Merkel’s approach to the migrant crisis is a battle for Germany’s soul

Alan Freeman on Germany and refugees:

Yet while Chancellor Merkel is keenly aware that the flow must slow down and is enacting measures to screen out non-Syrian and non-Iraqi migrants, she continues to insist that Germany cannot and should not follow its neighbours and simply shut its borders. In a weekend TV interview, she dismissed the idea of a rigid limit on the number of new migrants. “There is no point in believing that I can solve the problem through the unilateral closure of borders.”“I have no Plan B,” Merkel said bravely, although she added that Germany will continue to work on solving the problem at its root, in the Syrian conflict, and will try to get her EU colleagues to accept some redistribution of the migrants. Aside from Sweden, nobody else has stepped to the plate in the same way as Germany.

Why is Merkel doing this? Her reasons actually have as much to do with Germany’s past and future as they do with its present.

When I lived in Berlin in the late 1990s, I was struck by the burden of history that ordinary Germans bear. The Nazi past is around every street corner, with museums, memorials and plaques recalling the horror of those dozen years. Added to this unfortunate heritage was the weight of four decades of totalitarian rule in the old German Democratic Republic. Can a nation have too much history?

Aware of how their forebears were the source of so much displacement, hatred and death in the Second World War, contemporary Germans like Merkel have vowed they will never again close their doors to those in need. They also see their national identity as being as part of something bigger — which explains in large part why they continue to be the major backers of the European ideal.

“If Germany can’t show a friendly face in an emergency situation, then it’s not my country,” Merkel has said.

She picked up the same line in her weekend interview. “There is so much violence and hardship on our doorstep,” she said. “What is right for Germany in the long term? I think it is to keep Europe together and to show humanity.”

There’s also a practical, down-to-earth reason for opening Germany’s doors to migrants. Germany’s population is stagnating and on the verge of major decline, as the birth rate continues to fall and the proportion of the elderly rises. Over the next 15 years, it could mean a loss of 6 million of the workers needed to power the German economy. If nothing is done, the population will drop to 67 million by 2060.

Japan, facing a similar demographic crisis, already has seen its population fall by 1 million over the past five years to 127 million. Japan is on track to losing 40 per cent of its population by the end of the century. But Japan won’t even consider mass immigration as an alternative, dooming itself to increasing irrelevance.

The idea of a shrinking Germany is obviously anathema to Chancellor Merkel. So she is willing to take the risk of opening up the country to masses of migrants, hopeful that they can be successfully integrated into a strong economy and become Germans. It’s a huge gamble.

Germans may not be yet convinced — but neither are they rejecting her vision of the future either. A poll conducted for Focus magazine at the end of January showed that 39.9 per cent of those surveyed believed Merkel should resign because of her handling of the refugee crisis. But a surprisingly strong plurality of 45.2 per cent said she should stay on.

And her Christian Democratic Party still leads handily against its rivals. It would be foolish to count Merkel out.

http://ipolitics.ca/2016/02/29/merkels-approach-to-the-migrant-crisis-is-a-battle-to-save-germanys-soul/