Dirk Kurbjuweit of
Der Spiegel has been embarrassing himself for years with his fawning coverage of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. See, for instance, my post of 08/05/2013,
German siesta? Or neoliberal demobilization?
Now he seems to be actually surprised at the calculating and cold-hearted posture she is now displaying on the refugee issue: "Die Kanzlerin der Grimmigen"
Der Spiegel 4:2018 20.1.2018 (print edition). Merkel had an intense year in 2015. After soundly defeating Greece's attempt to get out from under the absurd EU debt policies that were keep Greece in a state of severe depression, her image had take a hit. The cold, dogmatic, destructive stance she took in the Greek crisis had tarnished her reputation as a world leader.
Klaus Stuttmann captured this image of her in a cartoon of 28.06.2012 depicting her as Frau Fritz, a takeoff on a famous portrait of Frederick the Great, aka, Old Fritz:
Angie is saying in the caption, "Thrift, incorruptibility, efficiency and discipline: THAT's what Europe has to learn!!"
The refugee inflow to Europe has been a chronic crisis, as well, at least since 2011. But it hit an acute phase in 2015, when large numbers poured into Europe. Merkel and the EU had been handling the EU crisis according to her signature extend-and-pretend style, i.e., do enough to stave off immediate disaster but don't do the hard task of actually
solving the problem. So in 2015, the EU countries were insufficiently prepared in emergency services. And, critically, they had not made long-term plans for burden-sharing among the EU countries.
Dirk Kurbjuweit has discovered in 2018 that Merkel displays "the arrogance of power." In 2015, she announced that Germany was taking a large number of refugees that year, which turned out to be around one million. She clearly thought that she could force her EU partners, who she sometimes seems to regard more as vassals, into taking significant quotas as the refugees. It doesn't speak well of the EU governments like France and Britain that failed to take what would arguably have been a fair share of them. But Merkel had momentarily solved the problem for them.
And she got a momentary bonanza in the short-term, transforming her image from that of Frau Fritz to the Compassionate Pastor's Daughter. A
Spiegel cover that September featured her as Mother Theresa:
In that same
Spiegel, (
Der alte Kontinent 19.09.2015), Peter Müller succinctly described in inadequacy of extend-and-pretend on the refugee crisis:
Ähnlich wie in der Eurokrise die Währungsunion durch eine gemeinsame Finanzpolitik ergänzt werden muss, können Schengen und Dublin in Zukunft nur funktionieren, wenn die Europäer Asylstandards angleichen, sich auf einen festen Verteilungsschlüssel einigen und endlich damit beginnen, die Ursachen der Migration ernsthaft zu bekämpfen: Dazu gehören eine effektive Entwicklungshilfe, eine Klimapolitik, die ihren Namen verdient, und gemeinsame, legale Zuwanderungsmöglichkeiten. Fast alles Jahrhundertaufgaben.
"Zur Herausbildung einer europäischen Identität gibt es nur eine Alternative", schreibt Jürgen Habermas. "Der alte Kontinent verschwindet von der weltpolitischen Bühne." Der Philosoph hat recht. Aber die Flüchtlingskrise zeigt, wie weit der Weg noch ist.
[Similar to the way that, in the euro crisis, the currency union has to be widened with a common financial policy, the Schengen and Dublin [treaties on borders] can function in the future only if the Europeans equalize their asylum standards, come together on a firm allocation formula [for refugees], and finally start to seriously engage with the basic causes of migration. Included among them are effective developmental assistance, a climate policy that deserves the name, and common legal immigration possibilities. Almost all of them tasks of a century.
"To construct a European identity there is only one alternative," writes Jürgen Habermas. "The Old Continent will disappear from the world stage." The philosopher is right. But the refugee crisis shows how far the way still is.]
Since 2015, rightwing parties have exploited xenophobia to demagogue against foreigners and Muslims. Meanwhile, the Compassionate Pastor's daughter worked out an extend-and-pretend "solution" to contain the number of refugees from Africa and the Middle East. Literally to contain the refugees in overcrowded refugee camps in Turkey and Greece (!). In order to reduce the high-risk flights by sea from North Africa, the EU worked with what currently constitutes government in Libya to also establish refugee camps, or prisons, there. The stories coming out of there have been horrific, e.g., Emma Graham-Harrison,
Migrants from west Africa being ‘sold in Libyan slave markets’ Guardian 04/10/2017.
Deutsche Welle reports in
Outrage across Africa after report exposes slave trade in Libya USA Today 11/23/2017:
Politicians in Africa have expressed their outrage at the scandal — especially in West Africa where most African migrants originate. President of Niger Mahamadou Issoufou felt particularly revolted by the reports, summoning the Libyan ambassador to Niger and demanding the International Court of Justice investigate Libya for trading slaves.
Meanwhile the foreign minister of Burkina Faso, Alpha Barry, told the press that he had also summoned the Libyan ambassador to the capital Ouagadougou for consultations. The issue has since been added to the agenda of next week's African Union meeting in Ivory Coast, to take place on November 29 and 30.
The issue has made waves in the Ivory Coast itself — 155 Ivorian refugees, including 89 women and underage migrants, were returned from Libya to the Ivory Coast earlier this week as part of a reintegration initiative launched by the European Union. Representatives of the Ivorian government, however, said that the health of those migrants returned from Libya was in a "deplorable state."
As part of the coalition agreement among the CDU, SPD and CSU that at this writing may or may not result in a new Grand Coalition government headed bgy Merkel sets an annual "upper limit" of 220,000 per year on the number of refugees Germany will accept.
Dirk Kurbjuweit is very disappointed by this policy. "Sie ist Ausdruck einer scharfen Kurve in der Flüchtlingspolitik, von den offenen Grenzen zur harschen Abwehr." ("It is the expression of a sharp turn in refugee policy, from open borders to harsh rejection.")
That's true so far as it goes. But, as shown above, there were plenty of reasons prior to this to regard Merkel's refugee policy as more hard political calculation with a preference for extend-and-pretend measures than the vision of the Compassionate Pastor's Daughter ludicrously constructed by Merkel's admirers in 2015. Still, Kurbjuweit seems to be quite disturbed by this latest position:
Nun zeigt Deutschland ein grimmiges Gesicht, und die Bundeskanzlerin hat kein Land mehr. Das stört sie jedoch nicht. Sie sieht das alles inzwischen ohnehin ganz anders. [Now Germany is showing a grim face, and the Chancellor no longer has a country. Now she sees everything very differently anyway.]
He sounds downright heartbroken! "The Chancellor" that he admired as the Compassionate Pastor's Daughter has been abandoned by her unworthy country. And (sob!) even
she sees things differently now! Heartbreak is sad.
He's also noticed that the family-values parties have gaps in their family values:
Ausgerechnet der Familiennachzug wird begrenzt, von den Oberfamilienparteien CDU und CSU, obwohl allen klar sein muss, dass Männer die besten Chancen auf eine Integration haben, wenn sie hier mit ihren Familien zusammenleben. [Precisely the family unification {for some immigrants} will be restricted by the supreme family parties CDU and CSU, even though it must be clear to everyone that men have the being chance of being integated if they are living together with their families here.]
I hope nobody tells Dirk Kurbjuweit that Donald Trump is a foul-mouthed, woman-hating racist. He might be shocked at that revelation, too. Golly, it never occurred to him that xenophobes don't actually give a s*** about their "family values" pretensions when it comes to immigrants they regard as subhuman enemies of good German white folks!
Snark aside, he actually has a good point when he observes that Merkel's embrace of the xenophobic agenda is actually a slap in the face to voters and especially to all the volunteers in Germany who stepped up to compensate for the inadequancies of Germany's and the EU's insufficient emergency preparedness in the 2015 situation:
Nicht nur Politiker haben die Flüchtlingspolitik des Jahres 2015 getragen. Das waren auch viele, viele Bürger. Sie haben dem Staat, der nicht gut vorbereitet war, geholfen, haben Flüchtlinge willkommen geheißen, unterstützt, bei sich zu Hause aufgenommen. Sie waren Akteure der Politik, und viele sind es immer noch, weil sie dabei helfen, Flüchtlinge in diese Gesellschaft zu integrieren.
[It was not only politicians who supported the refugee policy of the year 2015. There were also many, many citizens. They helped the government that was not well prepared, they called the refugees welcome, supported them by taking them into their homes. They were political actors {in doing so}, and there are still many, because they still are there to help refugees to integrate into this society.]
Kurbjuweit also recognizes that Merkel is helping xenophobes in the AfD (rightwing Alternative for Germany) party in promoting nationalist hatreds by not only adopting their framing of the refugee issue but also adopting policies in line with theirs:
An deren Land baut Merkel gerade mit, für deren Sicht auf die Lage macht sie Politik. Natürlich gab und gibt es enorme Probleme mit Flüchtlingen. Aber es gibt auch eine hysterische Sicht darauf, die wenig mit der Realität zu tun hat. Silvester 2015/16 in Köln war fürchterlich, doch die Jahre danach haben bewiesen, dass man solche Probleme in den Griff bekommen kann. Jede Vergewaltigung ist eine zu viel, aber Recherchen des SPIEGEL (Heft 2/2018) haben gezeigt, dass interessierte Kreise dazu falsch informieren, um Flüchtlinge zu diffamieren.
Merkel is building on their land with them {the AfD}, she is making policy with an eye on them. Of course, there are enormous problems with refugees. But there is also a hysterical view of them that has little to do with reality. New Year's Eve 2015-16 in Cologne {sexual assaults on women by foreigners} was horrible, but the years since have shown that such problems can be handled. Every rape is one too many, but research by SPIEGEL (issue 2:2018) has shown that interested circles provide false information on that in order to defame refugees.] (my emphasis)
Defining the Other as a criminal, dangerous, threatening collective is standard procedure for bigots and demagogues of all sorts. Anyone familiar with the history of lynch murder in the United States will know how big a role false accusations and hysteria over sexual assault played in the murder of so many African-Americans. Sadly, the example can be multiplied many times in other countries, as well.
It's worth noting that there have been reports in the mainstream press about Russian cyber-operations using rape propaganda in exactly that way in western Europe.
As we know from long experience, countering such propaganda, from Russia or from homegrown agitators or wherever, isn't easy. Many countries, maybe all of them, have a hard core of authoritarians who are eager to believe and spread such hysteria, whether they actually believe it or not. In one way or another, advocates of democracy and decency always have to struggle with that problem at some level of intensity.
Kurbjuweit may have been starry-eyed about how the Compassionate Pastor's Daughter has been handling the refugee crisis and immigration issues. He may not have noticed in 2015. But a highly skilled politician like Merkel surely knew that whatever genuine humantiarian motives she may have had for taking on such a large number of refugees into Germany in 2015, it also had the practical advantage of giving her international image a big boost after the throttling of Greece that year. And it did, she was right about that. It also gave her a potential tool to force other EU countries to take on quotas of refugees and institute a de facto allocation formula. But that didn't work out that way.
Those of us who never bought into the exaggerated Mother Angela image of 2015 are not nearly as surprised as Dirk Kurbjuweit at the recent turn of events. As his
Spiegel colleague Peter Müller recognized even then, the EU wasn't even beginning to grapple with the real dimensions of the refugee issue. With politicians all over the EU posturing with cheap nationalism and promising the "secure the borders," that is still true in 2018. And if Turkey decides for its own political reasons to send its refugees on to Europe, how illusionary the close-the-borders blather is will become very apparent once again.
