The Politics of Immigration. Is Germany moving towards a Multicultural Society?

The topic of immigration is never simple. Questions such as 'who belongs to society?' and 'how do you define national identity?', or 'what values are needed to maintain a coexisting society?' are extremely difficult to answer. Global migration introduces unprecedented challenges for conceptualising the integration of immigrants. On a European scale, Germany can be said to represent the first destination for immigrants since its unification in 1989. On a global level, Germany is the second largest immigrant receiving country after the United States. Nevertheless, only recently has Germany recognised and admitted that it is an ethnically and culturally diverse society. Before the 1998 elections, successive governments have always stuck to the maxim that Germany is 'not a country of immigration'. The infamous phrase came under increased pressure with the electoral victory of the Red-Green coalition in 1998. New laws regarding immigration, integration and citizenship were on the agenda with the aim of replacing the traditional ethnocultural model of German nationhood with a more liberal and modern model by moving away from the concepts of Volk and ius sanguinis. The conservative CDU, however, accused the Schroder government of trying to jeopardize German cultural identity, causing a fierce debate known as the Leitkultur (Guiding culture) debate. On the one side of this debate there were the conservative CDU politicians who viewed Germany in ethno-nationalist terms, while on the other members of the Green Party and the SPD, who attempted substituting the 'volkish' tradition with a multicultural model of citizenship that guaranteed universal human rights. The aim of this study is to assess which of these two models are currently prevailing in moulding immigration and integration policy. Has the progressive left achieved its objective of moving away from the traditional ethnocultural and assimilationalist model defining citizenship towards a more inclusive multicultural model?

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Chapter 3 Citizenship and Integration in Germany:
If the infamous Kein Einwanderungs Land assumption has been left behind, has the integration of the foreign population become easier? Has the naturalization of immigrants, especially from the Turkish community, become less difficult and has the perceived division between 'us' and 'them' been reduced? Is there still a contrast between the treatment reserved to the Turkish community and that held in reserve to the ethnic Germans, and if so, is it linked to the different notions of assimilation and integration? This chapter is going to test the hypothesis that immigrants are still expected to assimilate rather than integrate.
3.1 The 2000 Nationality Act:
In 2001 Roger Brubaker described the German citizenship policy as an "egalitarian apartheid, an institutionalized separateness, suggested in the oxymoronic phrase unsere auslandische Mitburger - our foreign fellow citizens." Whilst the provocative statement does arguably present a degree of truth, the 2000 Nationality Act represents a major first step towards a more pluralistic view of the concept of citizenship and has considerably facilitated the previously arduous task of becoming a German citizen. As Frank Eckardt declared, "for the first time in German history the immigrants' right to integration is recognized".
Right after the historic election win in September 1998, Schroder's coalition worked on an ambitious law proposal with the objective of facilitating the naturalisation process for foreigners by introducing the principle of ius soli and, most controversially, dual citizenship for foreign children born and raised in Germany. In a memorable speech to the Bundestag two months after his appointment as Chancellor, Schroder motivated his ambitious plan to reform the citizenship law:
"For far too long those who have come to work here, who pay their taxes and abide by our laws have been told they are just 'guests'. But in truth they have for years been part of German society. The government will modernise the law on nationality. That will enable those living permanently in Germany and their children born here to acquire full rights of citizenship. No one who wants to be a German citizen should have to renounce or deny his foreign roots. That is why we will also allow dual nationality. This is responding positively to the realities in Europe. Our national consciousness depends not on some law of descent of Wilhelmine tradition but on the self-assured democracy we now have".
Schroder's words clearly highlighted the strong determination and the high expectations embedded in the law proposal. However, the CDU/CSU counterpart, who defined citizenship in ethno nationalist terms, fiercely opposed the proposal of dual citizenship because in their view it would not encourage integration, but instead persuade the 'new' citizens to have divided loyalties. Wolfgang Schauble, at that time head of the CDU, argued that "regularly allowing dual citizenship is poison to integration as well as to domestic order." The intense political debates that followed ignited the anti-immigrant sentiment of public opinion and the centre-right coalition decided to ride the wave by taking the debates to the streets and calling for a national plebiscite on dual citizenship right before the upcoming regional elections to the state parliament in Hessen, the region surrounding Frankfurt, in February 1999. The petition against dual citizenship incredibly received more than five million signatures and the whole campaign of the CDU in Hessen focused on the opposition to the proposed citizenship reform. As a matter of fact, public surveys showed that over sixty three per cent of Germans were against the reform. Consequently, due to the exceptional public mobilization organized mainly by Edmund Stoiber, the arch conservative Bavarian chairman of the CSU, the SPD/Green government faced a striking defeat in what had traditionally been the stronghol