Integration panic

EVEN by their own exacting standards, Germans are experiencing a lot of Angst this summer. They are still jittery after aseries of terrorist attacks in July, including two by Muslim refugees. They are also newly nervous about the 3m German citizens and residents of Turkish descent, many of whom have staged demonstrations since last month’s coup attempt in Turkey in support of its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Most Germans are wary of Mr Erdogan, who has been cracking down on opponents real and imagined at home and has requested the extradition of several suspects from Germany (see article). Between the attacks and the demonstrations, many Germans feel civilisations are clashing on their own streets.

In response to the anxiety, politicians have come out with a burst of proposals claiming to get tough on terrorists, tough on security, tough on integrating refugees—in short, tough on the whole confused range of identity-politics issues that are making Germans nervous. On August 18th the eight interior ministers of German federal states who belong to the Christian Democratic Union, the centre-right party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, met in Berlin to issue a declaration summing up the proposals. Some of these, such as adding more police, are uncontroversial. Others that are politically explosive include restricting dual citizenship and banning the public wearing of burqas (veils covering both body and face).

Germany has already tightened asylum rules in the past year—making it easier, for example, to deport refugees who commit crimes. On August 11th Thomas de Maizière, the federal interior minister, offered his own ideas to get even tougher. These range from increasing video surveillance to easing confidentiality requirements between doctors and patients, so that psychiatrists, say, can tell on people they deem dangerous (though doctors are already obliged to report such cases).

A few worry that the new measures represent panic, not sound policy. Even Mr de Maizière, a Christian Democrat himself, rejects some of his party colleagues’ more extreme ideas. He sees the burqa as a symbol of failed integration and the subordination of women, he says, but “you can’t prohibit everything you reject”.

Centre-left politicians, meanwhile, worry that the debate is veering off course. It was a government of Social Democrats and Greens that in 2000 liberalised citizenship laws, mainly so that the children of Turkish guest-workers no longer had to choose between their native and inherited nationalities. The premise was that they could then integrate better into society. (At the latest count, in 2011, 4.3m Germans had another citizenship, 530,000 of them Turkish.) If Germany now forces its Turkish citizens to choose one loyalty, says Sigmar Gabriel, the Social Democrats’ boss, that “would only help Mr Erdogan. He’s happy when we split people again, into Turks and Germans”.

Nonetheless, the debate will stay hot for the coming year, ahead of the federal election in the autumn of 2017. The campaign has, in effect, started already: two of Germany’s 16 regions, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and Berlin, will elect new assemblies next month. In both contests a populist anti-immigrant party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), is likely to enter state parliaments. In north-eastern Mecklenburg—the only state legislature where the NPD, a party considered to be neo-Nazi, is currently represented—the AfD is even polling at 19%, not far behind the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, who govern the state jointly. But the AfD puts most pressure on the Christian Democrats, who view security as part of their brand. This is why the interior ministers of Mecklenburg and Berlin, Lorenz Caffier and Frank Henkel, are the driving force behind the “Berlin declaration”.

Fears that migrants may commit terror are justified. The domestic intelligence service knows of 340 cases in which Islamic extremists have entered refugee centres in search of recruits. But banning burqas and dual citizenship will not assist security or integration. It would be disastrous, warns Wolfgang Kubicki of the Free Democrats, a liberal party, if politicians eager to translate Angst into votes jeopardised “all that makes us different from Turkey under Erdogan and Russia under Putin”.