Recruitment Agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany and Turkey

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Memorial plaque for the recruitment agreement in Munich Central Station

The recruitment agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany and Turkey was signed in Bad Godesberg on October 30, 1961 ( Cabinet Adenauer III ) and, despite initially stipulated otherwise (limitation of the duration of stay to a maximum of two years: so-called rotation principle ), led to increased immigration from Turkey to the Federal Republic of Germany . The recruited workers were called " guest workers " in Germany . Up until the recruitment stop in 1973, a total of 867,000 Turkish guest workers had traveled to the Federal Republic of Germany, and around 500,000 returned to Turkey.

The Federal Republic of Germany concluded similar recruitment agreements with other countries: Italy (1955), Greece (1960), Spain (1960), Morocco (1963), South Korea (1963), Portugal (1964), Tunisia (1965) and Yugoslavia (1968) .

motivation

Various political motives played a role in the conclusion of the recruitment agreement.

Economic policy motives

Due to the strong economic upswing , there has been a labor shortage in parts of the German economy since around 1955, for example in agriculture and mining. Given that full employment had almost been achieved and the threat of labor shortages, the federal government planned in 1955 to counter the labor shortage by recruiting foreign workers and thereby at the same time to dampen future wage demands. Despite the recruitment agreements with Italy in 1955 and with Spain and Greece in 1960, the situation on the labor market deteriorated further. In the summer of 1959, SPIEGEL wrote: "The struggle for workers has become a grueling long-term occupation, in which personnel administrations in large industrial companies see themselves entangled as in smaller companies with few employees." In 1959, Labor Minister Theodor Blank saw no alternative to the employment of foreigners, because “despite the progressive rationalization and mechanization of production processes in the Federal Republic of Germany, an increasing demand for workers can still be expected”. From 1960 onwards, the low-birth cohorts of the war generation made themselves felt and the lowering of the retirement age exacerbated the labor shortage. Since the late 1950s at the latest, there has been full employment; in 1960 there were 153,161 unemployed versus 487,746 vacancies. In addition, the unions had gained strength and had fought for high wage increases. The real wage increase between 1950 and 1960 was 67%. The gradual introduction of the 40-hour week began in 1956 (previously: 48 hours), which also dried up the labor market. The situation of the shortage did not change until 1973. Despite immigration, the unemployment rate has been at a historically low level since 1961, below 1% in each case, apart from the year of the “minor recession ” in 1967.

Helmut Schmidt was already critical of the recruitment agreement in 1961: "It was Ludwig Erhard who got the whole thing going, first as Minister of Economics and later as Federal Chancellor. Germany had a need for workers, which caused wages to rise. He wanted to prevent that." In 2004 he found that "it [was] a mistake that we brought guest workers from foreign cultures into the country at the beginning of the 1960s".

Domestic political motives

The establishment of the Bundeswehr and the introduction of compulsory military service in 1956 also made manpower scarce. A newspaper article wrote in November 1954 that Erhard was “about… a forward-looking regulation in the event that the establishment of German armed forces and the establishment of an armaments industry of its own could result in a shortage of workers. ... There is [...] the possibility that the Federal Republic [...] will again become an immigrant country for foreign workers in the foreseeable future. "

Foreign policy motives

During the Cold War, Turkey was an important NATO member on the south-eastern flank of what was then the Soviet Union . Turkey has suffered from high unemployment rates for decades, caused by population growth that has long been higher than economic growth: “The initiative for the German-Turkish recruitment agreement came, which is little known, from Turkey. Turkey had a considerable interest in sending part of the rapidly growing population abroad as guest workers on a temporary basis ”. By transferring money from Turkish guest workers to Turkey, Turkey's trade balance deficit in trade with Germany was to be compensated by surpluses in the transfer balance in order to balance the Turkish current account with the Federal Republic of Germany. The economic and political stability of Turkey was in the interests of the NATO states and other western countries.

Course and consequences

The signing of the agreement was preceded by long negotiations and numerous, partly private initiatives by various institutions. As early as 1956 there was a training project for Turkish craftsmen. In 1957, the then Federal President Theodor Heuss Ankara offered to invite 150 Turkish vocational school graduates to training. Turkish workers also came to Germany on their own initiative, in 1960 there were already 2,500. These activities led both the German and the Turkish side to think about state regulation of immigration.

The federal government initially reacted cautiously to the offer. Labor Minister Theodor Blank rejected an agreement and said he feared conflicts between Turkish guest workers and locals because of the religious and cultural distance between them. In September 1960 Anton Sabel , President of the Federal Employment Agency, told the Ministry of Labor that no agreement with Turkey was necessary in terms of labor market policy. The agreements with Spain and Greece had been concluded shortly before. In August 1961, the construction of the Wall stopped the influx of workers from the GDR, which had continued until then. Two months later, the German government gave in to the urging of the Turkish government, since it would otherwise "consider a rejection as discrimination". In the first years after the agreement, Turkish guest workers played a rather marginal role in overall immigration. That changed after the economic crisis in 1967, when the steel industry and the automobile industry in particular required a large number of unskilled workers in order to achieve savings potential and avoid expensive rationalizations.

The residence permit for the Turkish guest workers was initially limited to 2 years. After that, they should return to their homeland and be replaced by new workers (rotation principle). In contrast to the other recruitment agreements, there was no provision for family reunification. In practice, however, the rotation principle could not be implemented in the long term. German companies spoke out against letting semi-skilled workers go after two years. In a new version of the agreement on May 19, 1964, the rotation principle was suspended; The ban on family reunification has also been lifted. Shortly after the start of the oil crisis in 1973, the federal government at the time decided to stop recruiting, which affected all recruiting countries. At that time - after 12 years of recruitment agreements - there were around 600,000 Turks in Germany. Faced with the choice of either returning permanently to Turkey or staying in Germany, most of them opted for the latter. This was the beginning of sustainable Turkish immigration to the Federal Republic.

Historical assessment of the recruitment agreement

Many researchers point to the importance of the agreement for the continuation of the “German economic miracle ” and the development of social systems. The Federal Ministry of Labor declared in 1976 that immigration had led to a sharp reduction in the working hours of Germans while maintaining high economic growth. According to calculations by the migration researcher Friedrich Heckmann, immigration between 1960 and 1970 enabled around 2.3 million Germans to move up from working-class to salaried positions. According to Karl-Heinz Meier-Braun , the pension insurance contributions would have had to be increased as early as 1971 without immigration, yes, the pension insurance was actually "subsidized" by the foreign workers, since the contributions paid were only offset by around a tenth of benefits.

Historian Heike Knortz takes a different point of view . In relation to the economic and domestic political causes, she sees a “primacy of foreign policy” and immigration to be an economic failure in the early Federal Republic. Only obsolete industries like coal mining were kept artificially alive by the import of cheap labor and structural change prevented. The recruitment agreements were not based on the labor market needs of the FRG.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Stefan Luft: The recruitment of Turkish workers and its consequences | bpb. Retrieved February 18, 2019 .
  2. ^ Cabinet minutes online in the Federal Archives
  3. ↑ The third set . SPIEGEL 34/1959 of August 19, 1959, p. 26.
  4. ↑ Rhineland-Palatinate, Ministry for Integration, Family, Children and Women - 50 Years of the Recruitment Agreement ( Memento of the original from May 17, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / Lebenswege.rlp.de
  5. ^ Numbers and dates 1960
  6. ↑ Historical figures on unemployment statistics
  7. ↑ 50 Years of Migration: Ten Million Turks: The Fear of Helmut Schmidt , Die Zeit , October 20, 2011
  8. ^ Former Chancellor Schmidt: Recruiting guest workers was wrong , FAZ , November 24, 2004
  9. ↑ Workers for the "economic miracle" . Newspaper clipping, November 30, 1954, Federal Archives Koblenz B119 No. 3050 Vol. 1, p. 67. Online at angekommen.com.
  10. ^ Stefan Luft: Farewell to multiculturalism - ways out of the integration crisis , Resch-Verlag, Graefelfing 2006, p. 101.
  11. ^ Heike Knortz: Diplomatic barter deals. “Guest workers” in West German diplomacy and employment policy 1953–1973. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne 2008, p. 177 . Similarly, Faruk Şen : "Turkey (was) dependent on sending workers abroad, as this was the only way to reduce unemployment in the country and to use regular guest worker remittances to offset its high foreign trade deficit"; Faruk Şen: Turkish Employee Companies. Establishment, structure and economic function of the Turkish workers' societies for the socio-economic situation of Turkey. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1980, p. 38; quoted According to Stefan Luft: Farewell to multiculturalism - ways out of the integration crisis. Resch-Verlag, Graefelfing 2006, p. 101.
  12. ↑ a b Rhineland-Palatinate, Ministry for Integration, Family, Children and Women - 50 Years of the Recruitment Agreement ( Memento of the original from July 11, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / Lebenswege.rlp.de
  13. ↑ a b Heike Knortz: Diplomatic barter deals. “Guest workers” in West German diplomacy and employment policy 1953–1973. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne 2008.
  14. ^ Johannes-Dieter Steinert: Migration and Politics. West Germany - Europe - Overseas 1945-1961 , Osnabrück 1995, p. 307.
  15. ^ Deutschlandradio Kultur: Historian Ulrich Herbert in conversation with Marietta Schwarz
  16. ↑ Karl-Heinz Meier-Braun, review of: Diplomatic barter deals by Heike Knortz
  17. ↑ Sehepunkte - review journal for historical studies about Heike Knortz: Diplomatic barter deals
  18. ^ Martin Kröger: Initiative of the sending countries. In: FAZ.net from June 23, 2008 Initiative of the sending countries Foreign Office and employment of foreigners 1953-1973 - FAZ -Archiv (Review of the book "Diplomatic Barter Transactions" by Heike Knortz .)