What Can Soccer Tell Us About Open Societies?

With a mix of players from Algeria, Tunisia, Congo, and Guadeloupe (among others), the French national football team has consistently been regarded as the poster child of a multiculturalism. But after France crashed out of this year’s World Cup in spectacular fashion, pundits have now turned their attention to another European nation.

With Germany in the semifinals, Joachim Loew’s young squad has emerged as the success story of this year’s tournament, combining youth and diversity with goal-scoring.

The 2010 team boasts names such as Cacao (Brazil), Boateng (Ghana), and Khedira (Tunisia) as its starlets. All told, 11 out of the 23 players on the German national team could have played for other countries, but thanks to a change in the citizenship law, German-born children of immigrants now have the right to a German passport.

Mezut Özil, the talented 21-year-old forward has emerged as the new face of the German team. The son of Turkish immigrants, Özil is one of the nearly two million Germans of Turkish origin living in Germany.

Despite a wave of support behind this team of young stars, the multi-ethnic model represents a drastic point of departure for a country that gave birth to home-grown talents such as Franz Beckenbauer, Jurgen Klinsmann, and Michael Ballack.

As Rob Hughes recently wrote,

Not all Germans embrace with open arms this son of Turkish descent who reads the Koran before games. But there are 1.7 million people of Turkish origin in Germany, and with the national team, the Mannschaft, becoming a league of many nations, there could be more nights like this, more new heroes like Özil.

Recent research on Muslims in Berlin and Hamburg from the Open Society Foundations At Home in Europe Project suggest that the German model of multiculturalism is working at the local level: whether in Kreuzberg or Hamburg-Mitte, Muslims in these cities feel at home. In Berlin, for example, 84 percent of Muslims and 76 percent of non-Muslims surveyed said they felt they belonged to the district of Fredrichshain-Kreuzberg.

Yet when it comes to feeling “German” in general, non-Muslims were more likely to see themselves as German than did Muslim respondents. However, over half of Muslim respondents with German citizenship do identify as German.

As one participant of the Hamburg focus group said,

Look, there are 3.5 million Muslims [in Germany], that makes 4 percent of the population. We know from experience that not more than 25 percent are really practicing people. "Practicing" means that they go to Friday prayers. That means that approximately 1 percent of the population is actively religious. Yet if you consider the public fears you hear about Muslims in Germany—a country of 70 million people—you find a situation in which 70 million people seem to be afraid of 1 percent of the population.

The German national team represents the changing face of Germany, a country with a thriving immigrant population that will likely continue to churn out new Mezut Özils in the years ahead.

Once the furor of the World Cup has subsided, Germany needs to continue prioritizing integration and social inclusion: investing in schools with higher immigration populations, passing anti-discrimination legislation, and collecting data on minority groups are a few key things that can be done to ensure that Germans can continue to embrace what Chancellor Angela Merkel called Germany’s “international team.”