Wir schaffen das! Angela Merkel and the European Refugee Crisis

Unification triggered profound changes in the geographical, generational and global context that had shaped restrictive German policies regarding citizenship, immigration, asylum and refugees for 40 years. Since 2015 Chancellor Angela Merkel has been praised as well as denounced for her bold decision to open her country to an extraordinary influx of refugees from Northern Africa and the Middle East. Efforts to transform Germany into a ‘welcoming culture’ are rooted in internally motivated demographic changes stemming from the 1990s, but the process has been accelerated due to external pressures from the European Union. This essay argues that Merkel’s attempt to turn the nation united into a land of immigration  and  integration derives from her experiences as a former GDR citizen, amounting to a major policy break with her erstwhile patron, Helmut Kohl. In order to make the case for the female leader’s direct impact on such policies, one needs to review FRG asylum policies prior to unification, as well as post-unity SPD-Green reforms preceding her first term in office. Addressing the impact of external versus internal forces for change requires a treatment of key EU developments, and domestic reforms adopted after unification but prior to the 2015 refugee crisis. While a degree of back-tracking has occurred since 2016, Germany’s first woman chancellor has managed to stay the course by leveraging top-down, bottom-up, supranational and domestic reform currents, even in the face of ostensible opposition within her own party. This case confirms that studying unification’s impact on policy changes cannot be confined to a single decade.