White ghettos: The ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ in post-unification Germany

Abstract

This article traces the shifts in German discourses about multiculturalism and the failed experiment of multiculturalism from the early 1990s into the 21st century by analyzing anxieties about emerging ‘ethnic ghettos’ and ‘parallel societies’ in Europe. In these discourses, ‘Europe’ functions simultaneously as an example for the failures of multiculturalism and as a bastion of western values in need of protection. The second part of this article shifts to a discussion on creative political interventions that expose these tensions and contradictions and emphasize the historic dimension of racialized exclusion in Germany and the European context. They describe the effects of social exclusion and propose (often syncretic) translocal forms of solidarity and activism. In their irreverent, playful and performative interventions, activists and artists develop strategies to counter the essentialist culturalisms that underpin the debates about European integration, multiculturalism and the crisis of multiculturalism in the German context.