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Preface
- Jonas Otterbeck, Jørgen S. Nielsen
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- Muslims in Western Europe
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- 12 November 2015, pp vi-xii
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Summary
More than twenty years have passed since the first edition of this book. However, its structure and its driving questions have stood the test of time remarkably well. Still, the need for an updated version has become obvious as the field has developed and the legal and political structures of countries have changed. New Islamic organisations have taken the stage, and some old ones have lost influence. Having taught courses on Islam in Europe and benefitting from Jorgen Nielsen's book, I found the need for an update pressing and contacted the author asking if he considered a fourth edition. As it happened, I ended up responsible for the revisions instead, but Nielsen has assisted both with advice and proof reading, possibly becoming more involved than he at first meant to.
The history of an integration process
When Jorgen Nielsen penned the first edition of the book, western Europe was slowly becoming aware of a demographic change that was taking place. The book was timely, up to date, and yet scholarly, written by a historian who was among the first researchers to seriously consider the new Muslim presence in Europe. As time has passed and the new editions have been prepared and published in 1995, 2004, and now in 2015, the original part of the book describing the late 1980s and early 1990s has changed character and is now describing an important, transitional phase in the history of Muslim integration in western Europe. Reading the book today, a pattern emerges that was not there from the beginning. Rather, it has been created by the passing of time and been caught by the updates. If comparing the first faltering steps taken by Islamic organisations in the 1970s with the, at times, highly professionalised, often legally recognised, Muslim organisations of today, the development becomes striking. Muslim organisations have learnt to adapt and make space for themselves through trials and errors, a development that can be observed in all western European countries. Some have received external aid from, for example, the Diyanet, the Turkish Department of Religious Affairs, which sends out paid imams and helps out with organising. Others have been built up through local individual initatives when trying to take a stand in a single question – like the possibility of serving halal food at the local school.
4 - United Kingdom
- Jonas Otterbeck, Jørgen S. Nielsen
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- Muslims in Western Europe
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- 20 December 2017
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- 12 November 2015, pp 43-66
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Summary
Immigration and settlement
The immigration of people of Muslim background in the period after the Second World War has tended to be subsumed under the general heading of ‘coloured’, ‘immigrant’, New Commonwealth and similar all-embracing terms. This disguises not only the fact that these general definitions include Afro- Caribbean, South Asian and other origins, but also the significant differences of origin, culture, religion, class and education which are to be found within the main subcategories. I shall concentrate on those groups which come from a wholly or mainly Muslim background.
Until 1962, entry into Britain by citizens of British colonies and member countries of the Commonwealth was unrestricted. The first major wave of immigrants after the end of the Second World War came from the various islands of the West Indies, starting in the late 1940s. The migration from the Indian subcontinent took off much more slowly, and was based very much on those hundreds of men who had worked on British ships during the war, as well as on the smaller number of professionals. During the 1950s, ‘travel agents’ from these communities were active in setting up business alongside the family networks. Together, they facilitated an annual gross immigration of about 10,000 men from the Indian subcontinent. Economic decline reduced this rate in the last couple of years before 1960, but the existence of the networks meant that when the time was ripe, there was the capacity for a very sharp rise in the rate of immigration from the Indian subcontinent.
The one immediate cause of the sudden rise in entries during 1961 and 1962 was the prospect of legislation restricting entry. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 was a response to a growing public debate over the desirability of large-scale immigration of ‘coloureds’. There were clear elements of racism in the debate, linked to a perception of Britain moving out of its imperial mode. The debate had been fuelled by ‘race riots’, in particular those in Notting Hill (London) and Nottingham in 1958. Over the eighteen months during which policy and then legislation were discussed, there was a massive increase in immigration from all regions, particularly from the Indian subcontinent. In addition, the controls were ineffective.
Contents
- Jonas Otterbeck, Jørgen S. Nielsen
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- Muslims in Western Europe
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- 12 November 2015, pp v-v
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Muslims in Western Europe
- 4th edition
- Jonas Otterbeck, Jørgen S. Nielsen
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- 12 November 2015
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A useful introduction to the social, political, cultural and religious position of Muslims living in contemporary Europe. It describes the history of early European Muslims and outlines the causes and courses of twentieth-century Muslim immigration.
A note on statistics
- Jonas Otterbeck, Jørgen S. Nielsen
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- Muslims in Western Europe
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- 12 November 2015, pp 194-195
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8 - Family, law and culture
- Jonas Otterbeck, Jørgen S. Nielsen
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- Muslims in Western Europe
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- 12 November 2015, pp 112-132
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Social and economic considerations
The process of immigration has been the main factor in determining the basic working and living conditions of the majority of Muslims, certainly of the immigrant generation itself. They came with little European language ability, to find employment in the less skilled parts of industry. Their educational qualifications were low, and those which they had were only recognised sparingly. Housing conditions were poor. The effect of racial discrimination has been to perpetuate these conditions and, to a great extent, to pass them on to the children.
This is not the place to present a general survey of the social and economic conditions of non-European immigrant and ethnic minority communities in Europe, a field in which a substantial literature has accumulated. Much of this literature relates of course to Muslims, since in mainland Europe most such communities are Muslim in origin. This circumstance makes it particularly difficult to make any judgement as to how far their social and economic circumstances are affected by the fact of these communities’ Muslim identity. While there is no doubt that the conditions affect very strongly Muslims’ reaction and adaptation, it seems absurd in such circumstances to attribute to Islam, as a religion, any alleged social or economic shortcomings attributed to Muslims in Europe.
In Britain, however, the circumstances of the immigration have brought not only Muslim communities but also Hindu and Sikh communities from generally similar areas, namely particular regions of the north of the Indian subcontinent. Here, one has a situation where it is possible at least to attempt a comparison, and so we can refer again to the circumstances outlined in the opening paragraph above.
A number of surveys have shown the extent of these circumstances, in particular four major surveys on racial disadvantage, conducted in 1966, 1974, 1982 and 1994. However, there are significant differences in these areas, as the third survey showed with reference to English-language ability. In 1982, three-quarters of Bangladeshi women and a slightly smaller proportion of Pakistani women spoke little or no English, while the same was the case with half of Bangladeshi men but less than a quarter of Pakistani men. These differences are symptomatic partly of the later arrival of Bangladeshis and partly of the extent to which women conducted their lives within the community.
Bibliography
- Jonas Otterbeck, Jørgen S. Nielsen
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- Muslims in Western Europe
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- 12 November 2015, pp 196-208
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5 - The Netherlands and Belgium
- Jonas Otterbeck, Jørgen S. Nielsen
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- Muslims in Western Europe
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- 12 November 2015, pp 67-83
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Summary
THE NETHERLANDS
Immigration
Immigration involving Muslims started in the Netherlands after 1945. The first small groups arrived as Indonesia became independent in 1949. Among the mainly Christian Moluccan soldiers of the Netherlands East Indies Army were about 1,000 Muslims. By the early 1980s, this group was estimated to number about 1,500. As the Moluccans had not been expected to stay for long when they arrived, they ended up in temporary camp accommodation and were only slowly moved to more permanent housing after some years.
A more substantial number of Muslims came from the Dutch colony of Suriname (Dutch Guyana): some of them were part of the Lahore Ahmadiyya movement. From the mid-1960s, labour migration from that colony started to increase, reaching 5,500 people entering in 1970. Talk of more restrictive immigration laws led to a doubling of the rate of immigration by 1974. An explosive rise to 36,000 entries in 1975 could be attributed to the coming of independence, after which Surinamese not living in the Netherlands would lose Dutch citizenship. After independence, immigration continued under a bilateral agreement, mainly for family reunification, until the agreement expired in 1980. The majority of the Surinamese were Christian, but an important number were of Indian origin and continue to call themselves Hindustanis. By the early 1980s, it was estimated that about 30,000 of the Surinamese living in the Netherlands were Muslim and a further 90,000 were Hindu.
Apart from these special cases, there was little immigration until the 1960s. For a long time, the country considered itself overpopulated, but by this time the available internal labour pool was exhausted, and industry started looking for workers from around the Mediterranean. After first making bilateral recruitment agreements with Italy, Spain and Portugal, the turn came to Turkey in 1964. Agreements followed with Morocco in 1969 and with Tunisia and Yugoslavia in 1970. By this time, there were 92,000 foreign workers in the country, the largest single group being the Turks. Despite a short recession in 1967, immigration continued to increase sharply until it was stopped in 1974.
2 - France
- Jonas Otterbeck, Jørgen S. Nielsen
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- Muslims in Western Europe
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- 12 November 2015, pp 8-24
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Muslim immigration after 1962
Until the beginning of the 1960s, North African immigration into France had been overwhelmingly Algerian. Despite consistently higher unemployment rates among Algerian workers in France, and despite employers' continued preference for workers from southern Europe (mainly Portugal and Italy), Algerians continued to cross the Mediterranean. In the decade up to 1957, over 190,000 Algerians had arrived, mostly from the regions around Tizi Ouzou, Setif and Constantine in the north-eastern parts of Algeria. In the following decade the figure rose to almost quarter of a million.
The traditional lack of a coordinated and consistent foreign labour policy continued, until the rise in immigration became remarkable in the early 1960s. The major contribution to this change came, in fact, not from the Algerians but from Morocco and, to a lesser extent, from Tunisia. Migration from the Tunis conurbation and the border regions with Algeria started in the late 1950s, and settlement in France reached a total of close to 48,000 by 1964. This total jumped to 161,000 a decade later and then slowed down considerably. The Moroccan population of France had reached about 50,000 by 1962, but the next decade saw a massive growth to over 400,000. Algerian growth also took off, reaching a total of about 830,000 in 1977. These increases continued in different proportions until the mid-1980s (see Table 2.1).
The reaction of the French government was finally to try to adopt some form of immigration policy, which very quickly became a policy for control and limitation, as distinct from the earlier policies of facilitating labour immigration. To begin with, the policy was haphazard, consisting mainly of an accord with Algeria agreed in 1964. In a revision four years later, a limit of 35,000 annual immigrants was agreed, subsequently reduced to 25,000. In practice, these accords were virtually impossible to enforce, and the government was reduced to policing clandestine immigration. In response to the economic recession of 1974, controls were very rapidly tightened. This culminated in the period 1977–81 with a policy of subsidising migrants to return to their countries of origin. The aim was to achieve the return of 1 million people. However, the policy met with little success, and the legalisation of 130,000 clandestine settlers in 1981–2 amounted to an admission of failure.
10 - European Muslims in a new Europe?
- Jonas Otterbeck, Jørgen S. Nielsen
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- Muslims in Western Europe
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- 12 November 2015, pp 169-193
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Coming into Europe, Muslims have been part of the far larger phenomenon of post-1945 labour immigration, which has led to the settlement of significant ethnic minority groups throughout the region. As they have settled, Muslims have raised challenges to their surroundings as well as been challenged themselves. There has been a complex of adjustments, not always easy, which both sides have had to make in the details of daily life. But the increasingly permanent Muslim presence and Muslims’ interaction with their surroundings are raising deeper questions and challenges to both sides, issues which relate to individual and collective senses of identity and which therefore affect and will continue to affect basic patterns of corporate and public life in western Europe.
It became common during the 1980s, especially in educational and religious circles, to talk of a Europe which was becoming ‘multicultural’. As a description of the situation in some city districts, the term had some justification, but behind it lay, on the one hand, an optimism as regards the degree of change which had been achieved and, on the other hand, the affirmation of a common European myth of a pre-existent monocultural society.
Historically, of course, Europe had for centuries been multicultural. What commonly goes under the simplistic heading of European – or even Western – culture is a product of Hellenistic, Roman, Middle Eastern and Germanic inter-mixing with previous cultures. No modern European nation can claim to be other than the product of cultural and human intermarriage. Britain had its Celtic, Norse, Saxon and Norman immigrations further enriched by more recent Dutch, Huguenot, Jewish, Italian, Polish and Ukrainian influxes. All other European countries can draw up similar lists – even before the list is expanded to include the Caribbean, Arab, Turkish, Pakistani, Indian, Vietnamese or other migrations which are the direct background to the new presence of Muslims in Europe.
Advocates of a multicultural Europe often appeal to such histories in support of their case. Such appeals can obviously be useful as an educational tool, but their usefulness as a description of realities is doubtful – and it is realities which must be dealt with before dealing positively with futures. These realities can be briefly summed up under three headings: the liberal myth of a multicultural Europe; the social reality of a multicultural Europe; and the unreality of cultural encountein Europe.
9 - Muslim organisations
- Jonas Otterbeck, Jørgen S. Nielsen
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- Muslims in Western Europe
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- 12 November 2015, pp 133-168
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In any consideration of the development of Muslim organisational activity in western Europe, three main processes of establishment can be identified: groups which arose out of the community and its own perceptions of its needs; groups set up as extensions of organisations and movements in the country of origin; and groups set up by governments or government-related agencies.
During the first phase of Muslim immigration, the migrants were mostly men on their own coming for a limited period. The fact that they were men on their own meant that requirements of religious practice were minimal – it was usually sufficient to be able to pray. This minimal religious practice was further marginalised by the expectation of imminent return home. The situation changed fundamentally when the migration of Muslim workers became an immigration of Muslim families. Firstly, the sense of temporariness began to weaken, to be replaced by a sense of permanence. Secondly, the presence of wives and children critically widened the scope for interaction with the surrounding society, especially in education, health and social welfare, as indicated in Chapter 8. As a result, large areas of traditional culture came under question, creating a need for the construction of institutions which could either help defend tradition or lower the level of tension.
It is necessary first to attempt to present an overall perspective on the processes involved in establishing Muslim organisations in Europe and an identification of the factors, both in origins and in the European environment, which have affected the nature of organisations. Certainly in Britain, and probably elsewhere in Europe, these elements have been a major force in determining the balance between and the character of the institutional integration of Muslim communities.
The context of origins
The study of Muslim communities in Europe has suffered from a lack of awareness of the complex of structure and culture from which the communities come. It is certainly fair to complain that, on the whole, British race relations and ethnic minority studies have, with the partial exception of some social anthropologists, shown either ignorance or lack of interest in the contexts out of which the immigrated communities have come, which is somewhat surprising in view of the oft-repeated assertion of the weight of imported ‘cultural baggage’.
7 - Southern Europe
- Jonas Otterbeck, Jørgen S. Nielsen
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- Muslims in Western Europe
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- 12 November 2015, pp 98-111
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SWITZERLAND
As in many other European countries, it was the Ahmadiyya movement which first brought a Muslim presence to Switzerland. Based in Zürich since the end of the nineteenth century, it built up its work on a Europe-wide scale, though with only minimal impact in Switzerland itself. It was only when a mosque was constructed in Zürich in 1963 that the Swiss public paid attention, with fears being expressed that the intention was to make Switzerland Muslim. Reactions were more muted when another mosque was built in Geneva, funded by Muslim governments, especially that of Saudi Arabia, intended to serve the Muslim community attached to the various international organisations based there.
Both of these ventures remained generally isolated from Swiss society. The period of labour migration which led to the creation of a larger Muslim community came significantly later than elsewhere. Only in the late 1960s did Switzerland begin to experience a major immigration of workers from Muslim countries, primarily from Turkey and southern Yugoslavia into the northern, German-speaking areas, and from North Africa mainly into the French-speaking areas. In the late 1970s, Switzerland allowed family reunification, paving the way for a second wave of immigration. With this growth in the Muslim community has come a greatly increased activity of organisations and mosques, which have made themselves noticed in native Swiss society to a degree that was not the case with the older centres in Zürich and Geneva.
Starting in 1850, Switzerland has a long tradition of carrying out national censuses every ten year. Since 2000, this has been done annually through estimations using local government registries. The census of 1980 recorded 56,625 Muslims living in Switzerland. In between censuses, one has to rely on regular publication of numbers of foreign residents. If 95 per cent of Turks are Muslim, then there were 54,000 Turkish Muslims in the country at the end of 1988. Possibly around 20,000 Yugoslav Muslims, representing 20 per cent of all Yugoslavs, 12,000 North Africans and about 5,000 Swiss citizens should also be added. Swiss labour law makes room for large numbers of seasonal workers, who particularly tend to come from ex-Yugoslavia.
Frontmatter
- Jonas Otterbeck, Jørgen S. Nielsen
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6 - The Nordic countries
- Jonas Otterbeck, Jørgen S. Nielsen
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DENMARK
Denmark joined the Europe-wide search for migrant labour in the late 1960s with an initially almost unrestricted labour immigration policy. Estimates in 1968 suggested that there were then about 2,000 Muslims in Denmark, but many of them will have belonged to the Ahmadi community, which had already built a mosque in 1967 in a Copenhagen suburb. This new immigration meant that by 1970 over 8,000 Turks, 2,000 Pakistanis and nearly 9,000 North Africans had entered the country. In the following few years, immigration restrictions were gradually imposed. Early in 1973, these restrictions were lifted, only to be followed towards the end of the year by a full stop to labour immigration, while permitting the continued entry of dependants as part of a policy of family reunion.
By the early 1980s, family reunion and some continuing labour immigration had brought the total for Turks and Pakistanis to nearly 16,000 and 6,600 respectively. By this time, there was also a growing Moroccan community of 2,000 to 3,000. The following decade saw one of the most radical changes in immigration patterns of any European country during this period. While the Turkish community continued to grow, reaching 30,000 by 1991, the Pakistani community stagnated – although it should be noted that many Pakistanis have moved to Denmark as UK citizens and do not therefore appear as Pakistanis in the official statistics. The change came as a result of unrest in the Middle East. The official data for 1981 recorded a total of 463 nationals of Lebanon, Iran and Iraq combined. Ten years later, the government recorded 2,800 Iraqis, 9,000 Iranians and 3,200 Lebanese residents, a combined total of 15,000! Of course, not all of these were of Muslim background, especially among the Lebanese and, to a lesser extent, among the Iraqis, but the majority were. By the end of 1990, therefore, the total number of Muslims estimated for Denmark was between 55,000 and 60,000, and the second-largest national group had arrived within the decade. In this development, one also finds the reason for Denmark adopting one of the harshest immigration and refugee policies of all the countries of western Europe.
Index
- Jonas Otterbeck, Jørgen S. Nielsen
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- Muslims in Western Europe
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- 12 November 2015, pp 209-215
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1 - A brief history
- Jonas Otterbeck, Jørgen S. Nielsen
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The presence of Muslims in one or another part of continental Europe probably goes as far back in time as historical Islam. Traders and diplomats have over the centuries been a continuous feature of many places in especially central and southern Europe. But it is also possible to identify three distinct periods of established Muslim communities. The first of these has passed into history, namely the period of Islamic Spain and Muslim rule in Sicily and southern Italy. The Normans put an end to the latter in the eleventh century, and the Spanish reconquista finally put an end to the last Muslim foothold in Spain in 1492. All that remains today of that phase is the rich contribution it made to all aspects of European culture.
The two following phases have, however, left permanent communities. The second was the result of the spread of Mongol armies during the thirteenth century. After only a few generations, their successor states became Muslim, and one of these, the Khanate of the Golden Horde, centred on the Volga river basin north of the Caspian and Black seas, left a permanent Muslim population of various Tatar groups stretching from the Volga down to the Caucasus and Crimea. As itinerant traders and soldiers, many of these groups later travelled around the Russian empire and established colonies in places such as Finland and the area which today straddles the border between Poland and the Ukraine.
The third phase was the period of Ottoman expansion into the Balkans and central Europe. This was the context for the settlement of Turkish populations which still survive today in parts of Bulgaria, former Yugoslavia, Romania, the republic of Macedonia and Greece. Many of the Ottoman subject populations also became Muslim, to the extent that Albania became a country with a Muslim majority, and Slav groups in Bosnia-Herzegovina and parts of Bulgaria also became Muslim.
The period with which this book deals is a relatively new, fourth phase, namely the establishment of Muslim communities in western Europe. This is generally regarded as a feature of the great period of immigration after the Second World War, but in fact the foundations were laid long before then.
3 - Germany
- Jonas Otterbeck, Jørgen S. Nielsen
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- Muslims in Western Europe
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- 12 November 2015, pp 25-42
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Immigration and growth
The settlement in what was West Germany of a substantial Muslim population, the second-largest in Western Europe, is dominated by Turkish immigration. During the 1950s, there were a number of private and regional initiatives to recruit workers from Turkey to meet the beginnings of a shortage of industrial labour. An agreement between the Ministry of Labour of Schleswig-Holstein and the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs led to the arrival of a dozen Turkish craftsmen in Kiel in April 1957. A programme was sponsored by the Hamburg Chamber of Craftsmen. In Bavaria, a private ‘Research Institute for Turkish- German Economic Relations’ was in fact a recruitment agency, while a number of ‘translation bureaux’ sprang up for the same purpose. The best of these programmes provided some training, but most were simply looking for cheap labour. The experience of many of these early ‘guest workers’ (Gastarbeiter) was disappointing, as they learned that their Turkish craft qualifications were not recognised, that they had to do unskilled or semiskilled work below their qualifications, and that only a few of them were given the opportunity to train further.
These early settlers were concentrated in the industrial cities of the north, particularly Hamburg, Bremen and Kiel. The rules governing immigration at the time were liberal compared to later stages, and the immigrants were able to bring their families with them and to settle in quite quickly. As a result, despite their early disappointments, they were later to express quite a high level of satisfaction with the results of their move.
The federal government soon came to the view that the process of recruitment should be regularised while also being expanded. The move towards making recruitment of Turkish – and other foreign – workers a government monopoly was completed with a bilateral recruitment agreement between Turkey and Germany in 1962. The date was not coincidental. This was only a year after the Berlin Wall was erected, blocking the inflow of East Germans. It was also the year which saw the beginning of Turkey's first five-year plan, in which the export of labour was a major element.