Rita Chin, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) ("Treating immigration as a longer postwar story enables us to see that the variegated patterns of response to newcomers have not just pushed in a linear direction. Instead, the trajectories of public debate and policy making indicate that European reactions to non-European migrants vacillated between different forms of openness and exclusion at different junctures. In the 1950s and 1960s, Western European nations typically welcomed those who arrived from their colonies, former colonies, and other foreign countries to help rebuild after the massive destruction of World War II. In this way, questions of immigration and ethnic diversity were always interwoven with the postwar economic boom that drove a quarter century of prosperity and affluence. While governmental authorities in certain countries worried about the long-term effects of ethnic and racial difference on their societies, most suppressed such concerns by focusing instead on the immediate economic benefits of foreign manpower or by insisting that guest workers would eventually return home. For much of the 1960s and 1970s, Britain, France, and Germany pursued distinctly different approaches to dealing with their multicultural societies. It was only around 1980, in fact, that all three openly acknowledged the massive social consequences of immigration and ethnic diversity. At virtually the same moment, though, each country also began to pursue a new politics of national belonging that was at least partially framed in relation to non-European settlers. With growing intensity, British, French, and German political leaders identified immigrants as bearers of alien cultures that now rendered them 'inassimilable' to the nation." Id. at 5-6. In short: moving from 'we want you because we need you' to 'we don't need you, therefore, we don't want you, therefore you are inassimilable'.).
Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (New York: Cambridge U. Press, 2007) ("This book provides the first English-Language history of the postwar labor migration to West Germany. . . Rita Chin offers an account of West German public debate about guest workers. She traces the historical and ideological shifts around the meanings of the labor migration, moving from the concept of guest workers as a 'temporary labor supplement' in the 1950s and 1960s to early ideas about 'multiculturalism' by the end of the 1980s. She argues that the efforts to come to terms with the permanent residence of guest workers, especially Muslim Turks, forced a major rethinking of German identity, culture, and nation. What began as a policy initiative to fuel the economic miracle ultimately became a much broader discussion about the parameters of a specifically German brand of multiculturalism." Id. at i.).
Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley, & Atina Grossmann, After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan Press, 2009) (From the back cover: "What happened to 'race thinking, and racial distinctions in Germany, and Europe more broadly, after the demise of the Nazi racial state? This book investigates the afterlife of 'race' since 1945 and the challenges the long-dominant assumption among historians that it disappeared from public discourse and policy-making with the defeat of the Third Reich and its genocidal European empire. Drawing on case studies of Afro-Germans, Jews, and Turks--arguably the three most important minority communities in postwar Germany--the authors detail continuities and change across the 1945 divide and offer the beginnings of a history of race and racialization after Hitler. A final chapter moves beyond the German context to consider the postwar engagement with 'race' in France, Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands, where waves of postwar, postcolonial, and labor migration troubled nativist notions of national and European identity." "After the Nazi Racial State poses interpretative questions for the historical understanding of postwar societies and democratic transformation, both in Germany and throughout Europe. It elucidates key analytical categories, historicizes current discourse, and demonstrates how contemporary debates about immigration and integration00and about how much 'difference' a democracy can accommodate--are implicated in a longer history of 'race/' This book explores why the concept of 'race; became taboo as a tool for understanding the German society after 1945. Most crucially, it suggests the social and epistemic consequences of this determined retreat form 'are; for Germany and Europe as a whole.")
