Political parties blocked integration by declaring cultural differences unbridgeable

Evidence

By the late 1970s, the evidence that the ‘guest worker’ program had evolved beyond its original intentions demanded a clarification of the place of foreign workers in West German society. The Social–Liberal coalition of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt proposed to eliminate the status of ‘guest worker’ and make foreign residents eligible for what he termed ‘integration’. In rejecting the coalition’s proposal, the CDU and its allies claimed that cultural differences between Germans and foreigners were unbridgeable, a position that hardened with the surge of nationalism that in 1982 accompanied its return to power. … Yet the barriers to naturalization embedded in social experience and German practice, the lengthy residency requirement, inconsistencies among the federal states in the willingness to naturalize, the lack of linguistic and cultural fluency in segregated conditions, and the inability to measure up to ethnocultural expectations, created formidable impediments to overcome. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 201

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader finding base on manufactured external enemies and threat-based solidarity — the CDU’s nationalism functioned as an identity boundary reinforcing in/out group distinctions.