Merkel holds a copy of the Turkish daily Hurriyet.
Last Thursday in Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel hosted the country’s second “Integration Summit,” which saw representatives attend from various immigrant associations representing the more than 7 million foreigners currently living in Germany. But several of the major groups representing Germany’s 2.6 million-strong Turkish community decided to boycott the high-level gathering. Further, they threatened to no longer participate in such meetings unless the German government repealed new, more restrictive immigration reform legislation. Chancellor Merkel was quick to condemn the Turkish boycott and strongly rejected any attempt to coerce the German government into revoking the bill. At the Summit, she also promised to provide €750 million ($1.1 billion) in new funding for various integration measures, including German language and culture courses and sports activities for youth. Commentators from Germany’s leading newspapers were divided over whether the Turkish groups were justified in boycotting the Integration Summit or whether this was just further evidence that Germany’s Turkish community has no real interest in integration. From the Turkish perspective, the most controversial aspect of Germany’s immigration reform package–which was passed by both houses of parliament earlier this year but has yet to be signed into law by the German President–concerns new provisions restricting the ability of foreigners to have their foreign-born spouses move to Germany permanently. First, foreigners in Germany will have to wait until their spouses are at least 18 years old before they can bring them into the country. Second, all spouses will be required to demonstrate basic German language skills before they are allowed to move to Germany. In particular, these two new provisions attempt to clamp down on a very disturbing practice that has prevented the successful integration of Germany’s growing Muslim community for far too long. In Germany (like in other European countries) Muslim immigrants have “imported” their young brides–who generally come from rural areas, have low levels of education, speak no German, and are sometimes only 15 or 16 years old–through arranged marriages. In this context, German authorities are also increasingly concerned about forced marriages involving young women and girls from Turkey and other Muslim countries being married against their will to foreigners in Germany. Obviously, the line between “arranged marriages” and “forced marriages” can be very blurry. In her bestselling 2005 book Die Fremde Braut (The Strange Bride), Turkish-German sociologist and women’s rights activist Necla Kelet provided a powerful account of the plight of young Turkish women sent to Germany to marry men they’ve never met before and to live in a country where they do not speak the language. Kelet’s book and similar publications by other Turkish-German authors like Seyran Ates and Serap Cileli are based on interviews, sociological studies, as well as partly on autobiographical material. For obvious reasons, though, it is very difficult to obtain and assess the true extent of the problem as Turkish women in Germany are often too afraid to speak out and seek legal protection in response to abuse. But Kelet’s book, in particular, has triggered a barrage of criticism. Several Turkish-German academics and journalists have accused her of overstating the extent of forced marriages by taking isolated incidents out of context and making generalized statements about the Turkish population in Germany at large. The influential Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, which has a circulation of more than 500,000 in Germany alone, accused the authors of insulting Turkish women, making the Turkish community look bad, and reconfirming German prejudices against Turks by making generalizations. But Germany’s respected conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, responded that Hurriyet‘s actions amounted to a smear campaign.
In this context, one should not forget that other European countries face very similar immigration and integration challenges when dealing with their growing Muslim communities. In France, for example, newly elected conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy has already ordered his interior minister to craft a new immigration reform package that would require family members of non EU-immigrants to acquire basic French language skills before coming into the country and also to acquaint themselves with French history and customs. In addition, according to French media reports, the proposed bill would require immigrants to sign a contract agreeing to promote the integration of their families into French society. According to the same article in the International Herald Tribune:
In Germany, Chancellor Merkel and other conservative political leaders are very concerned about the aggressive rhetoric and tactics employed by several of the Turkish groups boycotting the country’s Immigration Summit. For its part, Turkey’s Hurriyet newspaper ran a cover story on Thursday with a photo of Chancellor Merkel and the headline “Pure Racism”. At best, these unprecedented Turkish boycotts, threats, and attacks are unhelpful. At worst, they are making the integration of millions of foreigners living in Germany even more difficult by further widening the gulf between them and their new country. As the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung put it: “Germany is not a country of immigration, but a country of integration.”
