248   Frani$-Oíaf Radtke
Multicultiiralism in welfare states: the case of iiermany
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The process of ethnic formation of migrant workers and their families in Germany must be discussed in the framework of the concept of political pluralism on the one hand and, on the other, the specific condition of the social democratic type of welfare state both of which seem to reflect conflicting principles. [This essay sets out to discuss]: (1) that migrants did not arrive in Germany as 'ethnic minorities' but were created as such as a result of the historic condition of the German nation state; (2) that there is in Germany unlike in other immigration countries no ethnic mobilization in terms of an ethnic bottom up movement which could efficiently claim group interests; (3) that multiculturalism has an unintended effect by transforming social conflicts into ethnic ones and has made them irreconcilable.
A precondition of the functioning of the liberal model of political pluralism is the chance for individuals to articulate and give voice to certain kinds of interest by forming interest-groups. The ability and power to organize one's interest depends, in the market model, on the equality of individual opportunities and rights. Only those interests which can be organized and confronted efficiently with conflicting interests will have the chance to become part of the social compromise in which the distribution of the social wealth is regulated. Common interest in the pluralistic concept cannot in advance be defined in political programmes but appears a posteriori as a result of the free game of social powers.
Within the normative model of liberal democracy the task of the state is endowed with the monopoly of force, to make sure a minimum of rules and norms which form the constitution are voluntarily maintained. Liberalism is based on the idea of a division of powers which is more exactly a division of social spheres: the public sphere and the private sphere. Both spheres are composed ofdifferentsystems, each of them dominated by different principles.
In the public sphere is situated the political system where political participation is organized and state decisions are made and administered within bureaucratic organizations. The governing principle is the equality of universal human and political rights summed up as citizenship, symbolized in the right to vote and to be elected. The system of science, arts and the media also belongs to the public sphere but is strictly separated from the political system. It Is governed by the freedom of opinion and the privilege of error. The core of the public sphere is formed by the economic system of the markets of goods, labour and services; this most dynamic system is ruled by the maxim of competition, rivalry and advantage. The youngest but nowadays one of the biggest systems in modern societies has become the educational system which
Multiculturalism, welfare states and Germany   249
has made socialization and education a public task. It is ruled by the principles of achievement and meritocracy and by the principle of homogeneity which strives to build a national identity by means of language and culture.
The religious community of ethics is situated in the private sphere. During the modernization process in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe it has more or less been expelled from the public sphere and is now based on the individual freedom of faith. The core of the private sphere is formed around the family which is historically the oldest part of society and one organized on the archaic principles of kinship and descent. Around the family there is the wider community of friendship and neighbourhood which is held together by the principle of exclusiveness (Rex 1986; Walzer 1992).
Political pluralism will work only if the different spheres are separated and their ruling maxims are not confused. But there is no pure realization of the concept of strictly separated spheres anywhere in the world. All existing societies that devote themselves to political pluralism have difficulties in keeping principles, institutions and practices distinct. Conflicts arise especially at those lines where institutions have only recently differentiated themselves or have (been) moved from one sphere to the other. That is the case, for example, with religion which was only recently moved to the private sphere but which frequently intervenes with moral standards into the political ('abortion') or educational system ('school prayer'). Other examples are when the private community claims particular ('cultural') rights ('mother tongue*) in public education; when market principles undermine or political restrictions repress science, art, religion or education; when the state intervenes with regard to the principle of equality ('gender') into the labour market or into the privacy of the family etc.
Conflicts of this type are constitutive in plural societies and are part of the process of social change and modernization. The way they are solved gives every society a specific historic appearance. The decision over, for example, whether there should be more morality in the economic system or more commercialization in the science and art systems or more equality in the labour market or more cultural particularity in the education system is subject to political debate and is the outcome of conflicting interests. The existing pluralist societies can be differentiated along these lines.
The programme of the social democratic type of welfare state intentionally crosses the distinctions between the spheres and systems under the title of prevention and intervention. In this concept the task of the state is not only to guarantee certain formal rules and equal rights in the political process of conflict solving but also to create social justice by balancing individual disadvantages. The idea is that the principle of equality (of rights and chances) should not only be valid in the political system but has to be extended to an equality (of outcomes) in the other systems, too. Not satisfied with the mechanisms of self-control and -regulation by non-regulation in the market system, the state
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250   Frank-Olaf Radtke
define the common welfare in advance. Starting with interventions into the economic system, the state occupies more and more of those tasks which in the Uberal model are related to the market, to non-governmental organizations and
self-organized interest groups. The importance of the civil society of organized interests (unions, federations, companies, professions, parties, movements) is
reduced and transformed if the state claims an overall competence of problem solving.
An outstanding characteristic of the social democratic type of welfare state is the legal regulation of all social relations and the emergence of a client system This tends to overthrow the old class relations (as group conflicts in the economic system based on solidarity) as well as the functioning of civil society (based on self-organization of social and cultural interests). This also establishes a direct relation between the individual and the state by splitting up interest groups such that their members are isolated against each other and become competing receivers of benefits and substitute payments. The civil society vanishes or is ousted to the private sphere. Freedom is seen to be 'time free of work' and public affairs become the domain of professional politicians and party managers. The process of individualization opens up an empty space between the bureaucratic state and the individual. The necessity of self-organization is superseded in as much as the individual has contentions and claims to make which result from premiums or social rights. Social and political participation is reduced to periodical voting in general elections; political parties are changed from interest groups to 'people-parties' worldngas clearing organizations to transmit state interest.
A stepped clientelism may emerge if existing organizations of the civil society which organize interests or provide services or care for the socially disadvantaged become dependent upon state money to fulfil their tasks. This is the case where the state follows the subsidiarity principle delegating its duties to private institutions, e.g. private companies or the churches or church-run welfare organizations. The clientele of the state are organizations which have aclientele of individuals themselves. In both cases the dependency is reciprocal: the institutional or individual client will try to present himself as fitting into the programme of the patron; the patron will continue to exist only if he has the lasting support and trust of his cUentele. To compensate its notorious deficit the welfare state may not withstand the temptation to use civil institutions as instruments of policy implementation. At this point, civil society is transformed into a corporatistic system where individual rights and claims are only recognized as group rights depending on membership to certain categories. The liberal model of competing interests ends up in patronage, lobbyism and
paternalism.
The German model of the 'social market economy' follows the concept or the social democratic type of welfare state even if it was initiated after the Second World War by neo-conservative Christian Democrats. There is a high -.^■„...-.f „f -nm inron™nnnicm mm rhf prnnnmir.. rhe cultural and the
Multicuituralism, welfare states and Germany   251
educational systems, even into the religious and family spheres. Adebate on the limits ol the welfare state has only recently begun, and apolicy of deregulation, j-C. withdrawal of the state from several fields of activity, is now taking place.
The condition of the German welfare state together with an ethnic nation state tradition has shaped and sustained the way the state acted towards migrant workers. Until recently [West] Germany never considered itself an immigrant country, although more then 20 million people from eastern and southern Europe immigrated into the territory of the [former] Federal Republic between 1945 and 1989, among them 5 million 'guestworkers' and their families. West German capitalism, confronted with asecond socialist German state,presented itself as a system of social security. Unlike other immigration countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, but also the UK and France, immigrants in Germany are granted most of the social benefits provided to citizens but enjoy no political rights which would enable them to assert their interests effectively. Nobody can legally enter [West Germany] without immediately being endowed with nearly the full range of social rights. From the beginning of the recruitment of guestworkers in the 1950s until 1973, when a recruitment-stop was d eel ared, the migrant workers were formally granted working conditions and social benefits equal to the German workforce (which could not prevent them I rom getting the badly paid and dirty jobs). None of the trade unions was interested in having a situation of competition between a German workforce and the legally weakened immigrants who would have to accept any payment and any working conditions - a strategy that eventually brought about illegal work.
Immigrant workers are on the one hand integrated into the social security system but on the other hand not admitted to the political arena. This is due to the ruling interpretation of the German constitution of 1949 which is in essential parts built on the concept of the 'jus sanguinis', reserving citizenship to ethnic Germans based on blood. As non-citizens, foreigners do not have the right to political rights. They can not themselves struggle for their interests in the political system and have to find deputizing majority speakers. These conditions have made them prototypical clients. Private welfare organizations offered their services.
In the [former] Federal Republic of Germany social welfare under the subsidiarity principle is partly the task of private social welfare organizations which are nearly completely subsidized by state money. They are linked to the churches and the trade unions and thus are ideologically fixed. The care for the 'Ausländer' opened a new field of social work but also new spheres of interest: there was a pastoral-missionary interest not to let the uprooted migrants fall into moral disorientation or the influence of communist propaganda but there was also an interest to get state money to run the organization. To that purpose welfare organizations first created a 'guestworker problem3. As there are competing welfare organizations the growing number of migrants in the
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252   Frank-Olaf Radtke
organizations it became necessary to find criteria for the sharing out. The differences of language and religion were emphasized: (1) the Catholic CARITAS got the (Catholic) migrants from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Croatia; (2) the Protestant DIAKONIE got the non-Catholic but Christian migrants from Greece; and (3) the ARBEITERWOHLFAHRT, a non-denominational organization close to the trade unions, got the non-Christian (i.e. Muslim) immigrants from Turkey and the Maghreb.
From aprofessional point of view it was a pragmatic decision to homogenize the client groups along the lines of language to make communication easier by way of specializing the translating capacities. The decisive factor here - one especially important for the process of ethnicization - was the emphasis on religion - a marker migrants themselves would not have used. The combination of language and religion for professional and administrative purposes created 'cultures', and subsequently 'ethnic groups', whose special needs the welfare organizations had to meet through particular measures.
In Germany today the language of the 'guestworkers' and the denomination or non-denominational orientation of the welfare organizations, turns out to be the hidden scheme of what, since the 1980s, is also in Germany called the 'multicultural society'. Language differences were charged with religious ones and then reintroduced into the society, re-emphasizing a difference that during the process of modernization and secularization had already lost its social importance. Migrants were turned into representatives of their national culture.
The organizations had created the cultures which they were to look after in the comingyears by the installation of a system of counselling centres, support systems, learning courses etc. Migrants were no longer dealt with in their social roles as workers or family members, workless and/or homeless, pregnant, school failures, alcoholics, drug addicts etc. but seen from an ethnological viewpoint as representatives of their national culture of descent. Regional studies were conducted to get an idea of the difficulties and conflicts of a life between cultures. This approach opened a new field of operation for social advisers, and often resulted in an endless stereotyping of, especially, Turkish youth and Turkish women (who became the preferred object of social research). Detailed reports of the way of living in a village in Anatolia, in comparison with the living conditions in the German inner city, were used to draw conclusions and make prognoses about the migrants' ability or competence for integration. The differentiation of cultural, instead of social, characteristics offered the chance to constitute groups whose members' behaviour is deterministic. In this way pre- and intervention strategies need not be individualized, but instead can be applied to whole national groups.
When a public discourse on the limits of the welfare system arose, the situation of divided social and political rights allowed the state, after 1975, to start a policy of chicanery and nasty administrative tricks to expel those
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Multiculturalism, welfare states and Germany   253
politics of social cutbacks and the restriction of living conditions, migrants themselves had no political means to oppose discrimination; hence they were only to avoid it as best they could. Legal action was taken whereby a group was created within the population whose members were the object of discrimination and paternalization at the same time. Without any power or right to political action, migrants needed deputy speakers and therefore became a permanent topic of the discourse of the majority. In the media migrants were presented as being illegitimate participants in the social welfare system or as victims of discrimination. All participants in the debate following their own aims and interests established a discourse about the migrants and not a dialogue with them.
The terms of the debate among the majority population began to focus attention on the immigrants' abilities and willingness to integrate into the majority culture. In the course of this assimilationist debate, migrants were no longer dealt with in terms of their legal status ('Ausländer') but turned into 'strangers'. The difference of passport was changed into a difference of 'culture'. 'Ethnicity' as an important issue and a category to draw differences was once again in German history, wilfully introduced into the society to discriminate against a social group.
The response of the benevolent part of the society, especially that of the Protestant churches and the welfare organizations, was to adopt the concept of 'multiculturalism* imported from the US and the UK. Multiculturalism was the only way to keep on dealing with cultural and ethnic differences in a positive way. The welfare organizations which, for organizational and professional purposes had once described society in terms of religious and language differences, now tried to get rid of the ghosts they had called up by turning unwanted immigration into a programme of cultural enrichment.
Parallel to the discussion in the social welfare organizations, welfare and labour market politicians who saw themselves confronted with demographic problems in the indigenous population also changed their viewpoint. To stabilize the social security system and to release future labour markets, they welcomed immigration. Loolcing for a fitting ideology to reconcile those who were afraid of the strangers, they picked up the idea of multiculturalism and painted a colourful picture of a society of cultural plurality in an integrating Europe.
To find an explanation for extremely high quotas of school failures among migrant children, last but not least educationalists in school referred to cultural differences and cultural conflicts. They adopted multiculturalism and transformed it into a concept of intercultural education. It is very rarely implemented in the daily school life, but has the advantage of allowing teachers and headmasters to talk and conform with the benevolent part of the majority by way of offering excuses for the unacceptable outcomes of their schooling practices.
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254   Frank-Olaf Radtke
of 'Germanness* which after the Second World War had been totally tabooed. If the minorities had a national identity, why should the indigenous people not
- definitely after the 'reunification' - feel German? The ethnic formation of the minorities 'from above' opened the floor for a new nationalism in the majority
- a defensive nationalism of resentment induced by the political parties in the course of election campaigns to legitimate social cuts and economic disturbances following the national euphoria.
Having no political rights and being the discriminated and/or paternalized object of the discourse of the majority, the minorities in Germany can not take advantage of theprogramme of multiculturalism to organize and to struggle for their own affairs; instead they had to accept help - individually in the client role.
One small exception where migrants as group representatives have a chance to articulate their interests is found in the 'Committees of Foreigners'. Their task was to inform the decision-makers (at the municipal level) about migrants1 interests and claims. Only half the seats were reserved for migrants while the rest were given to representatives of social welfare organizations who felt themselves in charge of migrants and again acted as deputy speakers. During the 1980s, however, the members of these committees in several cities were elected by the migrant communities themselves. Although migrants now have the right to be heard in some city parliaments, they are far from being part of the majority representation with equal participating rights (Bommes 1991). The number of participants in these migrant 'elections' is very low not only because of the symbolic meaning of the vote but also because social and political differences within migrant populations can hardly be represented within a quota system.
The modus of these para-elections together with the discourse of multiculturalism for migrants made it advisable to present themselves as ethnics emphasizing their cultural heritage. Having no space in the public sphere except as the subject of exploitation, paternalism, advice and help, migrants in the German context were ousted to the private sphere and forced to follow the 'communal option' intensifying their ethnic links. They formed ethnic homogeneous communities around religious and traditional symbols not only to protect a cultural identity in an unfriendly and sometimes racist environment but also to present themselves in the way that the majority wanted to see them. There is a strong interaction between the policy of multiculturalism and the cultural acting out of minorities and their representatives. When the city of Frankfurt, for example, establishes an 'Office for Multi-Cultural Affairs', people who want to get help, advice or money from the office have to present their problems with reference to their ethnic origin. If there is, for example, a conflict between a tenant and a landlord, let's say about noise and smell in a fast-food shop, then the office will surely intervene if one of the conflicting parties plays the ethnic card. The noise and smell must be identified as ethnic noise and smell. The shopkeeper therefore has to be labelled as or to present himself as it._..i-:_l> ^_ .-------—:„! —„ii:„*. „ru;^u ^mnl.4 ko t\-,r> tvcrtnncíViilit-v nf the
Multiculturalism, welfare states and Germany   255
'Office of Public Order' in to an ethnic conflict between representatives of two national cultures.
The effect of multiculturalism in connection with clientelism is not ethnic mobilization but self-ethnicization of the minorities. As long as they do not have any political rights and as long as there is no policy of equal opportunity or affirmative action - and this is an important difference from the situation in die USA and the UK - multiculturalism inevitably ends up in folklorism. Minorities in Germany are kept away from the public sphere and invited by the legal system to form apolitical communities ('Gemeinschaften') in the private sphere instead of interest groups. The communal option in the German context will not favour ethnic corporatism as a means to struggle for one's rights. It is regressive and of doubtful value for coping with the problems of a modern society which follows the social democratic type of welfare state. It is regressive in the psychoanalytic sense of going back to former states öf the psychogenetic development where the basic triad of 'individual', 'patria' and 'mother tongue' is reconstructed. Here, 'fundamentalism' finds fertile soil. And it is regressive in a historic sense as it prolongs differentiation patterns once invented in the nineteenth century which have no solving capacity for the global problems of die twenty-first century. Ethnicization and self-ethnicization bring about the danger that the division of the public and the private spheres which is a condition of modern functional differentiated societies is replaced by secret undeclared segregation.
Societies which are subjected to clientelism are characterized by a process of d is socialization, individualization and singularization. Privatism, egocentrism and the decay of univers alistic orientations enforceparticularistic thinking and acting. Political philosophers and increasingly politicians recommend a recollection of the idea of 'community' (cf. Taylor 1989) for the majority, too. Multiculturalism appears as a form of 'communitarism' promising the solution for the post-modern decay of the society. This might be a serious fallacy. The functioning of pluralism depends on bargaining processes concerning conflicting interests with common rules and shared values. Organized interest groups, in the concept of pluralism, are thought of as 'pouvoir intermediaire' (in the Montesquieu sense) which guarantee the rules of the game in their own interest. Particularistic communities based on ethnic s elf-definition or external labelling are not able to guarantee the minimum consensus that is essential for pluralism because the principle of their organization is exclusiveness. When it comes to the questions of cultural identity, religious norms etc. differences become irreconcilable and compromises are reduced.
Multiculturalism translates the concept of a plurality of interests into a concept of a plurality of descents. Thus it offers, in the empty space between state and the individual, not an autonomous group but the believed community of those who have in common certain quasi-natural characteristics as religion and language. Multiculturalism is only a reversal of ethnocentrism. When ever
256   Frank-Olaf Radtke
draw differences remain the same. As long as ethnic differentiation is exclusively an issue for minorities, the German society is not really affected. But if the pattern of ethnic differentiation overcomes the majority as a national backlash - for example in the case of refugees and asylum seekers or in relation to the former 'brothers and sisters' in the connected territories in East Germany -then the fundamental principles of the republic are touched. Multiculturalism encourages such a development where ethnic differences are reified, revitalized and scientifically subsidized instead of deconstructed, reduced and demystified.
REFERENCES
Bommes, M. (1991), Interessenvertretung durch Einfluss, University of Osnabrück,
Osnabrück. Rex, J. (1986), The Concept of a Multi-Cultural Society, Centre for Research in Ethnic
Relations, Occasional Papers, University of Warwick, Coventry. Taylor, C. (1989), 'Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate', in N.
Rosenblum, Liberalism and the Moral Life, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Mass. Walzer,M. (1992), Zivile Gesellschaft und Amerikanische Demokratie, Rotbuch Verlag,
Berlin.
igration Theory, Ethnic Mobilization and Globalization
t causes u f m igration
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[Since the 1960s], 30 years immigration has emerged as a major force throughout the world. In traditional immigrant-receiving societies such as Australia, Canada and the United States, the volume of immigration has grown and its composition has shifted decisively away from Europe, the historically dominant source, towards Asia, Africa and Latin America. In Europe, meanwhile, countries that for centuries had been sending out migrants were suddenly transformed into immigrant-receiving societies. After 1945, virtually all countries in western Europe began to attract significant numbers of workers from abroad. Although the migrants were initially drawn mainly from southern Europe, by the late 1960s they mostly came from developing countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Middle East.
By the 1980s even countries in southern Europe - Italy, Spain and Portugal - which only a decade before had been sending migrants to wealthier countries in the north, began to import workers from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. At the same time, Japan - with it slow and still declining birth rate, its ageing population and its high standard of living- found itself turning increasingly to migrants from poorer countries in Asia and even South America to satisfy its labour ueeds.
Most of the world's developed countries have become diverse, multi-ethnic societies, and those that have not reached this state are moving decisively in that direction. The emergence of international migration as a basic structural feature of nearly all industrialized countries testifies to the strength and