Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies: Die Welt- "The Dominant Culture" in Germany

Above the entrance to the Reichstag building the slogan emblazoned: "To the German People". For the artist Hans Haacke implies the word "people" a "mythical, exclusionary tribal unity", a "blood relationship" and is "associated with a radically undemocratic understanding of the res publica". As an alternative Haacke brought in the atrium of the Reichstag, the dedication "the population" at.

Both solutions bring the intellectual substrate of the arguments about immigration and European integration to the concept. Are the nation states merely administrative units? Reduce to industrial sites? Are German, French, Greeks and Bulgarians "peoples", ie historical subjects, or merely bystanders "population"?

Today those who insist on a continuing role of the nation, such as the British, as Euro-skeptics apply; those that refer to a particular character of the nation state, and warn against immigration, as right-wing extremist. But the idea of the intimate connection of nation and people was not always connected to a non-democratic understanding of the Republic, as Haacke says. On The Contrary.

De Gaulle's "Europe of nations"

Winston Churchill about who rescued by his opposition to Hitler Germany to democracy in Europe, postulated a special historical mission of "English-speaking peoples". His antifascist comrades Charles de Gaulle was convinced of the "mission civilatrice" of France, argued for a "Europe of nations" and opposed the integration plans of Jean Monnet. For de Gaulle it was unthinkable that "a sovereign nation" Europe could bow to a dictum of strangers occupy "Areopagus". The demonstrators, who with him in Athens "Oxi!" - Call fought against the conditions of Ecofin and Troika, would be able to rely on the general.

Churchill and de Gaulle were quite typical representatives of liberalism of their time.Until the 70's into it, as Willy Brandt, the recruitment of "guest workers" under band, because "the boat fully" Anyway, it was an axiom that democracy can only thrive in a culturally and ethnically largely homogenous nation state.

"Demos" and "people" would have to be as congruent as possible; a welfare state should only be realized if donors and recipients stood near each quasi family. Only the United States were an exception. But even there, there was the ideology of the "melting pot", according to which the immigrants took off his old identity and was remelted into a new person, the Americans.

The boundaries of Asia and Africa

Since that did not seem possible in the Old World, after two world wars, millions of people have been pushed back and forth in order to create out of the bankruptcy estate of the European empires viable nation states. The more than 3,000-year history of the Greeks in Asia Minor was liquidated under the benevolent auspices of the League of Nations in order - to allow a Turkish national state - after the Armenian Genocide. After World War II, millions of German from Poland and Czechoslovakia were expelled. Smaller minorities of forced assimilation were exposed: South Tyrol, Basques, Catalans, Corsicans, Bretons, Gypsies and others.

That there was no reasonable alternative to the concept of ethnically, culturally and religiously unified nation-state, seemed the new nations in Asia and Africa to prove their limitations were often arbitrarily drawn by the European colonial powers and - like in Iraq - ethnically and religiously different yes warring groups together crammed into a State.

This was followed by civil wars, expulsions and massacres, often fueled by neighbors and international powers, the collapse of any law. Multiculturalism did not work, as most recently demonstrated the Yugoslavia war. Had it not for the British MPs Enoch Powell right? In 1968 he criticized a Virgil quote the liberal immigration policy. He sees, Powell said, "the River Tiber foaming with blood".

So if conservatives and new rights in Germany today instead multiculturalism and European integration in favor of a ethnopluralism, in which each nation determined within the limits of its own nation-state, its fate, so that's the first place intellectually not trivial, but has a long and quite respectable tradition;secondly, it should not be defamed as "anti-democratic"; Thirdly, one should bear in mind that such ideas for many European nations are self-evident.

Yes, one gets the impression that the German Furious Howl against unruly Greeks was only so loud because it would drown out his own discomfort at the integration of Europe by the Areopagus. Elsewhere - in the English-speaking world about - you could see the matter calmly.

There are good arguments against ethnopluralism, starting with the fact that it is unrealistic in an era of declining European birth rates. Certainly changes the character of Germany due to immigration, but the alternative would be to shrink to insignificance. Second, the historical examples that are available for nation-states no "natural" limits, and that most nation-states sought to achieve an artificial ethnocultural purity by suppressing the "other", of which the Jews could sing a song in the whole of Europe.

Multiculturalism against dominant culture

Thirdly and finally multiethnic imperial structures such as the Roman Empire, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire for centuries as amazingly resilient, most nation states have included Germany, proved to be relatively unstable structure. Even Britain, where the modern nation was born, is threatened by disintegration tendencies.

The European Union promoted the one hand these tendencies, they deprived the other hand her to the nation existentially threatening character. Another reason why it is indispensable. But the discussion about what role the nation and state people should play as behave multiculturalism and defining culture to each other, will not disappear because you questions - unpleasant place - and the questioner.