Spotlight
December 4, 2000

Internationalists haven't reserved multiculturalism for the United States, but one country fights back.
By William Carmichael

Germany's President Johannes Rau, a Social Democrat (SDU), is up in arms over the oppositon's use of the term Deutsche Leitkultur (prevalent German culture).
In fact, he's so upset that he issued a public rebuke to Christian Democrat (CDU) leaders.
What's behind the uproar is the use of the reference to German culture along with mentioning the term "multiculturalism" in a less than laudatory fashion.
It seems that the conservative Christian Democrats used the term Deutsche Leitkultur after claiming that multicultural societies do not work and demanding that immigrants accept the dominant German culture.
Several things about German politics and government must be explained to understand the situation clearly.
First, the CDU can be compared to the UK Conservative or Tory Party; the SDU to the UK's leftist liberal Labor Party.

What has the German left-of-center president in a tizzy is the suggestion that German culture could possibly by better than any other.
WHO'S NO. 1?
His remarks suggested that Germany had the "highest culture," and that it wanted to impose this on people from outside, he said.
According to German press reports, the president's "rare intervention into daily political skirmishing" was immediately condemned by CDU leaders, who told him that he should steer clear of politics and confine himself to his ceremonial duties.
Although the president's position in the German government is almost powerless, he has a "bully pulpit" and often uses it in issues of what has become known as public morality.
And when Rau took office in May of 1999, he siad the moral high ground-and his top priority-was to make integration of foreigners into Germany easier. (sound familiar)
{Part of making the foreigners more welcome was to allow-and spend quite a bit of public money on-all kinds of cultures to exist simultaneously.
If a foreigner didn't speak German, or had habits that disgusted Germans, the government had to step in and make the Germans like it.
Is this all sounding a bit familiar?
The charges by the SDU leader against the rival CDU came with a background of tension sparked by a debate about whether to ban the National Democratic Party (NDP).
It seems that the right-of-center NDP thinks Germany and Germans are just fine and can get along without culture distortion.
Meanwhile, the Christian Democrats are denying that they are leaning too far right or adopted racist, anti-immigrant policies-charges leveled against the nationalists.
The CDU insists, however, that problems of integrating foreigners need to be addressed. Party officials say integration cannot work on the basis of an "equality of cultures."
Fiedrich Merz, the parliamentary leader of the CDU who first mentioned the phrase Leitkultur, argues that parallel cultures should not exist in Germany.
And it was CDU leader Angela Merkel who threw gasoline on the smoldering argument by saying that multi-cultural societies did not work.
Meanwhile, Joschka Fischer, Germany's leftist Green Party foreign minister, said Christian Democrats were cultivating "a racist, anti-immigrant image."
He opined that the CDU needed an "issue" to get people's minds off the Helmut Kohl donations scandal. (Former Chancellor Kohl is a member of the CDU>
According to the German media, opinion polls show that immigration has become one of the main concerns of Germans as the number of foreigners has risen sharply in the past decade from four million to seven million.
Across the Channel, one of Britain's leading newspapers, The Telegraph of London, pointed out that the CDU has found in several recent regional elections that honest, realistic discussion about the immigration issue wins votes.