Germany asks difficult migration questions
Is it legitimate for privately owned boats to rescue those in peril on the Mediterranean Sea? Or, as the Die Zeit headline tersely put it: Should one just leave it?
That was the question posed in a recent article in the prestigious German weekly about the right response to the challenge posed by growing numbers of refugees and migrants stranded off the coast between Africa and the EU. The appearance earlier in July in a court in Malta of the captain of the Lifeline, a boat operated by a German aid organisation, on charges of violating national waters gave it added relevance.
In the article — presented in a for-and-against debating format — one writer made the case for intervention on the basis that where politics fails private aid organisations are right to step in and save lives.
Another countered that intervention by nongovernmental groups was playing into the hands of people smugglers and has long been part of their business models.
Within hours of publication a storm had broken out on social media, quickly acquiring the predictable clutch of hashtags. Politicians and pundits lined up to condemn what they deemed irresponsible journalism: to even ask such a question was reckless, they said, inviting an unacceptable violation of the basic humanitarian principles enshrined in the opening article of the German constitution.
On the country’s main national morning radio show a professor from a Catholic university slammed the piece as “unhelpful”, warning of a “catastrophic” spiral of rhetoric and violence and adding that rescuing life was a question of human dignity.
The controversy shows just how charged the debate around the subject of migration has become in Germany, reaching into the heart of government and at one point threatening to topple Chancellor Angela Merkel. Public unease about the scale and pace of migration, and the absence of a policy for dealing with it at either a national or an EU level, is in competition with a belief in assistance as a core duty given the country’s troubled history.
The tone of discussion and the language deployed has hardened over the three years since Merkel opened Germany’s borders to more than 1-million refugees. The fabled Willkommenskultur — welcoming culture — that greeted them and projected images of an open Germany is no longer unconditional.
It is against this backdrop that the Die Zeit piece stood out. The Hamburg-based title commands a hallowed position among Germany’s liberal elites, who prize its high-minded, vaguely academic and often expansive journalism. As some commentators noted, if this bastion of liberalism was now falling prey to populist reflexes and rhetoric, then something is shifting in public discourse.
The newspaper issued a statement standing by its decision to run the article, but some colleagues of Mariam Lau, the journalist who argued the case against intervention, openly distanced themselves from her.
The weekly newspaper also ran a piece entitled Culture of debate: Are there such things as wrong questions?
Lau makes clear she would not condone letting stranded refugees perish, but feels that the NGOs, however wellintentioned, are counterproductive. She knows what it means to be a migrant. Born in Tehran, her father, an academic, was twice forced to flee his country, first from the shah and later from Iran’s theocrats. For her, the bigger question is the lack of proper EU policy on migration. Failure to create one threatens to undermine democracy.
“The fight is about the middle ground,” she says, referring to those who do not have a problem with migration in principle, as long the rules and policy are clear. Such distinctions risk getting lost in an increasingly shrill political climate.