In the following, the research question on the depiction of refugees as Muslims is addressed by outlining three major discursive strands that were uncovered in the media analysis: the construction of a “Christian European Culture” (3.1.), the construction of cultural difference, self-responsible victims and a security threat (3.2.), and attributions of responsibility linking chancellor Merkel, Muslim refugees and the rise of the far-right (3.3.).
3.1 Constructing a “Christian European culture”
As indicated above, the search entries for the selection of the articles comprised only keywords that were directly related to Islam. Although “Christianity” was not part of the original search mask, it turned out that depictions of the refugee crisis were predominantly made against the background of a purported Christian or “Judeo-Christian” European identity (Kade
2016). For instance, the argumentative structure of the Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán arguing against accepting more refugees is built on the construction of a sharp differentiation between the religious identity of refugees and of the current Hungarian and European population. He claims that “those arriving have been raised in another religion and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims. [...] Is it not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian?” (Traynor
2015a; Bergmer
2015). This rhetorical question refers to an implicit assumption that Europe is and even should remain Christian. Building on this assumption, Orbán stylises himself in militaristic language as having to “defend our borders,” to defend “European Christianity” against the “offensive” of the “Muslim influx” (Traynor
2015b).
An integral part of what can be called a
Christians-as-insiders and Muslims-as-outsiders rhetoric is the underlying assumption that certain countries were dominated by one religion. Therefore, some articles suggest that it was normal or common sense to try to keep out people that do not share the same religion: “Hungarians did not want Muslims in their country” (Traynor
2015a). Some articles even attribute responsibility for accepting refugees to countries that share the same religion or even the same confession: “Sunni countries, headed by Saudi Arabia, should take in Sunni refugees. Shia countries, headed by Iran, should take Shia refugees. Christian countries should then take Christian refugees.” (Sherborne
2015; cf. Steinke
2015). This statement implies that it was more natural and beneficial if different religious groups remained separated. This reveals an ideal of religious homogeneity underlying the text which implies that a human right such as asylum should be granted not according to need but according to religious affiliation. Arguing for such discriminatory measures including watering down human rights standards by invoking Christianity appears paradoxical in face of the proclaimed “Christian” values such as liberal democracy and “dignity of every human being” (Esslinger und Steinke
2016).
1 Statements by senior German Christian democratic politicians reveal the same referential mechanism that fails to specify what a Christian identity of Europe means: “I am not of the opinion that Islam is part of the national identity of our country. The Muslims living in Germany belong to us, they are part of our society. But we have a Christian-Jewish tradition” (Kade
2016).
Another senior Christian democratic politician claims that the challenge to accept refugees is now bigger compared to refugees coming from a country with Christian tradition. Asked why this is the case, she answers that “The origin and the way of life a human being lives in his homeland shape him. This is completely normal. Like we Germans are shaped by the rule of law, the basic law, our civil and personal liberties and Christianity” (Esslinger und Steinke
2016). In this statement, a discursive pattern of what could be called
implication by correlation becomes visible, which occurs on multiple occasions throughout the texts. The conservative politician responds to the question about why it should be more challenging to integrate non-Christian immigrants by naming generally positively evaluated concepts as part of German identity. By implication, this suggests that non-Christians—the context of the interview reveals that she is talking about Muslims—are not “shaped by” or as intimately familiar with these concepts. Pushed even further by the interviewer to define what “Christian influence” actually means, she answers “Love of neighbour, tolerance. The values that my parents have taught me, with respecting the dignity of every human being, which ultimately also expresses itself in our constitution” (Esslinger und Steinke
2016). The claims that German identity and Christian culture mainly express themselves in the constitution expose a political theology that is at least in tension with the self-proclaimed religious neutrality of the constitutional state.
In the articles under scrutiny “Christianity” is largely stripped of a genuinely religious meaning and used to signify an indefinite set of concepts and structures that are an integral part of political culture. This change in signification helps to construct the cultural container “Christianity” and a culturally and religiously defined border to the “other”. Thus, because refugees do not share this religious tradition, they also purportedly do not share the support for core principles of liberal democracy. In other words, “Christianity” serves to proof that human dignity, rule of law and civil liberties are unfamiliar or even alien concepts to Muslim refugees. Through this rhetoric, talking about a “refugee influx” into Europe becomes inextricably linked not only to crossing borders of nation states but to crossing the cultural border between “Christian liberal democracy” and the “rest”. In the argumentation quoted above, a confined territoriality (“homeland”) is connected with an exclusive community of belonging (“we Germans” and “Christians”), and is linked with cultural superiority (“rule of law” and “our civil and personal liberties”). This tripartite amalgamation can be interpreted as the epitome of the discursive construction of the Muslim refugee as the “Other”. In sum, two seemingly clear cut cultural-spatial containers are being constructed that are marked by a sharp distinction between a “European Christian Culture” “here” and a “Muslim Culture” “there”. This spatio-cultural construction provides the discursive basis for arguments claiming that the integration of Muslims was especially difficult or even impossible.
3.2 Depicting refugees: cultural difference, self-responsible victims and security threat
Muslim refugees are not only considered to be unfamiliar with tolerance and principles of liberal democracy but also conceived as culturally “completely different” (Braun and Roll
2016) because “The hundred thousands of Muslims, that are coming now” (Belkin
2016) are from a “radically different culture” (Traynor et al.
2015). One author claims “that who comes has to accept the rules here, the liberties and cultural codes. Who comes here a thousand kilometers by foot has to cover the same distance in his head” (Rühle
2016). This statement suggests that the often very dangerous journey to Europe is as big a challenge for Muslim refugees as to bridge the gap of cultural differences.
While Muslim refugees are depicted as unfamiliar with and often not willing to accept the rules and cultural codes of the host society, one author contends that “Germany has a long tradition of knowing the Orient” (Krause
2016). He claims that because Muslim people “destroy each other or are being alienated by primitive and criminal Islamists from their best traditions, [...] we Germans actually have to reinforce the self-consciousness of those that fled to us. Namely by reminding them of their cultural achievements” (Krause
2016). While on an evaluational level this article positively acknowledges some elements of Muslim culture, it asserts that it is up to Germans knowing the Orient to remind Muslims of the positive sides of their heritage. While on a cognitive level the texts disagree fundamentally about the existence or value of “Muslim culture”, the knowledge/power formation that they enact has similar effects. No matter whether Muslim refugees are considered lacking something like a positively evaluable “culture” or as just having forgotten it, both positions result in the establishment of asymmetrical power relations. Thus, Muslim refugees are constructed as passive postcolonial subjects that are dependent on the rules, norms, and codes established by culturally superior Europeans (cf. Said
1978, p. 5).
Addressing the policy dimension of political culture, one text directly
translates these cultural differences into a political demand for an “immigration system that is tiered according to qualitative and cultural criteria. We should privilege well-educated refugees as well as Christians and other persecuted minorities from the Near East that usually have a higher readiness to assimilate” and “check whether they are culturally compatible with our basic values” (Wergin
2015). This implies the even more demanding cognitive assertion that it was somehow possible to form and measure “cultural criteria” that on an evaluational level should be the decisive criterion about whether refugees should be accepted or not. Therefore, not only are Christians supposedly more familiar with elements of liberal democracy and culturally more “advanced”, they are also supposed to be willing to give up their cultural, national, and religious identity in order to assimilate into European societies. This, again, implies a causality between religious homogeneity, cultural similarity, and successful integration or even assimilation. The author goes even further by demanding that those refugees who come are required to have “sufficient cultural capital in order to persist in a rapidly changing economy” (Wergin
2015). Therefore, we “need [...] the right immigration” which means choosing “whom we can make use of” (Wergin
2015). This statement endorses the possibility and the desirability of categorizing refugees into “needed” and “not needed”. It is therefore not only a set of cultural codes and political values, but also a set of skills related to economic performance that is constructed as requirement for refugees to be granted asylum.
In an amalgamation of economic, cultural, and religious argumentative snippets, the alleged reason for immigrants’ failure to be compatible with the European economic and cultural system is that they come from “culturally backward regions around the Mediterranean” (Wergin
2015). This “double-bind” becomes evident in the statement by one author: “the refugee is a victim that, however, is self-responsible. And the people come here for good reasons and not to Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. They come here because here there are liberties, but you also have to accept them” (Rühle
2016). The
self-responsible victim turns out to be the paradox figure that is torn between conflicting predications and the imperatives derived from them. On the one hand, the Muslim refugee is seen as victim of war, structural disadvantages, lack of cultural knowledge, deficient education and religious backwardness. On the other hand, the refugee is thought to have freely chosen to come to Europe. This purported act of free will is then used as an argument to claim that the Muslim refugee is self-responsible in overcoming all obstacles and in accepting European rules and traditions, its Christian character, and the demands of a dynamic economic system. This means that the self-responsible victim is depicted as being restricted and disadvantaged by deep-rooted, fundamental differences and “trenches”, while at the same time it is equally up to her to successfully integrate according to the vision of European societies.
Along with the cognitive assessment of deficient skill sets and cultural compatibility, the words used to collectively describe refugees are often
metaphors associated with force of nature or the movement of large material quantities. The wordings used in both conservative and left-leaning newspapers include “refugee wave” (Fried
2015), “stream of refugees” (Mühlfenzl
2016; Wergin
2015), “refugee flood” (Schulte von Drach
2015), “mass migration [Völkerwanderung]” (Herzinger
2015; Büscher
2015), “Muslim influx” (Traynor
2015a), and “onslaught of asylum seekers” (Wergin
2015). Using these metaphors associates the situation with several characteristics of natural forces. On the one hand, as the weather causing natural disasters, the situation is suggested to come from outside, recalling the contrast between the untamed and wild nature and the well-ordered “civilised” human society. Most narratives that include natural disasters imply that the only reasonable reaction is to build barriers between the forces of nature “outside” and that which must be protected “inside”. The repeated collocation of words in dominant discursive structures make it highly unlikely that words like “flood”, “wave” and “onslaught” are used to describe a group in a neutral, let alone positive way. Using a language of natural disasters is likely to contribute to a disregard of individual rights and individual needs.
Another central pattern in the depiction of Muslim refugees is the
association with jihadist terrorism. The connection between Muslim refugees and terrorism is established through different narrative elements and chains of association. First, texts indirectly quote politicians warning of the so-called Islamic State smuggling “sleeping terror cells” as refugees to Europe (Brössler et al.
2015; Schulte von Drach
2015). One commentator claims that “the security agencies are now afraid that radicals hide among the refugees that stream uncontrolled into Europe. [...] One should not pretend that Europe does not have a problem with Muslim immigrants, albeit only with a minority” (Wergin
2015). The author claims that there exists a lack of control of refugees that travel to Europe. This ignores the fact that while there have been a large number of people crossing borders without being registered in transit countries, most refugees, including the attackers of Ansbach and Würzburg, were officially registered as refugees by the state. The statement furthermore implies that it was possible to simply start controlling and thereby stopping the danger of terrorists entering European countries. It remains unclear, however, where and how these controls could be implemented and how they would identify potential terrorists. Despite falling short of providing answers to these open questions, the statements help to construct the idea of an easy solution in form of the undefined concept of “control”.
In addition to the construction of the “sleeping terror cell” narrative, an implicit causal
link between Islam and terrorism is being established. Making use of irony to point out the naïveté of the opposite standpoint, a text claims that “Islam is throughout a noble and peaceful religion and culture, which is why Islamic militants have to be incited to their infamous actions by evil powers of Western degradation” (Herzinger
2015). Here, the text builds on the presupposition of the audience that Islamic militants are not incited by anything else but by Islam itself. An article by a leading British Labour politician claims that “Our security interest in tackling the refugee crisis remains powerful, too. Criminal trafficking gangs are getting stronger, extremists are able to exploit the crisis, and the disorder of an unmanaged response threatens community cohesion and stability” (Cooper
2016). This can be interpreted as a securitising speech act because a topic that is not conventionally dealt with in terms of security is now framed as a security threat (Buzan et al.
1998, pp. 23–26). By also using “community” as key word in building the corpus, it is possible to identify this implicit dual reference to Muslims in the context of the refugee crisis. Both the exploiting extremists and the threatened communities are Muslims. Moreover, both are constructed to be in need of intervention by the security apparatus: the extremists have to be persecuted, the communities have to be protected. Therefore, this cognitively constructed need of state intervention, complemented with a threat aiming at creating fear on an affective level, is translated into evaluational support for the strong security interest in the refugee crisis. Applying the Foucauldian concept of governmentality one can argue that this power/knowledge formation constructs Muslim refugees as a population that needs to be governed by apparatuses of security (Foucault
1991, p. 102;
1978;
1997).
3.3 Attributing responsibility: Merkel, Muslim refugees and the rise of the far-right
A third major discursive strand concerns the cognitive and evaluational dimension towards an incumbent of a political role, the German chancellor Angela Merkel.
Merkel is attributed responsibility for the influx of Muslim refugees to Europe. In addition to that, the increased presence of refugees and Merkel’s rhetoric are constructed as principal
causes for the rise of far-right parties in Germany. In contrast to the debates around the feared loss of European Christian identity, one article hails Merkel as demonstrating “a little leadership, at last” in face of the “outrageous noises coming from some capitals about admitting only Christian, and not Muslim refugees” (Guardian
2015). Predicates and metaphors used include “Mama Merkel”, “compassionate mother”, the “mother of the Outcasts” and “#Merkel_TheEthiopian” referring to a Christian ruler that is reported to have given refuge to Muslim refugees (Olterman
2015). Again, it is Merkel’s alleged Christianity that is emphasised when refugees are framed as Muslims. In contrast, one author claims that Merkel’s “welcoming of refugees” to the “laid table” was a “moral defeat” (Brössler et al.
2015). Blaming Merkel for attracting refugees and creating a “pull” effect featured in the articles only as quotations from nationalist, right-wing, Eastern European political leaders in September 2015. However, this has completely changed one year on. In September 2016, there has been no mentioning of any positive predicate on an affective level towards Merkel in any of the articles. To the contrary, in 2016, Merkel is mainly remembered for two interdependent things that have turned her into the personification of the “refugee crisis”. The phrase “we can do this” from 31
st of August 2015 has come to signify a whole bundle of terms that are used to criticise government policy or to advance arguments against accepting refugees (Huggler
2016; Welt
2016).
On the other hand, the statement that “Mrs Merkel opened Germany’s borders to more than a million asylum seekers” (Huggler
2016) indicates on a cognitive level that all these asylum seekers entered Germany through newly opened borders. This depiction of the situation ignores the fact that borders between most EU member states have been open since the Schengen agreement that came into force in 1995. The article attributes agency to Merkel by implying that it was her actions that made “more than a million asylum seekers” to enter Germany. This reveals a frequent pattern throughout the discussions of Merkel, refugees and the rise of right-wing parties in Germany in 2016, namely, the assumption of the
manageability of migration and especially Muslims coming to Germany.
This proposition is made even stronger in articles on the relative electoral success of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD). While the rise of the far-right was not an issue mentioned in any article in 2015, the relative electoral success in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state election on the 4
th of September 2016 was a key concern in the articles in 2016. In this election, the AfD won 21% of the votes participating in the election for the first time. The party programme has been summarised as “openly anti-migrant and anti-Muslim” (Huggler
2016). The “recipe of success” of the AfD is characterised as attacking Merkel’s refugee policies and inciting “fear especially from Muslim migrants” (Welt
2016). Moreover, it is claimed that “major attacks of the AfD were launched continuously and extensively against immigration and Islam in particular” (Kamann
2016a). Thus, one AfD politician admonishes that “our land is transformed step by step into a caliphate” (Burghardt
2016). The articles depict details of the “anti-migrant and anti-Muslim” propaganda and claim that both the rhetoric and the topics contributed to their electoral success. The larger causal link suggested in the articles is that since Merkel is responsible for the large number of refugees coming to Germany, most of which are Muslim, right-wing parties with anti-Muslim propaganda are successful.