The Flüchtlingskrise in Germany: Crisis of the Refugees,by the Refugees,for the Refugees

The arrival of a significant number of refugees on European soil during the summer and early autumn of 2015 to a certain extent led to a series of paradoxical consequences. The governments of countries such as Poland or Britain, which received virtually no Syrians, Afghans or Iraqis, reacted with considerable hostility. It was even claimed that the so-called refugee crisis contributed to a general political atmosphere that pushed a greater part of the British electorate towards Brexit. By contrast, in Germany, the country that received by far the largest share of migrants during this period, politicians and the public alike were unexpectedly welcoming in response to the arrivals. While the events helped the far-right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland increase its share of votes in some regional elections as well as the national election in September 2017, the vast majority of Germans maintained a positive attitude.

For those who felt empathy for the refugees or who supported their right to asylum, it appeared patently clear that the term ‘Krise’ (crisis) needed to be avoided due to its negative connotations. The reasons for such discomfort were manifold. For some the notion of ‘refugee crisis’ was problematic because the combination of words suggested that refugees had themselves induced the ‘crisis’. In German, the term ‘refugee crisis’ is a compound noun: Flüchtlingskrise. In most cases these nouns are endocentric, in other words the last part contains the meaning of the word, which is modified by the preceding part. Sometimes, the precise semantic relationship between the different parts might remain unclear. Is it a crisis concerning refugees, a crisis for refugees or, as was often denounced, a crisis caused by refugees? To date, critical scholars in Germany are reluctant to use the expression and instead insist on speaking of a ‘political crisis’, pointing to the political responsibility of the European Union. Such scholars recognize that something extraordinary has indeed occurred that justifies talk of crisis, but emphasize that past and present migration and asylum policies of European states have brought about the situation. Although this critical position is far from being hegemonic in mainstream political and media discourse, it is certainly not limited to radical academic or activist circles (see, for example, Pasemann, 2015, as well as the petition launched in December 2015 by Migazin, an independent online magazine about migration and integration, to declare ‘Flüchtlingskrise’ the most outrageous word of the year (Gerwing, 2015)).

This critique points to a semantic association inherent within the concept of crisis that connects a particular chain of events, such as the massive movement of migrants and refugees in a short period of time, with the general political realm and particular fields of the political. When these events are understood to be extraordinary they carry the potential to call into question the social, political and legal patterns of routine social action. The extraordinary situation can be one of emergency, which can bring about a transformation of the modes of political action. The rationality of action in such a situation seems to be characterized by a lack of reflection or thought. As in a high-speed boxing match, action collapses into a kind of stimulus-response model. In a crisis, it seems, we do not have ‘the luxury’ to deliberate, but must act immediately. Philosophers from Carl Schmitt to Paul Virilio have linked this problem to technology and have understood it as posing a radical threat to humanity.

When acting under conditions of emergency we usually think of ourselves as not acting on our own account but as forced to act according to the ‘demands’ of a situation. It appears that the rationality incorporated in the material and social environment commands our actions, or, to put it in Weberian terms, action turns into behaviour, since the difference between action and behaviour is characterized by the latter’s lesser degree of awareness. Hence, for example, the German prefix ‘Not’ (need, misery, poverty, plight, etc.) in words such as Notwehr (self-defence) or Notstand (emergency) – the latter closely associated with the idea of Krise – denotes a reduction of agency or initiative of the individual or subject through a given situation.

However, the declaration of a crisis in itself is a rhetorical act. According to George Herbert Mead’s classic theoretical approach, social action is defined by an element of deceleration, as a moment of reflection that interrupts the chain of reactions within the ‘stimulus-response model’ and that thereby constitutes the very essence of human interaction. Thus, people never just react, rather there exists a moment that Mead called the ‘specious present’ during which the individual interprets the situation.

What Mead’s argument implies is that apart from extremely accelerated scenarios that involve some form of automation (be it in terms of human behaviour or through computation), social interaction always entails a moment of interpretation and of potential novelty. In this sense, the discourse of crisis does not appear to be characterized by automatic responses. This becomes quite clear when both the statement ‘we have to act immediately’ and the related call for extraordinary measures do not play out in the usual way. In fact, in the case in question, the German government suspended the Dublin regulation in late August 2015 and opened its borders for a number of weeks, which ultimately led to the arrival of more than one million refugees in Germany. Quite far from the conventional scenario in which governments or states make use of a crisis to impose, say, martial law or to pass laws restricting the liberties of citizens, German public opinion took a sharp turn towards a Willkommenskultur (culture of welcome), at least for a few months. In this initial phase, the arrival of huge numbers of refugees was indeed experienced as something quite extraordinary, but in a positive sense. Already at the end of August, when events at Budapest’s main railway station escalated, the extraordinariness was marked by an atmosphere of compassion in Germany, prompting the Green politician Katrin Göring Eckhardt to later speak of a Septembermärchen (September fairy tale).

To everyone’s surprise, in the early autumn of 2015, millions of Germans flocked to the train stations, shelters and other camps where refugees were arriving or were accommodated. Some even drove their cars to Hungary or Croatia during this ‘long summer of migration’ to collect those moving across the continent and returned with them to Germany or Austria (Kasparek and Speer, 2015; Misik, 2015). Each major political party as well as trade unions, companies, public institutions and the media joined in celebrating both the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees and the hospitality and reception offered to them by a significant part of Germany’s population. Even the populist and conservative tabloid BILD supported emergent grassroots hospitality with its own campaign, using the slogan ‘Refugees Welcome’. Together with another tabloid (the BZ), the Berlin edition of the BILD also published a supplement in Arabic, in which they welcomed Arabic-speaking refugees and provided useful information about the city, shelters and services offered by the municipality and other organizations.

The events reported to the German public – refugees stranded in makeshift camps along the so-called Balkan route from Greece to Austria, trapped and beaten in a Budapest train station, images of suffering families and young children – and positive responses by German authorities and the media helped turn a pre-existent but small volunteer movement into a mainstream initiative involving large swathes of German society. A survey conducted by Karakayali and Kleist (2016) in December 2015 revealed that around 70 per cent of all volunteers had not been involved previously in any activities related to migration or refugees. Thus, for very many people the crisis provided a chance to engage with the reality of migration in Germany. For some it was also a transformative experience. A retired teacher, who had started to teach German to newly arrived refugees, told us in an interview how her view on immigrants changed through her voluntary work: ‘Before, I was always afraid when I saw Arab-looking young men hanging around on street corners. But now, I take a closer look, because I might happen to know them personally.’ ¹ To this day, around 8 per cent of the German population continues to be involved in volunteering activities in support of refugees across the country. If a crisis is a condition in which old patterns and rules collapse and make way for new ones, or, to put it in sociological terms, if a crisis creates conditions of emergence, then this unprecedented outburst of solidarity could be seen as a paradigmatic case. In other words, crisis here resembles the sense of Walter Benjamin’s ‘real state of exception’ rather than Gramsci’s more pessimistic account of crisis as routinely opening the path to authoritarianism.

The enthusiasm with which diverse sections of German society joined the welcoming movement was not entirely surprising. It was precisely within this widespread sense of enthusiasm that the crisis discourse became recharged or articulated politically. The external crisis – people crossing borders – was placed into relation with a variety of internal crises. Parts of the economic elite had long seen migration as a strategy for labour recruitment and, as such, beneficial for the economy. Around the mid-2000s, the shortage of skilled workers, the increase in profitability in some sectors as a result of migrant workers and an expected labour shortage caused by demographic decline became important political concerns (Georgi, 2016). The CEO of Daimler-Benz, Dieter Zetsche, announced immediately after Merkel’s move to accept refugees stranded in Hungary that asylum seekers ‘could trigger a new economic miracle’ in Germany (Müller, 2015). It is therefore not surprising that some migration scholars have associated the term Willkommenskultur with utilitarian aspects of migration politics (see, for example, Castro Varela and Heinemann, 2016).

However, this more optimistic understanding has been challenged increasingly by negative, often apocalyptic narratives, resulting not only in the increasing success of right-wing populism in Germany, but also with the centrist parties adopting a more aggressive stance towards migration. The newly elected head of the Social Democratic Party, Martin Schulz, for example, tried to prove to the German public that Social Democrats were also ‘tough on migration’ when he demanded – with reference to the Social Democrats government plans in May 2017 – that ‘foreign criminals’ (a highly ideological term in itself) should be deported immediately. It is probably no coincidence that this statement was made after his party had suffered significant losses in three regional elections.

The notion of crisis has been associated with a more general feeling of decline. One has to remember that the German party Alternative für Deutschland was founded initially as a reaction to the euro crisis. The fact that northern European countries, and primarily Germany, were lending money to Greece to prevent the Greek economy from collapsing was represented in the mainstream media as if the members of the eurozone were a welfare community, and ‘we had to pay’ for ‘their failure’, as expressed in headlines such as ‘Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks’ (Schlosser, 2013) and reiterated in April 2017 when a prominent German economist proclaimed ‘We will have to pay forever for Greece’ (BILD, 2017). Although economists in the social democratic-leaning media tried to make a point about Germany’s responsibility due to its structural export surplus, the narrative about southern European failure remained hegemonic. Thus, German right-wing populism emerged as a more general reaction to a perceived loss of sovereignty with regards to the national currency, borders, but also so-called traditional values. Seen in this light, the refugee crisis represented a continuation of a series of proclaimed declines or crises that seemingly have emerged ever more frequently in the last two decades. Books with apocalyptic titles about Germany ‘abolishing itself’ ² (through migration) and many other subjects such as the end of the nuclear family, the death of the sole breadwinner, the decline of education and the demise of almost everything have become bestsellers, and have fed an atmosphere of nostalgia for an imagined golden age in which all of these things were in a much better state.

Hence, while the liberal elites sought to establish an interpretation of the refugee crisis in line with a neoliberal agenda, in which the renewal of the labour market could lead to opportunity and growth, reactionary parties and movements proposed a very different diagnosis: welcoming refugees was just another symptom of a general crisis, or rather decline, of German society.