Abstract
Focusing on the psychological dimensions of the social incorporation of Syrian refugees into the German welfare state, this chapter examines the actual experience of one Syrian refugee. Through the sensual and bodily experience of encounters between strangers and citizens, it demonstrates how the welfare state creates a secure “holding environment” that facilitates the development of a capacity to care for oneself and for others. While refugee incorporation is always potentially threatening to the integrity of both the individual and social body, it can be evaluated positively with the emergence of elements of mutual belonging. It is likely to be perceived as a failure unless there is a mutual modification of the internal images refugees and residents of welfare states have of each other.
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Notes
- 1.
See Münkler and Münkler (2016, 183–213) for the most ambitious (and successful) attempt to sort through these positions and propose responses to the interlocked German and European dilemmas on asylum and migration. Among other proposals, they argue for affirming the right to asylum but are also against a general right to immigrate. My chapter essay focuses on the other side of policy, the refugee experience of incorporation.
- 2.
Although these five positions have been repeatedly critiqued and reformulated by academics (cf. Mandel 2008; Schiffauer 2008; Tibi 1998; Welsch 1999), they remain the basis for a persistent phantasmatic understanding of refugee incorporation in popular culture, and among academics and policymakers the actual experience is distinct from these phantasms.
- 3.
Experience of the welfare state is not limited to relations with the law and social welfare institutions but includes everyday interactions and relations with others that have little to do with the state.
- 4.
The new arrivals differ in key respects from prior migrants. First, most are Muslim and today associated with terror coming from the Middle East. Second, they differ in expectations, education, and culture from the two largest immigrant groups from the postwar period: the 12–14 million refugees expelled or driven from the Eastern territories (Ostgebiete) and Eastern Europe after World War II, and the several million Turkish Gastarbeiter from the 1950s to the 1970s. The one group, expellees, were already citizens of the Reich, or classified as Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) or Kulturdeutsche, with a right to return to the heart of the homeland. Except for the ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union who repatriated after its collapse in the 1990s, the strangeness of the expellees and the repatriated Volksdeutsche has lessened or entirely disappeared over time. The other group, Turkish migrants, by contrast, remain culturally strange to many Germans while at the same time, following legal reform in 2000, have often become citizens (Palmowski 2008). Both the expellees and Turkish migrants are widely recognized for their essential contributions through labor to the Wirtschaftswunder and the success of the social welfare state (sozialer Wohlfahrtsstaat).
- 5.
Internal images are, as Christopher Bollas (1992, 59) writes, “highly condensed psychic textures, … the trace of our encounters with the object world.” They precede and accompany our encounters with the world of external objects, and they are capable of being modified. In this sense, refugees are not only external but also internal objects for scholars and non-scholars, for the welfare states of Europe to which many have fled, for other refugees who they befriend, for family and friends they have had to abandon, and for the states from which they fled and which retain certain powers over them. Moreover, we are objects for refugees, and they are also their own objects, now living in environments that challenge them to objectify and modify how they see themselves.
- 6.
My own ethnographic research began in Germany in 1982 and in Syria in 1999. I had already met as children or younger siblings some of the Syrians who then later fled to Europe after 2014 (Borneman 2007). In 2015, I began a project, together with Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, on the relation of Germans to Syrian refugees. During that summer and through the fall and winter, 1.1 million refugees and migrants entered Germany; 441,899 applied for asylum, of whom 298,000 are from Syria, 79% male, 67% under the age 30 (UNHRC 2018).
- 7.
Distinctive differences mark the experience of incorporation for minimally three groups of Syrian refugees: (1) those who came with families, (2) young men between the ages of 18 and 35 who came alone, (3) those who came as youths. Serdar partakes in experiences of both the first and second groups.
- 8.
A similar account of the experiences of a single German from 2015 to the present would illustrate aspects of mutual modification, but for reasons of length I will narrate only Serdar’s interactions.
- 9.
Although the refugees whom I know think uniformly of Germany as very Christian, not only in a religious sense but also politically and culturally, most Germans are in fact only nominally Christian and think of themselves as holding to a very secular vision of social organization. On the other hand, Germans, when addressing the new arrivals, single out the religious strangeness of Muslim refugees and regularly orientalize them. In any case, German Christianity today is radically different from that practiced in the past. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 10% of Catholics and 3% of Protestants attend church. A majority of Germans under 25 claim to not believe in any religion. Today nearly all German Christian communities tend to reach out to other religions rather than define themselves against and through the exclusion of Jews and Muslims (Schuster 2018).
- 10.
See the critique by Gilman (2012), who explains how Sarrazin relies on a philo-Semitic argument about Jews having a superior genetic inheritance (and thus not a danger to Germans) to escape his racial accusations about Muslim biological inferiority.
- 11.
The former West German-born history teacher-turned politician, Björn Höecke (2018), who moved from the former West Germany to Thuringia in the former East and co-founded the radical rightwing anti-Muslim/anti-immigrant party Alternative for Germany (AfD), has reintroduced some of the Nazi lexicon into the mainstream media (which cites but largely opposes him). Other neo-fascists follow his lead. In his rhetoric Höcke now consciously uses words, which had either been repressed or only spoken on the radical fringe, with powerful mythical appeals to loss, such as Volkstöt (death of the folk), Volksverräter (betrayer of the people), and Dolchstoß (stabbed in the back) by the opening of the border to Syrian refugees in 2015. Policy-wise, he argues for mass deportations of refugees, including Syrian.
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Borneman, J. (2020). The German Welfare State as a Holding Environment for Refugees: A Case Study of Incorporation. In: McKowen, K., Borneman, J. (eds) Digesting Difference . Global Diversities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5_2
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