Riot Control
The New Republic Online, 11/16/2005

BERLIN, GERMANY--Germany has Europe's second-largest Muslim population. Unemployment among the over two million Turkish residents here is more than double the national average. And Germany's overall unemployment rate tops France's. Yet as the French suburbs have gone up in flames over the last two weeks, Germany has remained relatively quiet. Four cars were torched here last weekend, but there has been no rioting, or even protests. Why aren't Berlin's lively Kreuzberg and Neukölln neighborhoods, said to house the largest Turkish communities outside of Turkey, on fire? What has gone right?

The answer lies in the different ways Germany and France have integrated immigrants in the past half-century. Historically, the French idea of citizenship has been superficially welcoming. Though many of the young people wreaking havoc across the country during the past few weeks are the children of immigrants, they automatically became citizens when they were born in France. But while the residents of the banlieues may have French passports, they are regarded as aliens by French society. The racist reception Arabs and Africans receive when they try to find jobs or leave their segregated suburban enclaves puts the lie to the philosophies of égalité and fraternité they learn in French schools. "It's when they reach the labor market that things break down," says Catherine Audard, a political philosopher at the London School of Economics. "It's a situation of the broken promise of integration." France, in short, is burning partly because it reneged on its promises.

Germany, on the other hand, never made any. To be German has long been a matter of blood. As a result, until very recently the millions of workers brought here in the 1950s and '60s weren't offered citizenship, nor were their children. Today--in some cases three generations later--there's a popular notion on both sides that immigrants are still guests. And guests have a responsibility to behave. Meanwhile, twentieth-century history makes Germans especially aware of their duties as hosts.

Germany's immigrant policy has its roots in the country's history as an emigrant nation. Though hard to imagine now, a century ago Germany was perhaps the world's largest exporter of people: Between 1820 and 1900, more than 5 million Germans left for America alone. When Germany united in 1871, these migrants were not forgotten. German citizenship was based on the concept of "jus sanguinis" (right of blood) instead of the more American idea of "jus solis" (right of soil, or place). After World War II, the concept was adjusted to extend automatic citizenship benefits to ethnic German refugees from the Eastern bloc. (Ironically, some of Germany's most problematic immigrants today are ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union who have come to live off the German welfare system.) Regardless of where they were born, these far-flung Germans are still considered German.

At the same time, foreigners stayed foreign, no matter how many generations were born on German soil. In the '50s, the German economy found itself short-handed. Over the next two decades, millions of men came from Spain, Italy, and Turkey on temporary guest-worker visas. Many stayed, since German companies were reluctant to keep training new workers. The program ended in 1973 as the economy slowed. But instead of packing up and going home, many of the laborers--who could not be deported by German law--decided to bring their families here and settle down.

Despite being non-citizens, immigrants in Germany enjoyed a number of rights, such as freedom of movement and speech, basic respect from the police, and limited participation in the political process. Guest workers were represented on labor councils and in German unions. They settled not in isolated housing projects but in war-damaged inner-city neighborhoods. The result was urban revival, and inclusion in the fabric of everyday German life, instead of the physical marginalization of the sterile French housing projects. "The inner city area is easier to take hold of for an immigrant. Little shops and stores represent investment and identification in the neighborhood," says Viadrina University sociologist and Islam expert Werner Schiffauer. And successful immigrants tended to re-invest in the neighborhood, instead of leaving for richer areas. Says Schiffauer: "There's no 'up and away' culture in Germany, so people were more likely to stay when they succeed." In France, by contrast, those who could afford to leave the suburban projects generally left as soon as they could.

There's also history to take into account. Postwar Germany has, for the most part, welcomed difference as part of public life and responded vigorously to racism. The French, on the other hand, have always been deeply suspicious of multiculturalism. French intellectuals have long been too busy pointing fingers at America's social hypocrisies to pay much attention to their own. France never ratified Europe's Charter for Minority or Regional Languages, for instance, arguing that formally recognizing the country's 70-some languages and dialects would threaten the "indivisibility of the Republic" and "the unity of the French people." Likewise, the country stands alone with Turkey and Andorra as holdouts on the Convention for the Protection of National Minorities.

In that respect, France has lived in a state of denial regarding its minorities. No one knows exactly how many Muslims or immigrants live in France because the French government deliberately excludes religion and ethnicity from the census on philosophical grounds. Germany doesn't track ethnicity either--for very different reasons; such labels were too useful in the Nazi era--but on all sides of the political spectrum here, immigration and integration are seen as problems to be solved, not ignored. For instance, in response to events in France, one conservative Bavarian politician called last week for "massive improvements" in Germany's integration efforts.

Furthermore, Germany's relationship with its immigrants isn't complicated by the legacy of colonialism. Many of France's immigrants are refugees from French colonies. An estimated 70 percent of the country's five million Muslims are North Africans with roots in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Many other immigrants are from former colonies in Africa like Senegal. To the extent that French immigrants feel betrayed by their adopted country, that betrayal stretches back over many generations. There's no equivalent dynamic for Germany's postwar immigrants.

All this isn't to say that Germany is an immigrant utopia. Far from it. In eastern Germany, where unemployment in some towns has reached 40 percent in the 16 years since the wall fell, a handful of far-right anti-immigrant parties have established a foothold in local government. Since German citizenship laws were relaxed in the late '90s, one of the most complex issues for immigrants has been whether to renounce their old citizenship for a German passport. Most have not taken the step. And parts of the Turkish community here remain isolated, with no incentive to learn German or adapt to German mores. Germans were shocked earlier this year by a spate of "honor killings," in which young women who had embraced liberal values were executed by their families.