The occupation of Ceuta sharpens the question: Domestic policy before foreign policy, or foreign policy before domestic policy? It is the wrong question.
(Picture: © William Crochot, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, Wikimedia Commons)
.jpg){kind=link}
The right question is: How broad is the spectrum of other differences that can be bridged by the danger of mass immigration? Why is this the right question, and why is the question of the primacy of domestic or foreign policy the wrong one here (!) ? The latter is by no means wrong in itself, and yes, in principle the primacy of foreign policy applies. But it is wrong here because there is currently no sharp opposition between foreign and domestic policy.
To illustrate this, let us look back at the old Federal Republic, where such an opposition did indeed exist. The oppositional Right rejected Americanization for domestic reasons, ultimately cultural and metapolitical ones. Through its alliance with America, Germany was also drawn into the cultural leftward drift of America in the second half of the twentieth century. The long road to the West did not lead into an imagined republican-democratic Western normativity, in which the Revolution of 1848 had, after all, retrospectively succeeded, but to Woodstock. Yet in foreign policy the United States was the only power that had something to hope for, rather than fear, from a resurgent Germany. From rearmament to reunification—both of them pushed through by the Americans against our dear European cousins—Westbindung was therefore indispensable. This contradiction reliably kept the oppositional Right in political irrelevance. At the time, it was left with nothing but fantasies about Central Europe, about de Gaulle’s France, and about even more absurd alliance constellations—with the Non-Aligned Movement, even with the impoverished Third World country that was then still called Red China—anything, somehow, against Washington and Moscow. Added to this was the complaint that Adenauer had sacrificed reunification for the sake of Westbindung. When reunification came in 1990 through Westbindung, which the elder Bush forced through against Thatcher and Mitterrand—who openly threatened Genscher with war—the West German Right to the right of the CDU was historically refuted. Irrespective of the fact, that Kohl never delivered his promised “spiritual and moral renewal” and allowed the last window of opportunity to pass in which the escalation of mass immigration could still have been prevented without a constitutional and state crisis.
That is a contradiction between domestic and foreign policy!
We do not have such a contradiction today. There are very different foreign-policy positions within the Right. Broadly speaking, one can distinguish Atlanticists, Europeanists, nation-statists, Central Europeanists, and Eurasians. The fact that there are five completely different and, for the most part, mutually incompatible schools of foreign policy within one and the same political camp is a consequence of the opening of the foreign-policy space of possibilities after the end of the Cold War and the subsequent unipolar hegemony of the United States. That does not mean that we are standing before a buffet of equally good options from which we can simply choose according to taste. Here too there are clearly better, worse, and catastrophic options. But the unmistakable clarity of the Cold War has disappeared—the clarity in which Westbindung was so obviously without alternative that anyone who failed to recognize this was kept away from power by a broad consensus of everyone who was not completely insane. Today one can reasonably hold different opinions about the foreign-policy orientation of the Federal Republic of Germany, even on fundamental questions.
This does not prevent the advocates of these different schools from accusing one another that the other’s position would inevitably lead to the continuation of demographic replacement. These accusations are so persuasive because, at this stage, demographic replacement can only be averted through a radical reform of constitutional law, public law, and the relevant jurisprudence. In other words: at the cost of considerable upheaval. As a result, the remigration movement has arrayed against itself all those people in every political camp who prefer the status quo—including its dynamic of demographic replacement—to the uncertainties and dangers involved in ending or even reversing it. That, however, does not make these mutual accusations any more meaningful.
Instead of a conflict between foreign and domestic policy, we are dealing with different foreign-policy objectives held by people who nevertheless share the same goals in demographic policy. Just as there are very different objectives in economic or social policy. For this the real question is: How large is the remigration tent? Or, put differently: Which differences can be bridged by the shared objective of preventing demographic replacement?
There are a number of attempts to answer this question.
[For the second part, please subscribe to Fragen zur Zeit A full subscription costs just €7 per month, and you no longer need a credit card. I'm spelling this out here because people keep assuming that, just because I don't put the paywall after the first five lines, the article has already ended.]
