Germany: How much should Turks assimilate?

The Turkish prime minister has issued a “stinging rebuke” to Germany over its attempts to assimilate Turkish immigrants, said Tony Paterson in the London Independent. Touring Germany last week, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said policies encouraging Germany’s 3 million Turks to speak German rather than their native tongue amounted to “a violation of international law.” A debate over the Turkish minority’s failure to integrate has been raging in Germany since the publication last summer of the book Germany Is Doing Away With Itself, which argues that Turks in Germany have created a separate “parallel society” of Muslim culture. Chancellor Angela Merkel has recently proposed measures to promote German-language competency and job training. Erdogan said such measures were racist. “No one should be able to rip us away from our culture,” he told a crowd of some 10,000 people in Düsseldorf. “Our children must learn German, but first they must learn Turkish.”

What a demagogue, said Rolf Kleine in Berlin’s Bild. By ordering Turks in Germany to put their Turkishness above all else, Erdogan is torpedoing the integration programs German taxpayers are funding. We are the ones paying “to ensure that their children learn German right from the beginning so that they later have opportunities to get a job or an apprenticeship.” But Erdogan doesn’t care about that. Facing an election in June, he’s using Turks in Germany as an excuse to grandstand for the voters back home. Such behavior is “shabby and irresponsible!”

“Does Erdogan even know what he is talking about?” asked the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an editorial. He spoke of the “threat of forced assimilation and Islamophobia” as if Turks here were in danger of becoming persecuted in pogroms. His words have very little to do with the realities of life for Turkish families in Germany. His characterization of state oppression of religion and culture would actually be far more apt if applied to the way “his own party deals with Christians in Turkey.”

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We’re making way too much of this, said Andrea Dernbach in Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel. Yes, Erdogan gave a nationalistic speech, as many politicians do when they’re running for re-election. But let’s distinguish between words and deeds. He told Turks to stay Turkish—but then he eased their way to integrate fully into German society by becoming German citizens. Turks here stubbornly cling to their Turkish passports because they fear that relinquishing them could cost them the right to live in Turkey someday. On his trip here last week, Erdogan announced that ethnic Turks who hold German passports would be able to receive Turkish ID cards that confer residency rights in Turkey. It’s a great idea. Surely “even conservatives can see” that the increasing rift between ethnic Germans and other residents “is a threat to our democracy.” Rather than heaping abuse on Erdogan, we should have “responded with gratitude.”