For many, however, the we proves to be fragmented and split. A powerful social fear holds sway in today’s ethnically heterogeneous society, one which revolves around ourselves and the threat that seems to be posed by others. There is talk of a fear of foreign infiltration and even a fear of terror. But who is afraid of whom here?
In Fear of Small Numbers, a book written under the shadow of 9/11 and published in 2006 by Arjun Appadurai, an Indian-born globalization theorist living in the USA, Appadurai points out the pervasive anxiety regarding the incompleteness of our collective existence in societies of our kind. By societies of our kind, Appadurai means the societies in the OECD world. As long as the nation state was viewed as a self-evident container for modern society, one which promised a sufficient degree of social security to its inhabitants and the same political rights to its citizens despite unevenly distributed economic power, there was a framework for the unity of differences. Appadurai was thinking of the consolidated nation states in the post-1945 era, which moved past the violent processes of their unification by excluding foreign populations and embracing native ones.1 Of course, even afterward there were disputes between established populations and newcomers which, according to Norbert Elias, were conducted with ugly blame-gossip and harsh rebukes. The power to define the criteria by which different life customs are valued is held by those who successfully assert their claim to have been there before the others who showed up later.2 Power is secured through the authority to ascribe value. But over time, people became accustomed to a growing plurality of communities of “common descent,”3 and they accepted the realities of mutual entanglements for the benefit of all. Italian restaurants, Greek tailors, Turkish metalworkers in the car industry, and Vietnamese eye doctors are part of the fabric of society. The shy, homesick “domestic foreigners”4 who would meet in front of the train station on the weekends and keep to themselves with their fear that eats the soul have, in many cases, become perfectly normal citizens who finance their own homes and defend their children’s secondary schools. In terms of exhaustion anxiety and educational panic, they are no different than their “domestically grown” neighbors in the same social situation.
The nation state was the roof under which social relationships were gradually restructured through the acceptance of other ways of life and new life energies. The generalization of value relations in the wake of the cultural upheaval of 1968, the expansion of entitlements through the grand coalition of social policy, and the internalization of comparative perspectives through tourism, pop culture, and TV shows created the conditions for the inclusion of citizens with very different migration stories.
But since nation states have found themselves compelled – through a complex interplay of purposeful liberalization from within and forced deregulation from without, which has come to be known as globalization – to open their borders to capital, information, goods, services and, ultimately, people, the lovely image of the gradual integration of outsiders and incremental change through others no longer seems tenable for the inhabitants of the perforated container. With the opening of the Iron Curtain, the expansion of the EU, and the establishment of refugee routes across the Mediterranean, an image has emerged among the middle class in the “postnational nation” of a fortress to be defended against “intruders.” These intruders are thought to slip through holes in border fortifications and hide in the Trojan horses of refugee centers, and there seems to be no controlling them. The cry that goes up in the face of mass-media images of the plight of refugees – namely, that “we can’t be the welfare office for the whole world!” – illustrates the irresolvable inner ambivalence between human compassion and human coldness. We see the lost souls striving to reach Europe from Africa in unseaworthy boats and we certainly don’t want to blame them for their terrible fate, but we recoil at the idea of opening the floodgates to endless streams of migrants. Empathy for the individual is thus mixed with a fear of the mass.
For Appadurai, the fear of a population’s incompleteness begets the horrors of cleansing and fortification. The defensive argument here usually mixes elements of demography, education, and culture. There are only a few of them now, so the argument goes, but there will be more and more because this hungry population has such a high birth rate. These are marginally qualified people, or so it’s feared, who will put even more strain on our welfare system, which is already overloaded on account of our own restrained birth rates. These people are from a different cultural circle who close themselves off from their environment and will thus remain foreign bodies in our country. This minority is merely the precursor to a majority that will eventually push us to the margins. And we must therefore fend them off if we do not want to die out.
But the actual tipping point in our sense of security was the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001, which involved non-German students from Hamburg who had appeared entirely unremarkable up to that point. Who are these people living among us as sleepers for years, waiting to be deployed in the war against the West? In 2006, Hans Magnus Enzensberger speculated about the “radical losers” in a global social sorting process who are gripped by an agonizing feeling of aggrievement and humiliation which demands a grandiose expression of rage.5 Ever since then, our relationship with strangers has been tied up with the fear of Islamic fundamentalism.
Muslims who identify themselves as such or are identified by others feel that they are suddenly being viewed as strangers in their own country. The headscarf question – when one dares pose it at all – can very quickly turn into a test of the emancipation level of a Muslim woman. “I am the way I am” is the only possible answer. This exoticization of the other changes the entire scene for the objects of this gaze. The looks thrown their way are not just suspicious, they harbor a latent fear. Without a single word being spoken, the other is forced into a position of having to justify himself. Can I help it if I look like a solemn Arab who has sworn allegiance to the suffering of his people? I am one, but I’ve lived in this country since I was 5, and I’ve been a citizen since I turned 18.
Situations such as these bring into focus our fear of strangers in the crowd. The xenophobic gaze that sees immigrants as competitors in the fight for scarce resources has, since 9/11, merged with an underlying fear of Islam. Islam does not correspond to the image of the private and sentimental religion that seems appropriate to a functionally differentiated society with no center and no apex; instead, it presents itself as a public and naïve religion6 to which one professes faith through signs that are visible to all, and which sets nonnegotiable boundaries through definitive doctrines and precisely defined liturgical practices. Unlike the Catholic church, however – which also insists on codified rituals and requires its followers to repeatedly profess their faith in a loud voice in every Holy Mass – Islam resembles Protestant churches and dominions in that it does not recognize a supreme authority with a holy status. This gives rise to the outward impression that there is enough room within the framework of Islam for selfappointed radical interpreters who would not hesitate to declare a state of emergency against dissidents and enemies. In this case, the rule of God means self-rule against foreign rule.
The Muslim who naturally eats no pork and drinks no alcohol, who also fasts to a certain extent and never passes a beggar without giving alms, senses within himself the defiant inclination to appear to be how others expect him to be. For him, Islam is not a strict and rigid religion that one must obey absolutely, it is a way of life that does not ignore life’s transcendental point of reference. Certain customs and practices can be of service here, which are naturally expressed all the more clearly the more one feels the pressure to live a leveled-out lifestyle of unaffectedness and abandon.
Why should I be understanding of the fears of those who have gone mad? What right do they have to expect me to make the first step toward understanding in a difficult situation? When will we have to stop justifying ourselves?
One side is afraid because it feels threatened by a minority, and the other because it feels threatened by the majority. And both sides, which have very unequal opportunities, suffer from a fear of the incompleteness of their collective existence. It is not possible to maintain the imaginary concept of an ethnically homogeneous milieu, however, either for the established majority or the minority that arrived later. Considering the fact that around half of all schoolchildren in major German cities have a migration background, neither the Germans of German descent nor those of non-German descent can keep to themselves in the long run. The Germans are no more of a self-contained unit than the Ottomans or Arabs or Europeans. These are ultimately abstract identifiers that are loaded with intense feeling but mask extremely variable concrete categorizations. If people insist on the idea of a collective we nonetheless, then the question is what new kind of social we will form in contrast to which other in an ethnically heterogeneous milieu.
The foremost aspect of this is that immigrants no longer want to be perceived as immigrants. Tuncay Acar, a musician and cultural events organizer who was born in Munich as the son of a Turkish “guest worker” and who founded the Göthe Protokoll network in his hometown, fumed on his blog when he heard about an art project in which a “person with a migration background” would guide spectators through an “immigrant neighborhood” of Munich: “Like hell am I going to explain my ‘sketchy immigrant neighborhood’ to you for the three thousand and five hundredth time! Am I a puppet or what? It’s your neighborhood too, dammit. Just look at it. It’s your country too, your city, your history…”7
It is obvious that the symmetry of fear evoked by terror requires a third position. This is only normatively defined – using the political vocabulary of trans-migrancy – by the term “people of color.” At the moment, the focus is on not forbidding either of the two imagined sides to feel their fears. Then perhaps those involved will realize that the fear for themselves immediately provokes the fear of others.