Transponder Issue 4: Identity

Bertelsmann Foundation

© 2023 all rights reserved.

About The Transponder

The Transponder is the Bertelsmann Foundation’s biannual publication focusing on issues that impact the transatlantic relationship. The magazine features short-form and long-form articles, interviews, infographics and photo essays that explore topics related to democracy, technology, and geopolitics through a transatlantic lens.

Published by the Bertelsmann Foundation

1108 16th Street NW, Floor 1 Washington, DC, USA 20036

www.bfna.org

@BertelsmannFdn

@bertelsmannfoundation

BertelsmannFoundation

@bertelsmannfoundation

About the Bertelsmann Foundation

The Bertelsmann Foundation (North America), Inc., established in 2008, was created to promote and strengthen the transatlantic relationship. Through research, analysis, forums, audiovisual and multimedia content, we seek to educate and engage audiences on the most pressing economic, political, and social challenges facing the United States and Europe. Based in Washington, DC, we are an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank and the U.S. branch of the Germany-based Bertelsmann Stiftung.

Identity

Welcome to the fourth edition of the Transponder Magazine. In this issue, we delve into the complex topic of individual and collective identity. In an era of widespread digital and cultural transformation, division, and societal change, what makes us who we are? What brings us together and what separates us?

Through this collection of essays and analysis, we explore the diversity and breadth of identity on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing themes of citizenship, belonging, personhood, heritage, and online persona. Identity — our individual notion of self or our collective sense of community and connection — is molded and shaped by our experiences, beliefs, and cultural and historical context. How we act online, who we vote for, what we believe, and who we love all contribute to our sense of self, society, and wholeness.

In the following pages, you will find a series of thought-provoking stories and profiles that approach these facets in unique ways, uncovering new dimensions of the intricate tapestry of transatlantic identity. I hope that these articles inspire deep reflection and new understandings about the multeity of human identity. And, in the process, I hope that you learn something about yourself as well.

Rylie Munn Editor-in-Chief

Where Online Meets Offline

There and Back Again

30

Turning the Key to Maltese Identity

34 On the Fringe

The 13.6 million French citizens who chose not to vote

38 (N)ostalgia

The two sides of German unity

42 Europe once stretched

into Algeria

48 Is the Melting Pot Boiling Over?

Reflections on immigration and American identity

56 INTERVIEW

José Luis Loera

Shifting Identities: From Victims to Changemakers

Where Online Meets Offline

Young people have grown up alongside social media platforms and many have never known a world without them. Teens and young adults are often very intentional about what they post on social media and how they present themselves on each platform. Social media allows users to carefully curate content that follows a certain narrative and builds an online identity. However, this on-screen identity can be different to the one users portray offline.

In the digital world, people can choose to use their real name and have public profiles or they have the option to be anonymous, allowing them to post content while hiding behind a screen. Anonymity and crafted online identities can make people feel more empowered to speak their minds and be themselves when they do not feel comfortable doing so in real life. This is what cyberpsychology experts call the online disinhibition effect: the lack of restraint people feel when interacting online as opposed to interacting in-person.

Most people’s online disinhibition is benign. Social media users benefit from the anonymity the internet offers and use it to express themselves more openly and form interpersonal relationships. People that are shy or have social anxiety find it much easier to make friends and be more vocal on the internet, where they can reveal parts of themselves without fear of judgment. The most popular social media platforms among Gen Z are the ones that serve precisely this purpose — providing a space for young people to express themselves in formats that are quick, simple, and visual.

Social Media’s Double-edged Sword

Written by Daniela Rojas Medina

TikTok teens

A 2022 Pew Research survey measuring teenager’s social media usage showed 95% of U.S. teens use YouTube, 67% TikTok, and 62% Instagram. By comparison, only 32% of them use Facebook and 23% Twitter. In the U.S., 80% of TikTok’s users are between the ages of 16-34 and globally that figure is almost 70%. What initially made TikTok so popular among younger audiences was its short 30-60 second video format, which Instagram later emulated through Instagram Reels in order to compete with the app. TikTok videos can now be up to 10 minutes long, but an internal survey showed that shorter videos were still favored as users found content lasting longer than a minute to be stressful. The short nature of the videos makes content more accessible and easy to consume, while allowing creators to quickly produce content in response to cultural trends and global news, ensuring the videos stay fresh and relevant.

The other feature that contributes to TikTok’s success is its highly personalized algorithm, which makes people with shared interests receive the same type of content. This filtering process creates sub communities within the app. These sub communities, ranging from BookTok to DisabilityTok to Mental HealthTok, are a place where users can find others they can relate to and find support. In short, the sub communities have become a safe space for many users. This is particularly true for underrepresented and marginalized communities. For example, TikTok user @shinanova uses her platform to talk about Inuit indigenous culture and spread awareness about issues that are prevalent in her community. Another user, @abbeysmom17, joined the platform to help her daughter share her experiences as an adult on the spectrum. Using the hashtag #everydayautism, Abbey posts videos where she talks about her special interests and how she overcomes daily struggles. In one video, Abbey says that she likes being on the app because she feels that her videos can help a lot of people. In the comments, an anonymous

user writes, “I am autistic and a bit different than Abbey but her ways of communicating have helped me a lot and I feel more confident being myself.”

A double-edged sword

But anonymity on the internet has the power to be harmful when users wield it with more sinister motives. This is what cyber psychologists call toxic online dishibition. The effects of this phenomenon can range from cyberbullying and harassment to building online communities around beliefs that are not widely accepted by the rest of society. Anonymous online forums, such as Reddit, Telegram and BitChute, have become popular among fringe groups that come together to share controversial opinions and beliefs, knowing they can remain invisible behind their screens. The conversations that take place on these platforms can range from hateful remarks towards various social groups to anti-establishment and antivaxxer rhetoric to conspiracy theories.

One example is the incel subculture, an online community of predominantly young men who self-identify as involuntary celibates and blame women for their inability to attract a romantic or sexual partner. These men use social media platforms to find anonymous support for their deeply rooted belief that women hold too much power in relationships. In doing so, many of them express views that are hostile — and even violent — toward women. The biggest issue with these online groups is that what is posted online can take root offline. Once they have built an online community, members of the incel subculture can meet offline and perpetrate deadly attacks against women. In 2021, a man named Tres Genco, who self-identified as an incel, was charged by a federal grand jury with attempting to conduct a mass shooting of women at a sorority in Ohio. Genco was a frequent poster on popular incel websites and compared his planned attack to that of Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old man who killed six people and injured 14 others outside a University of California Santa Barbara sorority house. Right before the shooting, Rodger uploaded a video to YouTube, in which he detailed the plans for his attack and his motives, explaining that he wanted to punish women for not being attracted to him and sexually active men for “living a better life” than him.

Another example are the far-right online communities and election conspiracy theorists who were convinced that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. The disinformation that conservative television networks broadcasted leading up to and in the days following the election was amplified on social media, where unfounded stories of voter fraud were shared across platforms. The disinformation campaign was so effective that, according to MIT professor David

Rand, 77% of Trump voters believed in widespread voter fraud. Just as the online incel communities can lead to real life crimes against women, the rampant election disinformation on social media largely contributed to the January 6 Capitol insurrection.

Regulating online lives

It seems that social media is part of our lives for good. There are admittedly many benefits to these platforms and their ability to bring people together, but how can policymakers effectively mitigate the harmful impact of toxic online disinhibition? The U.S. has made some progress regarding the protection of children online, holding several Congressional hearings in the past two years to better understand the protection of children’s privacy and shelter them from content that is not appropriate for their age and harmful to their mental health. At the time of writing, Congress has not yet come up with a good solution for how to regulate hate speech and illegal content more broadly, nor for how to prevent toxic online groups from forming or from committing crimes in the physical world.

Even the European Union, a leader in online content regulation, has struggled to police anonymous and encrypted social media platforms. In Germany, one of the EU member states with the strictest internet censorship laws, the government is struggling to limit the reach of Telegram — an online platform popular among far-right extremists, terrorist groups, and conspiracy theorists. In 2020, COVID-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories shared on Telegram sparked mass protests across Germany. Over time, according to openDemocracy, the COVID-19 conspiracy movement has become more radicalized and turning towards the far right, which is cause for concern for German lawmakers.

The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), passed in 2022, is the closest there is to cohesive online platform regulation in Europe. The legislation makes what is illegal offline, also illegal online, such as terrorist content or illegal hate speech. The DSA aims to limit the spread of disinformation and harmful content by requiring online platforms to conduct yearly risk assessments of the content hosted and circulated on the platforms, as well as provide data about the use of their algorithms. The legislation is seen as a game changer when it comes to internet regulation but there is skepticism about the DSA’s implementation and enforcement. There are still details to hash out regarding how the platforms will conduct the risk assessments, who will be responsible for auditing, and, since the platforms are the ones who pay the auditors, how to avoid conflict of interest.

Internet regulation is complex and there is no quick fix to this multi-layered issue. The fact remains that it is difficult to determine what exactly classifies as harmful

content. Another challenge is drawing the line between online discussions that are concerning and have the potential to create real harm in the offline world and those that are illegal. This is especially a topic of debate in the U.S., where free speech is protected under the First Amendment and social media companies cannot be held liable for user-generated content circulating on their platforms. This is due to the protections provided to them in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The future of digital life

Even with new legislation like the DSA, it is doubtful that regulation alone will be able to curb the spread of online disinformation and the creation of toxic online communities. This is going to take a comprehensive societal approach, where governments, social media companies, and civil society work together to find applicable solutions. Policymakers and their staffers, particularly in the U.S., need to understand the different types of risk associated with online platforms, not just the national security threats. During the recent Congressional hearing with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, the primary concern from lawmakers was TikTok’s Chinese parent company and the national security

concerns posed by foreign technology products. The risks the app poses to teenagers’ mental health, due to the amount of hours they spend on the app or the access to potentially harmful content, was not as prominent in the discussion.

In order for strong internet regulation to be drafted in the U.S., Members of Congress need to develop a deeper understanding of how anonymous groups operate on social media platforms, the role of algorithms in feeding users harmful content, and the new risks posed by AI, starting with the large language models used in ChatGPT. Legislation like the DSA, despite having its skeptics, can serve as a benchmark for U.S. lawmakers as they draft federal online content regulation. A second step would be for Congress to implement a Section 230 reform to address the unchecked spread of illegal or toxic online content. There should also be an incentive mechanism for social media companies to improve their content moderation and removal practices, especially on platforms that are popular among fringe groups and thrive on online anonymity. These actionable steps could spell out the beginning of a brighter future online. Social media is here to stay, but that does not mean we cannot make efforts to develop a healthier relationship with it.

“In the U.S., social media companies cannot be held liable for user-generated content circulating on their platforms.”

There and Back Again

Written by Kenny Martin

My junior year of college, I arrived in London on the way to Cambridge — where I would spend the next six months as a visiting student immersed in poetry — on an early January day of classically, delightfully awful weather. My umbrella broke almost immediately, and I was soaked through by the time I made it to my hotel, in the heart of Bloomsbury. The neighborhood charmed me, as I hoped it would, with its plainspoken but stately townhouses, its quiet parks, the British Museum.

There I was: a wet, jetlagged 20-year-old, full of the happiness and giddy expectation that come only with being far, far away from home. After a nap, and once the rain had lifted, I set out for Gordon Square, one of those lovely parks surrounded by historic homes, where I hoped to pay homage to the members of the Bloomsbury Group: Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, and all the rest, many of whom had lived and worked there. Not so long before, reading about their quietly revolutionary experiments — in art and life, sex and love, and in pleasure above all — had lit a small fire in my imagination, and in my heart too. I sensed an artistic and sexual affinity between the group and me; almost a century after their exploits, I believed I might be happy following in their footsteps. Here was queer artistic history, in the air and underfoot. By a seeming miracle, I was caught up in it, if not quite part of it.

There’s a distinguished tradition of Americans escaping across the Atlantic to find sexual and artistic freedom. As James Baldwin had Paris and James Merrill had Athens, countless others have found the license they craved in

Berlin, Venice, or Tangier. Some, like Baldwin, find long fulfillment abroad; others, like Merrill, decide to come back. For me, escaping across the pond set the stage for a newfound inner life animated by a sense of what it is to be queer and happy and in love with poetry, the imaginative force that buoys me most today and threads itself, in my mind, through all other forms of love.

England provided solace and a shock of imaginative stimulation at a critical moment in my life, but I never quite belonged there, nor was I quite happy. It wasn’t until I came back to the United States that a new sense of myself came into flower, but I thank Europe for setting the bud. Being temporarily out of place and away from home allowed me to begin the precarious business of figuring out where and how — with whom, to whom — I hoped to belong.

Like many young people going abroad, I hoped to be transformed by the magic of the faraway, and my pilgrimage to Bloomsbury was a first attempt to invite that transformation. For queer people and for artists, the longing to leave home and become someone else, even if you don’t know who that someone might be, can take on a ferocious hue. In Dallas, where I grew up and went to college, I had felt an urgency to declare just who I was, coupled with a terrifying doubt in my ability to do so. In London, sitting among strange foliage and small winter blossoms where Woolf and her friends once sat, I felt cut free from the tether of home — though I didn’t yet have any notion of what I would do, where I would go, or who I wanted to become with that freedom.

Let a small moment of revelation stand in for many: I remember lounging along the banks of the River Cam and watching the rowers gliding by, the swans swimming beside them. In a quiet instant, the poetical and the sexual came together with a spark, and Merrill’s early poem “The Black Swan” began to take on a fuller meaning. In the poem, a child “with white ideas of swans” is drawn to the titular creature, which swims in a lake “where every paradox means wonder”. It’s unclear why the child is so drawn to the swan, which is powerful and alluring and maybe a little dangerous and also healing. The last stanza is heartbreaking:

Always the black swan moves on the lake; always

The blond child stands to

gaze

As the tall emblem pivots and rides out

To the opposite side, always. The child upon

The bank, hands full of difficult marvels, stays

Forever to cry aloud

In anguish: I love the black swan.

To a young man yearning for other men almost without knowing it, these lines are also giddying. I had a hint that I was like the child, “hands full of difficult marvels” I didn’t fully understand, and full of love for something, or someone, as yet elusive. The poem helped me recognize that love and pushed me toward its pursuit, the only way to ensure that I did not become quite like the child, forever anguished, forever desiring the always unreachable. Thinking about Merrill’s expression of the fraught nature of love in a place that provided both shelter (from the anxieties of home) and stimulation (the beautiful rowers, the fantastical birds) spurred me to begin seeking that love out, or at least to admit its possibility in my own life. The first step to becoming who one wants to be is sometimes as simple as saying it out loud, or writing it down — especially in a poem.

Through Merrill and others, I began to realize that the literary imagination is not so different from the imagination it takes to be a good friend or lover. I began to see reading and writing as forms of queer joy — ways of understanding and even liking myself enough to believe that what I had to say might one day mean something to others. As I developed a burgeoning, still furtive sense of belonging to an aesthetic and an attitude, I felt I had been initiated, almost without my knowing, into an ancient, fertile

“The first step to becoming who one wants to be is sometimes as simple as saying it out loud, or writing it down — especially in a poem.”

manner of moving through and looking at the world. And as I began to write about what I saw there, the shared intensity between art and sexuality no longer a secret I had to keep from myself, it was as if I had stumbled into happy recognition of the person I still might become and the kind of life I might live.

I think Michel Foucault gets at the joy of this recognition: “It seems to me that a way of life can yield a culture and an ethics. To be ‘gay’, I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual, but to try to define and develop a way of life.” During my time in England and especially upon my return, that culture, ethics, and way of life became tied up, by love, in art — and in poetry most of all.

that poems are a score for performance by the reader, and that you become the speaking voice. You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem. You stand behind the words and speak them as your own.”

Getting on a plane or a boat is not the only way to travel, to Europe or anywhere else. John Keats knew this when he wrote his first masterpiece, a sonnet called “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” which begins like this:

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

The poem is about reading — Keats had been up all night devouring George Chapman’s translation of Homer — and it testifies to the transformative delights of going away through literature. Reading, especially reading poems, is not just a way to enjoy foreign places and fantastical happenings in the mind’s eye. Rather, reading is a way to try on the voice of another — this happens literally when we read a poem aloud — and to assume identities by which we don’t normally define ourselves. To people deeply invested in certain politics of our day, such a statement may seem odd. When identities are felt to be essential aspects of ourselves, suggesting that you can simply read a poem and try on an identity that doesn’t belong to you might sound like blasphemy.

But I believe strongly that you can, and must. In fact, if the messy experiment we call civilization (to say nothing of democracy!) is to have any chance, we owe it to each other to be a little less precious and territorial about our notions of self. No easy feat, but poetry can help. Helen Vendler says it best: “I believe

Trying on the voice and identity of a poem’s speaker is akin to travel, especially pilgrimage. You leave home and visit a place that doesn’t belong to you, but there you are, undeniably and irrepressibly in it, as I was in Bloomsbury. There you have the chance to try out different versions of yourself, made possible by the change of language and locale, the relative anonymity and freedom. Then you come back, only to find that your sense of who you are and how you relate to home has shifted. Likewise, you read a poem, assume the speaker’s identity (which is yours in that moment, but not yours forever), and then you come back to your own self. But you find that your voice has changed.

Keats’s most famous formulation is negative capability, which he defines in a letter as the capacity to exist “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. Negative capability is not the power actually to be anything or anyone, but it is something like the sincere willingness to try, at least for a while, at least for the duration of a poem. It is the openness to putting on a new face for a moment, whether or not you decide to keep wearing it. And it puts a golden frame around doubt, which must be the only appropriate response to society’s seeming certainty about who we all are and are not, what we are supposed to mean and not mean — gay or straight, Black or white, gentile or Jew, English or American.

A friend recently confided to me that she doesn’t believe in identity at all, and I was only a little surprised to find myself agreeing. After all, in another letter, Keats himself says that the poet “has no Identity”. The “poetical Character,” he feels, “is not itself — it has no self — it is every thing and nothing ... it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto”. Delighting in uncertainty, reveling in mystery, meeting doubt with desire: What is a self without these, and what is a life or a love without gusto?

Today, it makes many people happy to think deeply about certain differences of identity. I admit it used to make me happy too, or at least it provided a kind of thrill. Now, I find these differences less compelling. In my own circle, I am cheered by the passion with which some queer people stake a claim to their sense of self, and I hope the proliferation of sexual labels encourages imagination and possibility, rather than fixity and limitation. I also hope we remember Carl Phillips’s question: “If the political must be found in differences of identity, who gets to determine which parts of identity are the correct ones on which to focus?”

I wish we could be more whimsical and nonchalant about our identities. I worry about the tendency to define one’s identity so narrowly that no one else on earth could possibly share it. What’s the fun in that?! I dig labels — like queer, bi, and (in the word’s most expansive, permissive, imaginative sense, which is not often how it gets used today) gay — that allow people to recognize and honor themselves yet wink at, and dance with, fixity. These labels embrace the things we share, rather than the ways we are different. They remind me that one can’t be too certain when under the influence of desire, or when at play. And what else is writing a poem, what else being in love?

** Travel, art, and queerness are united by happy uncertainty. They involve looking at the world somewhat aslant, with desire and hope for things yet to be discovered. I continue to travel, read, and write in order to find out who I am, not to stake a presupposing claim to myself. Now, once I’ve finished saying a poem or writing an essay — or have flown from Dallas to London and back again — I enjoy the richest sense of self I’ve ever had. But that contentment and comfort with who I am lasts only until the next poem, essay, or flight — which is to say for a moment only. When you’re temporarily removed from your everyday self, whether living abroad or speaking in the poetic voice of another, nothing much at all has to happen for a wonderful lot to change. The basic imperatives are movement, reading, and imagination — and openness to what the world, and the world of the poem, can teach about who you might become.

Packing one’s bags to travel across the Atlantic for a prolonged stay involves no small amount of doubt, no small amount of desire — as does packing one’s bags to come home. Embracing a poem with a speaker unlike myself, putting pen to paper, deciding on a way of life, signaling a hope to belong, declaring love for another: These depend for their joy on those same twinned impulses. And so, too, does venturing forth into New York City — my home for now — and meeting the eyes of strangers, beautiful, a little scary, and swimming with abundant promise face by face.

“Delighting in uncertainty, reveling in mystery, meeting doubt with desire:

What is a self without these?”

“Jalil decided to get out. He told no one... ...there was no time.”

Jalil’s Journey

Written by Rylie Munn

For over four decades, Afghanistan has been fraught with conflict. The country, known for the bustling capital city of Kabul the “Paris of Central Asia” and the ruggedly beautiful natural landscape, was once a destination for artists, adventurers, and tourists. But the nation was plunged into disorder in the late 1970s after a period of stability and growth. Beginning in 1979 when the Soviet-Afghan War broke out, hundreds of thousands of Afghans fled the country. The crisis was further exacerbated by years of conflict due to the U.S. invasion in 2001 and subsequent clashes between U.S. armed forces and the Taliban. Most recently, Taliban forces took control of the Afghan government in 2021 after the U.S. withdrew from the state. These decades of turmoil have led to millions of people being displaced within Afghanistan, with over half of the country’s population in dire need of humanitarian assistance and over 2 million Afghans currently registered with refugee status by the UNHCR.

People have been fleeing conflict and turmoil in Afghanistan in order to seek safety and a better life for themselves and their families. But, due to years as a failed state, lack of infrastructure, and the Taliban’s evacuation ban, there are few conventional avenues for families to leave the country. This has forced the majority of Afghan refugees to seek alternative, dangerous methods for fleeing the state. The desperation to leave has given rise to an underground economy of people smuggling and bribery in order to deliver individuals from Afghanistan to Europe. The journey is long, treacherous, and expensive. But many feel they have no other choice if they want to build a better life away from conflict and suffering. For most refugees, achieving this goal not only entails numerous border crossings — by foot, horseback, van, and raft — but also years spent in refugee camps, impossible bureaucratic obstacles, and starting a brand new life.

“I had no choice but to leave”

For Jalil Shafayee, everything changed in 2014 with the gradual withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan. A student in Kabul, Jalil lived an ordinary life while the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) aided the Afghan National Security Forces in protecting Kabul and keeping the Taliban at bay. Kabul underwent rapid development, renovation, and urbanization after the Taliban was expelled from the city in 2001. For Jalil, there were opportunities in the capital beyond what was available to him in his small village in the Jaghori District. In Kabul, he attended class, spent time with his friends and family, and considered his future. But beginning in 2014, the climate of the city became increasingly dangerous and unsettling. “I felt like I was being followed,” he says. As NATO and the ISAF began their withdrawal, the Taliban’s forces creeped closer and closer to the capital. The Taliban had begun targeting civilians in Kabul, especially those who had formal education, Western ties, and were ethnically Hazara (all of which apply to Jalil). These groups faced great danger with the Taliban’s growing power in the region. Jalil knew that the situation would only worsen, and he felt that he had no choice but to flee his country.

Prior to the Taliban takeover of Kabul in 2021, legal channels for departure were still possible but reserved almost entirely for the wealthy and well-connected. If an Afghan citizen were to walk into the American embassy in 2014 and request asylum, it would have been denied. At the time, U.S. and NATO security forces were prevalent in the country under a United Nations Security Council mandate, so there were no grounds for asylum elsewhere. Afghan citizens could request passports from the state — often waiting months or years to receive them — but were forced to leave financial deposits in Afghanistan to ensure that they would return to the country. Only the wealthiest in the country could afford to leave this way.

Instead, many were forced to escape through other channels. This was the case for Jalil. Realizing that he

could no longer stay in Afghanistan meant that he would need to find feasible options to leave the country.

From Kabul to Tehran

In August of 2015, Jalil decided to get out. He told no one — there was no time. He packed a backpack and fled in the night. The price from Kabul to Tehran, Iran, set by the smuggling networks, was $500. With a group of 40 to 45 people, Jalil was packed into the back of a “tutar”, or truck, and driven across southwestern Afghanistan until they reached the border of Pakistan. There, they crossed over and alternated between riding in trucks and traveling on foot through miles of farmland. The Baloch people in this region of Pakistan, bribed by the smuggling networks, allow Afghan refugees to cross unharmed.

At this point, Jalil was approaching the most dangerous part of his journey yet: the border with Iran. Iranian police are notoriously hostile towards Afghan refugees, and the border is especially dangerous. There are reports of Afghans being shot at, detained, and tortured by Iranian border guards. So, smugglers use every resource to ensure that refugees make it across unnoticed. For Jalil, this meant being packed into the tiny trunk of a Peugeot with 10 other people. Peugeots, which are high-end vehicles in the region due to their European origins, have a lower likelihood of being stopped by Iranian border guards than a large cargo truck that could contain refugees. So, for over ten hours, Jalil lay cramped in the back of the small Peugeot. After successfully crossing the border, they continued on to Isfahan and then to Tehran. In total, it had taken them two weeks to travel from Kabul to the capital of Iran.

Upon arriving in Tehran, the smugglers hold refugees hostage until they are paid in full. This system works as insurance for both parties: the Afghans don’t have to pay until they safely reach their final destination, but they cannot walk free until the smugglers are fully compensated. Refugees are held in miserable conditions

“The inflatable raft struggled under the weight of its passengers, and some were forced to jump out and swim in the rough waters.”

with limited food and water until they pay the fee. For Jalil, this was $500 that he did not have. Luckily, he had family in Tehran who were willing to pay. It was at this point that he called his parents for the first time. They were angry, telling him that he should not have left. He explained the danger that he faced in Kabul, and they gradually came to understand his decision. In the end, they chose to financially support the rest of Jalil’s journey.

From Tehran to Lesbos

Jalil, now joined by a group of extended family members, set out from Tehran in late September. The group began the journey in cars, eventually arriving at a small village near the border. Here, along with hundreds of other refugees, they camped out in a livestock barn and awaited the next phase. They were surrounded by strangers: families, singles, children, and elderly people. The smugglers separated the single travelers from the families, and Jalil opted to stay with his extended family. From there, they were filed into a container truck and driven to the Turkish border. After crossing the border, they stood outside while they waited to transfer from the container truck to vans. It was midnight and freezing cold, Jalil recalls.

At this time in 2015, Türkiye was not stopping refugees inside their borders from fleeing to Europe. Just a few months after Jalil’s journey, this would all change. In March 2016, the EU and Türkiye signed an agreement to stop the flow of migrants to the EU. Now, according to the agreement, “Türkiye will take any necessary measures to prevent new sea or land routes for irregular migration opening from Türkiye to the EU.” As a consequence, migrants caught traveling to Europe through Türkiye could be sent back to Iran — an especially dangerous outcome for Afghans.

Once Jalil reached Istanbul, he was once again held captive until he paid the smugglers their fee. But while Jalil had the money secured, his family members did not. In 2015, the price to be smuggled between Tehran and

Istanbul was $1,500. For an individual, this may not seem like much. But Jalil’s extended family needed to pay the price for seven people — most of whom were children. So, they were forced to wait. The conditions were terrible: they were held in jail-like cells in a basement in Istanbul, only receiving one meal a day, until they gathered the necessary funds to continue their journey. They reached out to everyone they knew in the West — from family members to acquaintances — and asked for money. Finally, after a month in captivity, they were able to raise the $10,500 needed to pay the smugglers.

Early one morning in October, they took a bus to the coastal city of Izmir. There, they hiked into the wilderness on the coast of the Aegean Sea. They waited five days in a forest for the smugglers to organize a boat and for the weather to be calm for their passage. When the conditions were right, they boarded an inflatable, overcrowded Zodiac boat and set off for the Greek island of Lesbos — a crossing that would take three hours. The inflatable raft struggled under the weight of its passengers, and some were forced to jump out and swim in the rough waters. Jalil found himself in the water, but — like most other Afghans — he had never learned to swim. Luckily, a group of aid workers found the faltering boat and rescued them.

Leaving Lesbos

For Jalil, the arrival on Lesbos was filled with both relief and anticipation. He had finally reached the EU, but there was still so far to go. Like many of the stops along his journey, the conditions on Lesbos were dismal and overcrowded. Refugees and asylumseekers from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and other countries were packed together in camps and makeshift shanties until they could be formally registered. Instead of applying for asylum, Jalil was asked to fill out a questionnaire on a small piece of paper for statistical purposes. “Where are you coming from?”

“He had finally reached the EU, but there was still so far to go.”

Jaghori District, Jalil's home

While studying at a university in Kabul, Jalil leaves with only a backpack

They walk for half a day in Balochistan, Pakistan

Jalil meets up with his extended family and they continue the journey together

They stay the night somewhere in the countryside near the border, together with hundreds of other migrants packed in a stable

They are held captive in an underground basement for a month while they raise the money to pay the smugglers

They camp for a week with almost no food or water in the wilderness near Izmir, waiting for good weather conditions

They cross from Turkey to Lesbos in a Zodiac inflatable boat. Jalil fell in the water and had to swim until he was rescued by aid workers

Jalil's asylum application in Austria is rejected

10 Jalil's first asylum application in France in rejected

January 2020, Jalil is arrested to be deported

Judge in Aix-en-Provence allows him to walk free

Jalil remains in Marseille for 18 months where he enrolls in university while waiting to apply for asylum again. In October 2021, his asylum application is accepted

2019-2021

and “Where are you hoping to go?” were among the questions asked.

In 2014 and 2015, refugees and asylum-seekers only waited on Lesbos for days or weeks before they could continue on to mainland Greece. Jalil and his family only waited a few days before they boarded a ferry for Athens. But once the EU-Türkiye Agreement was signed in 2016, the EU stipulated that migrants arriving irregularly on Greek islands needed to be stopped there and promptly returned to Türkiye. In theory, this agreement was created to limit the number of migrants on the Greek islands; but in practice, according to the International Rescue Committee, only 2,400 individuals have been returned to Türkiye as a result.

Now, instead of moving through Greece to the rest of the EU, refugees and asylum-seekers are forced to wait until they are either sent back to Türkiye or until they can find a loophole to leave the island. Predictably, a new network of smugglers has risen to the occasion. As a result of the EU-Türkiye Agreement and worsening conditions in countries like Afghanistan, refugee camps on the islands — such as Moria on Lesbos, referred to as “the worst refugee camp on earth” — have ballooned far beyond their original capacity of around 3,200 people. In 2015 alone, more than half a million migrants passed through Lesbos on their way to the rest of the EU. Jalil was one of them. This number is more than half of all migrants who reached Greece that year, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Austria and Seeking Asylum

For Jalil and his family, Greece was not the final destination. They had their sights set on reaching Austria, but they still had a long journey ahead. From this point on, they no longer relied on smugglers. Before 2016, the borders were open for migrants to move between the Balkan states. These countries had no incentive to keep migrants inside their borders, and no EU mandate to stop

them and send them back. So, Jalil was able to cross through North Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and finally into Austria. Jalil and his family traveled mostly by train, but refugees with less financial means have to travel by foot. This journey can take months.

Today, it is no longer easy for migrants to cross through the Western Balkans. Due to increased pressure from the EU, many of these states have taken a hardline approach to migrants, closing their borders and deporting people once they arrive. Some states, such as Croatia, have been heavily criticized for their violent crackdown on migrants. Jalil explains that, today, new smuggling channels have materialized to help refugees and asylum seekers navigate the quagmire in the Balkan states — for a price.

Since Jalil undertook his journey in 2015, smugglers’ prices have grown exponentially — and so has the danger. Jalil tells me that last year one of his nephews paid $12,000 to travel from Afghanistan to Italy. Part of his trip was spent sailing from Türkiye to Italy on a small fishing boat, facing raging Mediterranean storms in the process. The plight of Afghan refugees has only compounded. The Taliban takeover, new EU policies, and stringent deportation practices used by countries along migration routes make the path to the EU more perilous than ever. While the dangers and cost are ever present throughout the journey, the bureaucratic quandary of applying for asylum is a looming obstacle for those who arrive at their destination.

After finally reaching Austria in November, Jalil breathed a sigh of relief. In Vienna, he officially began the process of seeking asylum. He was fingerprinted, per the Dublin Regulation, and completed a lengthy application process. He was optimistic and eager to begin a new life in Europe. Little did he know, he would have to wait four years for a response. During this time, Jalil kept himself busy. He learned German and settled into refugee

“For eighteen months, Jalil lived without papers and without an identity.”

housing with his family. He began a new life in Europe. When his application decision finally came in June 2019, it informed him that he was denied asylum and scheduled for deportation. In one moment, the hope he had gathered from years of striving for a better life were torn from his grasp. He couldn’t let his journey go to waste.

France and a Life Without Identity

Once again, Jalil fled. He went first to Germany for a few days, and then to France. He studied French and stayed with friends in Strasbourg until he could apply for asylum there. Once Jalil submitted his application, the French government promptly rejected it — due to his previous asylum process in Austria — and threatened to deport him. In January of 2020, he was arrested in Marseille for not leaving the country. After a lengthy legal battle in which he argued — in French — that he would be returning to an unsafe and life-threatening situation in Afghanistan, he was allowed to walk free. For eighteen months, Jalil lived without papers and without an identity, a period of time he calls his “black life”. “I didn’t exist officially during this period,” he explains. Jalil studied French, enrolled in university, wrote a book about his migration journey, and translated it into English, German, and French. Eventually, once enough time had passed, he was allowed to apply for asylum once more. Finally, in October 2021, he was granted asylum in France. “It was one of the most emotional days of my life,” Jalil says of the day he received the letter. He had waited for this piece of paper for six years.

On August 15, 2021, the Taliban took control of Kabul, following the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Due to this crisis, and the international news coverage that surrounded it, Afghan asylum-seekers have seen a huge increase in asylum acceptances in EU countries. Before the Taliban takeover, Afghan asylum applications were accepted around 50% of the time in EU countries. But in the months after the event, that number was over 90%. Jalil only waited three months for his application acceptance in France.

A Stronger, Multicultural Identity

Today, Jalil attends a university in France and is applying to graduate programs. He has now selfpublished two books, and is working to translate his second book into English and German. He regularly speaks at conferences and shares his story. “I try to serve as a bridge between migrants and European citizens,” he explains. When I ask him about his Afghan identity, he tells me, “I am a proud Afghan, I love my country.” But there is so much more to him than that. He feels distinctly French and, in a smaller part of him, Austrian as well. He has dedicated time to learning about the EU and European values, and has fallen in love with the shared culture. For him, identity is tied to values. The way Jalil sees it, he has two sets of values — one from Afghanistan and one from Europe — and is stronger and more whole because of them. These two identities do not compete with one another, they are complementary. This multicultural identity, he explains, is what European values are all about.

At the end of 2023, Jalil will apply for French citizenship. And someday, he hopes to be a diplomat, perhaps to his home country. If the situation in Afghanistan changes, he would like to go back. But, he tells me, he will only return if he is able to make a difference.

“The way Jalil sees it, he has two sets of values — one from Afghanistan and one from Europe — and is stronger and more whole because of them.”

Home Game

Written by Samuel George

Last October, my father, oldest brother, and youngest brother came to visit me in Washington, DC. This was not normal. In fact, it was the first time they had come to visit all at once, and it would mark the only time we would all be together in 2022.

What monumental occasion reunited our family, which was usually spread across the United States? Alas, we gathered not for the inauguration of a President, nor was it for a solemn visit to one of Washington’s war memorials. We had come together to go see the Philadelphia Eagles, our family football team, which was playing in DC that week.

As we filed into the stadium, each in our matching green football jerseys, I realized that somewhere along the line, supporting Philadelphia’s professional sports teams had become a cornerstone of our identity. After all, are there any other causes to which we would pledge our allegiance so publicly?

For nearly four decades, I have ridden the roller coaster of Philadelphia fandom. It’s an emotional investment, and one that takes its toll. As a child, tears would stream from my eyes following a loss, as my befuddled mother desperately tried to rationalize the situation by explaining that none of the players were, in fact, from Philadelphia.

Decades later, the tears may be fewer, but the feelings remain. Recently, as the Philadelphia 76ers choked away a 26-point playoff lead, I found myself on hands and knees, banging my head against the wooden floor, much to the sheer incomprehension of my wife.

In other words, for some reason, we care. Too much? Perhaps. Are we alone? Not by a long shot.

The economic footprint of professional sports reveals just how deeply the games are ingrained in communities on both sides of the Atlantic. The four major U.S. professional leagues generate over $40 billion in annual revenue. The overall economic impact is likely at least double that. The Super Bowl is America’s second biggest food day of the year, after Thanksgiving. In Europe, the top 20 grossing football clubs net over €9 billion in annual income, surpassing the GDP of roughly 60 countries.

For millions around the globe, our allegiance to teams have become a fundamental aspect of who we are, how we present ourselves, and how we gather with friends and family. It is an element of our identity that

we share proudly, branded onto shirts, hats, coffee mugs and more.

But what does it mean? As I looked around Washington’s decrepit stadium that afternoon last fall, I saw tens of thousands of other people decked out in our team’s silver and green. I wondered what I had in common with these other Eagles fans? I knew nothing about them. And yet, there I was, whooping and hollering among thousands of others who apparently share this core characteristic.

It’s a Family Affair

Part of the power of sports is that we often become aware of our teams in the years that we slowly become aware of ourselves. For many, this fandom is ingrained from early childhood, as a learned practice from those we love most. A 2011 Murray State University study found that 44% of men and 34% of women cite their parents as the biggest factor in their fandom. This number increases to nearly 61% for men and 42.5% for women when expanded to include grandparents and siblings.

The study underscores the specific influence of fathers on sports fandom: both men and women overwhelmingly cite their dads as “the greatest single influence” in their selection of teams. It’s a deeply embedded relationship that changes over the years. As a child, my father helped me up to the cheap seats for big games. Now, 30 years later, he leans on me to climb those same stadium steps.

Outside of immediate family, the only other factors that significantly register in the study are friends (10% for men, 7% for women) and school (8% for men, nearly 15% for women). In other words, if the connection to sports teams is not born in the living room, it is on the playground.

Perhaps this is why, even as we move on from our childhood homes, towns and cities, many of us hold on to those original bonds. Megan Long, Bertelsmann Foundation’s Project Coordinator, grew up in New Jersey, in a family of die-hard Mets and Jets fans. She left in 2009, but her fandom remains. “My team spirit

has a lot to do with my family,” she tells me. “It got stronger because it was a familiar comfort, especially when I used to get homesick.”

The further we get from home, the stronger the bonds can become. The games become a shortcut to a time and place that may not exist anymore. We lost my mother in 2016. But when I watch the Eagles, I can still sense her sitting in her blue armchair across from the TV, knitting, and muttering under her breath when one of our loud cheers made her miss a stitch.

This powerful mixture of home, family, youthful joy, and civic pride hooks us from a young age, and becomes a cornerstone of how we understand ourselves. Tony Silberfeld, our Director of Transatlantic Relations, has lived in Washington, DC for 25 years, yet he remains a big Los Angeles Lakers fan. As he explains it, “Nothing ever brought my family together like watching a Laker victory.” Despite leaving Los Angeles at the age of 17, Tony believes “the Lakers are as much a part of who I am today as any other influence that came into my life along the way.”

A Global Phenomenon

There are similarities across the pond in Europe. On game day, Germans from throughout the North Rhine-Westphalia industrial belt stream from midsize towns onto trains in a swarm of yellow and black, on their way to Signal Iduna Park to support Borussia Dortmund. Similar scenes play out in Naples, Liverpool, and Sevilla: where teams are tightly bound to the identity of their hometown.

However, as it is more common in Europe for a city or region to have multiple teams, a fan’s allegiance can reveal a deeper identifying clue. For example, Tottenham Hotspur has long drawn support from London’s Jewish community. The nickname “Yids” serves both as point of pride for some supporters, and a term of antisemitic abuse from the team’s antagonizers. Crosstown rivals Chelsea, meanwhile, manage to appeal simultaneously and separately to both a posh and loutish fanbase.

Bologna’s soccer team has a left-wing reputation, stemming from the city’s communist inclinations in post-war Italy. Famously, the “El Clásico” match between longtime rivals Real Madrid and FC Barcelona has extensive historical and political connotations, rooted in the violence of the Spanish Civil War, the tension between a centralized Spain and the autonomous regions, the legacy of dictatorship, and other deep-seated grudges.

Sometimes, the signaling associated with support tells us more about how someone sees themselves,

“Are we alone?

as opposed to who they actually are. For example, consider the two powerhouses of Argentine football in Buenos Aires, River Plate and Boca Juniors. By reputation, River Plate is the team for the wealthy, playing in the upscale Núñez neighborhood and nicknamed Los Millonarios. By contrast, their archrivals, Boca Juniors, play in a worn-down port neighborhood, and the club’s supporters cherish its scrappy, working-class immigrant reputation. Nevertheless, plenty of rich people root for Boca, and plenty of working-class folks cheer for River.

Given the global nature of soccer, in which the top teams inevitably field an international starting eleven, there is an additional layer of identification based on nationality and pan-ethnicity. For 15 years, Lionel Messi’s European matches have been must-see TV not only for Argentines, but for large swaths of Latin Americans that find meaning in one of their own succeeding so spectacularly on a global stage. This effect has created no small number of Barcelona fans who rather suddenly became Paris Saint-Germain fans after Messi’s transition from the former to the latter.

These additional identifying characteristics are less extensive for teams in the United States. People don’t support the Cincinnati Bengals for political reasons. They don’t support the Texas Rangers as a demand for political autonomy. My family doesn’t support the Philadelphia Phillies for religious reasons (though that has not stopped us from resorting to prayer).

In fact, in a divided, politicized, and economically stratified society, sports seem like one of the few elements of American life where support doesn’t fall along these lines. Both Democratic President Joe Biden and arch-conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito are Phillies fans, and both attended the same Phillies World Series games in fall of 2022. What a shame they could neither veto nor overrule their team’s loss.

The Identity of a City

Sports can act as a powerful unifier. As Tony Silberfeld, our resident Lakers fan explains, fandom isn’t just about family—nothing brings his city together like a good Lakers team. This is certainly the case in Philadelphia. Playoff season in Philly can resemble holiday seasons in other parts of the world. The city is full of public decorations, festive outfits, and friendly banter on the streets, in trains, and office elevators. “Go Birds” becomes a substitute for “Hello”. Family gatherings are planned to coincide with the games. And a big win can lift the spirits of the city for weeks. My father, who worked decades as a public defender in Philadelphia, remains convinced that juries and judges are more forgiving on Mondays after an Eagles win.

Another factor is that Philadelphia fans have routinely suffered exquisite disappointment. The Phillies, a franchise dating back to 1880, have won baseball’s championship precisely twice, racking up over 11,000 losses along the way. The Eagles, the city’s crown jewel, won the Super Bowl for the first time only in 2018. The last time the 76ers won, Ronald Reagan was president. When the Flyers last won, it was Gerald Ford. Every other season has ended in disappointment, usually of the soul-crushing variety. In a recent blow for the city, both the Phillies and Eagles lost their respective championships in a three-month span bridging 2022 and 2023.

Following a big defeat, the city goes silent for days. The decorations come down. The jerseys and costumes come off. In classrooms, trains, and elevators, folks gaze at their feet, growling to themselves about what might have been. Juries and judges may be less forgiving.

But then, somehow, in a process that defies logic or expectation, the city regroups within a few months. Hope springs eternal. Philadelphia is back, and ready for more. Louder than ever before. In part, the boisterous attitude stems from the knowledge that it will almost certainly end in agonizing defeat. We might as well scream a little while we can. Every carnival has its end, but every end has its carnival.

And I probably won’t be there to see it in person: after all, I left Philadelphia 15 years ago. But I will be watching it on TV. For a split second it will take me back to the top of Veterans Stadium, where I sat next to my father as an eight-year old, feeling the 70,000-seat stadium shake in rapture for a Phillies World Series game. It will take me back to my mom in her powder blue armchair. And even if I promise my wife I will behave, win or lose, we both know that’s not true. I can’t help it. It’s who I am.

Not by a long shot.”

The Past, Present, and Future of Transatlanticism

Written by Noah DeMichele

Five transatlanticists tell us what drives their commitment to their work

Friendship and strong relations between the United States and Europe have been a foreign policy mainstay on both sides of the Atlantic for the better part of the last 70 years. A battered Europe — emerging from World War II — needed the United States’ help to rebuild, and a rebuilt Europe was in the best interest of a United States preparing for intense competition with the Soviet Union. The foundations of transatlanticism were laid, through the Bretton Woods Agreement to dictate how the international monetary system would function in the post-war era, the Marshall Plan to rebuild a devastated Europe, and NATO to provide collective security against the Soviet Union. By 1949, the stage was set for future partnership between the United States and Europe, grounded in a shared vision of how the international order would look in the post-World War years.

In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO’s founding document, defined the ideals underpinning this vision. The treaty pointed to the shared principles of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law as the values that bind the transatlantic nations. More than half a century later, those same values are still championed by leaders and practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic. In joint statements and op-eds, American and European leaders write of “shared commitments to personal freedom and dignity” and a partnership that is “based on shared values and principles”. Meanwhile, practitioners continue to cite these transatlantic values as central to the success of the relationship. Although this relationship across an ocean has not developed without roadblocks, the values-based, shared identity of transatlanticists — the practitioners who advocate and work towards a continued close relationship between the U.S. and Europe — has continuously allowed the transatlantic relationship to persist.

Throughout the 20th century, as Europe grew stronger both politically and economically, interests began to diverge and relations came under strain. Figures like French President Charles de Gaulle advocated for and pursued early versions of European strategic autonomy. The United States became occupied with an unpopular war in Vietnam and Bretton Woods would collapse, ending the multilateral monetary system that helped guide Europe’s reconstruction. German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s “Ostpolitik”, normalizing relations between West Germany (FRG) and the Soviet Union (USSR), brought fear that the FRG was receding from the West and towards the USSR.

With 1989 came the collapse of communism in Europe and hope for reinvigorated Euro-Atlantic ties entrenched in the Western, liberal values espoused by transatlanticists. This was given further voice by George W. Bush in West Germany as he spoke of a Europe “whole and free”. Over a decade later, 9/11 brought Europe and the United States even closer together and the first evocation of NATO’s Article V symbolized renewed solidarity across the Atlantic. But before long, the mistakes of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Bush’s war on terror caused interests to once again diverge.

Europe, who had eagerly anticipated the Obama presidency, feared that the strategic pivot to Asia was a sign of a United States no longer committed to a future with the Euro-Atlantic at its heart. Later, the Trump administration brought “America First” policies and the deliberate degradation of alliances and partnerships in Europe, exemplified by reports that the president wished to withdraw the U.S. from NATO. This took the transatlantic relationship to new lows and many doubted the possibility of recovery. Doubts

about the United States’ commitment to the region were clearly characterized in 2019 by French President Emmanuel Macron’s assertion that NATO was “brain dead”. Previously, German Chancellor Angela Merkel had warned in 2017 that “the times in which we could completely depend on others are somewhat over.”

Yet, from de Gaulle to the war on terror to Trump, transatlanticism has persisted. The belief that a robust U.S.-European relationship is necessary has survived each ebb and flow that the relationship has faced since the end of World War II — even as experts have lamented its potential demise. In 2003, Ivo Daalder, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, published an article with the headline “The End of Atlanticism” in which he pondered whether the U.S.-European marriage was coming to an end in the wake of the Iraq War. David Whineray, then of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote a 2020 piece titled “Trump has irrevocably changed American relations with Europe — and Biden probably can't fix it.”

And yet, post-Trump, transatlantic synergy is as strong as ever. Russia’s war in Ukraine has mobilized the Euro-Atlantic community around Europe’s defense in a cohesive rejection of Moscow’s attempts to alter the international norms by invading a sovereign Ukraine. Meanwhile, U.S. President Joe Biden’s foreign policy highlights his belief in the transatlantic relationship, displayed by his words in his 2022 State of the Union address and in his consistent and robust action in supporting Ukraine’s defense. Even so, transatlantic experts have warned that this latest era of transatlantic harmony should not be taken for granted. Some refer to Biden as the last of the Atlanticists, given a shift in American politics to younger generations who did not experience the ardent transatlanticism of the Cold War, while others fear the return of isolationism to the White House — if a Republican wins the 2024 presidential election. Despite transatlanticism being at peak levels of unity and its habit of surviving challenges, its potential downfall remains a cause for concern.

To understand why transatlanticism has persisted and what U.S.-Europe relations may look like in the future, it is necessary to understand what underpins, supports, and allows the transatlantic partnership to routinely rebound from challenges. To get to the root of it, I asked the transatlanticists themselves what drives their commitment to transatlanticism.

What makes you an advocate for transatlanticism?

Noah Gordon Acting Co-Director, Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program; Fellow, Europe Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

While it’s easy to focus on the many differences between the U.S. and Europe, there is more that unites the regions than divides them — to name a few, democracy, federalism, and the relatively unbiased application of the law. That’s why I’m an advocate for transatlanticism.

Sam Denney Senior Research Analyst, American Statecraft Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

My belief in the importance of strong transatlantic relations ultimately stems from the shared liberal democratic values which underpin the relationship. These shared values form the basis of our common ambition to create more just, prosperous, and democratic societies — an ambition born out of bitter experience of the consequences of nationalism and totalitarianism in World War II and the years preceding it. The reemergence of anti-democratic extremism on both sides of the Atlantic and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine provide an important lesson for a new era in transatlantic relations. Liberal democracy is not a self-fulfilling end state but rather a precious achievement to be maintained and defended.

These views shed light on the guiding principles of transatlanticism, and why the ideology persists through each challenge it faces. A common thread present in each response is a commitment to shared democratic values — just as NATO Secretary General George Robertson asserted in a 2000 speech to the NATO Defense College, “Atlanticism has never been a concept based on geography, but on shared values.” The values underpinning the transatlantic relationship — a commitment to democracy, the rule of law, and human rights — form the foundation of the transatlantic community. This strong foundation allows translatlanticism to persist through differences

in policy or incompatible leadership, tackle intractable problems together, and evolve to meet rising challenges.

Today, the transatlantic relationship has rebounded from the tumult of the Trump era to thrive during the Biden presidency due to this common global outlook. While the war in Ukraine has necessitated a quick recovery from the transatlantic tensions of the Trump era, the values-based foundation of the relationship allowed for a return to tightknit relations post-Trump. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine doubles as an assault on transatlantic norms of state sovereignty and freedom.

Carisa Nietsche

Associate Fellow, Center for a New American Security

I advocate for a strong transatlantic relationship because of the United States' and Europe's commitment to democratic values. Shared democratic values are the lifeblood of the transatlantic relationship. As new global challenges emerge, our democratic values provide the guiding principles to address them. The shared commitment to democracy is even more important as authoritarian actors seek to advance their own vision of the world underpinned by techno-authoritarianism. In this world, technology enables dictators to tighten their grip on power, seize control of supply chains, and advance a surveillance state. The transatlantic partnership is critical in order to reclaim the narrative for democracies and advance a different vision for the world. The United States and Europe must work hand-in-hand to move from words to action. The United States and Europe can chart a democratic future for technology, but they must do so together.

Courtney Flynn Martino

Senior Manager of Transatlantic Relations, Bertelsmann Foundation North America

To me, the transatlantic relationship is a partnership forged by shared values, complimented by aspects of history and culture, and driven forward by a common global outlook. Transatlantic teamwork — although hard-won at times — creates space to try new things, develop solutions to problems, and build a foundation to withstand crises. The reliability of our closest ally, along with the accountability this offers, makes us both better. This is why I am committed to transatlanticism.

Research Assistant, German Marshall Fund of the United States, Paris office

North America and Europe are intertwined in every aspect of life. As a French American binational, I am myself a product of that history. In fact, it is my dual identity that first drew me to the transatlantic field. But this dual upbringing has also enabled me to identify, understand, and appreciate the differences within the Atlantic region. To me, being an advocate of transatlanticism does not only entail enabling cooperation, but it also means creating the space required to have difficult conversations when necessary and finding common ground to ensure healthy competition.

In an April 2022 speech to the New School in New York, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock advocated for transatlantic leadership to strengthen these values, saying that “Freedom, democracy and human rights are under attack.”

Collective security and responding to Russia’s war in Ukraine now dominates transatlantic channels. Even so, several challenges loom on the horizon — coordinating policy responses to China’s geopolitical rise, integrating technology and climate policies, managing trade tensions, and growing anti-democratic extremism on

both sides of the Atlantic — which will require a common transatlantic approach. The outcome of the U.S. presidential election in 2024 may pose another challenge to the relationship, if isolationism were to return to the White House. Yet, as long as transatlanticists remain committed to this relationship forged by a shared mission and common values, transatlantic cooperation will persist and the relationship between the United States and Europe will remain strong.

James Sallembien

Turning the Key to Maltese Identity

Written by Sara Leming

the Mediterranean, Malta was viewed as a strategic location by colonial empires seeking to expand their military and economic powers. This led to the establishment of naval bases and trading seaports on the Maltese islands. Throughout the nation’s history, a long list of conquerors battled for control. The extensive list includes the Phoenicians, Romans, Knights of St. John, French, Arabians, Spanish, Italians, and the British. Although the archipelago gained its independence in 1964, Maltese culture remains heavily impacted through linguistics, food, art, music, religion, and even allegiance in European sporting events.

While walking around the quaint streets of Malta’s capital city, Valletta, the multicultural influence can be spotted easily. Cars drive on the left side of the road, which was introduced while Malta was a British colony. Delicious Arabic-inspired pastries filled with almonds and spices can be purchased on every street corner. Perhaps most notably, the nation boasts no less than 359 churches, which were heavily influenced by the Roman Catholics — a legacy that lives to this day with 98% of Maltese citizens identifying as Catholic. The Maltese language itself is a prime example of this blend, belonging to the Semitic language family and made up of Arabic, French, and Italian blended together.

An intriguing identity

Malta, a myriad of multiculturalism

The blue waters surrounding the Maltese archipelago run as deep as the nation’s multicultural roots. Located approximately 60 miles from the southern coast of Sicily and 186 miles from the northern coast of Libya, Malta is commonly referred to as the stepping stone between the European and African continents. While it is the smallest member of the European Union in both population and physical size, the island has an intriguing and turbulent history that has impacted its cultural identity.

The archipelago reflects a multicultural aesthetic blend of the nations that have influenced it over its 7,000-year history. Due to its position in the heart of

When asked about their cultural identity, most Maltese agree that in many ways the small nation is still developing and learning to understand its own independent character. Due to its complicated past shaped by outside influences, it can be difficult for citizens to pinpoint what makes them uniquely Maltese. One exception and commonly described attribute among the Maltese is their willingness to be assertive and to identify with a cause — which often sparks a competitive spirit across the archipelago. There is even a designated Maltese term, “pika”, which means friendly neighborhood rivalry. George Cassar, a tourism and culture professor from the University of Malta, describes pika as “the need to outdo one's rival with an attitude that seems to say this town is not big enough for us both.”

The concept of pika can be seen during political debates between Malta’s two main political groups, the labor and nationalist parties. It is also sparked during international soccer tournaments where citizens will root for either England or Italy. During the 2020 Euro Cup final between the two nations, police were asked to stand by to provide crowd control, and stationed outside of restaurants and pubs broadcasting the game. Perhaps the best example is during the annual summer festival season where local communes compete with one another to light up the sky with the

most impressive fireworks display. The celebrations often get rowdy and in 2018 a dispute among rivals even ended in court. The Times of Malta reported that the event got out of hand when a man hit another man from a neighboring town over the head with a flower pot. Another 2018 festival incident included a banner being hung on a street that separated two rival communities. The banner had a picture of the Virgin Mary and read, “Ours it the most beautiful statue. Yours is the ugliest in Malta.”

The origins of “pika” are still widely unknown; it can potentially be traced back to the country’s small geographic size or centuries of colonization with the inability to become independent, or maybe both. What is clear is the intense desire of the Maltese to associate with a cultural group and to identify with its causes. Perhaps it stems from uncertainty around what exactly Maltese identity means.

A local graphic designer and art enthusiast has found a creative way to articulate what being Maltese means to her. Lisa Gwen uses artistic elements found around the islands as a way to showcase Maltese identity.

When a door opens…

While meandering around the curved and narrow streets of Malta, one of the first things visitors will notice are the vibrant front doors. The cobblestoned streets feature a panoply of doors which gives them an inviting character. Gwen explains that a front door is an extension of one’s personality. They are generally painted bright colors such as yellow, red, and green. Some doors are ornate and personalized to match their inhabitants’ character and lifestyle traits. Their conditions vary, as some boast fresh coats of paint, while others have been abandoned to chip away over the years. Each one seems to have its own unique story.

On a rainy Sunday afternoon in 2017, Gwen was looking through the pictures on her phone when she realized how many of them were images of Maltese front doors she had captured while walking around. She created an Instagram account and has been documenting Malta door by door ever since. On her aesthetically curated page, @MaltaDoors, Gwen has over 23.6K followers and more than 1,900 posts documenting the unique facades. On a sunny day, Gwen enjoys winding down quaint streets and playing tourist in her own city, always ready to snap a photo. When posting pictures, she purposely leaves out the location of each door because she wants to encourage her followers to be curious and to explore the architectural delights of the country. Gwen’s artistic initiative has not only attracted the interest of travel and art enthusiasts from around the world, it has also popularized

“While the doors are unique to Malta, they feature bits and pieces of the cultures that used to rule the nation.”

Maltese doors as a symbol of identity. While the doors are unique to Malta, they feature bits and pieces of the cultures that used to rule the nation, such as Sicilian tiles, North African style balconies, and lumber brought over from England during British rule.

In Gwen’s eyes, Malta is “door proud”. She explains that Maltese people, and humans in general, pride themselves on surface appearances. To present a facade of what we want the world to see. In Malta it is the same with doors. For example, in the past it was common for Maltese people to customize their doors to make them look similar to important government buildings in color and pattern. Another way that this Maltese tradition allows for identity to be present on one’s front door is through the association of door colors with specific professions. For instance, fishermen often paint their doors blue, as a symbol of long days spent floating on the Mediterranean Sea.

Apart from the vibrant colors, there is another unique

feature on the outside of Maltese doors that holds significant meaning. A “habbata” is the Maltese term for a door knocker. While a door knocker typically serves a practical function, a habbata is multifaceted. A large and extravagant habbata signals that the people living inside the home are prosperous. The intricate design of a habbata is another signifier of identity on the archipelago. The more common styles reflect symbols of importance in Maltese culture, including maritime animals which are a main source of trade and income for the nation, angels which represent the importance of religion, or a lion which is associated with the protection of loved ones and the strength of the Maltese family bond.

Gwen explains that her own front door is a modernist era style door that was inspired by the famous Maltese architect Richard England. She describes it as a contrast of pinks and blues with bright pink ironwork. A mustard yellow terrazzo mosaic

shines from the bottom of the door. Amid all this color, Gwen’s habbata is even more intriguing. It is made of two asymmetrical eyes with lashes that represent a traditional “luzzu”, a Maltese fishing boat. A luzzu typically has the eye of Osiris painted or carved on the bow. For Gwen, the eye provides a superstitious effect to complement her brightly colored door. Gwen’s door represents her quirky, bright, and artistic personality.

Turning the key

According to Gwen, the architecture of Malta is quickly changing. With European investments coming to the island — especially in the IT sector — and special permits being offered to entrepreneurs, the population is steadily increasing. As of 2023, Malta’s population is at an all time high of 535,000 people. High-rises are quickly being constructed to accommodate new residents and businesses. Gwen agrees that the European Union has brought many economic opportunities to Malta, such as the construction of

new roads, an uptick of tourism, and opportunities for start-up businesses. However, she highlights that the construction has bulldozed homes with historic doors that many consider the cultural jewel of the small nation. While the Instagram account primarily serves as an artistic outlet, posting doors is Gwen’s way of showing people the need to preserve Malta’s unique beauty. It is Gwen’s hope that the national government of Malta will take action to protect the beloved doors.

Like the country, the doors have been created with British, Arabian, and Sicilian characteristics. Together, the Sicilian tiles, North African balconies, and large British door frames — mixed with Malta’s bright colors and ornate designs — create something new. They are symbolic of Malta’s unique historic and cultural blend and have come to represent the country as a whole, in a way that can be admired and celebrated by locals and visitors alike. One thing is clear, over time Malta’s identity will continue to grow, with its doors as a robust symbol of its cultural evolution.

“Some doors are ornate and personalized to match their inhabitants’ character and lifestyle traits. Each one seems to have its own unique story.”

On the Fringe

Written by Chloe Laird

Emmanuel MACRON

28% of French citizens chose not to vote in the second, and final, round of the April 2022 French presidential election. This was the highest rate of abstention in over 50 years and the second highest rate in the history of the Fifth Republic. Although the official presidential race was a narrow fight between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, the number of voters that opted to not vote in the election outnumbered those who cast a ballot for far-right candidate Le Pen. In total, 13.3 million French citizens voted for Le Pen, while 13.6 million decided to remain home. Many have argued that Macron won the 2022 election not on his platform but rather by default.

With the 2027 election on the horizon, the future of Macron’s party hangs in the balance. As Macron is prohibited by the French constitution to run for a third consecutive term, media attention has shifted to how Macron voters will cast their ballots in 2027. This uncertainty, mixed with the abstention vote, will make the road to 2027 a tricky one to navigate for potential presidential candidates.

Political Disarray

In a study carried out by IPSOS, French people who didn’t vote in the latest presidential election were asked why they chose not to cast their ballot. The top reason selected was “the fact that not a single candidate corresponds to their political ideas”. In 2017, Macron’s party, La Republique en Marche (now Renaissance), first emerged onto the French political scene and subsequently won the presidential election. In doing so, it disrupted the political landscape many French citizens were accustomed to. It was the first time since 1958 — the year that France moved from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic — that a president came from an “out of system” party.

In order to run for president, candidates must obtain 500 signatures from various elected officials, endorsing their candidacy for the highest public office in France. After this initial phase, endorsements continue to hold political weight in the presidential race for the wider French public. In the last election, former President Nicolas Sarkozy was perceived as betraying his own party, Les Republicains, when he did not formally endorse their candidate, Valerie Pécresse, in the first round of voting. In fact, he was incredibly critical of the candidate and was largely missing in her campaign. And yet in the second round, the former president openly endorsed Macron. This lack of support from a high visibility politician further undermined the traditional right in France.

In fact, the traditional left and right candidates received the lowest percentage of votes in the history of their parties. On the right, Pécresse received only 4.8% of the vote, down from the 20% of votes François Fillon gathered in 2017. Le Parti Socialiste candidate Anne Hidalgo only received 1.7% of the vote, down from Benoît Hamon’s 6.4% in 2017. The lower turnout reflects the sentiment that French citizens are increasingly feeling disconnected from their traditional party alignments.

Adding to the disruption of these long-established divides in French political parties, Macron’s “en même temps” or “at the same time” approach has further divided the French populace. The approach is meant to appeal to both sides. But when you appeal to all, sometimes you appeal to none. His government has pushed for cleaner energy initiatives, which historically aligns more with the left, while at the same time pushing for more controlled migration, which historically aligns more with the right. This has led to a state of political confusion in France, and citizens are unable to see their values and convictions represented by the candidates on the political roster, which led some to stay home on election day.

“Macron's approach is meant to appeal to both sides. But when you appeal to all, sometimes you appeal to none.”

Political Distaste

In 2018, France was overrun with Gilets Jaunes protests across the country when Macron’s government attempted to raise the gas tax. In 2020, as the world shut down due to COVID-19, France imposed some of the stricter regulations across Europe. In early March 2020, people had to fill out a form each time they wanted to go outside — if they were found violating the rules they could be fined up to $150. Many took to the streets to protest the government mandates. In 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine brought war to France’s backyard. Kyiv is roughly 1,500 miles from Paris, which is approximately the same distance between Washington DC and Houston, Texas. And finally, pension reforms pushed by executive order earlier this year have fueled a fire that — at the time of writing — has yet to be put out.

In an interview with Le Monde, Jerome Fourquet, Director of Opinion at IFOP, described abstentionists as “people who have lost interest in politics”. Ongoing crises will continue to contribute to this disillusion with the political system. Today, many in France argue that they have been left behind by the state. Crises like the pension reform and ensuing protests push voters to see the government as more of a problem maker than a problem solver — which could in turn make abstention rates higher.

Shortly after Macron’s 2022 victory, Bruno Le Maire, France’s Finance Minister, stated in a France-Info interview that the abstention vote needed to be addressed. He asserted his belief that it was the government’s role to respond to this “democratic dissatisfaction”. Emphasizing the anger and abandonment that neglected non-voters feel, Le Maire argued that the French democratic institutions needed to respond accordingly. However, it is unclear, a year later, what the administration is doing to address this group.

Sub-par Solutions

One proposal to revitalize democratic institutions in France is to bring back the “septennat” — the sevenyear mandate for the president. This was the duration of the presidential term limit until the year 2000 in France. Currently, elections in France happen every five years and the presidential election and general legislative elections take place only a couple of weeks apart. The closeness of these elections allows for a predictable voting pattern to unfold and does not hold the president accountable for their future actions, as their party usually secures a majority in legislative elections as well.

In an interview with Le Point, President Macron proposed this idea along with introducing a U.S.inspired midterms as a way to encourage more active participation in democracy. In theory, midterms are viewed as holding the president accountable and yet in practice, midterms don’t translate into more active voting. In 2022, the U.S had approximately only 46% of its population come out for Midterms, with more than half opting to remain home.

Another solution that has been put forward is mandating the vote. In a 2021 survey, 59% of French citizens opposed making the vote obligatory. Oftentimes, mandatory voting does not solve the civic engagement countries intend on fixing. In Australia for example, mandatory voting leads to a phenomenon called the “donkey vote”, where individuals fill out their preferential voting ballots in the order that the names are listed, independently of who is first. They actively choose to make uninformed decisions that have real implications on their democracy. Alternatively, individuals show up to avoid any fines but choose to leave the ballot blank, in turn making mandatory voting a counterproductive solution to the original problem.

Blank ballots are an active part of the conversation around encouraging democratic participation in France. The “vote blanc”, translated as the “blank vote”, functions as a protest vote. Citizens choose to vote for neither of the two final candidates. While this is not recognized as an official vote, they are counted and made public to the French people. Some argue that the “Parti du Vote Blanc”, or the “Blank Vote Party”, should be recognized as a formal political party. On the left, presidential hopeful JeanLuc Mélenchon has argued that if the numbers in this camp reach a certain threshold, new elections should be held. He is not alone: many other French politicians support this initiative. They argue that — if this change was implemented — it could reduce the number of abstention voters because citizens would feel that their vote mattered more.

To put it into perspective, in the last presidential election, the “vote blanc” accounted for 6.5% of the French population. If the “vote blanc” had been merged with the 28% of those who abstained, President Macron would not have reached the 50% threshold to be elected. Reaching a 50% threshold for any candidate is nearly impossible. If this legislation were to be put in place, France could find itself in the midst of never-ending elections, placing policy in a chokehold.

The Road to 2027

Solutions that could help make a huge impact

in increasing voter engagement before the next elections in France is reducing obstacles ensuring proper voter registration. In 2017, there were an estimated 7.6 million individuals who were improperly registered to vote. One of the more active voices in this discussion is the NGO, A Voté. Inspired by the American “Rock the Vote” initiative, it advocates for more resources provided to the average French citizen to help them properly cast their ballots for different elections.

The NGO has also heavily focused on encouraging the youth vote which is the largest percentage of the population that abstains from voting. In an unusual marketing approach, the organization partnered with the Tinder dating app for the 2022 election to encourage Gen Z to go out and vote. Their slogan signaled how easy it is to vote: “If you can date down your street, you can vote down your street.”

An additional factor that could help with encouraging the youth vote is to lower the voting age. In Germany, for example, voting begins at age 16 (aside from the general election which is still set at 18). Research proves that decreasing the voting age encourages the individual to vote over time, investing early in the importance of civic engagement.

Finally, the more difficult task is to find reasonable political candidates to run for the next election. At this time it’s unclear whether unhappiness with Macron’s policies will translate to more votes for the far right in the 2027 election. But after Marine Le Pen’s attempts to make her party seem as approachable as possible, the rebranding of Rassemblement National seems to be a successful one. In April 2023, a poll asked the question: “if the election happened tomorrow, who would you vote for?” Le Pen came out on top.

Interestingly enough, the areas where the highest percentages of abstention exist usually align with where the far right performs best in France. It is difficult to predict how an abstention vote would turn out, and whether or not these disconnected voters are being successfully swayed into the Le Pen camp. The two groups can often express similar frustrations with regard to feeling left behind by the state but find themselves at odds with how to find a solution.

De Gaulle famously said: “How can you expect to govern a country with 264 different types of cheese?” And yet, the French people have this task ahead of them: to find a candidate fit for the job, who will not lead them astray. The choice for 2027 should not have to be Le Pen or stay home. The answer for an electorate that feels forgotten or ignored should be more — and better — candidates to choose from.

“The choice for 2027 should not have to be Le Pen or stay home.”

(N)ostalgia

Written by Courtney Flynn Martino

On October 3, 1990, the carefully negotiated Unification Treaty took effect, and over four decades of divided Germany came to a legal end. Reunificati the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a socialist workers’ state born out of the Soviet Union’s occupied zone following the Allied division of post-war Germany. The German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, consisted of over 16 million people in five states, which are still known today as the “neue Länder”, or “new states”. During reunification, the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, absorbed these states and their people, who came from an entirely different political, economic, and social system. From that point on, there were no longer meant to be West Germans or East Germans, but simply Germans.

Over 30 years later, October 3 is annually marked by parades, festivals, and fanfare across the country to celebrate a unity that seemed inconceivable at the time, but inevitable in hindsight. By most external metrics, German reunification is seen as a success — the country as a whole has remained democratic, with strong political institutions and the largest economy in the European Union. But pension returns, unemployment rates, voting patterns, cultural attitudes, and even vocabulary show that there is still a divide between eastern and western Germany. A 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 74% of eastern Germans and 66% of western Germans agree that living standards in the former East still have not caught up to the West.

Unemployment is consistently higher in the eastern part of the country, with up to a 10% disparity in the early 2000s — a time when Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s promise of “blooming landscapes” of industry and prosperity in the East should have materialized. In 2010, just 4% of marriages were between eastern and western Germans, well below the number of marriages between Germans and those with migration backgrounds, which was 18.9% in 2007.

Even more illuminating, the 2019 Annual Report of the Federal Government on the Status of German Unity revealed that 57% of residents in eastern Germany felt like second-class citizens, and only 38% of them consider reunification a success, 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This sense of “otherness” in eastern Germany has persisted, and so has a distinct cultural identity — partly rooted in geography, and partly in history. “Ostalgia”, or nostalgia for the East, is felt in many parts of eastern Germany today, even by an increasing number of individuals born after reunification. For most, that does not equal a desire to return to the state control of the Socialist Unity Party or the constant scrutiny of the Ministry for State Security (Stasi). Instead, it is a deliberate reminder that there was a distinct set of culture and traditions from the GDR that did not disappear with the unification of East and West. East German identity has outlived the state and still has a foothold in Germany today.

In May 2023, the rural town of Friedrichsroda on the edge of the Thuringian Forest hosted an Ostalgia festival. The event was complete with Trabants, the famed East German car rumored to be made of cardboard that could take up to two decades between ordering and delivery; East German food specialties; crafting with the Young Pioneers, the East German scouting organization that nearly every GDR child belonged to; and closed with a concert of “Ostrock” hits, in homage to the popular “East Rock” genre of the 1970s and 1980s. The event description clearly stated that the day was not meant to glorify the negative aspects of the GDR regime, but instead to enjoy music, culture, and good times — pure Ostalgia, plain and simple.

But Ostalgia is just not relegated to specific events. It is visible on a daily basis, particularly in Berlin, once home to both East and West Germany. The Trabi Safari sightseeing company offers tours where participants can drive their own Trabant through the capital, with information via radio from their guide. Anyone who has been to Berlin has likely seen the line of often brightly colored and patterned Trabants meandering along where the Berlin Wall used to stand, straddling the line of East and West — of past and present. Their next stop might be to one of the Ampelmann shop’s six locations, featuring a variety of

“There has to be a clear distinction between the GDR life on one hand, and on the other, the political system that suppressed people.”

wares from clothing to toys to food, all emblazoned with the beloved East German traffic light man, jaunty hat on head. In the shade of the trees on Unter den Linden, on the way to the Brandenburg Gate, there are usually folding tables full of old GDR or Soviet memorabilia for sale — hats, pins, flags, books, and even bullets, often of dubious authenticity. All of this shows that there is a market for Ostalgia, but what does it mean to those who actually lived through the GDR?

Bundestag Senior Policy Advisor Stefan Göhlert, born in 1974 in East Berlin, doesn’t mind the cultural commercialization, but wants to make clear that it is not representative of the East German experience: “It is like a Disney theme park, not real history.” For European Parliament Assistant Stefan Krabbes, born in 1987 and raised in Saxony-Anhalt, Trabi tours remind him of winter mornings spent in the car with his mother, waiting for the heat from the engine to warm the cabin where they sat. But he sets limits on Ostalgia, saying that “there has to be a clear distinction between the GDR life on one hand, and on the other, the political system that suppressed people.”

Both men are part of the so-called hybrid generation in Germany, those who were born to East German families during the GDR, but lived their formative years in the West German, reunified system. Adolescence is a nebulous time for any individual, where one might look to their parents for guidance as to who they are and what they might become. But for the hybrid generation, their parents were also adapting to a period of tumultuous change — both on a personal and professional level.

Unemployment and underemployment were rampant in the East following reunification, with unemployment reaching nearly 20% in the early 2000s — compared to 11% in the West. The GDR’s Ministry of Economics estimated that 40% of East German companies would turn a profit post-1990, but the actual figure was less than 10%. After decades of success measured merely by production quotas, most East German enterprises had difficulty adapting to a business model focused on revenue generation. An additional burden on East German industry was the 1:1 exchange rate of eastern marks to western marks — a decision lauded by many as a clear sign of the value of reunification, both literally and metaphorically. However, this flat exchange, equivalent to a 700% currency appreciation for the eastern mark, caused labor costs to spiral and forced many East German companies to lay off workers — once regarded as the backbone of GDR society. Suddenly, blooming landscapes turned into “illuminated meadows” of barren, concrete eastern commercial parks that remain devoid of industry to this day. Just one of the of the top 40 companies on the German Stock Index, fashion e-tailer Zalando, has its headquarters in the former East, located in Berlin.

The economic upheaval of reunification, combined with questions of how eastern Germans fit into the larger sociopolitical landscape, left many of the hybrid generation to figure out their own place in this new world. West Germans were resentful of having to shoulder financial responsibility for the GDR’s failings and thus, its people. East Germans were resentful that they were absorbed into a West German structure that stripped them of their collective identity and left no room for positive remembrance in the reunified national discourse. A burden on a system they did not ask for, the hybrid generation sought to navigate both of these realities with one foot in the past of their parents, and one foot in the future of a new Germany.

Stefan Göhlert recalls the uncertainty of that time for both him and his family, explaining that: “Seeing your parents lost and broken, unable to give you guidance because they themselves can’t see where the path goes, is frightening.” This uncertainty has ebbed over time, replaced by dismal confirmation that those in the West who were in their 30s and 40s during reunification — who are now preparing for retirement — are simply doing better than their eastern peers. When asked about his parents’ feelings about reunification, Stefan Krabbes believes that more than anything else, his

parents want acknowledgement for doing the best they could to navigate a difficult transition. He reiterates their belief that unified does not mean equal. “They are not unhappy, they are not angry, but they don’t feel like winners of reunification. They would be happy with a good salary, some certainty about their future with retirement money and pensions.”

His parents are not alone in this regard; in the late 1990s, pensions for eastern Germans were 40% lower than their western counterparts, as a result of higher unemployment and lower wages overall. By 2025, the East-West pension gap will close, in large part due to 2021 reform legislation establishing a new basic pension. But in the 35 years between 1990 and 2025, millions of former East Germans will have retired at an economic disadvantage, limiting how they are able to spend their golden years. These lower pension payments are the disappointing cherry on top of a lifetime of lower wages, which — despite the lower cost of living in eastern Germany — equates to less disposable income than western households. For Krabbes’ parents, both of retirement age, this has meant limited travel. He explains that they were limited in where they could travel until 1990 due to the political system, but now they are limited by financial

constraints. “I want them to see the world with their own eyes,” Krabbes says.

When asked about their own sense of identity today, the answers differ. Stefan Göhlert considers himself “a German and a European, who grew up in East Germany”. Through his work in the Bundestag, Göhlert has insight into the issues that unite and divide the German people, whether by political, societal, or geographical lines. To him, there is no distinct East German identity, but rather a shared experience that stems from history — for which there is not a western equivalent. “There is no West Germany identity because there was no need to form one,” he explains. However, Göhlert does not rule out the possibility of better cohesion in the future, as “it takes longer than one generation to create a national identity.”

Stefan Krabbes believes that there is a distinct East German identity, underpinned by adaptiveness, humility, and care for one’s community. However, similar to Göhlert, he is informed by a larger identity, feeling like both “a European and a ‘Dorfkind’ (village child)”. Now living in Brussels, Krabbes is immersed in a cosmopolitan European environment, juxtaposed with his rural, East German roots. “When I am in the ‘Dorf’ (village), I feel more European. And in Brussels, I think I’m seen as European as well, but I make my points as an East German person. I am probably more European, but I don’t want to give up on my Dorfkind, because if this part was missing, then I would not have the range of what I need in order to see the world with open eyes.”

When asked about the legacy of the GDR, both men pause before giving their answer. Göhlert believes that the harsh realities of the system should not be downplayed, but at the same time, he understands the desire to attach feelings of loss — loss of country, loss of agency, loss of job, even loss of physical markers and buildings — to an Ostalgia made rosier by every Trabi tour, every GDR fest. "Of course it was a dictatorship. But for many, it was their home as well. It was where they lived their lives with the little freedom they had."

Krabbes is less concerned with how the state is remembered, but rather the people alive today who lived under it; most notably, his parents. “Even if they weren’t on the streets fighting for democracy, they were just simple people living in the GDR and then the Federal Republic of Germany, but they had their own fights — losing jobs, finding jobs, raising children, building a house, not always having money, changing currencies. I want them to be happy and treated in a nice way; I don’t want them to feel like they are losers.”

“It is like a Disney theme park, not real history.”

Europe once stretched into Algeria

Written by Hanna Bechiche

The French Empire’s bid for a European Algeria — and the French Republic’s crusade against an Algerian France

“We had French nationality, but not French citizenship. We were part of Europe, but we were not European. We were immigrants, but not foreigners.” Sitting in a Parisian café, my greatuncle reminisces about when he and his brother answered France’s call for cheap manual labor in the 1950s.

“What were you then?” I ask.

“Nothing. We were nothing,” he responds. “We were only allowed to come to France as guests, to work. That’s what we were supposed to do, work and then go back.”

Today, European borders are deemed immovable walls, the result of natural barriers clearly cut out in the form of a continent — ones that take the shape of migrant restrictions and a separation between an us and a them.

Yet, Europe once stretched into Algeria.

A French Algeria

In 1830, the failing French Bourbon monarchy set its sights on Algeria to reinvigorate the empire’s prestige and military might after revolts against Charles X. What was supposed to be a quick military operation — intended to turn people’s attention away from internal struggles and improve electoral support — ended in 30 years of genocidal carnage that wiped out one-third of the entire Algerian population. At the end, France claimed the nation as an extension of itself. For over a century after that, French people settled in large numbers in their new “French department”. By 1900, French settlers made up one-quarter of the population. Yet those native to Algeria were demoted to the status of second class non-citizens and lived under a “Code de l’Indigénat” (Indigenous Code) which restricted their rights to work, move, own livestock or property. They were also forced to pay arbitrary taxes which assured their inferior legal and political status.

When the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) planted the seed of the European Union in 1957, Algeria was still a part of France. As one of the six founding members signing the treaty of Rome, France demanded the inclusion of its Algerian territory. To French officials, France was Algeria, and Algeria was France. It was only natural that Algeria was thus European. In 1957, Algeria was incorporated into the EEC as a symbolic “seventh member”.

But there was nothing natural about the drawing of the EEC’s initial borders. The inclusion of Algeria was a ploy

to consolidate colonial power. At the time of negotiations, France was knee-deep in the Algerian War of Independence, 1954-1962, led by the National Liberation Front (FLN). The Algerian nationalist movement wished to reinstate the Mediterranean Sea as France’s outermost southern border. In the first months of 1957, the war reached its peak with a bloody campaign of urban guerrilla warfare against the French Algerian authorities — the Battle of Algiers. By late March 1957, the authorities had mostly crushed the FLN within Algiers. Its leadership had been arrested, tortured,and sometimes executed. Signing the treaty of Rome that same month was France’s last bid to hold its empire together.

After Algeria claimed its independence in 1962, the president of the newly formed Algerian state, Ben Bella, attempted to keep its ties with Europe. But most of his demands for migration rights and muchneeded reconstruction funds were swept aside by the EEC, claiming Algeria’s independence as reason enough to ignore them. Then Minister of Foreign Affairs Bouteflika pushed for the recognition of Algeria’s place in the EEC — as agreed in the treaty of Rome — but the independent nation’s legitimacy remained blurry. Algeria’s membership of the EEC ended in 1976 with a newly negotiated relationship that ignored its past membership and considered Algeria simply a neighboring country like many others.

An Algerian France

While the borders of Europe included Algeria when it was convenient, the conception of a closed-border Europe now excludes Algerian presence from its identity and history. The collective French memory has been remodeled to think of Algeria as a separate entity — a past colony. Yet, legally, it was never a colony. Algeria was considered a French department, forcefully attached despite the sea separating the two lands. As French historian Pierre Nora explains, “Algerians and Algeria came to be perceived as “non-lieux de mémoire” (non-sites of memory) or even “lieux d'oubli” (forgotten sites).” The European mark France has left on Algeria after 132 years of colonial presence is undeniable. But so is Algeria’s mark on France, for settler colonialism is not a one-way street.

Algerians are one of France’s largest post-colonial immigrant minorities, a presence that dates back more than a century. Algerian immigration was initially labor migration, due to the population decrease of World War I and the call for North African soldiers. In the 1920s, one-fifth of Algerian youth physically able to work immigrated to France. After World War II, “travailleurs invités” (guest workers) were called to fill in the growing need for cheap manual labor and rebuild a country ravaged by war. Initially, 700,000 Algerian men were legally allowed in. But the status of a guest worker, whose wages were lower than the law was supposed to allow, was temporary. After

contributing to France's manufacturing growth, the men were meant to return to Algeria. Many of them never did.

After the 1970s, a pattern of permanent family settlement began to emerge among North Africans living in France. Today, Algerian communities are scattered across the country, but they cluster in two cities: the southern cosmopolitan city of Marseille and the northern capital city of Paris. Though seen as the most quintessential French city, Paris holds urban pockets people colloquially call “Little North Africa”. They form what historian Pascal Blanchard calls “le Paris Arabe” (the Arab Paris). Here, the word “Arab” has become a blanket term that denies ethnic diversity by capturing any and all French-North Africans into a net strewn with colonial prejudice, stereotypes, slurs, exclusion, violence, and criminalization.

One of the most famous sites of Arab Paris is Barbès, a northern Parisian neighborhood in the 18th “arrondissement” (district). Barbès is filled with North African shops, restaurants, butcheries, pastry shops, and fashion stores. One of the most iconic and famous ones is Tati, a North African landmark whose bright pink and blue sign hovers above a Haussmann-style building. Tati, which went out of business in 2021, was a discount department store built by Tunisian immigrants in the 1940s. It was a memorable — and hectic — place for many immigrant families who had found in Tati the North African “souks” (markets) of their childhoods.

Undeniably, Algerians who settled in Barbès in the mid-20th century have left their mark on the French landscape. Here, the verb “to settle” loses its colonial brutality to reclaim a softer nature. Algerians have settled in Barbès like a leaf settles on the ground, like a shell settles on the sand — organically — after decades of enticed immigration.

My maternal grandfather was one of these guest workers who immigrated to Paris in the 1950s with the idea of returning home — an intention that withered into an improbability. As a tailor’s apprentice, he left the Algerian countryside around Constantine — an eastern city nestled atop mountain ravines — to work in a Barbès couture atelier in need of cheap labor. A few years later, his brother joined him to open a little tailor shop in the middle of the immigrant neighborhood.

Erased from history

When I visit my great-uncle, his broken memory tries to stitch back together what he calls “his little Algeria”. He recounts the names of Parisian places where he finds bits of his natal home. The Place de Clichy where he lived, the neighborhoods of Abbès and Anvers where his favorite Algerian cafés were, and Nanterre — where tens of thousands of North Africans first lived in shanty towns built to house them in a hurry.

“France has turned my grandfather

“36 rue Goutte D’or, that’s where your grandfather opened the tailor shop,” he says, eyes lost in a time long past.

“What was it called?” I ask.

His eyes narrow in confusion. “It didn’t have a name. It was a measly thing. Why should we have named it? Just one room, enough space to put two sewing machines and a chair. There were scraps of tissue everywhere. And buttons, and needles. Wool, sometimes. I remember that.”

Many of these nameless tailor ateliers were later repurchased by the French state and offered to fashion designers at a discounted rent in an effort to develop the neighborhood of La Goutte D’or. Today, there are no visible traces of Algerian grandfathers in the story of Paris’s fashion legacy.

Sifting through memories, my great-uncle turns his attention to another urban site of Algerian presence, Nanterre. In the 1950s, the state hastily built cheap wooden cabins in this commune to house a growing number of North African immigrants coming to work in Parisian factories. He remembers the shanty town in the western “banlieue” (suburb) as a muddy, foul-smelling amassment of 10,000 North Africans — mostly Algerians — living in leaking, poorly insulated shacks. Yet — his eyebrows rising up — he also remembers the coffee stands mimicking the cafés in Algeria and the men, sitting on wooden stools, playing games of dominoes or ronda like at home.

Since my grandfather’s arrival, the Nanterre shanty towns have been razed to the ground, replaced by their vertical doppelganger — cheap, high-rise social housing. Today, this type of public housing is found throughout Paris’ economically disadvantaged “banlieues”, and is mostly home to people of immigrant origins. Nanterre has been so thoroughly cleansed of its slums that it is almost impossible to retrace the history of the thousands of North Africans who lived here.

Many immigrants and their descendants now live among the ruins of a violent colonial union, erased from French society and culture. Today, France’s settlement into

Algeria — a period that lasted for almost a century and a half — is considered taboo, barely mentioned in school programs or in public discourse.

After having spent my entire higher education studying French history, the first time I had heard about the 17 October 1961 massacre in Paris was through my grandfather. On that October night, the FLN mobilized the immigrant population to protest a curfew targeting Algerians living in Paris. What started as a peace march ended up a bloodbath when police officers opened fire on the crowd. Hundreds of Algerian bodies, dead and alive, were then thrown into the river Seine. It was not a covert operation done at the fringes of the city — this happened right in the heart of Paris, at the Pont Saint Michel next to the Notre-Dame Cathedral. That night, tens of thousands Algerians were arrested, many of whom disappeared.

“I saw two of my friends go to the march,” my grandfather told me. “No one heard from them after that. To this day, I don’t know what happened to them.”

It was in his measly couture atelier that my grandfather spent the night of 17 October.

“I made hundreds of Algerian flags that night, for people to take to the march. I sewed and sewed until my machine broke.”

Later that day, French police arrested him. He spent weeks in prison for making the Algerian flags, which were outlawed at the time.

“Say you’re French”

As French president Emmanuel Macron stated in his October 2020 speech against “separatism”, France is “not the sum of multiple communities but one single community.” This is the very idea upon which French society is built — to be considered French, immigrants and descendants of immigrants are asked to shed their cultural and religious heritage. France's view on integration borders on assimilation: an extreme form of inclusion that forces one to give up their culture of origin in order to completely blend into French society.

grandfather into a ghost.”

Growing up, I've seen my mother twist her entire being to reconcile her Muslim identity and her career in public education, where she was not allowed to wear a hijab. She could not practice her religion anywhere that was not at home and had to live through officials debating whether or not she could have pork-free options at lunch or shelves of halal meat in stores. She was expected to cut ties with her country of origin to remain neutral. In order to be considered truly French, these are among the many things that are expected of citizens of North African heritage.

“Keep quiet,” my grandmother always tells me. “Don't talk too much about your Algerian heritage, say you're French.”

French assimilation started during colonial times, when Algerians were called “French Muslims” and constantly held up to the standards of European settlers. To be granted French citizenship, they were asked to give up “Islamic law” and adhere to a “French Islam”, which forced Imams to sign a charter of rules to abide by. As subjects of the French empire, “French Muslims” were granted visas to work in mainland France, but it stopped there — they were never legally French, almost never allowed French nationality and the rights that came with it.

This ambivalent identity and legal status continued when Algerian men of my grandfather’s generation first arrived in Paris where they were called “French workers of Algerian origin”. The borders these men managed to cross turned out to be thin blades that sought to cut the threads of their Algerian identity. They were expected to come out barren on the other side, virgin slates on which they were asked to retrace the formal outlines of their beings in the hexagonal shape of France.

Through this erasure, France has turned my grandfather into a ghost, failing to recognize that a ghost’s purpose is to haunt the home that has been ripped away from them. Between Barbès and Place de Clichy, my “jedo’s” (grandpa’s) ghost scurries the Parisian streets he has helped garnish and shape, forever the pariah of a culture that erases his involvement.

Today, France has fallen into the clutches of a rising far-right party that has gained popularity by painting the portrait of children of immigrants refusing to “integrate”, and as scapegoats responsible for any and every criminal or economic distress. Politicians like Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour claim that the North African heritage of millions of French citizens should come second, or better yet, be kept in the shadows.

Bridging France and Algeria

As much as France’s physical and cultural borders have tried to sever the tie between French-North Africans and their countries of origin, they have failed. Today, many children of North African immigrants consider themselves both French and Maghrébins (Moroccan, Algerian, or Tunisian). It was a collective experience shared by the North African diaspora which helped strengthen those ties, one we call “l’été au bled” (summer in the homeland).

As dual citizens — most of the time — many children of north African immigrants have spent their formative summers in their ancestral lands. Every year, the school break marked the return to the homeland and the only time our parents could visit their family back home. For two months, many families lived in Algeria as if they had never left — not as tourists but as residents, reuniting with cousins and grandparents.

In these moments of union, stories of European Algeria and Algerian France were finally passed down to me. They are stories my grandmother still has a hard time sharing, stories my grandfather has taken to his grave. Summers spent in the homeland were a way for me to fill in the gaps of a French history that had forgotten Algeria and my family. But most importantly, these trips were what made me realize that the hyphen in “French-Algerian” was not a border but a thread, one that stitched the two identities together so tightly that it created one single entity.

Written by Tony Silberfeld

Is the Melting Pot Boiling Over?

There are many myths about America, but one of the most enduring seems to be the concept of the nation as a melting pot. This unfaltering idea that all people regardless of origin, faith, color, creed, or political beliefs come together into a single American community that pulls together for the betterment of all. Whether we look at the treatment of Native Americans,

the discrimination against the Irish and Italian immigrants who populated American cities in the 19th century, antisemitism against Jews who fled the Holocaust and its aftermath in the 20th century, or the long history of systemic racism against African American and other minority groups, it should be easy to debunk this myth. Yet, through it all, immigrants continue to come to American shores to realize a “dream” and often find it, overcoming waves of xenophobia and exclusion along the way. The most optimistic, or even Pollyannish view, might suggest that the United States is indeed a melting pot, although one that takes an eternity to cook.

No matter one’s take on the integration of new arrivals and minority groups into the American family, it is indisputable that Americans are living through a volatile time in the political and societal history of this country. It is something we all experience every day. Political divisions between red and blue are as perceptible as the racial differences between black and white, and the gulf between them is only widening. From the halls of Congress to policing on the streets, something is fundamentally broken. Though historically unifying in times of crisis, American identity has always been difficult to define, but today,

our inability to do so has exacerbated political and social polarization.

When adequate explanations are out of reach, it can be useful to reset the narrative and remind ourselves of who we are and how we got here. It’s in that spirit that we present the stories below, both firsthand and third-person accounts of journeys to the United States. These are deeply personal and candid stories. They aim to help redefine what American identity can be, so we can grow together, and to give insight into the people and motivations behind our work at the Bertelsmann Foundation.

(HIS)Story

When the German army invaded Poland in 1939, Markus (also known as Max) Silberfeld was a small business owner with a wife and three children. As the Nazis rounded up Jewish families and sent them to concentration camps, Max and his family were among them. Over the course of the war, Max’s wife and children were murdered by the Nazis. Max, now alone, was put to work and moved multiple times in response to German victories and defeats on the battlefield. Along with nearly 90,000 other souls, he ended up in the Flossenburg concentration camp near the German-Czechoslovakian border. In April 1945, the United States Army liberated Flossenburg, but Max was nowhere to be found.

Just two days earlier, he had been moved to the Dachau concentration camp on the outskirts of Munich. Salvation finally came for Max a week later when the Americans opened the gates of Dachau.

In the years following the war, Max rebuilt his life in Munich. He opened a new business, married the nurse who treated him during his recovery, and had two children. Always fearful of a resurgence of antisemitism in Germany, Max decided it was time to follow the path that so many European Jews had taken

before him and set sail for the United States.

The Silberfelds arrived in the United States, passing through Ellis Island, on New Year’s Day 1956. After a brief stay in the Empire State, Max, who had limited options since he didn’t speak English, found a job at a Pontiac auto factory and began a new migration west to Detroit. But the working conditions and cold Michigan winters sent the Silberfelds packing. This time they headed to a city they were told was paved with gold.

The final chapter of this transatlantic immigrant story begins in West Hollywood, California, but doesn’t end there. Max and his wife Anna settled into a small apartment near the supermarket where Max would bag groceries. Their children Karin and Roman dug into their studies at school, seeing education as the best opportunity to attain the American dream. Max saved every penny to be able to buy the apartment building in which he lived, and subsequently purchased other buildings in this up-and-coming corner of Los Angeles. His daughter left home to marry and start a family of her own, while his son worked his way through college and law school to become an attorney.

Throughout the remainder of their lives, Max and Anna never forgot their shared European identity, but they were proudly American. Having lived through tragedy and hardship, the Silberfelds found solace in the United States knowing that one’s identity could be an asset, rather than a curse, and that each person can define for themselves who they wanted to be.

Coda

Max’s grandson, Tony Silberfeld, has returned to his German roots as the Director of Transatlantic Relations at the Bertelsmann Foundation, the U.S. branch of the Germany-based Bertelsmann Stiftung.

Reflections on Identity – By Tony Silberfeld

Being part of the first generation of my family born in the United States, I always felt like I belonged and didn’t belong simultaneously. I don’t think I felt particularly German beyond our frequent schnitzel meals with my grandparents, but I subconsciously gravitated toward other immigrant communities in search of shared experiences. I could be as Irish as anyone on St. Patrick’s Day and more Greek than an Athenian at Greek independence celebrations. In those days — back in the 1980s — that was the beauty of America. Despite its many problems, it was a melting pot in which the world came together, even if just for brief moments. Today, I fear that identity is used to separate, rather than to celebrate. It is used to distinguish “us” from “them”. The rise in hate crimes against immigrants and minority groups today is a disturbing sign of a society in decline. It’s one my grandfather Max wouldn’t recognize and would be ashamed of. He, like so many others, left their homelands for the aspirational idea of America. It’s time to reach for that goal again, before it’s too late.

(HER)Story

This story of life in the Americas begins in 1911 with the birth of Amador Indalecio Medina Alvarez in Venezuela, followed two decades later by Edilia Rosa Alvarado Villanueva. The pair went on to raise 13 children on a small farm near the town of Carora. In the summer of 1971, they welcomed their eleventh child to the world, a daughter they would name Lilisbed, or Lily.

In the 1970s, the children lived on Amador’s cattle farm and moved closer to public school in Carora when they reached schooling age. Lily thrived in Carora, splitting her time between her studies and the farm. But by her 15th birthday, she had faced a series of unexpected family tragedies. First, her father Amador passed away, followed by the death of two of her brothers just a few years later. With three of her closest relatives gone, Lily was compelled to fill the massive gap they left

behind for the welfare of the family. She dropped out of school for several years, only to return to night school and earn the equivalent of her GED at the age of 20.

In 1996, Lily walked across the stage to receive her associate’s degree in Barquisimeto with her newborn daughter in her arms. With a degree and family in hand, she returned to her hometown of Carora to make a new life for herself and her daughter, Daniela. Three years later, Lily fell in love with Ivan Barrantes Limon, the son of Peruvian immigrants who had come to Venezuela years earlier to work in the agricultural sector. Though Ivan and Lily began their life together in Carora, it wasn’t long before they sought out opportunities in the capital city of Caracas. Success in the capital led to other career prospects for Ivan that would send the family to Switzerland for several years — where the couple welcomed two more children. In 2011, they returned to Venezuela to find their homeland in turmoil.

Back home in Caracas, a collapse in oil prices and mismanagement at the highest levels of government left the country almost destitute. Lily and her family returned to long lines outside supermarkets, physical altercations over basic goods, and pervasive violence. There were many cases of people getting killed over petty robberies and kidnappings for ransom, to the extent it was no longer safe for the family to be outside after sunset. Hardly an ideal homecoming for a mother with two infants and a teenager in tow. There were signs that a crisis was looming, but no one could have predicted the downward spiral the country would experience.

Hope for relief finally came in 2012 with a presidential campaign that promised to reverse the damage done by President Hugo Chavez. Venezuelans pinned their hopes on opposition leader Henrique Capriles, to no avail. Chavez won reelection and died in office just two months into his new term. A special election followed, where Capriles was defeated a second time amid allegations of electoral fraud. As a result, government and opposition supporters took to the streets in a cycle of violence and intimidation that has left a lasting scar on the people of Caracas. That summer, Ivan and Lily decided that they could no longer remain in Venezuela and, like many others fleeing violence and political unrest, set off for the United States.

With the family settling into a new home in Rockville, Maryland, Ivan returned to Latin America to continue working. In the meantime, Lily navigated the complicated terrain of raising three children in an unfamiliar place without a family support system to help start their new life. But she made friends and the transition was made easier by the strong Hispanic community in their part of Montgomery County. Lily found work with a cleaning service and she and Ivan worked tirelessly to be able to send her oldest daughter, Daniela, off to college.

When Lily and Ivan were first married, they discussed the possibility of emigrating to the United States in search of the American dream. Today, she is an American citizen — but her heart remains in Carora.

Reflections on Identity – By

Daniela Rojas Medina

After growing up on three continents, I am sometimes conflicted about the question of identity. When asked whether I feel American or Venezuelan, my gut reaction is to say both but it really depends on the day. Having been in the U.S. for nearly my entire adult life, there are moments in which I feel more culturally American, but still like an outsider. There remain gaps in language and humor that native-born Americans pick up along the way which add to the feeling of “otherness”, without it being one of exclusion. When I chat with Latinos or people from other ethnicities, especially if they grew up in predominantly white neighborhoods, they often exhibit a sadness that comes with feeling ostracized as a minority in that community during one’s formative years. Fortunately I never felt that sensation firsthand since I moved to the U.S. when I was older, avoiding this predicament of identity that is all too common in the United States today.

For native-born Americans and new arrivals alike, the idea of one American identity is confounding. For me, it is ill-defined beyond the process of becoming a citizen. Speaking English and memorizing key points in civics and U.S. history is a must, but there’s nothing about cultural integration or what responsibilities one has as a citizen. Instead, I see it as many different identities that, together, build what it means to be American. I see more of a melting pot than one that’s boiling over.

Coda

Lily’s daughter, Daniela Rojas Medina, is a research analyst for technology policy at the Bertelsmann Foundation in Washington, DC.

In the Dutch town of Valkenburg aan de Geul, Irene Braam observed the daily comings and goings in this tightly-knit community from the top of the spiral staircase above her family’s bicycle shop. She would watch the locals who came in for repairs or to chat with her parents, the many foreign visitors who visited the picturesque town, and the refugees who came from around the world. The variety of languages, food, music and scents captured the imagination of this child who sat perched above the action below. But this story doesn’t begin in the family shop, it starts across the border in Belgium.

Irene’s father, Pierre Braam, was born in Belgium to Dutch parents. His mother’s side of the family was from Maastricht, and his father’s was from Valkenburg, where Pierre would grow up. He learnt the family business alongside his father in their bicycle shop. Irene’s mother, Mia Pisters, grew up as one of six children on a fruit farm in Geulle. Mia and Pierre met at a tango dance, though perhaps they were drawn to

each other by the fact that neither was a particularly skilled dancer.

By 1971, the couple had built a family that numbered one boy and three girls, with Irene being the third of the four children. At that point, Irene’s father had taken over the family business. Valkenburg at that time was the kind of small European city one often imagines from that era. The neighbors were photographers, bakers, pharmacists and other shopkeepers. There were no locks on doors, and children ran around the neighborhood without a second thought.

In primary school, Irene noticed that groups of immigrants from Suriname were arriving in Valkenburg. Since the town drew so many tourists throughout the year, housing for the new residents was never a problem. In the offseason, local hotels would provide housing for the families, so their kids could be integrated into the same schools as Irene and the other children of Valkenburg. The community came together to provide what

they could, and Irene’s father even chipped in by giving away free bikes to the children. One of the families who returned to Suriname years later took the gifted bike with them, and every year Irene’s family would receive a photo of that bike being passed from one child to the next as time went on.

When she was growing up, Irene recalls the very first television set they bought. It was black and white, but they’d always watch dreamy Hollywood movies there and in the local cinema. From “Snow White” to “Singing in the Rain” to “Grease”, the prospect of what else lay beyond the town limits of Valkenburg was nothing short of magical.

With this spark of creativity ignited, Irene pursued a career in the creative sector. From her job in 1998 at a Paris-based music company called Naïve, it was clear that it would take a combination of grit and luck to find success. After her stint at Naïve, a string of serendipitous opportunities sent her to Brussels. First to an Israeli software firm, then to Universal Music and finally to the Bertelsmann media conglomerate. Irene had spent most of her adult life on the move. This became her identity as much as being Dutch or anything else.

Irene was attracted to the speed of working with American colleagues during business trips to New York, but the interest in life in the United States began in Valkenburg with the movies she watched and the conversations she had around the family dinner table. Her parents always credited the Americans with saving the Netherlands from German occupation, so there had always been a favorable view of America. The opportunity to move there finally came in 2016, when she moved to Washington, DC to lead the Bertelsmann Foundation.

Once she settled into life in DC, however, she noticed a pronounced difference between reality and the depiction of America in film, books, and music. She observed a much more socially conservative country than she had imagined, one that lacked the unity that people abroad often assume is inherent. Irene’s story is ongoing, but she is a long way from sitting atop the spiral staircase in her parents’ shop. To this day, her identity is defined by the experiences that shaped her, rather than where she is.

Coda

Reflections on Identity – By Irene Braam

Despite the road that has taken me far from Valkenburg, I continue to embrace my Dutch identity. And when I don’t identify as being Dutch, my default position is to proudly claim that I am European. To me, identity is a fluid concept. The characteristics that I learned in my youth, such as humility, directness, and diligence, are as important in a tiny corner of Europe as they are in Washington.

Though the prospect of becoming an American may be on the horizon, I am culturally much farther away. This is partly due to the fact that the concept of identity in the U.S. is so ill-defined. How many Americans are culturally American? What does that mean? People talk about their Polish, French or German roots, but don’t speak the language and have very little connection to the country of their ancestors. That’s perhaps the most puzzling aspect of American identity, but this ambiguity creates the space to allow everyone to feel like they're part of this great experiment, no matter where they’re from. And being part of the experiment fundamentally implies that the responsibility to succeed lies with the individual. It means dedication to a duty, work, community, and family. These are not exclusively American values, but they are certainly at its core. In my view, despite a particularly volatile moment in its history, this country is still a melting pot, but I suppose it largely depends on where the pot is sitting. In DC, at least on the surface, it remains a melting pot. Elsewhere it is clearly coming to a boil. When people come here, they really want to be American. I often say that the United States has the best marketing on Earth. America excels at making people dream.

Irene Braam is the Executive Director of the Bertelsmann Foundation in Washington, DC.

INTERVIEW José Luis Loera

Shifting Identities: From Victims to Changemakers

Since 2020, the United States has experienced an influx of Mexican migrants due to the declining economic situation and rise of organized crime in the country. Mexico has also long acted as a buffer state for the United States, hosting Central American migrants and refugees. The evolving situation in Mexico has led to monthly encounters at the border being the highest seen in over two decades.

Bertelsmann Foundation’s Chloe Laird sat with José Luis Loera in April 2023 to chat about the changing context in Mexico and how it has impacted the nature of his work.

Prepared & edited by Chloe Laird

José Luis Loera is the co-founder of Programa Casa Refugiados, a UNHCRbacked non-profit organization in Mexico that works to promote the rights of people displaced by violence. He is the head of the organization’s board of directors and leads the “Education for Peace” team, supporting the long-term integration of refugees that allows them to keep their culture and identity.

About José Luis Loera

What made you get into this line of work?

I had my first experience with refugee people coming into Mexico in 1983. I experienced the beauty of the jungle in the south of Mexico sharing a border with Guatemala. The juxtaposition of beauty and violence. The contradiction between being in this beautiful jungle and hearing the sounds of bombings in the distance and violent stories being told by those who had left their war-torn country. Their stories — and this experience — has impacted me to this day.

I’m faced daily with the challenge of understanding the capacity of man to have incredible compassion and the ability to peacefully coexist while at the same time being able to inflict an incredible amount of pain and suffering on their own people.

Tell us about your organization, Casa Refugiados, and the work it is able to accomplish?

Casa Refugiados was never intended to be the organization that it has become. But as we have faced different challenges, the context has led us to become what it is today. Initially, it was set up to provide opportunities for refugees to have temporary housing, access to health services and job opportunities. From there, it grew and evolved into a fully developed program.

Today, we provide humanitarian assistance to those displaced by violence, we work alongside UNHCR and other institutions to create the best possible conditions for those coming to Mexico. But we also try to focus on preventive work and promote reflecting on the various impacts of armed violence, and ways in which to foster peacebuilding.

Casa Refugiados builds community centers for individuals to gather. How do physical meeting spaces lead to better approaches to integration and peaceful societies?

Providing conditions for refugees to meet with local community members in dignity and with an attitude of openness is where the work starts. All these projects at Casa Refugiados started to happen when people had a place where they could meet and get to know each other — breaking their negative stereotypes on both sides. Getting to know each other and trying to find common experiences through common activities: it created what is now Casa Refugiados.

What are the different crises facing Mexico today?

I think we are in a context of global crises. We are facing different common crises across borders: environmental, political polarization, the pandemic, social violence, and economic crises. All of these lead to displacement. In Mexico, we are unique because of our geographical location. We are seeing that all these crises cross through Mexico. Mexico is at the border — at the last part of the journey for many.

In Mexico itself, we are experiencing a severe economic crisis. In 2020, 56 million people were living in poverty conditions. That’s 44% of the population. This has a big impact on the Mexican reality. 9% of the population is currently in extreme poverty.

We are also experiencing a rise in political violence, especially post-pandemic. In 2022, 31,000 people were murdered. 26 people go missing every day. Officially, the violence is not recognized as an internal armed conflict. But if you look at the figures, the number of people affected by violence is similar to those of war-torn countries.

In Mexico — just like the U.S. — we are approaching an election next year. This surge in violence makes us particularly vulnerable to those who are thinking of using violence as a tool to gain political influence.

There have been calls by states in the U.S. to have Mexican drug cartels labeled as terrorist organizations. What are your thoughts on this?

Organized crime is taking control of almost every economic activity in Mexico, even humanitarian aid is affected by this reality. We are also facing a stark reality that people are increasingly viewed as part of this illicit market. If they are kidnapped, they are worth a ransom. In my opinion, criminal gangs could be considered terrorists. Their capacity to inflict violence has an impact on society that controls the community — and the behaviors and thoughts of the population. It will also be interesting to think of the impact across the border, because these criminal gangs operate on both sides.

Which areas need more work to help address the refugee situation in Mexico?

We could be doing more research about the causes of and conditions in which people are fleeing the impact of armed violence. This is one key issue that we should be working on but are not yet at Casa — documenting the impact of armed violence for the displaced people we are assisting. Tracking their displacement from their country of origin to when they arrive in Mexico.

I also think it’s important to understand that people in the U.S. who don’t want migrants or refugees to cross into their borders need to help us from the other side, by blocking the arms traffic to Mexico. Mexico shares a 3,000-kilometer border with the U.S. and there are at least 9,000 arms shops on the other side of the border. A lot of the people who are fleeing into the U.S. now were previously able to create job opportunities in Mexico. But they are forced to move again because of the impact of armed violence in our country. It’s now one of the key factors of displacement. This will require a new approach, a new type of engineering to connect all these cross-border actors.

It's a challenge, but also an opportunity.

What do you think of the belief that national identity and migration don't always easily mix?

It’s a reality that people can be threatened by the different challenges we are facing. The impact of unemployment, of people having to close their businesses, and of artificial intelligence taking jobs. People fear these things and have many threats they are experiencing daily. The key issue is that the media — and sometimes political speech — focus on the possible enemy, and those who are different. In human history, that particularly vulnerable group has been the foreigners. It’s not that they themselves represent a threat, but they are used as a focus for these feelings.

In the case of Mexico, I think we actually have a weak national identity. There is a very small minority of people who have a clear indigenous identity. There is another group who have ties with Spanish ancestry. But most Mexicans are a mixture of identities. We need to develop these multiple identities and extend beyond these limited historical identities — to expand into new identities. Identities allow us to collaborate with each other and see each other as part of a new community. That’s what I’ve personally witnessed at Casa Refugiados.

Do you believe that crisis forges identity?

Something that I am personally very interested in is our resilience and how Casa Refugiados promotes resilient identities.

You can be affected by violence, and then forced to reduce your identity to being a victim of this violence. You’ll see that — in many cases — people will crumble under the weight of being a victim. But some of them find opportunities to go beyond this victimhood and label themselves as survivors, and then ultimately, they can develop an identity as changemakers. I would argue that these three identities can present themselves under crisis.

I think our main challenge as humanitarian organizations is to try and promote the conditions to develop individual and collective identities so that people can feel like actors of change. Whether that’s advocating for change in their own families, their communities, or beyond.

At Casa Refugiados, we have proof of this. Refugees who came to our community center as children are now leaders of the community, invited by the UN to go to Geneva and speak about their lived experiences and current work as leaders in their communities.

I would like to insist on the fact that even if the context is quite challenging, and even discouraging at times, we are convinced that it doesn’t matter. If we manage to reshape the humanitarian system so that all the stakeholders — public, private, social and displaced people themselves — are involved, we can prove that things can be different.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

TRANSPONDER TEAM

EDITORIAL

Executive Director

Irene Braam

Editor-in-Chief

Rylie Munn

Editor Juli Simond

CONTRIBUTORS

Anthony Silberfeld

Director ofTransatlantic Relations, Bertelsmann Foundation

Chloe Laird Manager of Transatlantic Relations, Bertelsmann Foundation

Courtney Flynn Martino Senior Manager of Transatlantic Relations, Bertelsmann Foundation

PRODUCTION

Design & Creative Direction

Eddie Stok, Are We Europe

Production Are We Europe

Printing DCG One

Daniela Rojas Medina Research Analyst, Bertelsmann Foundation

Hanna Bechiche Freelance writer

José Luis Loera Co-Founder, Casa Refugiados

Kenny Martin 2018 Warsaw Fellow, Humanity in Action

Noah DeMichele

Transatlantic Relations Intern, Bertelsmann Foundation

OPERATIONS

Executive Director

Irene Braam

Director of Administration

Faith Gray

Project Coordinator & Events Manager

Megan Long

Rylie Munn Manager of Digital Communications & Outreach, Bertelsmann Foundation

Samuel George Global Markets & Digital Adviser, Bertelsmann Foundation

Sara Leming Research Analyst, Bertelsmann Foundation

—José Luis Loera

Excerpt from interview on page 56

www.bfna.org

Some find opportunities to go beyond victimhood and label themselves as survivors, and then ultimately, they can develop an identity as changemakers.