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Contesting ethnic immigration:
Germany and Israel compared
F entangled as victim and perpetrator during th
century’s darkest hour, Israel and Germany adopted curiously similar
policies of ethnic immigration after World War II. Both states welcomed
newcomers as ‘immigrants’, that is, for permanent settlement and
membership in the national community, only if they qualified ex ante as
co-ethnics, that is, members of the state-defining majority nation. This
sets an interesting counterpoint to the reverse development in the new
settler nations, such as Australia or the United States, which shifted after
World War II from ethnicity and race to culturally neutral criteria of
immigrant admission, most notably individual skills and family unification. This is not to deny the fundamentally different perceptions of
these immigrations in both cases, most notably the denial by Israel and
Germany that their ethnic immigrations were ‘immigration’ at all, but
rather the ‘return’ of co-ethnics. However, this self-perception conflicts
with the fact that in each instance we are dealing with the admission by a
state of non-citizens (or ‘aliens’) for more than temporary stays on its
territory, which in common sense, as well as in international migration
law (Plender ), constitutes ‘immigration’.
Despite basic similarities, ethnic immigration in our two cases is
marked by sharply differing trajectories: while Jewish immigration to
Israel shows no sign of weakening, the parallel ‘return’ of ethnic Germans to Germany has, in principle, come to an end, in a law of that
limits the status of ethnic Germans to persons born before . The
purpose of this article is to account for this variation, emphasizing differently structured political spaces for contesting ethnic immigration as
an explanatory variable. We thus offer an interpretation of ethnic
immigration that differs from the conventional perspective on the
underlying type of immigration policy, which links it ‘straight-line’ to
deep-seated and relatively fixed ethnic conceptions of nationhood (for
Christian J, European University Institute (Florence).
Zeev R, Hebrew University (Jérusalem).
Arch. europ. sociol., XLIII, (), -—-//-$. per art + $. per page © A.E.S.
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Germany, see Brubaker ; for Israel, see Weiss ). However, our
stress on the political mechanisms that either shore up or undermine
ethnic immigration is not to deny the important role of ethnic understandings of nationhood in the setting-up of ethnic immigration policies; only they tell us a little about the further course and the sources of
possible contention surrounding ethnic immigration policies.
In the first part, we offer a brief phenomenology of ethnic immigration policies, and identify some shortcomings of linking them too closely
to ethnic conceptions of nationhood. Secondly, we trace the different
origins and justifications of ethnic immigration in Israel and Germany.
While ethnic conceptions of nationhood were clearly involved in the
ideological articulation and legitimization of ethnic immigration in both
cases, geopolitical factors were no less important for getting ethnic
immigration started—the perceived demographic need for Jewish
immigrants in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict in Israel, World
War II consequences, and the Cold War in Germany. In a third step, we
argue that the change or persistence of this geopolitical context and
different historical connotations of ethnic immigration in both cases
explain the different directions that ethnic immigration took in the s.
Due to these factors, there was more political space in Germany than in
Israel for an effective contestation of ethnic immigration policies.
Describing and explaining ethnic immigration policies
While there has been considerable recent theorizing on the determinants of ‘normal’ immigration policies, such as interest-group pressure
(Freeman ), autonomous legal systems (Joppke ), subnational
mobilization (Money ; Karapin ), and supranational norms
and regimes (Jacobson, ; critical Guiraudon and Lahav, ), the
specificities of ethnic immigration policies have largely escaped scholarly attention. Hence, it may be worthwhile to delineate some characteristics of this type of immigration policy.
Israel and Germany’s policies of ethnic immigration are part of a
larger family of immigration policies that screen newcomers according
to ethnic, racial, or national-origins criteria. Such schemes differ along at
least three dimensions (). First, some ethnic immigration policies
screen according to the citizenship (in the formal sense of nationality or
() These dimensions are inductively derived from a study of eight countries, which is currently being conducted by Christian Joppke.
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state membership) of the would-be immigrant, while others select on his
or her ethnicity proper. Selecting on citizenship is categorical and
generic, based on the simple presence or absence of the requisite state
nationality (). By contrast, selecting on ethnicity proper draws the state
into the murky terrain of examining individual ‘identity’ claims, which
is an altogether more elaborate—and problematic—procedure than the
former. Moreover, the latter creates an incentive on the part of would-be
migrants for ‘creative ethnic reidentification’ (Brubaker : ),
even for fabricating the requisite ethnicity, for which one may assume
the legal and moral threshold to be lower than for fabricating passports.
In fact, the multiplication of ‘false’ co-ethnics would pose a serious
challenge to both the German and Israeli ethnic immigration policies in
the s, opening the space for what we call ‘restrictive’ contestation.
Secondly, some ethnic immigration policies give preference to certain
ethnic or national-origin groups according to their putative proximity
(but essential difference) to the state-bearing nation, whereas others are
based on the putative sameness of immigrant group and state-bearing
nation. Examples for ‘proximity’ are the U.S. national origins quota of
(see King ), the preference for Italians in early postwar French
immigration policy (see Viet ), or the still effective preference for
‘Hispanic’ or ‘Lusophone’ immigrants in Spain and Portugal, respectively. All of these were or are justified in terms of the ‘assimilability’ of
immigrants and preserving the ‘homogeneity’ of the receiving society.
An example of ‘sameness’ concerns ethnic Germans and Jews, who are
believed to be not similar to but identical with the state-bearing nation.
Whereas proximity schemes are justified in terms of homogeneity and
assimilation, and thus in terms of state and society interests, sameness
schemes are couched as the right of the ethnic migrant, to be held
against the receiving state. In the German case, the right of return is a
constitutional right, enshrined in Article of the Basic Law; in Israel,
it is formally a statutory right, but ideationally a natural right that precedes the existence of the state.
Finally, some ethnic immigration policies restrict eligibility according to the time and place in which ethnic claims are raised, while others
do not. On this dimension the German and Israeli cases ultimately take
opposite positions. The German Law of Return was designed as a
temporary remedy for the consequences of war and expellation, cover() Examples of citizenship (or country-oforigin)-based ethnic immigration policies are
the national origins quota in place in the United States until , or—to quote some
contemporary examples—the preferences in
Portuguese and Spanish immigration and
nationality laws and policies for citizens from
Lusophone and Hispanic countries, respectively.
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ing only ethnic Germans caught in the Soviet Empire, who were deemed
to be persecuted for being German. By contrast, Israel’s Law of Return
is a permanent, state-constituting provision, applying to every Jew in the
world, independently of their individual or group-specific persecution.
In its expansiveness and state-defining quality, the Israeli ethnic immigration is unique in the world.
This introduces the main objective of this article, which is to account
for the resilience of Israel’s ethnic immigration, and the demise-inprinciple of Germany’s. Reference to their different intended designs is,
of course, at best the beginning of an answer, not the answer itself.
Examples abound where notionally temporary and categorically limited
rights and entitlements are expanded and perpetuated by the very
clientele and vested interests created by these provisions, thus crossing
out the originally limited purpose of the underlying policy (for the case
of minority voting rights in the U.S., see Thernstrom ).
The very fact of divergent outcomes in Israel and Germany casts
doubt on a culturalist account of ethnic immigration, which links the
latter to deep-seated and relatively static ‘ethnic’, as against ‘civic’,
understandings of nationhood. In an otherwise superbly subtle normative discussion of immigration policy as a political community’s quintessential act of collective self-determination, Jules Coleman and Sarah
Harding () argue (and defend) that Israel and Germany (along with
Japan) accept immigrants, if they accept them at all, according to ethnic
criteria, because these states happen to adhere to an ethnic conception of
political community. By contrast, the United States or Canada select
newcomers according to individualistic criteria, such as skills and family
ties, because they happen to adhere to a civic or strictly ‘political’
conception of political community (). Even the stellar and highly differentiated analysis by Rogers Brubaker () succumbs to the pitfalls
of a culturalist explanation when he claims that Germany’s ‘marked
openness toward ethnic Germans’ (p.) derives from the German
ethnocultural idiom of nationhood. He links the emergence of different
idioms of nationhood to specific historical conditions of state-building
() Cultural determinism of this sort is
admittedly more widespread in normative
political theory than in empirical sociology. In
normative political theory the argument is as
follows. Borders, while arbitrarily set, do not
lack moral significance. They allow political
communities to flourish, which in turn provide
security, meaning and liberty to the individual. These communities are necessarily
bounded and particularistic, and they are free
to select new members that reinforce their respective self-conceptions. Primordial reasoning on the normative dimension of immigration policy can be found both among communitarians (Walzer ) and—more implicitly—among some liberals (Kymlicka ).
An excellent critique of the ‘genteel vision of
politics’ underlying Kymlicka’s (implicitly
primordialist) account is Laitin ().
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processes, but once crystallized, these cultural understandings of
nationhood become rather rigid and function in his model as allpowerful causal factors. As a consequence, although Brubaker recognizes empirical pressures on the linkage between the ethnocultural
idiom of nationhood and ethnic immigration, he cannot conceptually
account for them within his overall culturalist approach ().
The problem is not the insistence on the cultural conditioning of a
state’s immigration policies—this conditioning exists (as we shall see).
Rather, the problem is the assumption of a ‘straight line’ between reified
and fixed identities and policies, which leaves out other important
variables that may influence these policies. Drawing a direct linkage
between (ethnic or civic) conceptions of nationhood and immigration
policy suffers from what Brubaker (b: ) himself has later called
the ‘realism of the group’, that is, the misconception of political communities or nations as real entities with wills and intentions, or—to use
Ruth Benedict’s () terms—as ‘personalities writ large’. National
identities may be invoked, Bourdieuian style, by individuals and groups
who try to impose their preferred immigration policies in a liberal
democracy, but ‘identities’ do not as such generate the policies commensurable with them. How could we otherwise explain that the classic
new settler nations, now torch-bearers of non-ethnic, and thus universalistic immigration policies, not too long ago subscribed to blatantly
ethnic, even racial, criteria of immigrant selection? ()
Cultural accounts of ethnic immigration revolve around a reified
opposition between ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ nationhood. In this they follow a
central streak in the nations and nationalism literature, from Hans Kohn
() to Liah Greenfeld () and Rogers Brubaker (), which has
classified Israel and Germany (along with Japan) as proverbially ethnic
states, with a preconstituted ‘nation’, conceiving of the state as its tool of
representation and protection. In contrast, in ‘civic’ states, where the
nation is a creature of the state and thus is politically and territorially
conceived (). As writers such as Anthony Smith (: ) have long
() Much less sophisticated culturalist
accounts are to be found in Schnapper ()
and Fulbrook ().
() For the United States, the recent historiography of immigration and citizenship has
shown that there are, at best, ‘multiple traditions’ (R.Smith ) of nationhood that can
give rise to widely divergent immigration and
citizenship laws and policies, racist as well as
liberal ones. We say ‘at best’, because revisionist immigration historians have convincingly
refuted the Tocqueville-Myrdalian ‘anomaly’
view of the racist citizenship and immigration
laws in force until and , respectively,
showing instead the (most often invisible)
racial boundedness of the melting-pot ideal
and of American republicanism (Jacobson
; Ngai ; King ).
() We admit that the ethnic-civic distinction has mostly been made at the nation-, not
the state-level, that is, at the level of culture,
not of political institutions. In this vein, Hans
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argued, this dichotomy does not hold at the empirical level (see also the
excellent recent critiques by Yack and Brubaker , the latter
cautiously retracting from his own earlier work of ).
Certainly, there are ethnic components to the German and Israeli
states’ self-conceptions, and their respective Laws of Return are primary expressions of them. These laws indicate that state and nation do
not overlap, as is typically the case in civic states, but that the nation is
prior to and wider than the state. However, these ethnic components are
strongly counteracted by civic components. The latter maximally derive
from competing, more inclusive models of nationhood; minimally they
are inherent in the logic of liberal stateness, which revolves around the
precepts of equality, public neutrality and the universalistic rule of law.
This minimal sense of civic stateness, which both Israel and Germany
have to subscribe to qua (desiring to be a) liberal state, is invoked in the
Israeli notion that Israel should not only be the state of Jews, but a ‘state
of all its citizens’. We shall see that in the Israeli case this points to a
multi-national alternative conception of the state, which leaves the ethnic definition of its Jewish constituency intact and only seeks to include
the Arab constituency on equal terms; there has been no attempt to forge
a more inclusive Israeli ‘nation’. By contrast, in Germany there has been
a struggle over the very definition of German nationhood, ethnic or
civic, with a strengthening of a civic definition over time. Minimal or
maximal, civic-liberal precepts can be found in Israel and Germany
alike, providing resources that can be—and have been—mobilized
against an ethnic self-conception, and related policies, of the state.
What is called the ‘liberal’ challenge to ethnic immigration articulates
the tension between ethnic and civic stateness, which is observable even
in an extreme case of ethnic stateness such as Israel. This challenge
brings out that the state’s preferencing of one ethnic group (even if it
coincides with the majority nation) entails discrimination for the nonpreferenced group(s). The liberal challenge is thus carried by or on
behalf of other immigrant or minority groups that are disadvantaged by
(or appear disadvantaged vis-à-vis) policies supporting such immigration, such as Palestinians in Israel or asylum-seekers and the descendants of Turkish guestworkers in Germany. However, there is also an
additional source of conflict surrounding ethnic immigration, which we
call the ‘restrictive’ challenge. Instead of deriving from a tension
Kohn defined nationalism, with Zangwill and
Weber, as ‘a state of mind’. However, he
continues to say that this is a state of mind
‘striving to correspond to a political fact’
(Kohn : ), that is, to find embodiment in
a state. Looking at this process from the result,
one may apply the ethnic-civic distinction to
the state, as we wish to do in the following. We
also use the notions of civic and liberal stateness interchangeably.
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between ethnic and civic stateness, the restrictive challenge takes ethnic
stateness for granted, and attacks an overly extensive implementation, or
even a misguided direction of the immigration policy, which allows the
entry of ‘false’ or ‘diluted’ co-ethnics.
While the possibility of ‘liberal’ and ‘restrictive’ contention surrounding ethnic immigration is—in principle—available in Germany
and Israel alike, the political space for their articulation and mobilization
differs according to geopolitical context and different historical connotations of ethnic immigration. In the case of Germany, changes in the
geopolitical context (i.e. the end of the Cold War), along with this
country’s privileged location in uniting Europe, contributed to a decline
in the legitimacy of ethnic immigration, and broadened the political
space for its (liberal and restrictive) opponents. In the case of Israel, the
persistence of its specific, less privileged geopolitical context (i.e. the
conflict with the Palestinians) and of the concomitant material state
interest in peopling the land with loyal Jews, helped shore up ethnic
immigration against the political forces opposing it in principle or in
actual operation.
The mapping out of the differently developed political spaces for
contestation surrounding ethnic immigration defies any grand macrohistorical or sociological scheme (à la ethnic versus civic nationhood).
One even has to consider the mutual implicatedness of both cases under
investigation. From a historical point of view, we are dealing not just
with two parallels but with two highly interactive cases. If, in addition to
the demographic-geopolitical imperative, Israel is an ‘ethnic’ state in a
much more unambiguous and stronger sense than Germany ever was,
this is of course also due to its grounding in a powerful and enduring
historical founding myth, which was provided by (Nazi) Germany’s
very attempt to destroy world Jewry. By contrast, the same Nazi quest
for racial purity had rendered ethnic stateness in postwar (West) Germany rather oblique and qualified from the start, and a sense of civic
nationhood emerged as a strong contender to the compromised ethnic
tradition. The ironic result of the tragic German-Jewish encounter under
Nazism has been to push the Germans firmly toward civic nationhood,
and to lock-in the Jews (and the Israeli state) in an ethnic self-definition.
Origins and justifications of ethnic immigration in Israel and Germany
A frequent fallacy in cross-national comparisons is to blend out the
different physical size of the compared objects and the different scope of
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their compared characteristics. In our cases, the meaning and impact of
numerically and typologically similar (ethnic) immigration is radically
different in two countries of vastly different territory and population
sizes, and these differences are bound to be even more extreme if one
such immigration is entirely constitutive of state and society (as in
Israel), whereas the other immigration remains rather peripheral to the
latter (as in Germany). Accordingly, interpreting Jewish and ethnic
German immigration exclusively in the light of ethnic state and
nationhood in Israel and Germany obscures more than it reveals. In the
German case, this linkage is at best an indirect one, and by far more
relevant has been the political and only temporary imperative of mastering the consequences of World War II, in the context of the Cold War
confrontation with the Communist East. In Israel, there is a more direct
and openly promulgated link between Jewish immigration and ethnic
state and nationhood; however, the full significance of Jewish immigration derives from a conflictive geopolitical environment in which
demography is seen as destiny.
Demography as destiny in Israel
The principle of unrestricted Jewish immigration was legally enshrined in the Law of Return of , whose first article declares that
‘Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh’ (). The Law
of Return—one of the few Israeli laws in which there is an explicit
reference to Jewishness as the basis for a special privilege—is perhaps
the major legal expression of the definition of Israel as a Jewish state (see
Klein ; Shachar ). By framing Jewish immigration as ‘return’,
the law provides a statutory enunciation of the link between the state
and the Jewish Diaspora. Tellingly, the right of return was framed not as
an entitlement granted by the state, but as a ‘natural’ right of every Jew
in the world that precedes and constitutes the state. Accordingly, the
state only recognizes and endorses, but does not create, this right. As
Prime Minister Ben-Gurion put it, the Law of Return is not an ‘immigration’ law in which the state establishes which kind of immigrants it is
willing to accept; rather, it is ‘the law of the persistence of Jewish history’, on the basis of which the State of Israel has been established ().
() Law of Return (-). The
English text of the law can be found in the
website of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs
(www.Israel-mfa.gov.il). The term oleh refers
to a Jewish immigrant to the Land of Israel.
The law was passed by the Knesset unanimously, with not even the non-Zionist Israeli
Communist party dissenting (Hacohen ),
and the notion of an absolute and ‘natural’
right of every Jew to settle in Israel was taken
for granted by all members of parliament.
() Knesset Records, July , Vol. , p.
. The perception of Jewish immigration
not as ‘immigration’ but as ‘return’ is reflected
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Part of the legitimation of Israel as a Jewish state is that it should
provide a shelter for Jews threatened by persecution. This motif was
mentioned in the presentation of the Law of Return in the Knesset ().
Yet, the principle of unrestricted Jewish immigration did not only apply
to those Jews suffering from discrimination or persecution; instead, the
right of return was conceived of as belonging also to Jews willing to
settle in Israel because of their ‘love to the ancient tradition, to Hebrew
culture and to Israel’s glorious independence’ (). Hence, in a sharp
contrast to Germany, the right to freely immigrate to Israel was ideologically framed as based on membership in the ethnonational community per se, and not merely as a remedy to persecution or discrimination.
Accordingly, there is no reference at all in the law itself to persecution as
a condition for entitlement to the right to immigrate to Israel.
However, Jewish immigration is grounded not only in the ethnocultural idiom that defines the Israeli polity, but also in material statebuilding imperatives. The Zionist colonial project was from the start
founded on immigration flows, and the existence of a pre-state Zionist
community in Palestine was entirely the result of successive waves of
Jewish immigration. After the establishment of the state, Jewish immigration continued to play a fundamental role in the demographic
make-up of Israeli society. According to the first census carried out in
November , percent of the Jewish population was foreign-born.
As a consequence of massive immigration this proportion significantly
increased over the first years of statehood, reaching percent in .
Since then and until the nineties the percentage of the foreign-born
among the Jewish population decreased, but still remained at very high
levels ( percent in ). The large wave of immigration from the
former Soviet Union during the last decade caused a temporary halt in
the downward trend (see Central Bureau of Statistics, different years).
Between and the net migration balance constituted nearly
percent of Jewish population growth (DellaPergola : ).
Jewish immigration has played an instrumental role in the internal
conflict between the Zionist settlers and the Arab population of Palestine, and in the external confrontation with Arab countries since .
Since the beginning of Zionist settlement in Palestine and over the
entire pre-state period, the demographic ratio between the Zionist settlers and the Arab population was one of the central dimensions of the
also in the Hebrew word chosen for it: not
hagirah, the Hebrew word for immigration, but
aliah, a religiously charged expression that
literally means ‘ascension’.
() Knesset Records, July , Vol. , p.
-.
() David Ben-Gurion, in Knesset
Records, July , Vol. , p. .
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conflict between the two national movements. Both sides recognized that
demography would be a central factor in the determination of the political future of Palestine and its two national communities. Accordingly,
Palestinian attempts to halt, or at least to limit, Jewish immigration and
Zionist efforts to enlarge it as much as possible, were key components in
their respective political strategies.
The dependence on immigration for the consolidation of the Zionist
project vis-à-vis the Arab population continued after the establishment
of the state, especially during its first decade of existence. Following the
- War, the national composition of the population residing on
Israeli territory changed dramatically. First, due to flight and expulsion,
only about , of an estimated ,-, Palestinians who
had lived in the territory before the founding of Israel remained (Peretz
: ). In addition, as a consequence of the enormous wave of
immigration following the establishment of the state, the Jewish population doubled within three years. Despite this sweeping demographic
transformation, the Israeli state continued defining the ratio between the
Jewish and Arab populations as a matter of national security and survival, and Jewish immigration remained the main tool for maintaining what
is called in official discourse the ‘demographic balance’. This is a
euphemism that refers to the basic interest of the Israeli state in keeping
the demographic superiority of the Jewish population over the Palestinian minority, and which gained further impetus from significantly higher
fertility rates among the Palestinian population (Goldscheider :
) (). This demographic superiority is seen by the state and most
political forces as a precondition for holding down the Palestinian
minority in a subordinate status, especially given the fact that as citizens
they enjoy full formal political rights (i.e. voting rights).
The instrumental link between Jewish immigration and statemaking, which goes well beyond symbolic notions of ethnonational
belonging, is illustrated by the state-initiated and operated massive
immigration of Jews from Moslem countries during the s and early
s. Despite the ambivalent and often overtly negative attitudes of
European Zionist state-builders towards these ‘Oriental’ Jews, and
disregarding some voices that demanded a more selective immigration
policy, state agencies actively encouraged their massive immigration to
() The goal of increasing fertility among
the Jewish population has occupied a prominent place in the discourse about social policy
in Israel, and some policy initiatives, such as
the increase of child allowances during the
s and s, have been linked to that goal,
though mainly at the declaratory level. Nevertheless, due to a rising standard of living, fertility rates among the Jewish population,
except in the ultra-orthodox community, have
steadily decreased.
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Israel. These immigrants were considered mainly as an instrument for
pursuing material state-building tasks, especially in increasing the
Jewish population ratio, for planting Jews in the peripheral areas of the
country with a high concentration of Palestinians, and for strengthening
Israeli state and society in economic and military terms. As stated in
by the Minister of Finance, Eliezer Kaplan: ‘We need workers and
fighters’ (quoted in Segev : ).
The demographic motif in the management of the national conflict
became more acute after the War, when the occupation of Arab
territories significantly enlarged the Palestinian population under Israeli
control, providing new fuel to the ‘demographic threat’ to the Jewish
character of the Israeli state (see Lustick ). By then, the reservoir of
potential Jewish immigrants from Moslem countries was practically
exhausted, and Jewish communities in the Soviet block were banned
from emigration by their respective governments, except for a brief
period during the early s. Under these aggravated conditions, the
framing of Jewish immigration as imperative for assuring Israel’s survival remained salient and broadly consensual among Zionist political
forces. As we will elaborate later, when the collapse of the Soviet Union
in the early s opened up a huge new reservoir of Jewish immigrants
for Israel, the iron link between Jewish immigration, demography and
the protracted national conflict helped shore up the principle of ethnic
immigration against its liberal and restrictive challengers.
While the Law of Return stands for the ethnic self-definition of
Israel as a Jewish state, there are also civic principles in the legitimation
and functioning of the Israeli state. For example, the Nationality Law
incorporates significant civic elements, as it sanctions the acquisition of
citizenship by birth on territory and by residence (Gouldman :
Chapter ). Civic principles in the operation of state agencies, and in the
political arena in general, have become more prominent over the last two
decades, although they are still subordinated to ethnonational notions
(Shafir and Peled ). The simultaneous operation of both ethnic and
civic principles, and the tensions between them, are manifest especially
in the relations between the state and its Arab-Palestinian citizens. As
Peled () notes, although excluded from the ethnically defined
national community, Palestinian citizens enjoy formal civil and political
rights, which allow them to participate, albeit in a restricted form, in the
political process. Moreover, the relative strengthening of state-level civic
principles has enlarged the opportunity structure of Palestinian citizens
to challenge the ethnonational character of the Israeli state and to exert
some influence upon state policies (see Rosenhek and Shalev ).
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These civic notions would be mobilized during the s by the Palestinian leadership and ‘post-Zionist’ Jews to advance their liberal challenge to the principle of ethnic immigration.
Mastering the consequences of World War II in Germany
In contrast to Israel, Germany’s ethnic immigration has remained a
peripheral and temporary, rather than state and society-constituting
device. This is not to belittle the magnitude of the German expellee
problematique. Expellees from the lost eastern territories and beyond
constituted some percent of the West German population in .
Their swift and generous integration was the single greatest challenge to
the fledgling West German democracy, because expellees represented a
considerable source of revanchism and right-wing radicalism ().
Public-order perhaps more than ‘identity’ considerations conditioned
the setup of the legal framework for Germany’s ethnic immigration in
the s.
Accordingly, the link between ethnic immigration and the ethnocultural tradition of German nationhood is less straightforward and direct
than conventional wisdom would have it (e.g., Brubaker ). Consider, for example, that the Weimar Republic denied any responsibilities toward some , forcibly collectivized German-origin peasants
during the Stalin era, who had asked for their repatriation to Germany.
The German ambassador in Moscow at the time sardonically declared
that ‘these peasants cannot be helped, their German nationality is
doubtful, and their desire to enter Germany is pure illusion’ (in Otto
: ) (). This suggests the centrality of the consequences of
World War II in (re)activating the ethnocultural tradition, which was
not automatically available for indiscriminate co-ethnics.
It is still important to point out, in line with the argument of ethnocultural tradition, that postwar Germany, like Israel, has always denied
that its ethnic immigration is ‘immigration’ at all, but the ‘return’ of
co-ethnics to their homeland. This points, in both cases, to an ethnocultural relationship between people and ‘their’ states: not states building citizenries in their image, and thus the former preceding the latter,
but pre-constituted people forming states for their self-representation
() Most notably in terms of the Bund für
Heimatvertriebene und Entrechtete (BHE),
which entered the federal parliament in
with . percent of the national vote. Successful expellee reception and integration contributed to its demise by .
() In the year of the world economic crisis
(), the Weimar government was simply
short of money to accommodate the would-be
resettlers. After protests by right-wing parties,
among them Hitler’s NSDAP, some ,
German-Russian peasants still had to be
admitted (see Otto : ).
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and protection. Is then Germany a ‘state of Germans’, as Israel is a
‘Jewish state’? A crucial difference between the two is that, as a very
result of the confrontation between Germans and Jews under Nazism, the
German ethnocultural idiom of nationhood has in principle been delegitimized, whereas the idea of Israel as a Jewish state has been powerfully
reaffirmed, as a safe haven from persecution. In addition, the ethnic
homogeneity of the resident population in Germany prevented the rise
of an Israeli-style demographic imperative in its policy toward ethnic
Germans—there was no rebellious minority to hold down by peopling
the country with loyal ‘Germans’ (). In contrast to Israel, whose ethnic texture is internally visible in the rift between Jews and Arabs, the
ethnic dimension of the (West) German state became internally invisible, as it was transferred into the future (as the mandate of national
reunification) and extraterritorialized (as the—in the Cold War period
mostly virtual—commitment to admit co-ethnics) ().
Daniel Levy (: ) has succinctly argued that the ethnic German
expellees allowed the ‘rehabilitation’ of Germany’s otherwise delegitimated ethnocultural self-understanding after World War II:
through reference to the ‘victimhood’ of expellees, ethnocultural
nationhood could be ‘dissociated from Nazism’ (p.). Was (West)
Germany, at least in this indirect way, a state of Germans, as Israel is a
state of Jews?
Turning to West Germany’s founding document, the Basic Law, one
can observe a tension between ethnic and liberal elements. The ethnic
elements are tellingly tied to the temporariness and incompleteness of
the West German state. Accordingly, the preamble of the Basic Law
states that it was to apply only for a ‘transition period’ (Übergangszeit),
until the ‘unity and liberty of Germany was completed’. Moreover, the
‘German people’, in crafting this constitution, had ‘acted also for those
Germans who were denied participation’—the German division
obviously reactivated the traditional non-congruence between state and
nation. On the liberal side, the Basic Law’s preamble commits the new
state to a ‘united Europe’ and ‘to serve peace in the world’, and the
constitution’s first seven articles protect universal human rights inde() A weak equivalent to demographic
considerations in Israel is the pointing out by
some conservative voices in Germany’s immigration debate that the size of its immigrant
population had to be kept small, because the
Federal Republic was ‘a state created by the
German people for the German people with
the purpose of national reunification’ (Uhlitz
: ).
() This does not mean that there were
no internal costs to (West) Germany’s ethnic
orientation as an ‘incomplete’ nation-state
geared towards ‘reunification’: they were
shouldered, for instance, by second—or
third—generation Turkish ‘guestworkers’
who, until the early s, remained excluded
from the citizenry by an ethnic citizenship law
(see Koopmans ).
&
pendently of citizenship—all commitments that, in contrast to the ethnic ones, were conceived of as not only temporarily valid ().
A cornerstone of postwar Germany’s ethnic orientation, and the
constitutional foundation of its ethnic immigration, is Article (),
which defines who is a German. It contains a liberal element in simply
stating that a ‘German’ is one who ‘owns German citizenship’, leaving
the determination of citizenship to the political process. Accordingly,
the German Basic Law never prescribed an ethnic citizenship law, like
the one that was in force until . However, Article () contains an
ethnic element in adding that a ‘German’ is one also who ‘as refugee or
expellee of German origins (Volkszugehörigkeit) or as his spouse or descendant has found reception in the territory of the German Reich
according to its borders of December ’. This meant that (West)
Germany was not only the state of its citizens, but also of certain noncitizens, if they qualified as co-ethnics. However, as in the unity mandate
in the preamble, this ethnic commitment was to be temporary only—this
is expressed in the fact that Article was placed under a statutory
proviso, and that it appears only in the last section of the Basic Law,
which deals with ‘Transitory and Concluding Regulations’ ().
Article points to the fundamental difference between Jewish and
ethnic German immigration: while the former was an invitation to every
Jew in the world, the latter applied only to those ethnic Germans who
were ‘refuges or expellees’. From Article alone one might conclude
that the pool of potential claimants was both wider and more narrowly
conceived than the actual ethnic immigration engendered by it: ‘wider’,
because there was no geographical specification attached, so that, say,
ethnic German refugees from Pinochet’s Chile would qualify as well;
‘narrower’, because in common understanding ‘refugee or expellee’ is
someone who is actually forced to leave one’s homeland by a persecuting
power. The Federal Expellee and Refugee Law (FERL) of , which
spells out the statutory framework for Germany’s ethnic immigration,
reversed this constellation. Its Article () () stipulates: ‘An expellee is
also one who as a German citizen or as a German Volkszugehöriger...
after the end of the general expulsion measures has left or leaves the former
eastern territories, Danzig, (the Baltic States), the Soviet Union, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Jugoslavia, Albania, or
China’ (emphasis supplied). This peculiar expellee, who was not
() Article () of the Basic Law explicitly invests the human rights catalogue in
Article to with a Ewigkeitsgarantie, that is,
immunity from future revision or amendment.
() Ethnic interpretations of the Basic
Law, which draw their ammunition from the
unity mandate in the Preamble and the ethnic
refugee clause in Article (e.g., Uhlitz
), ignore the temporariness of these provisions.
:
actually expelled, but who had to originate from a Communist country,
was labelled ‘resettler’ (Aussiedler). Interestingly, this geographic restriction of expellee/resettler status, which denied the latter to German
minorities in Denmark, France or Italy, occurred ‘with respect to the
western Allied powers’, that is, was mandated by the winners of World
War II (Münz and Ohliger, : ). In addition, it is curious that
among the listed territories for resettlers are China and Albania—not
known for harboring any German minority groups. This reveals, as the
administrative Expulsion Pressure Guidelines of put it, the
‘regime and ideology-reference’ of the notion of resettler (). In other
words, only ethnic Germans under communism qualified for resettler
status. By the same token, one could forfeit one’s claim by ‘special tie(s)
to the political regime of the state of origin’ (). Communists could not
become resettlers. This was obviously not only an ethnic, but also a
political status betraying the pivotal role of the Cold War in shaping
German ethnic immigration.
Resettlers, most of whose ancestors had left the ‘German’ lands
before there even was anything akin to a German national consciousness,
let alone a German nation-state have formed the bulk of ethnic German
immigration after World War II. Accordingly, what had started as a
temporary measure to integrate the millions of ethnic Germans who
were actually forced to leave their homeland by the advancing Red Army
and retaliatory expulsion, was turned around by the Federal Expellee
Law and its—rather generous—subsequent administrative implementation into an open-door policy for anyone from Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union who could claim, however remotely, German origins
(Brubaker a: ). It is therefore not far-fetched to assume that,
much like the Israeli Law of Return, German policy quite literally
produced the ‘co-ethnics’ whose existence it notionally presupposed,
who were lured by the prospect of moving into a country with vastly
better living conditions.
Liberal and restrictive challenges in the s
In the s, both Jewish and ethnic German immigration came to
face serious social and political challenges. The external causes for this
() The Expulsion Pressure Guidelines are reprinted in Liesner (: -).
() Ibid., p. .
&
are similar, the removal of exit restrictions in the declining communist
states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. This greatly increased
the number of ethnic claimants, many of whom were of questionnable
truthfulness. In response, there has been a dual ‘liberal’ and ‘restrictive’
challenge to ethnic immigration in Israel and Germany alike. The existence of a liberal challenge sets ethnic immigration apart from ‘normal’
(labour, family, or refugee) immigration, opposition to which has been
restriction-minded only. The liberal challenge to ethnic immigration
articulates the point of view of other migrant or minority groups
disadvantaged by, or in respect to, the ethnic-preference policy. The
liberal challenge is usually not against the entry of putative co-ethnics as
such, but against their exclusive or preferential entry, opting instead for
an ethnically neutral immigration policy. By contrast, the restrictive
challenge articulates the point of view of (certain groups among) the
majority population, which sees itself threatened by the cultural and
economic consequences of immigration. Ethnic immigration, after all, is
still ‘immigration’. In the specific case of ethnic immigration, the restrictive challenge is either premised on (as in Germany) or directly
addresses (as in Israel) a questionable truthfulness of claims for
co-ethnicity. This questioning entails the cognitive and evaluative
transformation of ‘returning’ co-ethnics into ordinary ‘immigrants’.
The restrictive position is usually not concerned with keeping out ‘true’
co-ethnics, but with keeping in check ‘creative’ re-identifyers, and with a
reluctance to give them entitlements that exceed those of the domestic
population.
While the duality of liberal and restrictive challenges has been the
same, the nature of the restrictive challenge has been rather different in
both cases considered here: religious in Israel, populist in Germany. In
addition, the liberal-cum-restrictive challenges have yielded sharply
different outcomes: the resilience of Jewish immigration in Israel, and
the closing-down in-principle of ethnic German immigration in Germany.
Resilience in Israel
While still supported by a large majority of the Jewish population in
Israel ( percent according to a recent survey) (), the Law of Return
came under significant pressures during the s. The challenges
emanated from two opposite ideological sources. The first objects to the
notion of Israel as a Jewish state, proposing instead a non-ethnic definition of the polity. The second challenges the (de facto) expansive
() The Jerusalem Post, April .
:
secular definition of the Jewishness of the state, offering instead a more
restrictive, ethno-religious conception of membership.
The liberal challenge. The thrust of the liberal challenge is to bring out
the fundamental contradiction in the self-definition of Israel as both a
Jewish and a liberal-democratic state (see Rouhana ), targeting the
Law of Return as a major expression of the ethnic character of the state.
In Israel, the liberal challenge builds on a minimal sense of civic stateness, with a religious-culturally neutral, plurinational state as the goal.
In contrast to Germany, there are no significant political actors pursuing
the building of a more inclusive, ethnically neutral Israeli nation. Tellingly, the Israeli liberal challenge is mainly, though not exclusively,
articulated by the political and cultural elites of the Palestinian population in Israel. For example, the celebrated Palestinian writer in the
Hebrew language, Anton Shammas, denounced the Law of Return as a
‘racist law’ (: ). According to Shammas, the Law of Return may
have been justified in the immediate wake of the Holocaust and if
applied to persecuted Jews, but the indiscriminate granting of immigration rights to every Jew in the world is surely indefensible today
(Shammas , ). In addition, Palestinian members of the Knesset have recently picked up the notion of ‘a state of all its citizens’,
questioning and challenging the ethnic character of the Israeli state and
its exclusion of the Palestinian minority. In this context, Arab political
parties openly raised the demand to abolish the Law of Return. Their
basic claim is that as long as the definition of Israel as a Jewish state
stands, with the Law of Return as its key symbolic and institutional
component, this state cannot be regarded as a genuine democracy. For
example, Knesset member Azmi Bishara, chairperson of the (Arab)
National Democratic Alliance party, characterized the Law of Return as
a discriminatory law that should be revoked (), seeing this as a necessary step towards the de-Zionization of Israel and its transformation
into a liberal-democratic state which is founded on non-ethnic, civic
principles of membership (in Shavit ).
In order to highlight the discriminatory character of the law, Palestinian leaders often contrast the right of return granted to Jews with the
dismal situation of Palestinian refugees. In sharp contrast to the unrestricted immigration of Jews, the Palestinian population displaced and
expelled during the - War was never allowed to return to its
homeland by the Israeli state. This comparison is drawn by Knesset
member Talab El-Sana from the United Arab List: ‘If the Jewish peo() Knesset Records, November (www.knesset.gov.il/tql/knesset/knesset/).
&
ple have the right, according to the Law of Return, to come to the State
of Israel, and this on the basis of a historical claim from , years ago,
why is this right denied to those Palestinians who were forced to leave
their towns and villages, not , years ago, not , years ago and not
years ago, but only years ago?’ ()
The liberal critique of the Law of Return has recently been adopted
by ‘post-Zionist’ Jews. Post-Zionism, while originally an intellectual
and academic preoccupation, has gained considerable public attention,
particularly through its popularization in the media. It claims that the
Israeli state should cease to be defined according to ethnic principles,
and be transformed into a ‘normal’ liberal democracy based on the
notion of ethnically neutral citizenship (see Ram ). Post-Zionism
does not necessarily reject Zionism in toto. Rather, it reduces the latter to
a historical stage in the dynamics of the Israeli state and society that now
should be surpassed. Like other Zionist notions, the principle of
unrestricted and exclusive Jewish immigration is also viewed by many
post-Zionists as an anachronism that impedes the transformation of
Israel into a democratic state of all its citizens. Hence they urge the
abolition of the law (Silberstein : , ). Post-Zionist ideas are
slowly sinking into the liberal wing of Zionist parties. For instance,
Knesset member Zahava Gal-On from Meretz, a ‘left-wing’ Zionist
party (), stated: ‘It is possible to sincerely recognize that in the Law of
Return there are also racist elements, because it is based on origin and
membership in a group... It is a law that discriminates between those
that want to immigrate to Israel and also between Jewish and non-Jewish
citizens’ (). Interestingly, she proposed a German-style restriction of the right of return as applying only to Jews suffering persecution,
and the establishment a ‘normal law of immigration such as those existing in Western countries’ for non-persecuted Jews.
There is no doubt that the liberal critique of the Law of Return is at
the moment very weak politically, and the likelihood that it will affect a
basic change in Israel’s ethnic immigration regime in the foreseeable
future is extremely low. Yet, the very appearance of this challenge and its
growing legitimacy reveals the emergence of cracks in the ideological
foundations of the ethnic character of the Israeli state.
() Knesset Records, July .
() The right-left political spectrum in
Israel is mainly defined according to the parties’ positions concerning the conflict with the
Palestinians and Arab countries, and other
political issues such as the state-religion relationship. The left wing endorses more mod-
erate positions concerning the national
conflict, and the right wing a more militant
stand. With respect to state-religion matters,
the left wing tends to endorse more secular
postures. It is in these terms that Meretz is
considered the most ‘leftist’ Zionist party.
() Knesset Records, December .
:
The restrictive challenge. The restrictionist attack on the Law of Return
also emerged during the s, as a response to the ethnic composition
of the large immigration wave from the Soviet Union and its successor
states (). Due to a amendment in the Law of Return that made
non-Jews with family ties to Jews eligible for immigration and automatic
citizenship (), nearly percent of the immigrants arriving between
and were halachic non-Jews (that is, non-Jews according to
religious law) (Tolts : ). The proportion of non-Jews even
increased considerably in the following years (DellaPergola : ).
The Minister of Diaspora Affairs, Michael Melchior, reported that
among the immigrants, percent were non-Jews; among
immigrants the share of non-Jews further increased to percent ().
Based on figures published by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics in
, roughly , of all immigrants arriving in the country during
the last decade were registered as non-Jews (). An unknown, but
probably large number of them are non-Jews not only according to the
halachic definition, but also according to their religious and ethnic selfidentification.
Especially (but not exclusively) ultra-orthodox religious circles
viewed the growing numbers of non-Jewish immigrants as a severe
threat to the Jewish character of Israel. This concern was first raised in
, just one year after the beginning of the new immigration wave.
The Ministers of Interior, Arye Deri, and of Immigration and
Absorption, Yitzhak Peretz, both from the ultra-orthodox Shas party,
proposed to change the law to reduce the number of non-Jewish immi() There has also been controversy over
the immigration of Christian Ethiopians of
Jewish descent or with Jewish family connections (known as Falas Mura). Despite the
demands of Jewish-Ethiopian activists in
Israel, the state refuses to recognize them as
entitled to immigrate under the Law of
Return. Some of them are being allowed to
immigrate under special schemes of family
reunification (see Kaplan and Salamon
).
() The amendment, which was a
compromise between religious and secular
factions in Israeli government and parliament,
introduced two important changes to the Law
of Return. One restricted the definition of
membership in the Jewish people for the
purposes of immigration, while the other
expanded the right of immigration also to
family members of Jews who were not deemed
Jewish according to religious law. A Jew was
defined, largely according to religious law, as
‘...a person who was born of a Jewish mother
or has become converted to Judaism and who is
not a member of another religion’. But this
restrictive test was accompanied by an expansive rule extending the rights of a Jew under
this and other laws (e.g. Nationality Law) to
‘...a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse
of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the
spouse of a grandchild of a Jew...’ (Law of
Return—Amendment , -). Epitomizing their expansive thrust, these rights
were extended to family members of a Jew
whether he or she was still alive or not, and
whether he or she had immigrated to Israel or
not.
() The Jerusalem Post, October ;
November .
() Central Bureau of Statistics, Press
release /, May .
&
grants (). Other ministers and Knesset members from the ultraorthodox parties explicitly depicted the non-Jewish immigrants as a
threat to Israel’s existence (). Even some members of Zionist secular
parties expressed concern about the future of the Jewish definition of
Israel (). The print media also became involved in the mounting
campaign for a more restrictive immigration policy. For example, an
opinion article in the Jerusalem Post stated: ‘Has the Law of Return,
Zionism’s ultimate instrument for the ingathering of the exiles, inadvertently become a mechanism for the creeping de-Judaization of Israel?
The answer is yes, and therefore it is time, alas, to amend the law [...]
Ironic, isn’t it? A Zionist cornerstone, out of control, is contributing to
the diminishment of Israel’s Jewish character’ ().
Up to now, however, all attempts to limit the immigration of halachic
non-Jews have failed. In order to understand why, one must consider the
reasoning and forces behind the defence of the law, which—in the order
presented here—make reference to the Holocaust, demographic fears,
and the risk of a cataclysmic (restrictive-cum-liberal) challenge to the
Law of Return as such. The first line of defence was to frame the eligibility criteria in the Law of Return as a response to anti-Semitic
ideology in general, and to Nazism in particular. In order to legitimize
the granting of immigration rights and automatic citizenship to the
non-Jewish grandchildren of Jews, many of the supporters of the Law
of Return in its present form link it to the definition of Jewishness
practiced by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. For instance, an
editorial opposing any change in the law claims: ‘Providing a safe haven
was our raison d’être. But now we are considering changing the message.
And the dangers inherent in doing so are vast. Legislators beware...
(N)othing could be more immoral for the Jewish state than to deny a
home to the same category of Jew that Hitler had wanted to exterminate’ (). Similarly, the Minister of Immigration and Absorption, Yael
Tamir (better known in academic circles for her work on ‘liberal nationalism’), declared in the Knesset: ‘There are reasons for the definition of
Jewishness and the definition of who is entitled to immigrate under the
() The Jerusalem Post, July ;
November .
() See Meetings of the Knesset Committee on Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora
Affairs, November ; January ;
and Knesset Records, November .
() For example, the Chairperson of the
Knesset Committee on Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs, Naomi Blumenthal,
and Knesset member Tzipi Livni, both from
the Likud party, in Meeting of the Knesset
Committee on Immigration, Absorption and
Diaspora Affairs, December ; Minister
of Justice, Yossi Beilin, from the Labor party,
in Meeting of the Knesset Committee on
Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora
Affairs, January .
() The Jerusalem Post, December .
() The Jerusalem Post, December .
:
Law of Return. They derive from Jewish history. They are not disconnected from the Jewish past, from the persecutions of Jews. The state of
Israel was established as a shelter... for the Jewish people as they were
defined, to our regret, by their persecutors in the Diaspora, and not as
they were defined by the halacha’ ().
A second defence of the Law of Return in its presently expansive
version relates to the demographic functions of immigration within the
context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As Ian Lustick () pointed
out, to maintain the demographic advantage over the Palestinian
minority—whether in the whole ‘Land of Israel’ (including the occupied territories) or only within the State of Israel’s recognized
borders—has been the main reason for the unwillingness of most political forces to amend the law in a restrictionist direction. In this vein,
Knesset member Moshe Arens, a former Minister of Defence and of
Foreign Affairs from the Likud party, explains his opposition to limiting
the number of non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union:
‘I’m afraid that if we accept the proposal of Knesset member Halpert [to
restrict the eligibility of non-Jews], ...we might put at risk the Jewishness of the state, because today we have percent of Arabs in the
country. The natural increase of the Arab population is higher than the
natural increase of the Jewish population... (I)f we don’t succeed in
increasing the percentage of Jews in the population, in not too many
years we will face a huge (demographic) problem’ (). Expressing a
mainly secular notion of membership in the Jewish people, the defenders of halachic non-Jewish immigration for demographic purposes hold
that the newcomers would eventually be integrated into the Jewish
majority through their participation in central Jewish-Israeli institutions, such as the educational system and the army ().
The third line of reasoning by the opponents of restricting the Law
of Return interestingly reconnects to the liberal challenge to the Law of
Return. The late Prime Minister Barak was not only unwilling to change
the Law of Return, but also unwilling to allow any discussion of it in the
cabinet (). This was driven by the fear that an amendment in the law
limiting the eligibility of non-Jews, or even a discussion of such an
option, might open the ‘Pandora’s box’ of a thorough public debate on
() Knesset Records, November .
() Meeting of the Knesset Committee
on Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora
Affairs, November .
() For example, Knesset members Moshe
Arens and Michael Nudelman, both from the
Russian immigrants’ party Yisrael Beiteinu, in
Meeting of the Knesset Committee on Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs,
November ; Knesset Speaker Abraham
Burg, Knesset Records, December .
() The Jerusalem Post, November
.
&
the principle of ethnic immigration as such, enlarging the political
opportunities also for the liberal challengers to the Law of Return.
This is intimated by the Minister of Immigration and Absorption,
Yael Tamir: ‘(W)e would throw ourselves into a very painful and unneccessary debate, in which the claim will be raised—that I do not want to
see raised—that the Law of Return should be abolished completely’ ().
The challenge to the Zionist principle of Jewish immigration,
whether from a liberal or from a religious-restrictionist perspective, has
failed so far. Yet, the public debate on the Law of Return is in motion.
The emergence of this debate, triggered by the ethnic composition of
the immigration wave from the former Soviet Union, shows more
generally the gradual erosion of Zionist hegemony in Israel and the
increasingly confrontational politics conducted by the Palestinian
minority. Should the national conflict with the Palestinians and the Arab
countries come to an end (admittedly a most unlikely outcome at the
present time), the controversy over the ethnic character of the Israeli
state and the tensions between ethnic and civic components in its definition of membership would certainly be exacerbated. Then, with the
weakening of the ‘demographic imperative’, the political space for the
questioning of Jewish immigration, from both liberal and restrictive
perspectives, would widen significantly.
Demise in Germany
Between and , about . million resettlers were admitted to
the Federal Republic, which amounts to an annual trickle of just ,.
Low numbers kept German ethnic immigration outside the public view.
This abruptly changed in when, due to the liberalization of Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union, the number of admitted resettlers skyrocketed, to about , in that year alone. Between and , a
total of . million resettlers were admitted—which is almost double the
figure in the preceding four decades (Münz and Ohliger ). As in the
Israeli case, escalating numbers of ethnic migrants created pressures on
the underlying policy. In a second parallel to the Israeli case, these
pressures originated from both liberal and restrictive positions. As in
Israel, the liberal challenge spoke on behalf of those migrants and
minorities who were disadvantaged vis-à-vis ethnic migrants, in this case
asylum-seekers and the (Turkish) guestworker immigrants. However,
() Meeting of the Knesset Committee
on Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora
Affairs, January .
:
the restrictive challenge was different in kind. There could not be an
ideological challenge and concomitant plea to return to the original spirit
of Germany’s ‘Law of Return’, because the rationale of this
policy—mastery of the consequences of World War II—was simply no
longer valid. There was no original spirit to recapture. Witness that, in
contrast to Israel, an equally doubtful truthfulness of claims for
co-ethnicity was generally presumed (), and did not trigger calls to
admit only ‘true’ ethnic Germans. Instead of an ideological challenge,
Germany’s restrictive challenge was a populist challenge, in which the
economic and social privileges attached to expellee status lost their
public support.
The liberal challenge. Just about the time when the center-right government celebrated the reception of ethnic German resettlers as an ‘act of
national solidarity’ (Chancellor Kohl, quoted in Levy : ), the
same government responded to a swelling number of asylum-seekers by
trying to renege on the constitutional asylum right, as guaranteed by
Article of the Basic Law. This inequity was doubly scandalous,
because both asylum-seekers and the ethnic resettlers (who were officially assumed to suffer from ‘expulsion pressure’) were notionally
‘refugees’. However, how could ethnic resettlers from post-communist
Poland, Hungary or Romania still be subject to ‘expulsion pressure’,
when according to the new ‘safe country of origin’ rule in asylum policy
the same states were officially labelled ‘free of persecution’ (verfolgungsfrei), so that asylum requests by people originating from these
states were generally denied? The contradictory treatment of both types
of ‘refugees’ was first attacked by a leading SPD politician, Oscar
Lafontaine. Calling the center-right government’s preference for ethnic
German over non-German refugees ‘Deutschtümelei’ (an intranslatable
term denoting ethnic nationalism), Lafontaine declared: ‘I have certain
problems in admitting German-origin people in the fourth and fifth
generation, while coloured people whose lives are at risk are rejected’ (). Chancelor Kohl, known externally for his commitment to
unifyingEurope but on the domestic scene a long-standing proponent of
a strengthened ethnic sense of national community, derided this state() At first, regarding Poles who claimed to
be ethnic Germans because of their (ethnically
Polish) parents or grandparents’ forced inclusion into the Nazi Volkslisten (Der Spiegel,
no., , -). Later, the suspicion of
lacking ethnic credentials focused mostly on
non-German speaking Russians. In a
survey of the Allensbach Institute, less than
one-third of respondents considered the newly
arriving resettlers as ‘Germans’; the rest was
either undecided ( percent) or did not
consider the newcomers as ‘Germans’ ( percent) (quoted in Levy : f).
() Quoted in Frankfurter Rundschau,
November , p..
&
ment as ‘disgusting’, and he found that Germans would be a ‘morally
deprived people’ if they did not stand by their ‘compatriots’ ().
As in Israel, this was a struggle between liberal and ethnic interpretations of the German state, the liberals rallying around the defense of
the constitutional asylum right (Article ), the ethnics pointing to the
commitments enshrined in the Basic Law’s ethnic German expellee
clause (Article ). A first difference, however, was that the commitment to asylum-seekers was an abstract human rights commitment,
directed at people outside Germany’s territorial and national boundaries, whereas the Israeli liberals’ reference to disadvantaged Palestinians was directed at a group that was not only within the state’s borders
but considered its territory their ancient homeland, much like Jews did.
In this regard, the structural equivalent to Palestinians in Israel are the
descendants of non-European guestworkers (especially Turks). They
were kept out of the citizenry by archaic citizenship laws that favoured
the ethnic resettlers, even though the latter had no concrete ties to German society. This was a much more powerful comparison, because it
pointed to a discriminated group in, rather than outside, German
society. Calling those Polish, Russian and Romanian newcomers ‘Germans who want to live among Germans’ (Liesner : ), while calling
those who were born and raised in Germany ‘foreigners’, showed in
extremis the obsoleteness of the ethnic idiom of nationhood. Liberal
challengers of ethnic immigration, in fact, were drawing references both
to disadvantaged asylum-seekers and guestworker immigrants. If the
asylum-seeker reference was somewhat more prominent, this was simply because this was the largest migrant group in the early s, singled
out by the resettler-friendly center-right government for restrictive
measures.
The notion of Deutschtümelei and the inclination of the German
liberal challenge to associate the conservative government’s ethnicreturn policy with the Nazi’s ‘Heim-ins-Reich-Politik’, which had a basis
in some questionable administrative practices (), indicates a second
difference from the Israeli case—the obvious delegitimation and decline
of an ethnic understanding of nationhood. Positively phrased, the
German liberal challenge to ethnic immigration could rely not only on a
minimal sense of civic stateness, based on the procedural logic of
() Ibid.
() Before the issue became politicized in
the late s, for instance, expellee authorities
granted ethnic-German status to ethnic Poles
whose (grand)parents had been forcibly incorporated in the Nazi Volksliste . This rendered
ad absurdum that part of the recognition procedure that asked for a subjective ‘confession to
German peoplehood’. In addition, dubious
Nazi credentials, such as ‘service’ in the murderous Waffen SS, could help a person to attain
ethnic-German status.
:
representative democracy and legal universalism, but also on a thicker
sense of civic nationhood, according to which it has become anachronistic to define Germanness on the basis of ethnic genealogy (for details
see Levy ). This made the German liberal challenge potentially
much stronger than its Israeli counterpart, which remained limited to a
few (Arab and ‘post-Zionist’) fringe voices, outside the political and
societal mainstream.
At the discursive level, the German liberal challenge came in two
variants. One was to consider ethnic resettlers as just one of several
immigrant groups, and to call for a comprehensive and self-declared
‘immigration policy’ to take care of all of them. As a Green MP put it,
‘resettlers are immigrants and refugees, independently of their ethnic
origins’ (). Another variant was to take sides, particularly with
asylum-seekers against resettlers, as in the Lafontaine response. Behind
these responses were different images of resettlers: as to what they were,
a sociological minority, like asylum-seekers eager to escape poverty and
state-breakdown; or as to what they were made to be in official discourse,
co-ethnics, and thus unloved relics of ethnic nationhood.
The restrictive challenge. In the context of a center-right party coalition
in power during most of the s, the restrictive challenge had to be
more immediately effective than the liberal challenge to ethnic-German
immigration. Its focus became the economic and social benefits bestowed on ethnic newcomers by the state. The Expellee Law of ,
the legal basis of ethnic immigration, was in the first place a social
integration law, which provided for a long list of positive discrimination
measures. Elderly resettlers, for instance, received fictionally wage and
employment-based pensions that equalled, and sometimes even exceeded, those of comparable native Germans, even though they had never
worked in Germany and thus had not contributed to the public pension
funds (). ‘Who has lost his home and property because of his Germanness may well expect that the great insurance community of West
Germany will compensate him for this’, said the responsible minister
during the drafting of the Expellee Law (). This reasoning may
have been appropriate in , when the number of resettlers was down
to a trickle of , per year. It was anachronistic when more than
times as many arrived in , with a rather lower sense of obligation on
the part of West Germany’s ‘great insurance community’. In addition,
() Erika Trenz, ‘Einwanderung gestalten,’ Das Parlament, August .
() In , the average pension for male
resettlers was , DM—which was DM
higher than the average pension of male natives (Otto : ).
() BT-Drs., Stenographische Berichte,
. Sitzung vom .., S..
&
there was preferential access to public housing, immediate unemployment benefits (based on qualifications and the type of work performed
before resettlement), compensation for lost property according to the
Equalization of Burdens Act (Lastenausgleichsgesetz), subsidized loans
for furnishing appartments or opening businesses, preferential hiring
(employers who hired resettlers were reimbursed percent of
employment costs), and even lower car insurance rates (see the entire
catalogue in Otto : -).
Against the backdrop of increasing mass unemployment and slimming welfare benefits for natives, the generous benefits bestowed on the
ethnic resettlers had to stir massive resentment and social envy. By ,
over percent of the public was in favour of restricting ethnic immigration, which was deemed by most to be economically rather than
ethnically motivated (Levy : ). Pushed by the recent successes
of the far-right Republikaner party, which was the first to scandalize the
privileges for ethnic resettlers, even the Bavarian sister party of the
ruling CDU, the CSU, started campaigning against overly generous
pension schemes for resettlers (Puskeppeleit : ).
In response to the dramatic collapse of public support for ethnic
German immigration, the center-right government quickly retreated
from its initial approach to make the newcomers’ swift integration a
s-style ‘national task’. Just one year after passing an ambitious
Special Programme for Integrating Resettlers in , the focus shifted
toward keeping resettlers in their places of origins, by means of development aids and securing in situ minority and self-government rights
(Puskeppeleit : ). For those still bent on immigrating, a series of
laws has been passed since making this both less lucrative and more
difficult. The Integration Adjustment Act of January , among
other things, replaced wage-based unemployment benefits with a standardized and more modest ‘integration money’, limited to one year. The
Interior Minister saw this as a response to populist pressure: ‘(P)ossible
irritations among the native population about the... favouritism of Aussiedler... are counteracted’ (quoted in Levy : ). Six months later,
the Resettler Reception Law, in a copy of the British ‘entry clearance’
system, shifted the application procedure to the countries of origin.
This amounted to an unofficial quota system (and approximation of
ethnic-return to ‘normal’ immigration), almost halving the number of
admitted resettlers, from , in to , in .
The restrictive trend culminated in the Law on Settling the Consequences of the War (Kriegsfolgenbereinigungsgesetz) of , which
phased out all special laws dealing with WWII consequences, thus
:
signalling the official end of the postwar period. This law was a compromise between the ruling CDU and the opposition SPD. The SPD
wanted to put an end to ethnic German immigration as such by means of
a ‘fixed day’ (Stichtag), after which no further applications were to be
accepted, arguing that after the liberalization of Eastern Europe there
was no longer any ‘expulsion pressure’. On the other side, the CDU
rejected such a ‘fixed day’ rule, but interestingly with the defensive
argument that the resulting ‘exit panic’ would further increase rather
than decrease ethnic immigration (Alexy )—the wish to decrease
ethnic German immigration had evidently become consensual by then.
There was a particular bite to the SPD demand, because the parliamentary opposition’s consent was needed for the center-right government’s plan to curtail the constitutional asylum right. In the so-called
Asylum Compromise of December , the SPD gave in to restrict
asylum, but only at the price of restricting ethnic-German immigration (). Accordingly, the Kriegsfolgenbereinigungsgesetz, which (among
other things) implements the Aussiedler component of the Asylum
Compromise, bears the mark not only of the restrictive, but also of the
liberal, challenge to ethnic immigration.
The crucial novelty of the new law is its denial of the status of ethnic
resettler to all persons born after January . This means that
ethnic-German immigration has in principle come to an end. For those
still eligible to apply, the procedure has been fundamentally reshuffled.
First, there is now a formal quota restriction of , admissions per
year (reduced to , in the late s). Secondly, except for applicants from the former Soviet Union, the existence of expulsion pressure
(which is one of two prerequisites for being granted the status of Aussiedler) is no longer presumed, but has to be proved by the applicant.
Thirdly, the criteria for ethnic membership (Volkszugehörigkeit, which is
the second prerequisite for Aussiedler status) have been tightened for
applicants born after December . Most importantly, the active
mastery of the German language is now key in proving one’s Volkszugehörigkeit. This change, innocent as it seems, marks a fundamental
departure from previous recognition practice, in which the very absence
of German language skills was taken as sign of oppression and forced
assimilation, and thus held in favor of the ethnic claimant.
The new centrality of language competence is less the result of a new
vision of ethnic Germanness than of the mundane need to better ‘integrate’ ethnic migrants. The stress on ‘integration’ as such is difficult to
() ‘Ergebnisse der Verhandlungen zu Asyl und Zuwanderung’, Süddeutsche Zeitung,
December , p..
&
reconcile with the official logic of ‘returning’ co-ethnics—how could
true ‘co-ethnics’ create an ‘integration’ problem? Regarding its statusrecognition function, harsh new guidelines stipulate that the language
test, obligatory since , cannot be repeated, because—as the
government says—its purpose is the ‘determination of a status’. In
/, over one third of Russian applicants failed the individual language test and thus once and for all forfeited their chances to be admitted
as resettlers. At the same time, the German government generously
finances German language classes in Russia, which are currently attended by over , potential resettlers. This shows the ‘integration’
concern behind the mandatory language test—the German government
simply wants to make sure that resettlers are not subject to ‘integration’
problems in Germany. Making language competence the key to admission amounts to conceding the obsolescence of ‘ethnic return’ migration. The new language policy is contradictory also in a second respect:
if its official purpose is ‘determination of a status’, why does the
government help to create this status by means of subsidized language
classes? As Müinz and Ohliger () indicate, the language classes
could have the ‘unintended effect’ of increasing rather than decreasing
the number of potential claimants. However, this unintended increase is
bound to be short-term only, because there cannot be ethnic Germans
born after .
Discussion
A common feature of co-ethnic immigration is to force the state into
the difficult business of checking individual identity claims—
interestingly, not unlike asylum policy, in which individual biographic
claims are the subject of an excruciating recognition procedure. These
classificatory practices by states are not determined by a fixed sense of
‘identity’, but instead are malleable, subject to conflict, and injected with
a heavy dose of political exigency. In Israel, the question ‘Who is a Jew’
has been anything but clear, and the eligibility criteria of the Law of
Return have been the stake of permanent conflict between secular and
religious understandings of Jewishness (see Samet ). In Germany,
the most recent emphasis on language in determining ethnic Germanness is entirely the result of state interests. It responds to the oddity of
sociological non-Germans entering as official co-ethnics, which had
raised the public against the policy and has found concrete manifestation
:
in obvious problems in socially integrating the latest wave of Spätaussiedler, particularly from ex-Soviet Eurasia (e.g. Dietz and Hilkes ).
In radically changing the role of language in the recognition procedure,
the German government has de facto admitted that the status of ethnic
German is more the result of its own policy than of some underlying
ethnic Germanness.
This indicates a second feature of immigration policies based on
co-ethnicity: the production of ethnicity by the very policies that are
meant to presuppose and to passively register this ethnicity. Ethnic
immigration policies are ‘performative’; they help create the (ethnic)
reality that they nominally presuppose (). This paradox is known
from affirmative action policies in the United States, in which preferential race quota in college admission or public employment provide an
incentive on the part of individuals to identify along ‘minority’ lines (see
Ford ). In our cases, the receiving states’ production of ethnicity is also favored by some objective demographic features of the sending
regions. The pool of applicants for ethnic German or Jewish status in
Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is anything but sharply
bounded; instead, it is characterized by high degrees of intermarriage
and cultural and linguistic assimilation with their local environments
(see Münz and Ohliger ). It is therefore not far-fetched to assume
that not the ‘real’ but the ‘official’ ethnicity of the state is driving this
strangely ‘non-Euclidian’ immigration, in which ‘outmigrations may
increase rather than decrease the reservoir of potential ethnomigrants’
(Brubaker a: ). There is a thin line between fabricating the
requisite ethnicity and exhausting the wide status-recognition opportunities provided by the state—the German-government-financed language courses in Russia quite literally help produce the co-ethnics that
are then subjected to a (paradoxically language-centered) status test.
Unfortunately, there is a lack of reliable data on this creation of ethnicity
by the status-granting state. A rare study of the situation in the Russian
city of Brest showed that the size of the self-declared Jewish population
doubled between and , the precise moment of heavy outmigration of Jews to Israel and Germany (quoted in Münz and Ohliger
: -, fn.).
A third feature of ethnic immigration policies is their susceptibility to
a ‘liberal’ challenge, even in proverbially ethnic states like Israel and
Germany. This is because such policies conflict with constitutive principles of liberal stateness, such as public neutrality and equality (see
() See Bourdieu’s () reflections on the performative character of ethnic representations
and classifications.
&
Dworkin ). At the academic level, liberals have usually argued in
favour of open borders (Carens ), and a policy that makes closed
borders more permeable for some should not further outrage them—if
those ‘some’ had not been singled out according to ascriptive group
criteria, which entails discriminations for other immigrant and minority
groups. Since ethnic immigration is, after all, ‘immigration’, it has also
provoked a restrictive challenge, which addresses the economic and
cultural costs of immigration; in particular, the restrictive challenge is
premised on questioning the veracity of co-ethnicity claims, as a result
of which returning co-ethnics are refashioned as ordinary immigrants.
Interestingly, while obviously differently motivated, the liberal and restrictive challenges have ‘synergetic’ effects, one reinforcing the other.
The liberal position is usually not against the entry of putative
co-ethnics as such, but against their exclusive or preferential entry, opting
instead for an ethnically neutral immigration policy. In turn, the restrictive position is usually not concerned with seeking to keep out ‘true’
co-ethnics, but with keeping in check ‘creative’ re-identifyers, and
resenting to give them entitlements that exceed those of the domestic
population, particularly in the contest of slimming welfare states.
However, in their ‘synergetic’ confluence, the liberal and restrictive
challenges can grow into a severe threat to ethnic immigration as such.
This has been the German experience, in which the combination of the
restrictive and liberal challenges in the Asylum Compromise of led
to the death-in-principle of ethnic-German immigration. Likewise, the
unwillingness of the mainstream political forces in Israel to change the
Law of Return in a restrictive direction (as sought by orthodox-religious
circles) was encouraged by the fear that this might also promote a fullscale liberal attack on the Law of Return as such, and thus endanger the
Jewish character of the state.
In order to explain divergent outcomes in Israel and Germany, we
have argued that for historical and geopolitical reasons the political space
for raising the liberal and restrictive challenges was differently wide in
both cases. Historically, the very encounter between Germans and Jews
under Nazism had compromised ethnic statehood in Germany, permitting only a temporally and spatially qualified ethnic immigration policy.
By contrast, the Holocaust has provided a powerful founding myth for
Israel as the place for the ‘Ingathering of the Exiles’, without any temporal or spatial limitations (). As we saw, the Holocaust motif was also
effectively used to deflect the restrictive-religious challenge to the Law
() The State of Israel’s declaration of
independence proclaims that it ‘will be open
for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles’.
:
of Return in its current, expansive form. Geopolitically, Israel’s interest
in Jewish immigration is enduringly tied up with the protracted national
conflict with the Palestinians, whereas the geopolitical interest of the
German state in ethnic immigration was temporally limited to the Cold
War context. One difference with Israel is that in Germany, ethnic
immigration has never had to be at the service of a state whose territory
is permanently contested by rival ethnonational groups. In addition,
Germany’s privileged position in a Lockean zone of peace, uniting
Europe, has deprived ethnic immigration of all secondary, strategic
purposes, next to complying with an individual right of the ethnic
claimant. And the legitimacy of claims for co-ethnicity became ever
more doubtful as national self-understanding moved from an ethnic
toward a civic mode. When the massive entry of notionally co-ethnic but
sociologically Russian or East European immigrants in the s created
adjustment and integration problems similar to those of ‘normal’ immigrants, an obvious opening was provided also for the restrictive
challenge, which at that point was no longer kept in check by the Cold
War division of the European continent. By contrast, the persistence of
the conflict between Jews and Palestinians over the same territory gave
rise to a demographic imperative of such magnitude that all liberal or
restrictive challenges to ethnic immigration in Israel have (so far) failed.
Given its historical roots in an ethnonational colonial project, Israel is
determined to be, and this perhaps permanently, a strong ‘nationalizing
state’ (Brubaker ) that seeks to strengthen the Jewish majority
against the Palestinian minority by admitting more (and in principle
only) Jewish immigrants. This demographic imperative has constricted
the political space not only for the liberal, but also for the restrictive
challenge to ethnic immigration—a doctrinary, narrow definition of
Jewishness would simply be luxurious in the Hobbesian zone of war,
into which Israel seems precariously and permanently locked.
The full scale of Germany’s turn away from ethnic-German immigration, and Israel’s continued commitment to Jewish immigration, is
evident in the following two contemporary constellations. Just about the
time when the German government went about to restrict the admission
of ethnic Germans, it opened the doors widely for Jewish immigrants
from the former Soviet Union. Since the passing of the Quota
Refugee Law, some , Russian Jews have seized the opportunity
of immigrating freely (without numerical restrictions and without
individual screening) to Germany, quadrupling the size of the small
Jewish community in the Land der Täter (Laurence ). In a delicate
twist, the Israeli government has repeatedly urged the German govern
&
ment not to grant automatic refugee status to Russian Jews, claiming the
latter for its own nation-building purposes. Already in , the same
conservative government that would soon restrict the entry of ethnic
Germans refused such pressure by Israel: ‘In view of her historical past,
Germany does not want to close her borders for Jews from the Soviet
Union’, said a government official (quoted in Harris : ).
Admitting Jewish immigrants is the latest instance in the country’s
politics of Wiedergutmachung (reparations), in which Jews obviously
take a higher order of priority than co-ethnics.
A partial structural equivalent on the Israeli side would be restrictions on Jewish immigration, and an open-door policy for Palestinians.
The ‘right of return’ for the . million Palestinian refugees was actually
a central stake in the aborted peace negotiations between the former
Prime Minister Barak and the Palestinian leadership. It was overwhelmingly rejected even by liberal Israeli intellectuals and peace activists. An
open letter ‘to the Palestinian leadership’ by Amos Oz and other
leading Israeli intellectuals declared that ‘(w)e shall never be able to agree
to the return of the refugees to within the borders of Israel. The meaning
of such a return would be the elimination of the state of Israel’ ().
Should Israel acknowledge the ‘right of return’ for Palestinians, worries
another liberal intellectual, they might become ‘the biggest population
group in a state whose essence and symbols they had always rejected, and
whose extinction had been their highest aim [...] ‘Therefore—no thank
you. I do not want to be a Jewish minority in Israel’ ().
The wholesale rejection of the Palestinian ‘right of return’ invokes
the demographic imperative not to be outnumbered by Palestinians,
which has been a central element in the resilience of Jewish-priority
immigration in Israel. It also shows that the definition of Israel as a
Jewish state prevails; no civic transformation of Israeli nationhood is in
the making. By contrast, the decline of ethnic German immigration is
closely linked to the rise of a new civic-territorial identity in postwar
Germany (see Levy ). If there still is an ‘ethnocultural idiom of
nationhood’ (Brubaker ) in Germany, it is not readily visible in the
disparate treatment of ethnic Germans and Jews for immigration
purposes, and at best it has taken on strangely inverted forms ().
() The Hebrew original appeared in
Haaretz, January . Quoted in The Economist, January , p..
() David Grossman, ‘No right of return’,
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January
, p..
() Laurence’s () informative study of
the divergent treatment of the Jewish and
Turkish immigrant communities in Berlin
shows that the better treatment of Jews is partially justified in ethnonational terms, as facilitating the return of Jews to their presumed
cultural Heimat.
:
In this article we considered ethnic immigration policies as a dependent variable, which is shaped not only by ethnic national idioms but also
by a geopolitical and historical context that either constains or facilitates
(liberal and restrictive) contestation. However, the dynamics of ethnic
immigration may also be looked at as an independent variable, which
impacts on the boundaries and the constitution of the national community. Once a policy has been set, it in turn affects the boundary definitions that it partially reflects. After the demise of ethnic-German
immigration, which will be complete only in a generation or so, a major
institutional expression of ethnic stateness will have disappeared in
Germany. The default result of this must be the further strengthening of
civic nationhood. In the same vein, Daniel Levy (: abstract) argued
that the scaling-down of ethnic-German immigration both ‘reflect(s)
and reinforce(s)’ the rise of a civic identity in contemporary Germany.
Conversely, the resilience of Jewish immigration is not just expressive
of, but also reproduces, the ethnic self-definition of the Israeli state as a
Jewish state. Note the superb irony that this is attained through admitting also halachic or even self-defined non-Jews, which might eventually
lead to the rise of a minority identity of the Russian newcomers, and
thus add to the already considerable challenges to the Jewish definition
of Israel. Conditioning and conditioned at the same time, the boundaries of the national community are not fixed but fluid, among other
things, as a result of a state’s ethnic immigration policies.
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