreement as “a landmark new measure as part of a Regional Cooperation Framework that will help put people smugglers out of business and prevent asylum seekers making the dangerous journey to Australia by boat.” That’s where the questions begin.

First, there’s the queue. Where exactly is the orderly process that asylum seekers transferred from Australia to Malaysia are meant to join? Hadn’t the Labor government been dismissive of the idea of sending asylum seekers “to the back of the queue” when it was suggested by Steve Fielding last year? (Australians would like asylum seekers to be told, “If you’re going to try and jump the queue you go to the back of the queue and wait in a refugee camp and wait your turn to come to Australia,” Senator Fielding said in March 2010, in what reads like the blueprint for Saturday’s announcement.)

Then there’s the duration of the commitment. According to the joint statement by Prime Ministers Gillard and Najib, the arrangement is a “one off pilot project.” Last year alone, 6502 “irregular maritime arrivals” sought asylum in Australia. If anywhere near that number arrives once the agreement commences, what will happen once Malaysia has taken the first batch of 800 asylum seekers? Would it be prepared to take another 800, thereby committing Australia to take another 4000 refugees stranded in Malaysia? Or does the Australian government envisage that other countries in the region would also want to swap refugees for asylum seekers at a rate of five to one?

The government is clearly hoping that it won’t be necessary to make arrangements beyond the pilot project because asylum seekers will no longer target Australia for fear that they will be sent to Malaysia. In my view, such hopes would be ill-founded for two reasons. First, it is likely that asylum seekers will again try to reach the Australian mainland rather than Christmas Island or Ashmore Reef (as they did after 2001) – and some will actually make it because, as the tragic events of December 2010 have once again shown, the Australian navy can’t detect all small vessels heading in Australia’s direction. More importantly, many will try (let’s not forget: many of them are desperate because they are fleeing intolerable circumstances) and thus the quota of 800 will soon be filled. Second, the counting starts once the memorandum of understanding between the Australian and Malaysian governments has been signed. In the meantime, possibly hundreds of forced migrants holed up in Indonesia will want to be among the last lucky ones to make it to Australia before the deadline. Many of them won’t make it in time, which again means that the quota could be filled much earlier than the Australian government anticipates.

What happens if asylum seekers processed in Malaysia are recognised as refugees under the criteria of the 1951 Refugee Convention: could they be included in a future batch of 4000 refugees transferred to Australia? Not only might they take their chances, given that there is no orderly queue (in Malaysia, or anywhere else, for that matter). And if other resettlement options are hard to come by – as happened under the Howard government’s Pacific Solution – would Australia guarantee the eventual resettlement of those transferred to Malaysia? Unless Malaysia – contrary to its long-standing practice – was suddenly prepared to resettle asylum seekers recognised as refugees, it would probably insist on such a guarantee.

And finally, and most importantly, there are the conditions in Malaysia. For the plan to work for the two governments, asylum seekers will need to be dissuaded from seeking temporary refuge in Malaysia in the expectation that this will be a pathway to resettlement in Australia if one-in-six of them set out for Christmas Island or Ashmore Reef. A temporary stay in Malaysia may indeed prove to be sufficiently unattractive to persuade refugees fleeing Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan to head for Europe rather than Southeast Asia and Australia – and that’s the very reason why the Malaysian Solution could work and why, at the same time, it is far more insidious than the “solution” proffered by the previous government.

The Sunday Age’s political editor, Michelle Grattan, suggested that “one increasingly needs a microscope to spot the differences between John Howard’s Pacific Solution and the Gillard government’s approach.” Neither Nauru nor Malaysia are signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention and are therefore not bound by international law not to return refugees to danger. Their laws do not provide for the granting of asylum or refugee status, and their governments have not established a system for providing protection to refugees. But that’s where the similarities end.

The differences aren’t as difficult to spot as Michelle Grattan claims. Unlike Nauru, Malaysia hosts a sizeable number of forced migrants – more than 170,000 according to the latest (2009) estimate by the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. The asylum seekers who were sent to Nauru by the Howard government had good reason to complain bitterly about their isolation and living conditions, which were well documented, not least in Michael Gordon’s book Freeing Ali. But neither the government of Nauru nor individual Nauruans were responsible for their predicament. In fact, the latter were welcoming rather than hostile.

The Malaysian solution could act as a more effective deterrent than either temporary protection visas or the prospect of being stranded on Nauru ever did, because refugees are not welcome in Malaysia. In Malaysia, forced migrants are frequently and arbitrarily arrested, detained and deported.

Malaysian law does not distinguish between refugees, asylum seekers and other irregular migrants. According to a recent Amnesty International report, “all are considered to be illegal and are subject to the same penalties.” Those penalties include fines, imprisonment and caning. Between 2002 and 2009, according to official statistics, 47,914 migrants were caned for immigration offences. Children are exempt from being caned – provided they are under the age of ten. But the reference to children is not to suggest that caning is a rather mild – or even purely symbolic – form of punishment.

Amnesty International has branded caning a form of torture. In a recent report, the organisation provides a graphic indictment: “Across Malaysia, government officials regularly tear into the flesh of prisoners with rattan canes (rotan) travelling up to 160 kilometres an hour. The cane shreds the victim’s naked skin, turns the fatty tissue into pulp, and leaves permanent scars that extend all the way to muscle fibres. Blood and flesh splash off the victim’s body, often accompanied by urine and faeces… The pain inflicted by caning is so severe that victims often lose consciousness as a result. Afterwards the suffering can last for weeks or even years, both in terms of physical disabilities and psychological trauma.”

Some refugees are subject to deportation – or worse. According to a US State Department report, “in previous years there were many allegations from NGOs, international organizations, and civil society groups that immigration officials were involved in the trafficking of Burmese refugees from [immigration detention centres] to Thailand, where some refugees were sold into slavery.” The prices charged by those officials reportedly range from US$250 to US$500 per deported refugee. While there were no reports of similar incidents last year, the State Department concluded in another report, less than a year ago, that the government of Malaysia still “does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.” Trafficking is an ongoing problem in the country, said the report, and some trafficking victims are “locked up in warehouses or brothels.”

Police and immigration officials aren’t the only ones refugees have reason to fear. Members of the two-million-strong People’s Volunteer Corps, a militia whose members receive little training, have been accused of raping, beating and stealing from irregular migrants, including those who have been issued with a card by the UNHCR to certify that they have been recognised as refugees in need of protection.

Malaysia’s sixteen immigration detention centres are already overcrowded. According to credible reports by NGOs, inmates lack regular access to clean drinking water, appropriate medical care and proper sanitation. A Malaysian Human Rights Commission report published in 2008 found that 1300 people had died in detention centres and prisons over a six-year period – largely as a result of poor medical care.

Yet, having said all that, the agreement reached on Saturday could also end up being a bold move in the right direction. Gillard and Najib agreed that asylum seekers transferred from Australia to Malaysia “will be treated with dignity and respect and in accordance with human rights standards.” It seems inconceivable that Malaysia will exempt those 800 people (and then, perhaps, another 800, and another 800…) from being caned, arbitrarily arrested, detained in overcrowded immigration detention centres and deported whence they came. After all, a card issued by the UNHCR has done little to protect refugees, so why would a letter saying its bearer needs to be “treated with dignity” on the grounds that he or she once nearly made it to Australia be any different?

Given that Australia has committed to funding the arrangement, however, the Najib government could demand that Australia help it treat all other refugees and asylum seekers currently living in Malaysia “in accordance with human rights standards.” Australia would then, commensurate with its economic capabilities and regional leadership aspirations, be able to initiate a genuine regional solution for forced migrants in the Asia-Pacific. It would facilitate the integration of forced migrants in Malaysian society by providing money for additional teachers and doctors. It would fund a well-trained police force whose only purpose is to uphold the law, and allow Malaysia to disband the People’s Volunteer Corps. The Malaysian government would accede to the 1951 Refugee Convention, introduce changes to its Immigration Act to distinguish clearly between refugees, asylum seekers, trafficking victims and other undocumented migrants, and provide protection to those recognised as refugees.

Together, Malaysia and Australia could create a model that could be exported to other countries in the region that host large numbers of forced migrants: Thailand or Pakistan, for example. In fact, they would need to export that model in case people smugglers directed Afghans and Iraqis and Burmese to Malaysia rather than to Australia. Julia Gillard might have had such a solution in mind when she persuaded her Malaysian counterpart to agree to the “pilot project.” And pigs might fly. (Actually, when it comes to this intractable public policy issue, they have to.) •

The post Trading refugees appeared first on Inside Story.

While the government pursued its ambitious program of building enough plants to produce more than half of Germany’s electricity, the West German anti-nuclear movement grew into a force to be reckoned with. But it attracted the support of a majority of the population only in the immediate vicinity of planned nuclear facilities – at Wyhl, the designated site of a nuclear reactor in the southwest of Germany, for example, and Gorleben, in Lower Saxony, where a salt dome was earmarked for storing nuclear waste and the government wanted to build a nuclear reprocessing facility. Elsewhere in West Germany, most of those actively opposed to the construction of nuclear power stations were high school and university students.

In February 1975, the day after construction started at the planned nuclear power plant in Wyhl, local residents and students from nearby Freiburg occupied the site. When the authorities used excessive force to evict the protesters, the resolve of the locals hardened and more supporters arrived from nearby cities. A week later, more than 25,000 people reoccupied the site. The conservative state government of Baden-Württemberg capitulated and agreed to halt the construction of the plant. In 1983, the state government abandoned any remaining plans to build a nuclear power plant at Wyhl.

In Gorleben, in northern Germany, local farmers were the driving force of the anti-nuclear protests. In early 1979, they called on their supporters to attend a rally in Hannover, the seat of the state government of Lower Saxony, to coincide with a government-sponsored hearing into the feasibility of a nuclear storage and reprocessing facility. The rally was scheduled for 31 March; organisers were hoping for more than 10,000 participants.

Three days before the rally, on Wednesday 28 March, crucial pumps malfunctioned at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station near Harrisburg in Pennsylvania. Following a partial nuclear meltdown, radioactive coolant leaked from the reactor. The seriousness of the situation wasn’t initially evident. On 29 March, Pennsylvania governor Dick Thornburgh said, “I believe, at this point, that there is no cause for alarm, nor any reason to disrupt your daily routine, nor any reason to feel that public health has been affected by the events on Three Mile Island.” The following day, however, a dangerous gas bubble was detected inside the reactor, and the situation appeared to spiral out of control. Thornburgh ordered the partial evacuation of the area around Harrisburg.

On Saturday 31 March, tens of thousands of people from all over West Germany descended on Hannover. Not only did the number of protesters –120,000 according to the organisers – exceed all expectations, but it was also the first time that anti-nuclear activists were warmly received outside the rural areas that were directly affected by the construction of nuclear facilities. Banners welcoming Gorleben’s farmers to Hannover hung from balconies along the route of the march.

I was a part-time journalist at the time, and went to Hannover to cover the protest. Several of the demonstrators I interviewed told me that they had been up until late at night glued to radio and television sets to keep informed about the accident at Harrisburg, and had then spontaneously decided to travel to Hannover, often driving through the night to arrive in time for the protest.

Six weeks after that demonstration, the state premier of Lower Saxony, Ernst Albrecht, declared that building a reprocessing facility at Gorleben was not politically possible. This admission came as a surprise, because while the only opposition party represented in state parliament, the Social Democrats, were opposed to the reprocessing plant, the Social Democrats were not yet opposed to nuclear energy as such and the Social Democrat-led government in Bonn had assured the state government of its support over Gorleben. After the Baden-Württemberg government’s cave-in over Wyhl four years earlier, Albrecht’s retreat marked the second significant victory of Germany’s anti-nuclear movement.

While the leakage of radioactive material from the Three Mile Island plant was limited, the fall-out from the accident contributed to the downscaling of West Germany’s ambitious plans for a future powered by nuclear energy. It also boosted the votes of a newly formed group, the Greens, at the first elections to the European parliament in June 1979. On account of winning 3.2 per cent of the West German vote the party secured enough funding to set up a national organisation. Later that year, the Greens won their first seats at the state level when they gained 5.1 per cent of the vote in the city state of Bremen.

At their 1994 national party congress, the Social Democrats committed themselves to phasing out nuclear energy within ten years. Their decision came at least twelve years too late. Since 1982, the Federal Republic of Germany was governed by the Christian Democrats and their minor partner, the Liberals, both of them supporters of nuclear energy. Only the Greens, who had become a permanent feature in the Bundestag, would be able to claim to have always been opposed to nuclear energy.

In 1998, the Social Democrats and the Greens won the national elections and formed a coalition government. Although they agreed to gradually shut down Germany’s nuclear industry, it took two years for the government to reach an agreement with the electricity industry, and another two years to push through legislation that gave effect to that agreement. No new reactors were to be built, and existing plants were given only a limited lease of life.

Since 2009, a government made up of Christian Democrats and Liberals has ruled Germany. In September of last year, that government agreed to revise the earlier agreement with the electricity companies and extend the life spans of Germany’s seventeen ageing nuclear reactors. The seven plants built before 1980 were to remain connected to the grid until 2018 – ostensibly to allow Germany to meet ambitious CO2 emission targets while it invested heavily in renewable energy generation.

Thirty-two years after the protest in Hannover, an accident in a far-away nuclear facility has again altered Germany’s political landscape and the government’s long-term economic plans. Last Sunday, the Greens became the second-largest party in the Baden-Württemberg state parliament. They scored 24.2 per cent, compared to 39 per cent for the Christian Democrats, 23.1 per cent for the Social Democrats and 5.3 per cent for the Liberals. Social Democrats, Christian Democrats and Liberals each had their worst results since 1952. Together with the Social Democrats, the Greens will form the next state government. Their leader, Winfried Kretschmann, as the leader of the majority partner in a coalition with the Social Democrats, will be the first Greens premier in Germany’s history.

THE accidents at Fukushima have had a huge impact in Germany. Since the damage to the Japanese reactors has been known, many German news bulletins have opened with reports about the situation at Fukushima. On 12 March, a day after the earthquake and tsunami that triggered the nuclear accident at Fukushima, 60,000 Germans formed a human chain linking Stuttgart, the capital of Baden-Württemberg, with Neckarwestheim, a nuclear power plant about forty-five kilometres away. As had happened in March 1979, a pre-planned protest happened to coincide with a crisis at a nuclear plant. A couple of days later, rallies in all major German cities demanded an immediate end to Germany’s nuclear program.

Polls taken after the Fukushima disaster suggested that a clear majority of Germans suddenly favoured a speedy phasing-out of all nuclear power plants. With crucial state elections looming in Baden-Württemberg and two other states, Rheinland-Pfalz and Sachsen-Anhalt, chancellor Angela Merkel rescinded the government’s decision from September 2010 and ordered that the seven oldest nuclear power plants be shut down immediately – initially for a period of three months, to conduct extensive safety tests. That was on 15 March. She was not the only one who had a sudden change of mind. The leader of the Liberals (and foreign affairs minister), Guido Westerwelle, and the premier of Baden-Württemberg, Stefan Mappus, likewise went cool on nuclear energy.

Merkel’s and Mappus’s changes of mind did little to shore up support for the conservative coalition. They were not helped by the federal economic affairs minister, Rainer Brüderle (Liberal Democratic Party), who last week confided to a Federation of German Industry meeting that the government’s change of heart was irrational and needed to be blamed on the upcoming state elections. Even without the publication of Brüderle’s candid remark (which may yet cost him his job), Merkel was widely criticised by friends and foes for being an opportunist. The election results last Sunday have only exacerbated the confusion in the ranks of the governing coalition in Berlin. Leading Liberals and Christian Democrats are now openly squabbling over the wisdom of Merkel’s decision to take the older reactors temporarily off the grid. To make matters worse, that decision may yet be challenged by the utility companies, which are questioning whether the three-month moratorium would be covered by legislation passed to give effect to last year’s decision to extend the life span of the reactors.

According to polls, the environment was the single most important issue for voters in the Baden-Württemberg election. But it was not the only issue that helped the Greens. The state government had tried to push through the controversial multi-billion euro redevelopment of Stuttgart’s central station. Yet support for the Greens had been declining since the end of last year – nationally, from 23 per cent in early November to 15 per cent in early March – and it wasn’t until the Fukushima disaster that the party’s vote recovered.

The results in Sunday’s election are significant. Baden-Württemberg is the most economically successful and innovative state in Germany and, with a population of over ten million, the third-largest. Its population equals that of Hungary, Portugal or the Czech Republic, but its GDP almost equals the combined GDP of those three EU member countries.

Since 1953, the state government has been led by the Christian Democrats. Together with neighbouring Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg has always been the bedrock of the Federal Republic’s conservative vote. The state is likely to remain a bastion of conservativism, even under a red–green coalition government. Winfried Kretschmann once belonged to a Maoist splinter party – but that was some thirty-five years ago. These days, he is a practising Catholic and a social conservative. “In 2011, the Greens will rock the republic,” the party’s leader, Cem Özdemir, had told a party congress late last year. Kretschmann and Nils Schmid, the leader of the Greens’ coalition partner, are unlikely to rock the Musterländle, the Federal Republic’s model state – renowned among northerners for the industriousness and conventionality of its citizens and their quaint way of talking.

On Monday, a headline in the online edition of Der Spiegel magazine suggested: “Kretschmann wants to plough up the Ländle.” Nothing could be further from the truth. But the green–red government can be expected to champion far-reaching environmental policies. More so than other states, Baden-Württemberg depends on nuclear energy, with some 60 per cent of its electricity being produced by nuclear power plants – about three times the average of the other fifteen German states. If the new state government wants to decommission the state’s nuclear reactors, it will have to rely heavily on energy-saving measures and renewable energies to meet targets for the reduction of CO2 output.

Baden-Württemberg’s dynamic economy puts it in an excellent position to promote the development of new technologies in the renewable energy sector. In recent years, its research and development expenditure (as a percentage of GDP) has been higher than that of any other region in the European Union, resulting in more patents being registered than elsewhere. Skill levels are high; in Baden-Württemberg, more people per capita work in high-tech industries than in Europe’s other regions.

The nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and at Fukushima in 2011 had far-reaching consequences for the future of German electricity generation, although, unlike the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, they didn’t affect Germany directly. The accident in 2011 will hasten the decommissioning of Germany’s nuclear power industry. It has also changed the political landscape in the key German state of Baden-Württemberg, which is likely to take a leading role in the development of renewable energy and energy-saving technologies. And who is to say that the ripples will not be felt as far away as Pennsylvania and Japan? •

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