In an article at The Week by Michael Brendan Dougherty on how “Angela Merkel is destroying Europe”, the key passage is here:
Germany thought it could assimilate newcomers. It believed it had done so before, having absorbed Turkish “guestworkers” during the 1960s and 1970s. But there are notable differences between Turks and the current refugee wave. Turkey had already undergone significant secularization. This new wave of migration into Germany is showing signs of developing some of the generational problems that mass Islamic migration has created in France. Syrian migrants find that the Arabic-language mosques in Germany, often funded by Saudi Arabia, preach a form of Islam far more fundamentalist and hostile to Western people and culture than anything they knew in Syria. Secondly, Turks came with skills that were immediately put into employment in the German economy. The new migrants are hardly working at all.
Germany was wrong. The Turkish minority in Germany is by many accounts the largest unassimilated minority in Europe. The German nationality law means that there are ethnic Turks in Germany whose grandfather was born in Germany who aren’t German citizens.
The Germans have had a project of Germanizing the European continent for at least 150 years. In the 20th century they twice attempted to effect that goal through war. For the last half century they’ve pursued their project by economic and political means.
Through their feckless policies they’re now faced with a new problem.
This is perhaps the biggest western foreign policy blunder since George W. Bush invaded Iraq and promptly lost control. The two are related, obviously. The ME was already unstable, we tipped Iraq over the edge, Syria went, and the migration wave swelled. It’s fascinating in an awful sort of way, the European reaction reminds me of an immune response, a rejection of foreign tissue. Merkel keeps pouring on the anti-rejection drugs and they’re having no effect.
Back last year when we were all arguing this out last year a point I tried to make was that it does not take two sides to make a war, just one. The Germans could be as lovely and welcoming as they liked, but if jihadis struck it would be war whether the Germans liked it or not. Love does not conquer all, nor does a desire for low-cost labor. Merkel bought her country a big, on-going problem, one that will likely persist for many years, and she may have destroyed the EU in the process. Unintended consequences, but not unforeseeable ones. If leaders are judged by end products Merkel has not been a good leader.
All aggravated, I think, by the natural human reluctance to admit error. The longer the German leadership holds on to the fiction that they didn’t make a mistake, the greater the opening for the AfD.
The German open immigration plan to try to get cheap labor was bad to begin with, and it isn’t getting any better. They need to give it up.
Steve
Has anyone thought about how much this issue is related to the widespread use of birth control that started in the 60’s and has expanded with abortion and the day-after pill, and made childbirth a purely voluntary decision? If Germans were having more babies it would solve their labor problems in (using my psychic powers here) about twenty years. Ditto the US. I mean, if you really don’t want Mexicans picking strawberries you need to grow some little farm workers of your own.
Because childbirth is far more likely to involve rational decision-making people aren’t having kids. They make zero economic sense and are rather a chore. (And as a father let me say that their logic is impeccable.)
I’ve mentioned it before. You can practically date the contraction of the American middle class to when Roe v. Wade was handed down.
2 other errors of Merkel that compounds the problem.
The first was to refuse to share the burden of the European debt crisis, and then hypocritically trying to “Europeanize” the migrant crisis, leaving Germany with no support from the Central Europeans, and left Southern Europe too weak and divided to help.
The second is Merkel’s preference to govern through “Grand Coalitions” with what should be her main opponents, the center-left. Its effect is there is no viable opposition in Germany. For Germans voters, they are left two very unappealing two choices, either continue Merkel’s policy or vote for the AfD.
I intuit that there are a lot of voters who cannot vote for the AfD, that AfD could reopen Germany’s dark past. At the same time they cannot vote to support the current policy for refugees, or they need to express their dissatisfaction at where Germany is. These voters have nowhere to go — and nature abhors a vacuum.
That Merkel got Germany into this place, barely acknowledges her mistakes coupled with actual course changes and wants to run for reelection — its shows an insularity and mental rigidity similar to another politician she is connected to, Obama.
I suspect the 2017 German election is going to the wildest and most unsettling since WW2.