By John Foster
If Germany does it, Europe will follow.
It’s an easy conclusion to draw when Berlin reinstalls border checks. Especially when a centre-left government takes the decision.
Olaf Scholz made it in response to Alternative für Deutschland’s victory in Thuringia two weeks ago.
With the Brandenburg vote on Sunday, polls predict his party will again lose to the Afd.
It’s hard to imagine Scholz prevailing in the former East German state. The numbers speak for themselves.
The chancellor might reduce the AfD’s win slightly, but not enough to make a difference.
The German government’s decision to reinstate border checks is deceptive. It’s within the letter, although not so much the spirit of the law as laid down in the Schengen Agreement, allowing freedom of movement in the European Union.
More disturbing is what it says about the current Social Democratic government’s policy direction, which now seems to be pandering to far-right voters.
The immediate cause for this policy is easy to divine. The mass stabbing event in Solingen in August, in which three died and eight more were wounded, was perpetrated by a Syrian asylum seeker.
In the wake of this criminal act, AfD swung into action to exploit the event to push its racist, anti-immigration agenda.
This is what happens when we let foreigners in was their message. Not just any foreigners but Muslims and Arabs.
Publicly discussing the possible political implications of such an event is not inappropriate. The German government was right to do that.
What’s wrong is its reactionary solution. It’s racist.
One of the most outrageous tactics employed by the right in the United States is to insist that, in the wake of gun violence and massacres, the immediate aftermath is not an appropriate time for political debate.
In the first place, this is pure cynicism on the part of a faction that defends gun ownership and the over-proliferation of assault rifles in American society.
Given that mass shootings have become a regular occurrence in the US, the implication is that the topic can never be discussed because the mourning periods of the various atrocities run together.
After Solingen, AfD leader Alice Weidel demanded a five-year moratorium on immigration, naturalisation, and asylum.
Weidel blamed “forced multiculturalism” promoted by the government, making it clear by implication precisely which cultures she thought to be at fault.
Presumably, her tune would have been different if the perpetrator had been, say, Irish.
Björn Höcke, an unapologetically Antisemitic member of the AfD’s delegation in the Thuringian Landtag, had typically immoderate comments to add.
Höcke called politicians who did not share his commitment to choking off immigration (by non-whites)“mental arsonists” and claimed that they had created an environment in which such crimes could happen.
Let us pause for a moment to consider the underlying reality of crime in Germany.
As in the United States and many other places, the volume of right-wing rhetoric about crime seldom trends in the same direction as the frequency of actual crimes.
According to the Bundeskriminalamt, crime decreased in Germany by 10% between 2017 and 2021, although the number of refugees and asylum seekers entering the country increased dramatically since 2015.
True, foreign-born people feature in crime statistics at higher rates, but taking such numbers in the raw is misleading.
A disproportionate number of asylum seekers are young men (the demographic group most likely to offend irrespective of national background).
Asylum seekers experience poverty and discrimination at higher rates than other social groups, which is another driver of criminal behaviour.
Finally, refugees and asylum seekers often tend to violate immigration laws, thus putting them in the classification of lawbreakers absent any more compelling reason.
There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that refugees and asylum seekers are more prone to commit acts of violence than native-born Germans (or French, or Danes, or what have you).
They are more likely than average to shoplift, but, of course, that’s (once again) true of poor people, regardless of where they were born.
Different circumstances give rise to different behaviours, and shape the meaning of those behaviours, as Anatole France noted when he wrote that “[t]he law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under the bridges of the Seine, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread”.
One wishes to ask the likes of Weidel and Höcke whether and why they would be more comfortable with a situation in which Germans were going around stabbing other Germans. As far as the statistics go, they’re no less likely to do so.
To be clear, that’s not the point. For the cynics of the AfD, the tragedy in Solingen (this one, not the time in 1993 when neo-Nazi arsonists burned five members of a Turkish family to death) is merely a prop for their continuing idee fixe that brown people are a danger to white folks.
The depressing thing about this is that Olaf Scholz’s response to this sort of populist demagoguery is, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” The results of the recent elections in Thuringia and Saxony have created a background against which this tired old saw makes political sense.
A party interested in leading and not simply prostituting itself to the lower impulses of the braying masses might have considered addressing the problem’s actual causes.
The German government might also have considered whether there was an actual problem in the first place.
However, given that something terrible happened and cartel party governments have to control narratives being pushed by the opposition, there is no chance that the SPD-led coalition would get this right.
So, assuming that something had to be done (and to be seen to be being done), the government chose to adopt a watered-down version of their Alternative für Deutschland’s policy.
This piece of crack political triangulation has three central problems.
1) It has precisely zero chance of preventing further events such as the one in Solingen because 2) it does nothing to address the circumstances (poverty, alienation, etc.) that are predictors for it.
And worst of all, 3) it makes it look as if the government views the AfD approach as correct but doesn’t have the guts to implement it with sufficient vigour.
The perpetrator of the Solingen attacks had been in the country for nearly two years, during which, so far as anyone knows, he didn’t stab anyone.
He was twice denied asylum and was likely to be sent back to a war zone. This doesn’t excuse his crimes, but it does (when combined with economic and demographic factors) help explain them.
Placing further restrictions on refugees and asylum seekers will not make Germany safer. Failing to properly care for vulnerable people who are, by and large, living in poverty will do just the opposite.
The SPD has found the worst of both worlds, allowing the conditions that drive criminality to fester while providing the impression that AfD has the solutions.
The poet Robert Frost once described a liberal as “someone who can’t take his own side in an argument”.
The German government seems intent on adhering to this self-defeating logic and committing political suicide.
For the Social Democrats to challenge the far right, they have to offer genuine alternatives to scapegoating and xenophobia.
Coopting the Alternative für Deutschland’s nationalism only weakens the centre-left and makes voters want the real thing.
Schengen is dead and the Germans are responsible.
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Photograph courtesy of Brian Burger. Published under a Creative Commons license.