Crisis and Willkommenskultur Civil society volunteering for refugees in Germany

The German experience of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015 and 2016 was closely linked to the mobilization of large-scale civil society support for incoming refugees. By autumn 2015, when the number and circumstances of asylum seekers arriving in Germany had come to be referred to as a ‘crisis/ volunteering to support the newly arrived refugees became an activity of national significance, both in terms of the unprecedented number of people involved and the large amount of overwhelmingly sympathetic attention volunteers received in cross-party politics and the media. Katrin Goring-Eckhardt (2015), then co-leader of the Green Party, summed up the dominating atmosphere by linking the situation to Germany’s hosting of the football World Cup in 2006 - a time when patriotism had surged amidst the redefinition of German national identity around the values of hospitality and cosmopolitanism - and calling Germans ‘world champions in providing help’ (Weltmeister der Hilfsbereitschaft). Even the country’s largest tabloid newspaper, the center-right BILD-Zeitung, whose polemics have often targeted immigrants, joined in the mood of humanitarian outreach by starting its own campaign to sign-up celebrities and business leaders to assist newly arrived asylum seekers. Notably, the BILD hilft campaign used the slogan ‘Refugees Welcome¹ as part of its logo, previously the sole domain of political activists from anti-border and human rights contexts. If the crisis context gave migrant support predominantly humanitarian connotations, it did, at least temporarily, have the underpinnings of a normative cosmopolitanism, since it suggested both that Germany was under an obligation to take in refugees, and that the diversification of Germany’s population resulting from refugees’ immigration was a good thing.

In hindsight, the temporary alignment of the refugee crisis discourse, the mainstreaming of pro-refugee volunteering and pro-migrant political positions disintegrated. Under the crisis paradigm, German and EU migration policy has seen some of its severest restrictions in years, both in terms of access to protection, and in terms of integration. While the EU is actively pursuing the externalization of protection obligations to third countries, despite their lack of Geneva Convention standards for refugees (Lubbe 2018), Germany has, in the period between 2015 and 2017, introduced residence requirements for recognized refugees, re-introduced the possibility to cut social security benefits below subsistence level for rejected asylum seekers, abolished the right to family re-union for persons with subsidiary protection status, and made analyzing and saving asylum seekers’ mobile phone data standard procedure, in violation of the right to informational self-determination.

These restrictions were introduced while policy-makers in Germany explicitly praised volunteers, often simultaneously emphasizing that Germany would not have been able to manage the refugee arrivals without them and that they represent the best of what Germany stands for (Goring-Eckhardt 2015; Gauck 2015; see also, Speth 2017). How, then, to square Willkommenslailtur [Welcoming Culture], Germans’ unprecedented public commitment to supporting refugees, with the outcome of a more restrictive asylum and border policy? More specifically, 1 would like to look at the role of the 2015 and 2016 refugee volunteer movement within the dynamics of Germany’s migration policy restrictions. Was civil society’s support for incoming refugees mostly a humanitarian movement that, eventually, ended up re-enforcing the exclusionary mechanisms it had briefly suspended, as some commentators have claimed (Graf 2017; Steinhilper & Fleischmann 2017; Ratfisch & Schwiertz 2015)? Or do volunteers testify to the polarization of German society with regard to migration issues? In other words, were the asylum policy restrictions passed in spite of and not in line with the unprecedented popularity of pro-refugee volunteering? The question bears on wider issues of how to approach recent authoritarian and communitarian challenges to cosmopolitan projects, including that of the European Union itself. We can understand the convergence of Germany’s pro-refugee volunteer movement with an increasing restrictiveness in migration politics as testimony to a deepening cosmopolitan-communitarian cleavage (see Teney et al. 2014). But the fact that pro-refugee volunteers often entertained cooperative rather than antagonistic relations to government agencies, plus, as we shall see, their ambivalent attitudes to immigration also makes plausible a different story. Germany’s converging of hospitality and restrictiveness would then imply not so much a deepening of social antagonisms but a change in public reasoning about what it means to be cosmopolitan.

I will approach the question about pro-refugee volunteers’ role within the wider developments of Germany’s ‘refugee crisis“ by analyzing available data in light of the normative commitments pro-refugee volunteers have expressed, both through their actions and as personal attitudes. While the available data do not allow for a comprehensive evaluation of these because no single data set integrates questions on volunteers’ motives, values, political attitudes, and general moral commitments, I maintain that a combined review of the available quantitative and qualitative data does yield some conclusions about how Germany’s surge in refugee support volunteering fits into wider developments.² First, data on post-2015 volunteers show that they are more skeptical towards questions of access and less inclined to see a political dimension in their activities than previous generations of refugee supporters. Second, additional data on volunteers’ individual values and motives highlight a strong emphasis on humanitarian values and reveal a surprisingly strong degree of civic identification among volunteers. Third, data on volunteers’ activities and forms of organization as well as qualitative studies on volunteer groups in local settings reveal that, on the ground, volunteers pursued a diversity-sensitive and inclusion-based understanding of integration - one that was often mediated through a strong identification with local communities.