The
only option we’re left with
If we
look at demographic data, social and crime statistics, educational studies and
the informal regulatory framework that governs everyday practice in many
places, we come to the conclusion that non-European ideas, standards and
etiquette have long since become dominant in many German cities and regions.
This dominance has been intensified and consolidated by the so-called wave of
refugees. In many places, the question of who has power and hegemony has been
answered by demographic, cultural, political, social, societal and religious
factors. Unease about the foreseeable consequences is also affecting sections
of the political class. Recent attempts to make it more difficult for Turkish
politicians to appear publicly to their compatriots in Germany, which have long
been forceful demonstrations of power vis-à-vis German society, point to this.
But such measures are purely defensive, too cautious and come years, if not
decades, too late. They can no longer change the fact that parts of Germany and
Europe – including core European areas – have been gambled away through
delusion, carelessness, convenience, opportunism and stupidity. Charles de
Gaulle’s dream of a Carolingian Europe, which would become the nucleus of a
Europe all the way to the Urals, is today even less realistic than a mirage.
What
political courses of action remain possible? If west Europeans and western
Germans want to maintain their historical identity, they will presumably have
to vacate large parts of their ancestral Carolingian lands and look for new
areas to settle in. This doesn’t necessarily mean that a new wall will have to
be built, to neatly separate old Europeans from immigrants. In any case that
would be impractical and unfair, because loyalties, beliefs, lifestyles and
abilities are not necessarily arranged according to ethnic or religious origin.
A
liberal, educated Muslim, for example, can turn out to be a better European
than a native German who transfers his desire for self-extinction into the
political sphere. What is conceivable is a blended western Europe and Germany
made up of a complicated, dynamic web of autonomous territories, secessions,
changes in borders, relocations, ex- and enclaves, corridors, protectorates,
condominiums, which resembles the patchwork of the Holy Roman Empire and
requires continual compromises. The dissolution of nation states will happen in
a completely different way from how multi-cultural dreamers imagine today.
However, Europeans here will be only one group of many.
However,
the precondition for their collective survival is that further east, in the
‘new Europe’ that former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld positioned in
the run-up to the Iraq war against the ‘old Europe,’ new political, economic
and intellectual-cultural power centers are established to replace the now
deteriorating western metropolises. Eastern Europe would be the main settlement
area for refugees from the west, and would also be the guarantor of the
European fragments in the west. The border between the compact eastern and
fragmented western Europe would roughly run along the Yalta line, which was
valid up until 1989.
For
Germany this would be a solution for areas east of the river Elbe. A European
shift eastwards would be the easiest for the Germans to cope with. They could,
moreover, put down roots in the old German settlements of East Prussia,
Pomerania, Silesia, Bohemia, perhaps even further east and south-east, in any
case in the historical soil from which they were once driven out. However, they
definitely could not appear as people entitled to old borders, ownership or
legal titles, but only as new settlers who have come to an arrangement with
those who have been the new owners since 1945.
So it
may be that the division of Europe, decided in Yalta, and the expulsion of the
Germans, will prove to have been a cruel, but with historical hindsight,
redeeming, ruse of history, because it spared the eastern Europeans from mass
immigration from the Third World. If the Federal Republic of Germany had
extended from the Meuse to the Memel, Danzig/Gdansk or Breslau/Wroclaw would
today offer the same outlook and views as Duisburg in western Germany. Instead
they have retained their European character, like Warsaw, Budapest, Prague and
St. Petersburg. Who would have dreamt in 1989, let alone in 1945, that a few
decades later the dialectics of Yalta and the displacement of peoples could
become a lifeline for Europe?
Abridged
and translated from eigentümlich frei, where the original article was published on 22nd
April 2017.