3 - Segmented Politics: Xenophobia, Citizenship, and Political Loyalty in Germany

Summary

This chapter explores the complex relationship between xenophobia and the politics of membership in the Federal Republic of Germany. The horror of xenophobic violence in the Federal Republic since unification in 1990 - with Hoyerswerda, Rostock, Mölln, and Solingen becoming shorthand for thousands of acts of right-wing violence perpetrated against foreigners - left politicians and commentators desperately searching for public policy solutions. Two main calls for change surfaced after this violence: As conservatives defined “too many foreigners” to be the problem, the solution advocated and adopted by the federal government in the early spring of 1993 was to tighten considerably Germany's constitutionally guaranteed right to asylum; as liberals and leftists alternatively defined Germany's citizenship law to be the problem - based on the principle of jus sanguinis - calls for a liberalization of Germany's restrictiveness were advanced.

Efforts to reduce complexity in order to yield pragmatic public policy solutions are common among modern Western societies grappling with difficult social problems; witness the current obsession in the United States with building prisons. Pragmatically, the drive to keep foreigners out of the Federal Republic and criminals behind bars in the United States might, respectively, reduce xenophobia and crime rates; but by identifying too many foreigners and too few prisons as the problems, the questions of why xenophobia and crime are such widespread phenomena in these societies remain unaddressed.