Radical-right backlash against Games of Belonging: the case of Mesut Özil

The recent case
of Mesut Özil has shown a severe rupture in relations between German-Turks and German
natives, which has been a long time coming, but went unrecognized while the
football national team put it in the shade. However, it was precisely because
of the earlier sporting success of the German squad that the Özil case
escalated into a fierce conflict. Three crucial ingredients played a role in this
escalation: the failure of political messaging on national football-team
diversity, some setbacks in Germany-Turkey relations, and the rise of the
populist radical right in both Turkey and Germany.

The staging of Games
of Belonging

International
football events include Games of Belonging
for immigrant footballers; a play that
evolves in three acts. In the first pre-match act, an approaching international football fixture prompts
the media to ponder whether immigrant players feel they belong to nation X or
Y, Germany or Turkey. National belonging here is a zero-sum game: the more one belongs
to nation X, the less one is able to belong to nation Y.

In a matchday
second act, nationhood is performed symbolically. A case in point is Özil’s
2010 handshake with German chancellor Angela Merkel in the locker-room after an
international match against Turkey in Berlin, when he was booed by German-Turks.
It was ironic that Özil scored against the national team of his “ethnic roots”,
which demonstrated the zero-sum game impeccably. Here was a second-generation
German-Turk opting for Germany and shaking off his ethno-cultural backpack with
the goal that he scored.

Act 3. In various after-match
episodes separate from the event, those subjected to these belonging debates become active
participants and insist that their choice for one nation does not fairly
represent their transnational feelings of belonging to both Germany and Turkey
equally. As many other immigrant footballers around the globe have proclaimed, Özil
has also repeatedly stated that he would prefer to play for both national
football teams if international football regulations made it possible.

Disenchantment and the growth of a nativist backlash against Games of Belonging

In 2009, Özil forfeited Turkish membership,
after he chose to play for the German football national team. He was framed as
an “ethnic traitor”, a “Turk who had defected”, lost touch with his “roots”. On the other hand, Mesut
Özil was celebrated as the poster boy for immigrant integration politics in
Germany, where he was, for instance, awarded a national immigrant integration
prize in 2011 and seen as one of the most influential role models to promote second-
and third-generation German-Turks’ identification with Germany.

After
the 2018 photo with Erdogan, Özil’s reconciliation with his Turkish identity
was widely recognized. On the other hand, Özil was denounced for paying court
to an autocrat, which was framed as the one thing a “true” German would not do.
In fact, as many pundits contended, native political and national football
association representatives were very busy wooing autocrats themselves in
former years. But immigrant national team footballers have
to accomplish more than natives. Any slippage,
and immigrants’ full national membership is questioned. Natives on the other
hand, may risk being banned from the national football team in a worst case
scenario, yet their national belonging remains beyond question.

Public
photos of Özil and Erdogan have appeared regularly
since 2011, and he always prayed before matches, sharing a post of his pilgrimage to Mecca before the 2016 European
Championship. Özil was neither fully reconciled to his Turkish identity at that
stage nor banned from German national identity, though the AfD party had unsuccessfully
tried to create a scandal around events related to Özil before 2018. Why then was
there no escalation before 2018?

To
begin with, the interplay of the rise of populist radical-right parties in
Germany and Turkey with failed political messaging by traditional parties aggravated
the political context for national football-team diversity.

After
ongoing blame-games from 2016 onwards, German-Turkish relations suffered a
severe setback. Disenchantment with traditional parties grew after their promises
to tighten the screws on Erdogan were not in the end delivered. When racial
outnumbered economic concerns, segments of the national conservatives from
right to left identified the AfD party as the only saviour capable of standing
for “German values” (most notably, democracy) and defending them against “the
Sultan of the Bosphorus” and his German-based Turkish supporters.

Ever
since the 2017 election campaign, traditional parties have pursued disenchanted
national-conservative voters by raising a critical voice on the ”Turkish issue”.
Özil could not escape the recurring nationalist German-Turkish blame-games expounded
by the already established populist radical-right in Turkey and its
consolidating counterpart in Germany. Failed political messaging by traditional
parties, and unmet promises, facilitated the mainstreaming of radical-right narratives
which defended secessionist expressions of nativist nationhood.

Finally, the economic
exploitation of national football-team diversity caused frustration among
German-Turks. In his post-World-Cup statement, Özil lamented the racism against him
because of his Turkish and Muslim identity. Özil sided with French Karim
Benzema and Belgian Romelu Lukaku, stating: “I am a German when we win, an
immigrant when we lose.”

For Turkish immigrants, the
case of Özil reflected the frustrating double logic they encountered over the decades.
They were turned to enthusiastically when needed to rebuild the country (and
its economy) but soon discriminated against once the work was done.
German-Turks united against such an obvious anti-Turkish racism. And the repeated
charges of Nazism raised by Erdogan against Germany even made some identify ‘cultural
traits’ of racism among Germans. The latter marked a dangerous trend, as such
propositions very quickly “close down” ethno-cultural boundaries, resulting in
ethno-cultural fragmentation and polarization.

This frustration of
immigrants can only be prevented if ethnic diversity is communicated,
explicitly or implicitly, as a basic democratic right instead of a conditional economic
promise of success. In fact, if ethnic diversity is linked to economic success,
it may soon be connected to failure as well. Merkel’s “golden handshake” in 2009 and the absence
of protection for Özil in 2018 are a good example of how easily “things have
changed”.

Failed messaging culminated in a frustrated backlash against immigrant
integration politics, while the German majority and Turkish immigrants were on
their way to “opening up” their horizons vis-à-vis each other. In 2018, the
mainstreaming of radical-right narratives in Germany and Turkey exploited the
Mesut Özil case and painted German-Turkish games
of belonging in a nativist light. It seems very unlikely that international
football will introduce transnational regulations for immigrant footballers in
this current period of ‘ethno-national rebirth’.

The staging of Games of Belonging

Disenchantment and the growth of a nativist backlash against Games of Belonging

The staging of Games
of Belonging