Recently, when I heard reports of Angela Merkel announcing that multiculturalism had "utterly failed", my first thoughts were: who is she talking about? I am German, and I have a sister whose three boys are half-Peruvian. My brother's children are part-Japanese. My partner is English. Were we all utter failures?
‘Multi-kulti' covers a grey area somewhere between co-existence and co-operation, and one hopes the German chancellor was trying to speak in favour of team-play and against mere tolerance. My guess is that Merkel wasn't talking about us, or about Poles, Italians or Greeks living in Germany, but about her country's 4 million-strong Muslim population — in which case she has still chosen her words terribly badly. The result is a faux pas uncharacteristic of a politician who has won a reputation for treading quietly in matters diplomatic.
So what made her say it? The question over how to integrate Muslim migrants and the rest of German society is hardly new: politicians and commentators have been discussing it ever since the first wave of Gastarbeiter (migrant workers) arrived in the 1960s.
If you look at the figures alone, there would be no particular reason to reheat the debate at this time: the number of Turkish immigrants into Germany in 2008 was as low as it had last been in 1983, according to Der Spiegel magazine, and the number of asylum applications is about a sixth of what it was in the mid-90s.
More Turks returned to Turkey last year than came to live in Germany, which is actually bad news for the German economy, because with the population forecast to fall by 11.6 million by 2050, the country needs every qualified worker it can get its hands on.
A recent football match might have rattled Merkel a little: a Euro 2012 qualifier in Berlin, in which Turkey fans outnumbered the home support and jeered German-born midfielder Mesut Özil, who had rejected the Turkish star in favour of the German FA's eagle. Assuming that most of the Turkey fans were Berlin-based, Merkel's interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, was appalled.
Not a mistake
"These are precisely the kind of integration deficits we are talking about," he said, "and it's not a mistake to address them". But even then the positives outweigh the negatives: Özil silenced the whistles by scoring the second goal in a 3-0 win, acting as the beating heart of a German-Turkish-Polish-Tunisian-Serbian-Brazilian team that has come to symbolise successful ‘Multi-kulti' in action. There was a time when you needed to look hard for successful examples of Turkish integration. Not anymore.
For the past 10 years, my mother has been volunteering as a German teacher for schoolchildren with reading problems in Hamburg. It used to be mainly young Turks who turned up to her classes — these days, she says, she's having as much of a problem with German children who can't read their Goethe.
Politicians tend to say stupid things when they are under pressure, but in this instance the pressure is coming from within Merkel's own party, rather than society at large. Ever since the former Social Democrat Bundesbank executive Thilo Sarrazin published a book called Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab (Germany is Digging its Own Grave) in August in which he polemicised against the ‘dumbing down' of German society through the Muslim population, the right wing of Merkel's CDU party has felt its own kind of claustrophobia.
Horst Seehofer, head of the CDU's Bavarian sister party, moved to outflank Sarrazin last week, announcing an integration programme towards German Judeo-Christian "leading culture". Perhaps Merkel and Seehofer are merely trying to close the political gap that might open up for antagonists with an explicitly anti-Islamist agenda.
Merkel's diplomatic style has made her an unusually popular chancellor — according to a recent Spiegel survey, 59 per cent of the population are happy to see her as a representative of their nation. She has to be careful that party calls for a more hardline approach don't ruin her legacy.
Philip Oltermann is an editor at the Guardian.
