Germany is groaning under the increasing number of refugees. Now a double compromise is the obvious solution, says t-online columnist Christoph Schwennicke.
At its core, politics is the art of compromise. Most of the time, the work on it goes like this: Both or more parties, who are condemned to compromise, work on a workpiece from completely different sides and with completely different objectives. It is carved, planed, rasped and sanded, until in the end there is a small, round something that everyone can somehow live with, but that does not make anyone really happy – and above all it is too puny for the size of the problem to be solved yet to be fair. We will all be able to experience this at the end of the process during the so-called heating transition.
Sometimes, instead, it would make sense not to make one out of two contrary ideas. But to approve and implement both ideas at the same time – with the learning effect that both parties to the compromise have to jump over their shadow at one point – for the double benefit of the matter. Such a case would have been to agree on speed limits on motorways and longer running times for the remaining nuclear power plants, both of which would have touched the political foundations of the FDP and the Greens. But the climate helped twice.
Right to stay instead of attrition
Now, with another major issue, migration, there is another chance for a strategic double strike that does justice to the magnitude of the challenge and promises a lasting and viable solution for the first time in almost 20 years. For Germany and Europe.
Recently, the Thuringian Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow from the left made a proposal on how to deal with the refugees who came to Germany in the course of 2015 and afterwards in a more practical and pragmatic way. Ramelow suggested that instead of going through grueling asylum assessment procedures, recognition and deportations, which almost never happen anyway, all those who have come since 2014 and are not guilty of anything should be given the right to stay.
It’s a proposition that structurally appeals to those who see borders as something to be transcended anyway (which they don’t, for they are constitutive and define a polity and the space within which that polity’s rules apply, but That’s not what it’s about now.) The proposal also takes into account the true essence of the sentence that Angela Merkel brazenly blurted out in the parliamentary group at the time when her critics reproached her: Well, they’re here.
Europe’s cold shoulder
And the experience of the years since then also shows that the distribution of the millions of refugees who have arrived in Germany across Europe, as Merkel boldly claimed in Anne Will, never took place. The promised land was always first and foremost Germany, Merkel’s pull policy made it even more promising, and the other European countries, rather restrictive on the migration issue, gave Germany the cold shoulder, with a certain right: your problem, self-created, must solve yourself. As residents, we have enough to do with buffering the consequences of your pull policy.
Of course, Ramelow’s proposal has soft flanks. The Thuringian state father is far too intelligent not to know that, as he claims, this will not solve the skilled worker problem that Germany has. Most of the time, no skilled workers came. And they won’t be made as quickly as needed, even if they are taken out of the state of toleration, which also condemns those who are willing to work to doing nothing.
Nevertheless, the idea is smart and cuts through a thick knot in one fell swoop.
