Much Ado About Nix?

President Rau signs Germany's first immigration law and EU leaders threaten to buttress Fortress Europe

Edmund Stoiber, the conservative Bavarian challenger to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, has promised to make immigration the centerpiece of the campaign leading to elections on September 22. At the end of a week which saw President Johannes Rau sign a controversial bill into Germany's first immigration law and European leaders quibbling over the issue in Seville -- never mind related cover stories in Time and Spiegel -- it certainly seems Stoiber won't have to bend over backwards to get the issue on the table.

For one thing, Rau's signature doesn't mean the immigration law will quietly slip out of the news. The sister parties hoping to propel Stoiber into the chancellorship, the Christian Democrats and Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), have contested the legitimacy of the vote in the Bundesrat, Germany's upper house of parliament, ever since the state of Brandenburg threw a monkey wrench into the process back in March (see Split Lawmakers and Reckless Enforcers). The Social Democrats (SPD) and CDU/CSU will soon be hashing over the same arguments in the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe.

But as Goedart Palm argues in Telepolis, all this hoopla over protocol is nothing but a cover for shameless electioneering on the part of both sides. The first paragraph announces that the law aims to "control and restrict the immigration of foreigners into Germany." This cuts both ways: immigration itself becomes officially sanctioned but it's also "controlled" and "restricted." In reality, the law does little but streamline and formalize policies Germany has practically been implementing all along.

The bigger picture was addressed on Friday and Saturday at the EU Summit in Seville. Five bombs (Basque separatist group ETA claimed responsibility for two) and tens of thousands of "anti-globalization" demonstrators seemed like outwardly visible symptoms of the rattled anxiety of many European leaders in the wake of recent populist right-wing advances all across the continent.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair teamed up with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar on the let's-get-tough front, proposing to punish countries that don't "cooperate" with the EU in its efforts to stem the perceived flow of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers by cutting back on financial aid. France and Sweden led the counter-charge, defeating the proposal. In the end, EU leaders settled on vague plans to coordinate their intelligence gathering, border patrols, visa regulations and laws cracking down on people smugglers.

All in all, there was little concrete progress indeed this week for those who, as Naomi Klein puts it, attempt "to make it across national borders by hiding themselves among the products that enjoy so much more mobility than they do."

Elsewhere

Joe Klein, the author of books on such quintessentially American subjects as Woody Guthrie and Bill Clinton, has been filing dispatches for Slate and The Guardian from what he calls his "Arrogant Yank" tour of Europe. The itinerary -- six countries in six weeks -- conjures visual punchlines from movies like If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium or National Lampoon's European Vacation, and Klein himself lightheartedly notes that "for the past half-century" Americans have approached Europe "anticipating an adult theme park." This was the week Klein arrived in Germanyland.