Some Thoughts on Germany's New 'Alternative' Party
I have learned to be careful with continental movements which at first appear to be conservative. In France and Belgium, I tend to find that such groups have unlovely origins, which they are unwilling to disown. The founders of France’s Front National are, shall we say, ambiguous about the Vichy era and by implication the Hitler era.
Flemish nationalism in Belgium has similar problems with fully disowning the, er, questionable behaviour of some of its forerunners during the ascendancy of National Socialist Germany. And so on. When I describe Britain as being almost the only virgin in a continent of rape victims, this is, sort of, what I mean.
Almost every continental country experienced either a tyranny or a tyrannical occupation in the middle of the 20th century, polluting its past. Even the democratic neutrals, Sweden and Switzerland, were compelled to make sordid bargains with the German Empire (German troops crossed Sweden, German war materials crossed Switzerland, which was unable, out of self-preservation, to offer much sanctuary to Jews, and also offered a haven for money and gold whose origins were perhaps suspicious). Portugal, not then a democracy, was blown this way and that by the winds of power. This past continues to pollute much conservatism, just as past associations with Stalin pollutes so much of the Left. People who won’t deal frankly with either (depending on which albatross they have around their necks) don’t, in my view, deserve to be taken seriously.
But the new anti-immigration party in Germany (not ‘anti-immigrant’ as the BBC and the liberal media so tendentiously claim in their unbiased way) may not be of this type, any more than UKIP is here. Not that I am necessarily inspired by its success, any more than I was by the gains made by of UKIP.
I have made more than one voyage to Germany to examine various supposed revivals of neo-Nazi movements, none of which in fact turned out to be significant. They are invariably knuckle-brushing movements led by idiots. I think Germany has learned pretty thoroughly to avoid such things, which seldom get above 7% of any vote and swiftly sag into impotence, despite winning seats in local assemblies through proportional representation, and even qualifying for state aid, as they sometimes do (a good argument against state support for political parties).
These days such things tend to begin in the former East, partly because it is much, much poorer and partly because the old East German State did little in the way of de-Nazifying education, claiming as it did that it was the inheritor of the anti-Nazi part of Germany and so (unlike the West) did not need to do so.
The recent Pegida (‘Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West’) Movement certainly began in the East and was quickly found to have nasty elements in it. Actually crude hostility to outsiders is to be found all over continental Europe, where the racial and cultural tolerance common in post-colonial Britain is often absent, as I have been privately told by Polish immigrants explaining why they come here rather than to other EU countries. I have myself directly encountered this bitter loathing (directed against North Africans) in Rotterdam, the heart of supposedly liberal Holland. One of Pegida’s leaders was certainly guilty of using contemptuous and hateful language about migrants as such, rather than simply opposing immigration. I think it’s pretty much disqualified from serious politics. Any such movement in Germany has to be about 100 times cleaner than it would need to be anywhere else.
But the Alternative fur Deutschland is not quite so easily dismissed, which is perhaps why it did so well in Sunday’s provincial elections (though far better in the former East than in the West) .
The AfD began, much as did UKIP, among academics, economists and rather grand journalists concerned at the threat to German independence from the EU and to German prosperity from the Euro. It did quite well, but not well enough to win seats, in the 2013 federal elections.
But in 2015 it switched to much stronger emphasis on immigration (unsurprisingly) and found in Frauke Petry a new and persuasive leader. Mrs Petry, 40, is not a Farage figure, but a young woman in the modern style, educated and very much in tune with the world of today, not especially socially conservative in her life or opinions. She is a chemist who studied in Britain, at Reading University, but got her Doctorate from Goettingen. She is estranged from her husband (a Lutheran Pastor) and now living with a party colleague. She still takes her four children to church. She was born in the East but moved to the West in 1990 at the age of 14.
But she does have dangling round her neck the claim that she once called for border police to shoot refugees. Did she? I am genuinely unsure. I have yet to see a complete unedited version of what she said. Does anyone have one?
This is one of the newspaper stories about it
I thought I knew less after reading it than I felt I’d known before. What exactly did she say and in what sequence?!’ I want to shout at the reporter.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough to put off a lot of voters in Germany on Sunday. There have been many analyses of these votes. Where did they come from? Often from people who hadn’t voted previously, and not necessarily from Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. But the AfD is now established as serious threat to Germany’s suffocating consensus, in which the equivalents of Labour and the Tories openly embrace each other in coalition government, instead of pretending to be hostile as they do here.
The AfD may come to threaten both major parties, if the migration problem is not somehow got under control. It also reflects a growing discontent with falling standards of living among Germans who had once been used to stable jobs and rising incomes. It might not help anyone to see this as a kind of revival of the Nazis. By doing so, you might miss the real point.
Personally, I think the moral impossibility of civilised countries using violence to guard their borders against migrants is one of the most complicated issues facing us. We're not as nice as we like to claim we are. For instance, a border featuring razor wire is itself a passive but severe threat of violent injury to anyone who seeks to cross it illegally. So is the presence of armed border patrols. What are we saying when we erect such fences and employ and deploy such patrols? Or even when we rely implicitly (as we in Britain do) on the depth and danger of the cold sea to keep our coasts secure from unwanted arrivals?
Yet in the end we are compelled by all we hold dear to weaken when the choice is to do so or to use violence, or to abandon people to drown in the sea. We will let people in, and rescue them. We have to, or we would not be the civilisation we are. Once it has got to this stage, I can see no alternative.
Australia, almost alone, is spared these dilemmas, because it has entirely maritime borders, composed of deep and inhospitable seas, and also because the countries from which migrants headed for Australia come have functioning governments and can be compelled to take them back . So it can repel unwanted illegal migrants by using measures (mainly interception on the high seas, towing back to point of departure or detention on extra-territorial islands) well short of lethal or even injurious violence. Not that these methods escape criticism.
The EU and the USA simply cannot do this. They have unenforceable land borders, which can be overwhelmed by numbers and cannot conceivably be adequately patrolled. And they face an unending migration across the often calm waters of the Mediterranean, from Libya which has no central authority, and across the narrow seas from Turkey, which isn’t prepared to exercise its authority and, even if it does accept returned migrants, can’t be expected to try very hard to keep them from trying again. Both EU and USA also lack extra-territorial islands on which to place unwanted migrants.
It might have been possible, 30 years ago, by exerting influence on nearby states, to persuade them to prevent mass immigration across the Aegean, the Mediterranean or the Rio Grande. But it’s my belief that many influential people in the US actively supported mass migration from Central America , as the USA was transformed into a low-wage economy (this caused a notable split in the US conservative movement in the early 1990s, in which social conservatives were pretty much flattened by Reagan-Thatcher-Murdoch economic liberals who had snatched the body of conservatism there much as they have done here) .
And I also suspect, but cannot prove, that many in the higher reaches of the EU felt much the same way. Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi made no secret of his ability to open the gates of migration if he so chose, and blackmailed the EU by doing so, as I’ve mentioned here earlier. How odd that Britain and France should choose to overthrow him without having a clue what would replace him, and made a similar ill-planned assault on Syria which has been almost as disastrous from the migrant point of view. The most absurd thing about this has been the monstrous, ludicrous claim that Russia(!) is ‘weaponising’ Syrian refugees, when the whole problem has been caused by Western and Gulf actions. If it hadn’t been for Russia, Syria would be just like Libya only a lot worse and millions more of its people would be heading our way. Whereas if we and the Gulf states had stayed out, Syria would be peaceful. Is this what Freudians call ‘projection’, accusing others of the things you’re guilty about?
But getting anyone to say anything sensible about Russia is almost completely impossible. Even quite intelligent people are determined to see Moscow as the seat of all villainy, and this distortion makes it hard for them to see what is wrong with our own societies and governments. Perhaps that’s why they do it.