H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (December 2003)

Betigul Ercan Argun. _Turkey in Germany: The Transnational Sphere of
Deutschkei_.  Middle East Studies: History, Politics, and Law Series.  New
York and London: Routledge, 2003. xix + 199 pp. Notes, bibliography,
index. $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-415-93568-7.

Reviewed for H-German by Rita Chin <rchin@umich.edu>, Department of
History, University of Michigan

Conceptualizing a Turkish-German Transnational Public Sphere

With _Turkey in Germany: The Transnational Sphere of Deutschkei_, Betigul
Argun makes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship
on transnationalism, as well as to work on the post-World War II migration
of Turks to Germany.[1] Before delving into a discussion of the book
itself, it is helpful to be clear about the author's analytical framework
and focus.  Argun is a political scientist, and her project aims to "bring
political science into transnationalism and transnational politics into
political science" (p. 7).  At the most basic level, her study seeks to
demonstrate the political significance of transnationalism.  More
specifically, Argun sets out to answer the question, "How are migration
movements and the transnational communities they create connected to the
possibility of enhanced political voice in sending countries" (pp. 7-8)?
Her central concern, then, is not so much with migrants in Germany, or
what migration means for Germany.  Rather, she wants to gain a deeper
understanding of Turkish domestic politics by looking at "Turkish civil
society outside of Turkish national boundaries" (p. 6).  In these
respects, it is not quite fair to consider Argun's book within the context
of H-German, although her study offers a number of insights that should
prove thought-provoking for scholars of Germany's postwar labor migration
and its attendant social, cultural, political, and ideological effects.

Roughly the first third of the book is devoted to fleshing out what Argun
has coined "Deutschkei," an amalgam of the German words "Deutschland" and
"Tuerkei," which she uses to indicate the "transnational connections
between Turkey proper and Turkey in Germany" (p. xi).  One of the defining
characteristics of Deutschkei, according to Argun, is the development of a
critical political discourse akin to the type of independent exchange
theorized in Juergen Habermas's well-known concept of the public sphere
(p. 29).  Because it occupies a space between Germany and Turkey, the
"transnational public sphere" of Deutschkei serves as an arena uniquely
situated to exert pressure on and even shape "ideas about national
identity, citizenship, social integration, and democracy in the native
setting" (p. 30).  Argun posits a number of factors in both Germany and
Turkey that have contributed to the emergence of a transnational public
sphere oriented toward Turkey.  In Germany, strict citizenship laws and
ongoing hostility to foreigners caused migrants to feel unwelcome and
isolated, encouraging them to identify most closely with political
developments in the homeland.  At the same time, German discussions of
multiculturalism in the late 1980s facilitated the articulation of new
identities (e.g. Alevi or Kurd) within the Turkish immigrant community
(pp. 68-73).  In Turkey, a generally closed and repressive political
culture--especially in the wake of the 1980 military coup--drove migrants
to become political activists from the safe distance of Germany.  Turkey's
ongoing bid to join the European Union, moreover, has meant that the
Turkish state is far more sensitive to the criticisms and concerns
expressed by members of the migrant community (pp. 71-73, 55-57).  Argun
is clearly engaged here with the scholarship on transnationalism that
began to emerge around 1990, and she rehearses many of its key
insights.[1] One that is worth highlighting is her assertion that
transnationalism draws attention to that which it seemingly negates--the
national (p. 19).  This is a useful point because it reminds us that
transnationalism always operates in dialectical relation to the nation.
Deutschkei, in other words, is always defined, both socially and
ideologically, vis-a-vis Germany and Turkey.

A key objective of _Turkey in Germany_ is to demonstrate that this
reciprocal relationship is not just a matter of academic theorizing, but
has concrete political effects.  The book's middle section traces the
particular impacts of Deutschkei on Turkish politics and political
discourse.  Specifically, Argun looks at the "ethnic differentiation of
migrants from Turkey into sub-national groups," a process which emerged in
the German context but eventually had important ramifications for the
Turkish state (p. 73).  For example, the Kurdish Cultural and Information
Center, established in Germany in the early 1980s, began to demand
separate Kurdish language classes for Kurds in the German school system.
These demands gradually made Germans more aware of the ethnic and
religious differences among guest workers from Turkey (p. 67).  Similar
kinds of consciousness-raising activities were undertaken by the Alevi, a
religious minority who comprise nearly 30 percent of the Turkish nationals
in Germany.  In 1990, Alevi Turks in Cologne organized the first
politically active Alevi organization, which later became the Federation
of Alevi Unions in Europe (AABF).

Argun then contrasts these developments in Germany with contemporaneous
political discourse in Turkey.  In the process of creating a Turkish
nation-state from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, she suggests, the
category of Turk (defined as any citizen of Turkey) was elevated at the
expense of other ethnic or religious identities.  For the Kurds, state
centralization also eliminated previous administrative and cultural
autonomy (pp. 82-84).  Prior to the early 1990s, it was not possible to
use the term "Kurd" in the public media; the Turkish state and press
couched Kurdish unrest as a "separatist" movement that stemmed from
"regional underdevelopment."  By contrast, early Kemalism initially
benefited the Alevi because its philosophy of secularization reduced Sunni
dominance.  Despite this apparent alliance, according to Argun, the Alevi
have been critical of religion-state relations in Turkey.  In particular,
they have questioned the legitimacy of the state's Directorate for
Religious Affairs (DIB) and its sponsorship of the Sunni sect.  Throughout
the 1980s, the government engaged in overt attempts to assimilate Alevi
(who for centuries have worshipped privately in their homes) by building
mosques in their communities.  "Since Alevis do not pose a territorial
threat and since they support secularism," Argun concludes, "they enjoy a
certain state sponsorship not felt by Kurds ... [h]owever, by asserting
their identity and culture and by fighting for recognition of their group
name, Alevis are challenging the illusion of ethnic homogeneity in Turkey
forcefully" (p. 104).  At this point, we might expect Argun to explain how
the activities in Germany effected a transformation of the discourse
around Kurds and Alevis in Turkey.  Instead, Argun merely asserts that the
Alevi renaissance and Kurdish activities abroad have pressured Turkey to
come to terms with the myth of a homogeneous nation (p. 87).

I think that Argun is on to something important in the connections she
attempts to draw here.  Yet the historian in me wants to know much more
precisely _how_ developments within Deutschkei have altered Turkish
politics and discourse.  The particularly vivid example that opens Argun's
book, I would suggest, goes a long way in illustrating how this reciprocal
relationship works in actual practice.  In February 1999, Turkish
commandos captured Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party
(PKK), in Kenya and brought him back to Turkey to face charges of treason,
murder, and crimes against humanity (pp. 3-4).  This event, Argun relates,
immediately provoked numerous demonstrations by PKK members and
sympathizers at consulates and embassies throughout Western Europe.  The
scene in Berlin turned particularly violent when Israeli consular guards
killed three Kurdish protesters.  The demonstrations and violence on
German soil prompted the German government (among others) to appeal to
Turkey to guarantee Ocalan a fair trial, open the process to international
observers, and refrain from seeking the death penalty.  Turkey's domestic
politics thus became a matter of international concern and intervention in
direct response to the activities of Deutschkei in Germany.  Most of these
protesters were refugees, legal residents, or naturalized citizens of the
Federal Republic, who had grown particularly savvy about the ways in which
their actions outside Turkey's national borders could shape its political
decisions at home.

This example, as Argun keenly observes, also points to the ways in which
transnational politics often becomes a domestic issue in both Turkey and
Germany.  The Ocalan demonstrators not only drew the attention of Germans
to the constitutional status of Kurds in Turkey; they also raised
questions about immigration and the process of integration in Germany.
After decades of residence in the Federal Republic, many immigrants
clearly continued to engage in the political issues of their homeland. But
precisely because of this ongoing engagement, Turkish immigrants
simultaneously had an effect on German political policy and
decision-making.  This example is so useful, in other words, because it
shows us ongoing reciprocal relations between Deutschkei, Turkey, and
Germany.

For the most part, however, Argun does not follow up on this central
insight in _Turkey in Germany_.  Instead, she focuses almost exclusively
on the implications of transnationalism for Turkish politics.  The final
third of the book examines four groups within the Turkish immigrant
community in Germany: Alevis, Kurds, ultranationalists, and Islamists (pp.
101-168).  In these case studies, Argun analyzes each group's political
goals in relation to the Turkish state and Kemalism (which she considers
official state ideology).  She also reviews the activities and
organizations among these different groups in Deutschkei, including their
internet websites and electronic chat rooms.  This section will be
valuable for readers unfamiliar with the basic fault lines in Turkish
politics, or the diversity of political organizations that Turkish
migrants have established in Germany.  But it fails to deliver on the
analytical promise set out in the book's opening discussion of the Ocalan
incident.  Somewhat ironically, the problem here seems to be the
reassertion of mutually exclusive binary categories:  dialectical
relationships are superceded by one-way national reverberations.  Argun
justifies this move by arguing that Turkish-Germans represent an
exceptional case within the larger spectrum of late-twentieth-century
migrant groups.  In her view, because Turkish migrants have been so
rigorously excluded from German civil society, their political identities,
affiliations, and activities have largely pointed in one direction--back
to their country of origin.

The ongoing and deep connection which many (if not most) Turkish migrants
feel to their homeland, I think, is too little acknowledged in the growing
literature on the labor migration to the Federal Republic.  In this sense,
Argun's book provides an important corrective to a body of work that has
almost exclusively emphasized the ways immigration has impacted German
society.[2] Yet her repeated insistence that German policies towards Turks
make them more invested in homeland politics exists for the most part as
an unsubstantiated assertion.  There is recent work, moreover, which comes
to the opposite conclusion:  namely, that despite restrictive German
naturalization laws, Turkish immigrants have sought to incorporate
themselves both socially and politically at the local level in their
country of residence.[3] My own sense is that this apparent discrepancy
cannot be understood in terms of a zero-sum game.  The complexity of
migrant experience in the Federal Republic undoubtedly supports both
views.

I suspect that each reader's assessment of _Turkey in Germany_ will
depend, in large part, on his/her theoretical starting point.  For those
working on Turkish-German history, this book represents a pioneering work
that fills out our understanding of the political affiliations and
organizations of Turks in the Federal Republic.  Its examination of
Deutschkei's effects on Turkish politics, moreover, will force Germanists
to pay closer attention to the labor migration's broader, transnational
consequences.  Scholars of transnationalism, by contrast, may view Argun's
book as somewhat one-dimensional because it only concerns itself with the
impacts of migrant politics and culture on Turkey.  Indeed, it seems to me
that an emphasis on national reverberations need not require us to abandon
one of the crucial projects of transnational studies--namely, to draw
attention to and explicate the reciprocal traffic of culture, bodies, and
ideas that exists _between_ nations.  Thus, it is quite possible to agree
with Argun that studies of the Turkish-German community have consistently
neglected the migration's impacts on Turkish political discourse, but also
to note the book's limitations in advancing our understanding of how this
transnational public sphere impacted ideology and discourse in multiple
directions.

Notes

[1].  Important studies on the contours of transnationalism include
Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut, _Immigrant America: A Portrait_
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Nina Glick-Schiller,
Linda Basch, and Christina Szanton Blanc, eds., _Towards a Transnational
Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism
Reconsidered_ (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1992); Linda Basch,
Nina Glick-Schiller, and Christina Szanton Blanc, _Nations Unbound:
Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized
Nation-States_ (Basel: Gordon and Breach, 1994); and Thomas Faist, _The
Volume and Dynamics of International Migration and Transnational Social
Spaces_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).  For a useful assessment
of theories of transnationalism, see Peter Kivisto, "Theorizing
Transnational Immigration: A Critical Review of Current Efforts," _Ethnic
and Racial Studies_ 24:4 (2001): pp. 549-577.  On the postwar migration of
Turks to Germany, see Ulrich Herbert, _A History of Foreign Labor in
Germany, 1880-1980: Seasonal Workers/Forced Laborers/Guest Workers_,
trans. William Templer (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press,
1990);  David Horrocks and Eva Kolinsky, eds., _Turkish Culture in German
Society Today_ (Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996); Peter
O'Brien, _Beyond the Swastika_ (New York and London: Routledge, 1996);
Karen Schoenwaelder, "Migration, Refugees and Ethnic Plurality as Issues
of Public and Political Debates in (West) Germany" in David Cesarani and
Mary Fulbrook, eds., _Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe_
(London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 159-178; Klaus J. Bade and Myron Weiner,
eds., _Migration Past, Migration Future: Germany and the United States_
(Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1997); Christian Joppke,
_Immigration and the Nation-State: The United States, Germany, and Great
Britain_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Rita Chin, "Imagining a
German Multiculturalism:  Aras Oren and the Contested Meanings of the
'Guest Worker,' 1955-1980," _Radical History Review_ 83:2 (2002): pp.
44-72; and "Toward a 'Minor Literature'? The Case of Auslaenderliteratur
in Postwar Germany," _New Perspectives on Turkey_ (Fall 2003).

[2].  Exceptions to this rule include Faruk Sen, _Tuerkische Migranten in
Deutschland_ (Essen: Center for Turkish Studies, 1997); Sami Ozkara, ed.,
_Tuerkische Migranten in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland_ (Cologne: Onel
Verlag, 1990); and Ertekin Ozcan, _Tuerkische Immigrantenorganisationen in
der Bundesrepublik Deutschland_ (Berlin: Hitit Verlag, 1989).

[3].  Brett Klopp, for example, has recently traced immigrants's efforts
to achieve social integration in the schools, unions, and political
organizations in Frankfurt.  _German Multiculturalism: Immigrant
Integration and the Transformation of Citizenship_ (Westport, Conn. and
London: Praeger, 2002).

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