Seite - 29 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Rainer Geißler/Sonja Weber-Menges | Media Reception and Ideas on Media Integration 29 (Fleras/Elliot 2002). The pole of “diversity” is associated with migrants’ rights to socio-cultural difference, rights to maintain and thus to engage in their particular cultural traditions, their language, their ethnic communities. The pole of “unity” places limits on these rights and demands a certain adaptation of the migrants – that they learn the language of the country they have emigrated to and other abilities important for being able to get along in the accommodating society: knowledge of laws and basic values of this society, orientation to these and identification with them, openness for interethnic and intercultural contacts beyond the borders of the ethnic community. The concept of “intercultural integration” challenges the people involved – the majority and the minorities – to seek and find a suitable balance between the desires of the minorities to have their cultural and social distinctions respected and the desires of the majority to have a common legal, cultural, and social framework that is indispensable for living together. Within this context, it is certainly a problem to establish or, more precisely, to negotiate (Kastoryano 2002) what Fleras/Elliot (2002, 9) call the “multicultural line” between unity and diversity, that is, an answer to the questions: Where does the right to difference end? Where does the obligation to adapt begin? The concrete design of this “multicultural line” is a dynamic, never-ending process; it is the subject of societal and political debates and the result of political, often enough also of court decisions. If both models of integration – the assimilative one and the intercultural one – are applied to reality, evidence of both can certainly be found. Both assimilative and intercultural integrative processes take place. Apparently, assimilation is a long-term operation that takes place over the course of several generations, and intercultural integration appears to be a preliminary stage to assimilation. Nevertheless, we prefer to consider intercultural integration as an important goal of integration policy and as a significant heuristic concept for migration research. Intercultural integration is more humane than assimilation. It lessens the pressure to assimilate, which, in Germany, has been shown to be experienced by migrants as an unreasonable demand (Rauer/Schmidtke 2001). Intercultural integration also takes into account the feelings of many migrants who do not wish to relinquish the cultural and social roots of their ethnic heritage and their corresponding sense of identity. Perhaps one should actually call the humane middle course between assimilation and segregation “multicultural” integration, as the concept is strongly oriented to the philosophy and policy of Canadian multiculturalism. But for two reasons we prefer the term “intercultural” integration. On the one hand, a heated debate on multicultural society in Germany has filled the concept of “multicultural” with other, negative content (‘simple juxtaposition’ of ethnic groups, ‘parallel societies’, ‘ethnic ghettos’) and for many people the