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Javier E

Leadership and Leitkultur - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...29Habermas.html

Habermas leitkultur immigration Germany toleration

shared by Javier E on 30 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • The real cause for concern is that, as the Sarrazin and Wulff incidents show, cool-headed politicians are discovering that they can divert the social anxieties of their voters into ethnic aggression against still weaker social groups.
  • What we are seeing is not a revival of the mentalities of the 1930s. Instead, it is a rekindling of controversies of the early 1990s, when thousands of refugees arrived from the former Yugoslavia, setting off a debate on asylum seekers.
  • the idea of the leitkultur depends on the misconception that the liberal state should demand more of its immigrants than learning the language of the country and accepting the principles of the Constitution. We had, and apparently still have, to overcome the view that immigrants are supposed to assimilate the “values” of the majority culture and to adopt its “customs.”
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  • It doesn’t make things any better that today leitkultur is defined not by “German culture” but by religion. With an arrogant appropriation of Judaism — and an incredible disregard for the fate the Jews suffered in Germany — the apologists of the leitkultur now appeal to the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which distinguishes “us” from the foreigners.
  • The motivations underlying each of the three phenomena — the fear of immigrants, attraction to charismatic nonpoliticians and the grass-roots rebellion in Stuttgart — are different. But they meet in the cumulative effect of a growing uneasiness when faced with a self-enclosed and ever more helpless political system.
  • The more the scope for action by national governments shrinks and the more meekly politics submits to what appear to be inevitable economic imperatives, the more people’s trust in a resigned political class diminishes.
  • Democracy depends on the belief of the people that there is some scope left for collectively shaping a challenging future.
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