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Turkish Diaspora. The initial institutional groundwork for Turkish migration was laid by a 1961 ( official gastarbeiter policy continued until ‘74) bilateral agreement between the German and Turkish governments.
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Turkish Diaspora • The initial institutional groundwork for Turkish migration was laid by a 1961 (official gastarbeiter policy continued until ‘74) bilateral agreement between the German and Turkish governments. • According to the terms of the recruitment provisions, Turkish applicants would be screened by German bureaucrats and allocated to specific job openings in Germany with specific firms. • These workers would only remain in Germany so long as they were needed to "plug" labor shortages in particular sectors.
Turkish Diaspora • This position was entirely consistent with migrants' own plans and priorities. Many of them hoped for a permanent return after earning a sufficient sum. • Hundreds of thousands of migrants did, in fact, return to Turkey. Return migration peaked at 148,000 in 1974 following the end of the official Gastarbeiter policy.
Turkish Diaspora • Turkish diasporic trans-nationalism in economic, socio-cultural and political realms • In economic terms, remittances, investments and Turkish-owned companies and banks, based in both Turkey and Germany • In the political context migrants are able to maintain their legal status in both states that offer access to health care, property, welfare and even formal voting rights. • In the cultural realm print capitalism, music sales, and satellite television play a decisive role for migrants in knitting together a sense of multilocal belonging and identification.
Turkish Diaspora • Turkish Diaspora’s socio-economic position • First generation migrants usually performed unskilled factory jobs. • Second generation attend German schools up to the tenth grade and, under pressure from their parents to learn a practical trade, complete a two-year apprenticeship program. Based upon their occupational training, they enter the labor market as qualified car mechanics, dental assistants, hair stylists, etc.
Turkish Diaspora • Third generation are encouraged to have higher goals and to attend a university and begin a more prestigious career as professional. • However, although the exceptions remain, many second-generation migrants remain, like their first-generation parents, in relatively insecure factory and service-sector employment. • In addition, members of the second and third generations are dramatically underrepresented in university-track high schools and in multi-year occupational training programs.
Turkish Diaspora • This leaves a self-owned business as a highly attractive and sought-after path to upward mobility for younger migrants. • Even those who manage to accumulate starting capital, however, are frequently unsuccessful in establishing themselves as entrepreneurs. • Competition, both within the ethnic enclave economy and the broader market, ishigh. Would-be entrepreneurs lack relevant business knowledge, contacts, and practical experience. The rate of Turkish-owned small-business failure is high. • Most continue to find themselves in the lower reaches of the German occupational structure, though a smaller proportion of Turks have moved into the ranks of educated professional managers, and small-scale entrepreneurs.
Turkish Diaspora • Diasporic Identity • Their emotional ties with Turkey and Turkishness, the usually denigrating connotation of the word “Turk" continues to be imposed on them in myriad ways in their everyday lives. • Consuming Turkish cultural products -reading the European editions of Turkish newspapers like Hurriyet, watching televised soccer matches and TV shows beamed via satellite; and listening to Turkish singers etc. helped them to sustain their attachment to the homeland.
Turkish Diaspora • "Integration" in Germany is not only a process of ethnic assimilation, but also a process of acquiring the habits and attitudes considered appropriate for a normatively middle-class lifestyle. • Academic or occupational credentials constitute a publicly recognized acknowledgement that migrants have successfully internalized "German" habits and attitudes. • Those individuals with factory and service jobs; on the other hand, usually lack the recognition to become integrated.
Turkish Diaspora • An educated, upwardly mobile group of migrants are more likely to draw on an intellectualized discourse of culture and to express multiethnic (that is, both German and Turkish) or hybrid forms of identity . • Migrants in less secure and less prestigious positions, meanwhile, tend to be more strongly bound to Turkey, and they often seem to more clearly draw the moral lines that separate them from Germanness.
Turkish Diaspora • Turkish Diaspora Organizations in Germany underlines the persistence of homeland politics among Germany's Turks and contributes to divisions in Germany's Turkish community . • Turkish guest workers arriving in the early and mid-1960s typically avoided organized political activity. But, as temporary guest-worker programs have given way to settlement, Turkish immigrants and their progeny have started expressing diverse political identities and engaging in related group activities. • The general trend in the organizational landscape is toward an increase in ethno-cultural orientations at the expense of class ideology.
Turkish Diaspora • DITIB (The Directorate for Religious Affairs-Turkish Islamic Union), a sending country leverage organization promoting a moderate Islam acceptable to the Turkish regime, enjoys considerable success. • IGMG/AMGT (The Islamic Community of National Perspective), an exile organization established in the late 1970s that promotes a brand of Islam considered irreconcilable with the modern Turkish regime. • In 1995, KOMKAR (The Federation of Workers Organizations from Kurdistan), an exile organization established in 1979 around Kurdish identity.
Turkish Diaspora • Germany's Turkish organizational landscape is that it remains fragmented primarily due to the persistent role of homeland political identities. • Internal divisions over goals, strategies, and tactics weaken the Turkish community's potential to launch a successful incorporation movement. • Leaders of these organizations contribute to divisions within the Turkish community. Because leaders, as opposed to their constituents, set the agenda in such organizations, a small set of immigrant activists is capable of fundamentally shaping how Germany's Turkish community will interpret homeland political conflicts.
Turkish Diaspora • There are two major factors affecting the increasing popularity of organizations that are more representative of the fragmentation in homeland domestic politics than support for traditional, class-based organizations. • One factor is the host society's ability to absorb various ethno-cultural minorities. Host democracies unable to absorb ethno-cultural minorities relatively quickly provide such homeland oriented organizations with a distinct advantage over local collective action organizations.
Turkish Diaspora • The other factor is whether the sending state generates ideologically contentious political migrants. As sending states attempt to manage their domestic social conflicts, they often generate politically dissatisfied emigrants and refugees. These exiles may be united or fragmented by their grievances against the sending state. • Additionally, the sending state may deploy its own political emissaries to the receiving country to compete for the loyalty of its expatriates and to gain favorable foreign policy outcomes by infiltrating the domestic politics of a sovereign state
Turkish Diaspora • Germany has experienced considerable difficulties in absorbing Turks into its associations and broader society. • Organizations, such as labor unions and most political parties, lack a government mandate to represent immigrants' interests, but welcome their participation all the same. • Unions were among the earliest indigenous associations to make Germany's class-based institutional channels accessible to immigrants
Turkish Diaspora • German political parties constitute another organizational medium through which Turks and other immigrants can negotiate terms of their incorporation. • Those who naturalize, or dual citizens inheriting host country citizenship from one of their parents or through recent changes in the citizenship laws, can participate in any capacity in German parties. • CemOzdemir, the Green Party Member of the Bundestag elected in 1994 and 1998 through the party list, and EkinDeligoz, another Green MP elected in the same manner in 1998, are cases in point. • However immigrant membership in political parties still remains low.
Turkish Diaspora • If they are going to become members of any organization, most immigrants, including Turks, prefer to join their own national associations. • Such organizations promising a support network and security in exchange for membership are likely to achieve greater success if immigrants feel the host society is fundamentally and intensely hostile to their presence.
Turkish Diaspora • Contentious political migrants preoccupied with diverse views on Turkey's domestic politics remain the dominant players in Germany's Turkish associations. Evidence suggests political migrants continue to control Germany's Turkish associations. • These political migrants take their mobilizing cues from developments in Turkish politics, fueling the division of Germany's Turks along the political fault-lines of their homeland.
Turkish Diaspora • The class-based associations political migrants established in Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s reflected their ideological attachment to conflicts, dominating Turkish politics in the 1950s and 1960s. • Since the 1970s, however, Turkish associations in Germany increasingly reflect the dominance of political migrants embroiled in struggles between Turkey's Kemalist tenets and competing ethno-cultural forces.
Turkish Diaspora • Immigrant communities that are more prone to consume homeland media are also more likely to act on homeland issues while living in the host country. Turks are Germany's premier consumers of the homeland media. • The resilience of homeland media consumption presents political migrants with powerful symbols around which to consolidate support and define boundaries. • Perceiving that Germany's institutions obstruct their ability to successfully mobilize constituents, many transplanted activists promote organization around identities reflecting homeland domestic, ethnic, religious and political developments instead of integrationist identities.
Turkish Diaspora • Germany's Turkish community is divided over homeland politics because ideologically contentious political migrants remain the primary agents in Germany's Turkish associations and continue to play a dominant role in the immigrant community. • The Turkish state has failed to manage social conflict within its borders and has not traditionally emphasized the need to control its expatriates. • Under these circum-stances political migrants have exited Turkey and established contentious trans-planted factions in liberal democracies, such as Germany, where they may exercise voice directed back toward the sending country.
Turkish Diaspora • The responses of Turkish-speaking migrants in London to the events surrounding September 11 through assessing the implications of their engagement with transnational Turkish media for how they perceived these events. • The events of September 11 regenerated political discourses around a national ‘us’ versus a dangerously different ‘them’. • The discursive order that emerged after the attacks was built around patriotic emotions and calls for loyalty to ‘our civilization values’ and ‘our way of life’.
Turkish Diaspora • The loyalty of immigrants suddenly became a key public issue. • British Muslims must answer some uncomfortable questions,: ‘Do all citizens of migrant stock, particularly Muslims, actually want to be full members of the society in which they live?’
Turkish Diaspora • Everywhere, it seemed, President Bush’s rhetorical question ’Are you for us or against us?’ was thrown at immigrant citizens, particularly those with Islamic backgrounds and beliefs. • It was sensed that they might well feel ‘against us’; that many immigrants, having come from undeveloped and poor zones of the world to the ‘West’, might well have good grounds (both economic and cultural) for being resentful towards their countries of adoption.
Turkish Diaspora • The assumption here is that migrants connect to their homelands because they want to remain loyal to them, and that new communication technologies now make such long-distance bonding realizable. • The belief seems to be that their ethnic-national identity is central to their lives and that the consumption of transnational television is ethnically motivated: it is about the affirmation of ethnic-national belonging.
Turkish Diaspora • As far as mass communications were concerned, immigrants were basically dependent on the media output of the host nation. • This restriction of access was consoling for the ‘host’ society. In the ‘majority’ culture, there was always the hope and expectation that exposure to host nation media would in due course bring immigrants into the symbolic ‘home’ of the national community.
Turkish Diaspora • The acculturating logic of the era of national broadcasting systems has been challenged since the early 1990s by the advent of transnational channels such as Zee TV, Asianet, Sony Asia, MBC, Al-Jazeera, Phoenix or the Chinese Channel. • Turkish speaking migrants are no exception. Turkish-speaking populations throughout Europe (and beyond) can tune into numerous satellite channels. In addition, the Kurdish-language stations, Medya TV and Kurdsat, target Kurdish populations across Europe, Turkey and the Middle East.
Turkish Diaspora • These developments have had very significant implications for how Turkish and Kurdish migrants experience their lives in Europe, and for how they think and feel about their experiences. • The emergence of transnational broadcasting has put the sense of belonging to the national family of the ‘host’ culture into question. This has been the ‘problem’ created by the new transnational broadcasting systems.
Turkish Diaspora • BEFORE 9/11 in Britain relatively little attention has been paid to the implications of immigrant communities watching their own television stations. • This reflects the predominantly multi-culturalist outlook in the British approach to minorities. The prevailing attitude has been tolerant of the different practices of immigrant and minority communities with television consumption regarded merely as one of these practices, and not an especially significant one.
Turkish Diaspora • The September 11 on the significance of transnational viewing, confirming already-existing worries about the divisive effects of transnational channels. • Even in the UK, more and more voices started to express the view that too much toleration of immigrant cultural practices was proving to be detrimental.
Turkish Diaspora • Those who have found themselves positioned as the enemies within-ethnic minorities, especially the Islamic ones, living in the West. Along with others, Turks and Kurds in Britain found themselves in a difficult and invidious position. Classified as fundamentalists, or potential fundamentalists, they are criticized for behaving, or thinking, or even just looking fundamentalist. • Migrants were figured as anomalous: they might live in the Western heartland, but they were not ‘of it’. They were de facto positioned as being anti-American, even when they might have no strong identification with the world of Islam, nor any other anti- American formation
Turkish Diaspora • In the eyes of their ‘host’ country, they were simply ‘Muslims within’, but their own self-image was far more complex and contradictory. • Though positioned among the ‘Muslims within’, the Turks felt at some distance from wider Islamic responses. Many Turks have a strong secular identity, while religious Turks differentiate themselves from Middle-Eastern (Arabic, Persian, etc) Islamic culture.
Turkish Diaspora • Turks’ religious identity was pushed to the fore, and they were positioned in the alien world of ‘them’. This development produced conflicting feelings. First, there was resentment: a lot of Turks in London know little and care less about Islamic religion and culture, and certainly take no interest in jihad politics. • They emphasize their secular identity, and have distanced themselves from Muslim concerns and values. • But Turks also found themselves paradoxically identifying with the Muslim position in the post-September 11 period.
Turkish Diaspora • Turkish migrants relate to Turkish television from a critical distance. They do not watch the Turkish channels from the inside, so to speak, but operate in and across many cultural spaces at once. • This sensibility was much sharpened after September 11. Not much came from the Turkish stations that would resist these viewers’ anti- American drift, while British channels were seen as propagators of the crusader mentality. • With no single authoritative resource to draw on, Turkish people in London had to do a lot of thinking for themselves.
Turkish Diaspora • Doubly estranged, fully identifying neither with the West nor with Islam, it was also very difficult to articulate what the new negotiated position would be between these poles. • Turks in Europe are increasingly becoming mobile across different cultural registers, and able to entertain an ambivalent, and sometimes even ironic, stance towards monolithic cultural orders. • There is an increasing scope for creative and independent thinking by individuals, based on their cultural ambivalence and mobility.
Turkish Diaspora • This thinking is no longer moved and shaped by a singular national structure of containment, and this clearly puts the idea of the national identification process under strain. • The sense of impermeable and unchanging borders around the imagined idea of national community is challenged.
