From “Ghetto” to “Interculturality”: Euro-Turkish Experiences in Germany and France

This article is based on a research project carried out among Turkish immigrants in Germany and France. It deals with showing the multiplicity of identity formation, depending on generations, but, above all, the new experiences of the “Turkish communities”, namely,in a range from being self-enclosed to total assimilation in the case of “citizen of the French Republic” and “German culturalism”. In this range, what enriches the debate on identities and “the issue of integration” is, above all, these identities in movement which, up until now, have been perceived as indices of the inability of the actors in situ. This article attempts to demonstrate that, far from being a question of inability, it is a matter of “new tactics of superseding” the modernist structures, unable to satisfy the existenceof the diaspora. Thus, while the individuals in the immigrant communities enter into cultural negotiation with the society and play on the borders, in a trans-national space, they call into question modernist dichotomies and national borders and symbols. Finally,“intersubjectivity” and “interculturality”, in which these individuals fulfil themselves, bind the dissociated parts of the human being and social life and prepare the social bases of a new citizenship.