Fear of foreign infiltration: The dirty secret

Most Germans believe that the share of Chinese direct investment in this country is 33 percent - while it is actually 1 percent. According to a study by the Center for European Economic Research, China's influence on life here is placed far beyond reality. As I read it, I immediately thought of how the proportion of Muslims is regularly grotesquely overestimated. What the two have in common is that they are enemy images. And when it comes to the fear of foreign infiltration, there is always a certain amount of madness at work.

But it's about more. If social protests express themselves as racist hatred, then the right has succeeded in reinterpreting distribution conflicts between top and bottom into a fight between inside and outside, as the sociologist Klaus Dörre puts it. This outside can then be local migrants or Muslims or others who are not tolerated in the interior of proper Germanness. But in my opinion, the right-wing resentment is equally about the great outside, about the echo chamber of changed world conditions.

The particular relentlessness and sustainability that distinguish current racism from other waves of previous decades derive from the global context. They arise from a sense of loss that is by no means imaginary. CDU Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently polemicized that the abbreviation AfD meant relegation for Germany. But isn't the influx to this party more of a reaction to its real decline?

is an author in Berlin, who has focused on Islamic worlds for many years. The most recent publication was “Understanding the Pain of Others: Holocaust and World Memory” (Propylaea).

Seven years ago, in the twilight of Western societies, I wrote a book called “The Long Farewell to White Dominance.” It reflected the changes in my own lifetime since the days when my school class only had children with beige-brown hair. And was borne out of the hope that there could be a thoughtful farewell after 500 years of European dominance.

"The word farewell presupposes that there are actors. Otherwise we would only be talking about expulsion from white dominance, a process that is already underway. I would like to encourage an active farewell and to accept something new, without fear," I wrote at the time.

The taz is an independent, left-wing and opinionated daily newspaper. We have been arguing in our comments, essays and debate texts since the taz was founded in 1979. We often cannot and do not want to agree on an opinion. That's why you'll find some completely opposing positions here - all part of the very broad left-wing spectrum of opinions.

The turbulent emergence of an immigrant society is connected to larger questions that concern our view of the world and our image of ourselves, because the ideas of the self and the foreign are equally fantasies about our place on this earth, whether consciously or unconsciously: “White Europeans today have to cope with a historic decline, and hopefully they will do so without falling into fascism.”

The term fascism still seemed daring and somehow distant back then. Seven years later, my book is no longer in stores and its topic is more burning than ever.

Between the last two election weekends, which were hyped as fateful for Germany, the BRICS summit met in New Delhi. 20 states, representing more than half of the world's population, agreed on an extensive political catalogue. It was not the USA or the EU that achieved this, but India. Rankings and priorities are obviously changing, and the speed at which this is happening is like a parallel curve to the rapid rise of the AfD.

And yet we hardly use the global moment as an explanation. It's better to poke around in earlier times and borrow the term "indefinite negation" from Hegel to analyze the voter's brain. Few see more clearly. The philosopher Eva von Redecker speaks of the defense of a “phantom possession”: violated claims to ownership are in reality “claims of superiority that refer to past dominance”. The political scientist Ingar Solty sees it similarly: The fall of the West and the rise of China caused an insult to collective narcissism.

Victimhood is the most powerful form of right-wing identity politics; it justifies its own brutalization and turns aggression into an act of self-defense. That's why there is latent violence in the air today among those who feel driven away from the intellectual geography of white supremacy - it may still look as disproportionate in their own imagination as it does on the distorted maps that the United Nations has just decided to correct.

In all of this, the resistance to migration functions, to use a Freudian term, as a cover for resentment for everything that is uncomprehended - which is why the AfD is particularly successful in areas with few immigrants. The whispers about remigration fuel the illusion that the situation is reversible, at least on a national scale. But there is not even a hypothetical recipe for regaining lost global importance. And when the parties of the so-called political center promise to defend our privileges from an ancestral imperial way of life, they are only postponing the necessary mental adjustment to new realities.

The fact that the world conditions that a significant percentage of Germans want back have been irrevocably lost is treated like a dirty secret. An honest anti-fascism would have to administer a simple truth three times a day: There is no going back to an age of Western white dominance. And anyone who dreams of this would do better to put his or her energy into educating their own children to prepare them for a world in which being white is no longer a priori advantage.