{"id":4619,"date":"2016-03-18T10:37:49","date_gmt":"2016-03-18T15:37:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dooneyscafe.com\/?p=4619"},"modified":"2016-04-04T09:18:16","modified_gmt":"2016-04-04T14:18:16","slug":"letter-berlin-refugee-referendum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dooneyscafe.com\/letter-berlin-refugee-referendum\/","title":{"rendered":"Letter from Berlin: The Refugee Referendum"},"content":{"rendered":"

BERLIN–About a month before the three pivotal German provincial elections that were held on March 13, 2016, the astute New York Times\u2019<\/em> European columnist, Roger Cohen, asked a pertinent question: \u201cWill Merkel Pay for Doing the Right Thing?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Chancellor

Chancellor Angela Merkel.<\/p><\/div>\n

For those who haven\u2019t followed the details of this debate, \u201cthe right thing\u201d that German Chancellor Angela Merkel did was to admit into Germany last year more than a million refugees fleeing the now 5-year-old Syrian civil war. She did so for both moral and legal reasons. The possible political cost of this policy, as Cohen suggested, could be a drubbing at the polls once Germans got the opportunity to express an opinion by voting in spring regional elections.<\/p>\n

The regional elections \u2013 in Baden-Wurttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, both located in prosperous south-western Germany, and in Saxony-Anhalt, a struggling, unemployment-ridden province in the former East Germany \u2013 were widely anticipated as not simply judgments on particular local matters, but as a referendum on the \u201crefugee question\u201d and on the German chancellor herself.<\/p>\n

\"The

The refugee crisis.<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s an issue that has been roiling Europe ever since hundreds of thousands of civilian victims from the Syrian war began pouring out of their embattled homeland, landing in nearby countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, and then attempting to make their way to economically and politically more secure destinations, primarily in Europe, but even as far away as Canada (which settled some 25,000 Syrian refugees since the election last December of Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau).<\/p>\n

More specifically, the three German regional elections were widely foreseen as a referendum on the \u201crefugee policy\u201d of Germany\u2019s prime minister, Chancellor Merkel, the right-of-centre Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader of the country for more than a decade, who had stunned both her followers and erstwhile political opponents last year. Long seen as a \u201ccustomarily prudent\u201d conservative chancellor, as Cohen characterizes her, Merkel surprised observers when she declared in 2015, as hordes of refugees attempted to escape the Middle East, that it was the moral and legal responsibility of Europe to provide shelter in the storm of war. Germany, it was understood, carried a particular responsibility as the European Union\u2019s largest and strongest economy, and in historical terms as the inheritor of the genocidal Nazi legacy of World War II.<\/p>\n

\"Refugee

Refugee welcome.<\/p><\/div>\n

Merkel announced that Germany would accept an unlimited number of refugees from the Syrian civil war, both on humanitarian grounds and in accordance with the German constitution and international refugee law, and she urged other EU members to do likewise. This \u201cwelcoming\u201d policy, as it\u2019s known, wasn\u2019t unprecedented. In the 1990s, during the Yugoslavian wars, Germany took in more refugees, principally from Bosnia, than any other country on the European continent. However, the displacement from Syria was exponentially larger in terms of the numbers of people involved. As a result of Merkel\u2019s policy, Germany admitted a million refugees in 2015, and proposed to \u201cintegrate\u201d them into a country of 82 million inhabitants.<\/p>\n

The statistics vary considerably between United Nations and German interior ministry reporting agencies, and there are distinctions to be made among Syrian, Afghan and Iraqi asylum seekers as well as sizeable numbers of \u201ceconomic refugees\u201d from non-war torn nations in, for example, North Africa, but it\u2019s safe to say that Germany has taken in more refugees than any other country in Europe during the current Middle East conflict. \u00a0While the percentage of newcomers is proportionally small (about 1.5 per cent) in relation to the population, it\u2019s nonetheless an enormous number of people to accommodate.<\/p>\n

The international legal basis for such a policy, it should be noted, is the 1951 \u201cConvention relating to the Status of Refugees\u201d (or, for short, the \u201c1951 Refugee Convention\u201d), a United Nations multilateral treaty agreed to in Geneva that defines who is a refugee, and sets out both the rights of individuals who are granted asylum and the resp0nsibilities of nations that grant asylum. The refugee convention, which is not to be confused with the Geneva Conventions about the conduct of war, has been updated in the more than half-century since its establishment, mainly to expand the responsibilities of its more than 145 signatory nations. German constitutional law, in accord with the refugee convention, is known as the “Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (Article 16a, [Right of Asylum], para. 1-5). There has been some debate in Germany on the legal fine points of the Basic Law, and especially on whether the numbers of refugees can be limited, but most experts I\u2019ve spoken to believe that Germany\u2019s high courts would not only uphold the legality of Merkel\u2019s policy, but would be likely to require its enforcement.<\/p>\n

As Cohen noted about the then looming provincial elections, \u201cit seems inevitable the far-right Alternative for Germany Party [AfD] will surge. Merkel will be blamed. Her support has already tumbled.\u201d Recent polls showed that her approval ratings had dipped below 50 per cent, compared with 75 per cent a year before \u2013 \u201cand that\u2019s with a strong economy,\u201d Cohen adds. \u201cShe could be vulnerable if her Christian Democratic Party turns on her,\u201d and some of them already have. But, warns Cohen, \u201cEurope without Merkel will sink.\u201d<\/p>\n

And then the columnist asks his pertinent question: \u201cSo why did this customarily prudent chanceller do it?\u201d Why did she craft the refugee welcome policy, and tell her citizens, \u201cWir schaffen das<\/em>\u201d (\u201cWe can do it.\u201d)? Cohen\u2019s reply is, \u201cBecause she is a German, and to be German is to carry a special responsibility for those terrorized in their homeland and forced into flight. Because she once lived in a country, East Germany, that shot people who tried to cross its border. Because a united Europe ushered Germany from its darkest hour to prosperity, and she is not about to let the European Union pitch into mayhem on her watch \u2013 as it would with more than a million ragged refugees adrift. And yes, because she has a heart.\u201d (Roger Cohen, \u201cWill Merkel Pay for Doing the Right Thing?\u201d, New York Times<\/em>, Feb. 14, 2016.)<\/p>\n

The last remark is Cohen\u2019s response to former social democratic chancellor Gerhard Shroeder\u2019s criticism that Merkel\u2019s policy was a \u201cmistake,\u201d because Merkel had a \u201cheart, but no plan.\u201d (Shroeder, who is Merkel\u2019s predecessor in the chancellorship, has since gone on from electoral politics to become a business executive at Russia\u2019s Gazprom energy firm.) It\u2019s true that the influx of refugees in Germany has been logistically chaotic as a strained bureaucracy scrambles to find even office space to process the paperwork, and improvises to temporarily house asylum seekers in such places as giant airplane hangers at Berlin\u2019s former Tempelhof Airport. But as observers like Cohen insist, the question of heart may, for once, be more important than the admittedly messy practicalities of shelter and integration.<\/p>\n

\"AfD

AfD leader Frauke Petry.<\/p><\/div>\n

The above, then, is the basis of Cohen\u2019s claim that \u201cMerkel did the right thing.\u201d Naturally, the claim is arguable\u2026 loudly arguable, as it\u2019s turned out. Its most vehement opponent is the 3-year-old Alternative for Deutschland Party (AfD), which was a rag-taggle group of right-wing populists until Dresden-born chemist, Frauke Petry, 40, pulled it together by focusing on the refugee question last year as the crisis broke and refugees spilled across Europe\u2019s mostly open borders. It was Petry who suggested that police should shoot at refugees \u201cas a last resort\u201d to prevent unregistered asylum seekers from entering the country.<\/p>\n

The AfD has an unofficial ally, as well as some overlapping membership, in a protest movement based in Petry\u2019s eastern German hometown, Dresden. The group is known as Pegida, which stands for the cumbersome moniker, Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, and it has been conducting anti-immigration and anti-refugee demonstrations since 2014, although Pegida\u2019s protests haven\u2019t really caught on in other German cities, and the Pegida protesters have often found themselves outnumbered by anti-fascist counter-demonstrations. Still, both Pegida and the AfD have found an angry, if xenophobic, constituency who have been roused by the refugee crisis to make their voices heard.<\/p>\n

While internal opposition to Merkel\u2019s stance on refugees has been confined to a worrisome but parochial minority, her main political problems have been external, namely, opposition from the 28-member state European Union. Apart from Germany and Sweden, most of the EU members have been reluctant, to put it mildly, to take in significant numbers of the estimated 4 million Syrian asylum seekers.<\/p>\n

\"Turkish-Bulgarian

Turkish-Bulgarian border.<\/p><\/div>\n

EU members with explicitly right-wing governments, such as Hungary and Poland, simply don\u2019t want to accept any refugees and want Europe\u2019s borders to be closed. Even those with a greater degree of sympathy for the refugees have begun calling for limitations on the assimilation of those seeking refuge. Germany\u2019s own president, Joachim Gauck, recognizing the logistical nightmare entailed by the crisis, recently observed, \u201cA limitation strategy may even be both morally and politically necessary in order to preserve the state\u2019s ability to function.\u201d He warned, \u201cIf democrats refuse to talk about limits, they leave the field open to populists and xenophobes.\u201d A quarter-century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, many European nations are building new walls, fences, and locked gates.<\/p>\n

Finally, the German debate over refugees is but a small part of a far larger international context that involves an overlapping set of wars and lesser but intractable geopolitical tensions. The players engaged in the conflict begin with the embattled Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad and an array of internal if splintered opposition forces; the dramatis personae include the so-called Islamic State, holding territory in both Syria and neighbouring Iraq; and to complicate matters further, there is a roster of countries, ethnic groups and religious institutions \u2013 the U.S., Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and a half dozen other Middle Eastern nations among them \u2013 all with separate, sometimes intersecting, more often conflicting, interests, goals and strategies.<\/p>\n

Asking voters in provincial German elections to take all that into account is a lot, even for those in the more sophisticated sectors of the electorate. Many, of course, would simply like to see the refugee issue disappear and they want to hear the voices of politicians who \u201ctell it like it is,\u201d in the style of U.S. presidential aspirant Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

2.<\/p>\n

Even in the midst of multiple provincial campaign rallies that required the chancellor\u2019s presence, from Mainz in the west to Magdeburg in the east, and in the middle of fraught negotiations between the EU and Turkey where she\u2019s a principal player, Merkel rather remarkably stuck to the principles she had established. In a late-February Leap Year interview with the German public broadcaster, ARD, Merkel warned fellow EU members that the continuing crisis could not be allowed to plunge Greece, where refugees had been landing in large numbers after perilous sea voyages from Turkey, into chaos and closed borders.<\/p>\n

\"Bavarian

Bavarian CSU leader Horst Seehofer.<\/p><\/div>\n

She also defended her open-door policy for migrants, rejecting any limit on the number of refugees Germany would accept, despite the pending provincial elections as well as open divisions within her government. Horst Seehofer, the leader of the CDU\u2019s sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the premier of the prosperous 12-million person south-eastern province of Bavaria, complained about Merkel\u2019s government that \u201cwe don\u2019t currently have a state of law and order. It is a rule of injustice,\u201d he said, which in German suggests comparisons with the former undemocratic East Germany.<\/p>\n

Merkel replied that there was no \u201cPlan B.\u201d \u201cSometimes, I also despair. Some things go too slow. There are many conflicting interests in Europe,\u201d she told TV viewers. \u201cBut it is my damn duty to do everything I can so that Europe finds a collective way.\u201d She added, \u201cThere is so much violence and hardship on our doorstep. What\u2019s right for Germany in the long term? There, I think it is to keep Europe together and to show humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Merkel

Merkel at German football match.<\/p><\/div>\n

She also, for good measure, denounced sporadic attacks on groups of refugees as \u201crepulsive\u201d and \u201cunjustifiable.\u201d All in all, it was a rare, perhaps heroic, political moment. It was unusual even for Merkel, who is notorious for muddling through on a range of issues. Heretofore, her most decisive moments seemed to be cheering for the German national football team at international soccer championships.<\/p>\n

Now, for a variety of deep-seated reasons, Merkel had taken an unbudging stand in favour of an idealistic humanitarian approach to the most difficult political issue of the day, and stuck by it in the face of unpopularity and a price to be paid at the ballot box. She appeared to be reminding constituents that the possible \u201cprice\u201d to be paid, in terms of expending her \u201cpolitical capital\u201d as well as a chunk of the German budget, hardly compared with the mortal price being paid by the Syrians themselves. At the same time, the \u201cprofile in courage\u201d needn\u2019t be exaggerated: the de facto<\/em> situation on the ground, which includes border closings in several European countries, as well as a negotiated temporary ceasefire in Syria itself, has somewhat de-intensified the overall crisis in recent weeks. \u00a0(Martin Farrer, \u201cWe can\u2019t allow refugee crisis to plunge Greece into chaos, says Merkel,\u201d Guardian<\/em>, Feb. 29, 2016. See also, Philip Oltermann, \u201cMerkel faces key test of refugee policies in German regional elections,\u201d Guardian<\/em>, Mar. 9, 2o16.)<\/p>\n

A fortnight later, Germans in three provinces went to the polls in unprecedented numbers. Pre-election polling foreshadowed AfD gains that would produce double-digit results in all three provinces and that\u2019s what happened. The AfD took 15 per cent of the vote in Baden-Wurttemberg, 12.5 per cent in Rhineland-Palatinate, and a notable 24 per cent in Saxony-Anhalt, to become that province\u2019s second largest party. Much of the right-wing vote came from those who previously hadn\u2019t bothered to vote, but some of it was peeled off from former CDU voters. Voter turnout increased across the board, running at about 70 per cent levels. The AfD, already represented in five German provinces, will now hold seats (and increased numbers of them) in half the country\u2019s 16 provincial legislatures.<\/p>\n

At the same time, all three provincial incumbent premiers held on to their offices, despite the overall decline of the \u201cmainstream\u201d CDU and Social Democratic (SPD) parties. Nonetheless, the initial press reports emphasized the rejection of Merkel\u2019s policies and party: \u201cMerkel\u2019s party suffers drubbing in German state votes,\u201d declared Reuters news agency (Mar. 13, 2016); \u201cSetback for Angela Merkel as Far Right Makes Gains in Germany,\u201d said the New York Times<\/em> (Mar. 13, 2016); and \u201cGerman state elections: Success for right-wing AfD, losses for Merkel\u2019s CDU,\u201d announced Deutsche Welle.com<\/em> (Mar. 13, 2016).<\/p>\n

\"Baden-Wurttemburg

Baden-Wurttemburg map.<\/p><\/div>\n

However, the \u201ctopsy-turvey logic of the current political situation in Germany,\u201d as one reporter described it, wasn\u2019t as simple as an angry surge in support for anti-refugee forces. Baden-Wurttemberg provides an interesting example of that logic. It\u2019s an historic stronghold of the CDU, but in the previous provincial election of 2011, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, although voters gave the CDU a 39 per cent plurality, under Germany\u2019s proportional representation voting system, the second ranked Green Party, with 24 per cent of the vote, formed a ruling coalition government with the third place SPD, at 23 per cent, and Green leader, Winfried Kretschmann became the provincial premier.<\/p>\n

\"Green

Green leader Winfried Kretschmann.<\/p><\/div>\n

Kretschmann, playing against type \u2013 a mid-60s gent with a white brush-cut rather than, say, a hip or counter-culture younger environmental politician — turned out to be a surprisingly popular choice. What\u2019s more, the Green premier was a consistent and enthusiastic supporter of Merkel\u2019s refugee policy, far more so than this year\u2019s CDU candidate, Guido Wolf, who made a point, as did other conservative provincial candidates, of distancing himself from Merkel\u2019s position. By contrast, Premier Kretschmann was such a vocal supporter of the chancellor\u2019s open-border stance that some conservatives labelled him Merkel\u2019s \u201cstalker.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the 2016 Baden-Wurttemberg election, the outcome had surprises other than the right-wing accession to office. For the first time in the province\u2019s recent history, the Greens became the leading party with just over 30 per cent of the vote, and Kretschmann, the supporter of Merkel\u2019s refugee policy, was re-elected. The CDU declined by 12 per cent to 27 per cent and a second place finish. The SPD had an equally poor showing at under 13 per cent, which dropped the social democrats to fourth place, behind the AfD\u2019s 15 per cent. How much of Kretschmann\u2019s re-election can be attributed to his position on refugees and the contrasting more distanced position of his local CDU opponent, is not known, but it\u2019s suggestive, because something similar happened in neighbouring Rhineland-Palatinate province.<\/p>\n

\"Rhineland-Palatinate

Rhineland-Palatinate map.<\/p><\/div>\n

There, the Social Democrat incumbent Maria Luise \u201cMalu\u201d Dreyer, another supporter of the open door refugee policy, marginally increased the SPD\u2019s vote to 36 per cent to remain the province\u2019s leading party. The CDU\u2019s candidate, Julia Kloeckner, often touted as a possible successor to Merkel, but who also distanced herself on the refugee question, finished second with nearly 32 per cent of the vote (about a 3 per cent decline from the previous election). There was also the AfD 12.5 per cent success, and a sharp decline for the local Green Party. Again, the coalition arrangements will see the Social Democratic incumbent remain in power.<\/p>\n

Finally, there\u2019s Saxony-Anhalt, a former eastern German province that has had relatively less contact with refugees than most provinces, but whose fears of being overrun by foreigners are inversely high compared to its experience. The province\u2019s impoverishment and unemployment no doubt contribute to its psychological antagonism to possible newcomers with strange cultural habits. However, the CDU dropped only 3 per cent of its vote there, and retained its first place position with 30 per cent, as well as securing the re-election of premier Reiner Haseloff. The Left Party, the SPD and the Greens all saw declines, and a surge of new voters produced a second place finish for the AfD with 24 per cent of the vote.<\/p>\n

Haseloff was the only CDU politician to win a provincial election, although as recently as last November, the CDU had been leading the polls in all three provinces, while the AfD remained stagnant at around 5 per cent. \u201cThe real leap happened shortly after New Year\u2019s,\u201d Haseloff reflected, \u201cagainst the backdrop of the events in Cologne\u2026\u201d During New Year\u2019s celebrations there, in the city centre where large crowds traditionally gather, hundreds of women experienced unwanted sexual approaches and assaults, and identified their assailants as \u201cArab-looking\u201d males. Although the event was a national scandal, it remained unclear if recent refugees were among the attackers, but the general ethnic profiling was enough to affect the attitude toward refugees. \u201cThat was when we saw a high double-digit leap for the Alternative,\u201d said Haseloff, \u201cand I noticed that internal security in Germany became the decisive question in refugee themes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the initial verdict of a drubbing for Merkel, by the next day, at least some of the press was saying that the \u201cAfD\u2019s remarkable gains don\u2019t tell the whole story.\u201d Said one Guardian<\/em> analyst, \u201cThe prevailing narrative in swaths of the press \u2013 that the results are a rejection of Angela Merkel\u2019s refugee policy \u2013 is simplistic.\u201d Even in Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD did best, the governing CDU dropped only 3 points, and exit polls reported that \u201ca substantial majority of voters across all parties, except the AfD, prefers an open and tolerant society to a traditional one.\u201d In Baden-Wurttenberg, where Kretschmann\u2019s Greens finished first for the first time, nearly one in three former CDU supporters opted for Kretschmann, citing refugees as the reason for the switch.<\/p>\n

In all three elections a majority of voters backed parties that supported Merkel\u2019s refugee policy. Researchers also reported that 55-60 per cent majorities in Baden-Wurttenberg and Rhineland-Palatine supported Merkel\u2019s management of the refugee crisis, while in Saxony-Anhalt a 49 per cent plurality said the chancellor was managing the issue \u201cbadly.\u201d As Germany\u2019s Die Zeit<\/em> newspaper put it, \u201cA million immigrants later, Germans are shaken, but Germany\u2019s civil society has shown its resilience.\u201d That\u2019s a far less dramatic reading of the situation than the alarmist headlines about a resurgent right-wing. (Alberto Nardelli, \u201cGerman elections: AfD\u2019s remarkable gains don\u2019t tell the whole story,\u201d Guardian<\/em>, Mar. 14, 2016; Philip Oltermann, \u201cGerman elections: the candidates who backed Merkel\u2019s refugee stance \u2013 and won,\u201d Guardian<\/em>, Mar. 14, 2016.)<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, the Merkel government announced it would stick by its existing refugee policy, in the wake of the provincial elections. The chancellor promptly turned to delicate EU negotiations, both internally, and externally with Turkey, with whom Merkel seeks to strike a deal on the handling and treatment of Syrian refugees. Die Zeit\u2019s <\/em>politics editor, Bernd Ulrich, in an article headed, \u201cGermany stays cools,\u201d argued that voters had demonstrated a \u201cdeep sense for quality and authenticity\u201d when it rewarded \u201ccharismatic and self-effacing\u201d premiers like the Greens\u2019 Kretschmann and the SPD\u2019s Malu Dreyer, while punishing candidates who had come across as schemers by campaigning \u201cfor the chancellor, but against her politics.\u201d Ulrich added, \u201cTwo-thirds have voted for parties who support Angela Merkel\u2019s relatively liberal refugee policy or stood for an even more liberal course.\u201d (Philip Oltermann, \u201cGermany won\u2019t change policy after gains for anti-refugee AfD party,\u201d Guardian<\/em>, Mar. 14, 2016.) The chancellor\u2019s refugee policy has gained her new admirers in the centre and on the left. As a writer for the centre-left Suddeutsche Zeitung<\/em> put it, \u201cMerkel is growing out of being a workaday politician. She comes across as statesmanlike; she is becoming Germany\u2019s first stateswoman.\u201d<\/p>\n

3.<\/p>\n

Beyond the electoral struggles, beyond the establishment in Germany of right-wing political parties similar to those throughout Europe, and beyond even the hotly-debated refugee policy, there\u2019s a deeper question. It\u2019s seldom openly discussed, but the leftist Slovenian philosopher and political commentator Slavoj Zizek addressed it directly, when he said, \u201cThe true question is not \u2018are immigrants a real threat to Europe?\u2019, but \u2018what does this obsession with the immigrant threat tell us about the weakness of Europe?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

When pundits and prognosticators search for a rationale to explain the degree of support expressed for opposition to the refugees, much of the talk in Germany echoes the attempts to explain the \u201cstraight-talking\u201d Trump phenomenon in the U.S. The people are angry, it\u2019s proposed; against the political establishment, the public wants to hear voices of authenticity, those who \u201ctell it like it is.\u201d But of course, Trump and his counterparts in Europe don\u2019t at all tell it like it is. In fact, anything but. What such allegedly authentic \u201coutsiders\u201d tell people is what they want to hear, what they already believe. Zizek\u2019s criticism of such psychological fantasies that present themselves as authentic truth is to the point.<\/p>\n

In talking of the growing fear of refugees, Zizek points out that \u201ceven if most of our prejudices about them were proven to be true \u2013 they are hidden fundamentalist terrorists; they rape and steal \u2013 the paranoid talk\u2026 tells more about us, Europeans, than about immigrants.\u201d<\/p>\n

He advises that, \u201cthere are two dimensions here which should be kept apart. One is the atmosphere of fear, of the struggle against the Islamisation of Europe, which has its own obvious absurdities. Refugees who flee terror are equated with the terrorists they are escaping from. The obvious fact that there are terrorists, rapists, criminals etc., among the refugees, while the large majority are desperate people looking for a better life\u2026 is given a paranoid twist. In this version, immigrants appear (or pretend) to be desperate refugees, while in reality they are the spearhead of a new Islamic invasion of Europe. Above all, as is usually the case, the cause of problems which are immanent to today’s global capitalism are projected onto an external intruder. A suspicious gaze always finds what it is looking for.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other dimension we should be careful of, Zizek argues, \u201cis the humanitarian idealization of refugees. This dismisses every attempt to openly confront the difficult issues which arise when those who follow different ways of life\u201d become cohabitants, for fear of condoning the views of the neo-fascist right.\u00a0\u201cEverything \u2018bad\u2019 about the other is dismissed\u2026 what we believe\u00a0we encounter as the \u2018authentic\u2019 other when we truly open ourselves up to them, the good, innocent other, is also our ideological fantasy.\u201d Zizek recommends that we should neither demonize nor idealise the refugee \u201cother.\u201d The task, he says, \u201cis to talk openly about all the unpleasant issues without a compromise with racism.\u201d<\/p>\n

But rather than phantasizing about others at all, we ought to look to ourselves, Zizek proposes. Such self-inspection would not produce \u201ca generalized cultural relativism, but something more radical and interesting. We should learn to experience ourselves as eccentric, to see our customs in all their weirdness and arbitrariness.\u201d<\/p>\n

The more radical perspective that is needed, Zizek claims, is \u201ca deep existential experience by means of which it all of a sudden strikes us how stupidly meaningless and arbitrary our customs and rituals are \u2013 there is nothing in the way we embrace and kiss, in the way we wash ourselves, in the way we behave while eating\u2026\u201d that is either \u201cnatural\u201d or necessary.<\/p>\n

Finally, \u201cthe point is thus not to recognise ourselves in strangers, but to recognise a stranger in ourselves \u2013 therein resides the innermost dimension of European modernity. The recognition that we are all, each in our way, weird lunatics, provides the only hope for a tolerable co-existence of different ways of life,\u201d says the Slovenian thinker. (Slavoj Zizek, \u201cWhat our fear of refugees says about Europe,\u201d New Statesman<\/em>, Feb. 29, 2016.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Germany, voters go to the polls to assess Angela Merkel’s refugee policy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":167,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[17,31,22],"tags":[1079,1083,239,1081,1088,1086,1085,1084,1082,1087,1080],"ppma_author":[1531],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLetter from Berlin: The Refugee Referendum - dooneyscafe.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/dooneyscafe.com\/letter-berlin-refugee-referendum\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Letter from Berlin: The Refugee Referendum - 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