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Legal clarity does not want to be defined dogmatically, but put into the picture: A primiparous woman who is qualified to be a judge is lying in the delivery room; a lawyer who is too drunk to see at the traffic control that he shouldn’t defend himself on his own behalf; a candidate on the way to her state examination who gets stuck in the tunnel with the subway – a really good legal term should be characterized by the fact that lawyers can define it flawlessly in every conceivable stressful situation.
“International understanding” is certainly not one of these terms.
And that, although a look at the Basic Law (GG) shows how important “international understanding” is to be taken. In addition to purposes or activities contrary to criminal law, i.e. a classic liberal reason for forbidding an association, Art. 9 (2) GG names its orientation against the constitution or against the idea of international understanding in order to legally destroy the organization.
Bremen conjures up international understanding three times
The state constitution of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (LV HB), which came into force almost two years before the Basic Law, mentions international understanding no less than three times.
It is even more decorative when Article 55, Paragraph 1 LV HB harmlessly declares May 1st as a public holiday and a “commitment to social justice and freedom, to peace and international understanding” – even if you wanted to know whether in Bremen only has justice or freedom to be “social”.
Art. 65 para. 1 LV HB should arouse the critical spirit a little more: “The Free Hanseatic City of Bremen is committed to democracy, social justice, freedom, protection of the natural environment, peace and international understanding.” – Is it technically well done to place fundamental characteristics of the constitutional state such as democracy next to mere state or goals that must necessarily be negotiated in the parliamentary process or in disputes between the collective bargaining parties, as is the case, for example, with “social justice”? And what then is “international understanding” – the fundamental principle of the state or the goal of practical daily politics? After all, why do you “confess” to all of this as you did on a holiday?
“Associations which endanger democracy or international understanding are to be forbidden by law”, requires Art. 17 Para. 2 LV HB. Perhaps in 1947 one had the idea in mind that the citizens of Bremen would forbid such associations “by means of a separate law, instead of” on the basis of “a law by a prohibition authority – a method that is interesting in terms of democracy theory, but of course does not yet reveal what is behind the” International understanding “hides.
Bavaria sees “friendship among peoples” more as a task of foreigner education
The triple invocation of international understanding in the constitution of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen is by no means the most delicate exercise in vocabulary.
What did the Bavarian legislature want to communicate to the people and the teachers of the Free State when it counted among the tasks of schools “in particular” in addition to imparting knowledge and skills as well as “independent judgment and independent action”, “to educate in the spirit of international understanding and to support the integration efforts of migrants as well as the intercultural competence of all pupils “(Art. 2 Par. 1 Bavarian Law on Education)? – Is “international understanding” something other than a disguised umbrella term for the “integration efforts” of foreign “migrants”?
Apart from the fact that Germans who change their place of residence, according to the legal understanding of the word “migrants”, but are probably not meant here, “international understanding” becomes a matter of pedagogical integration – the overlap with what must be sufficient for the prohibition of an association according to Art. 9 (2) GG, should not be too great here. That even larger and more weighty states like North Rhine-Westphalia catalog educational wishes in their school law in a way that has given up any deontic logic – Section 2 of the NRW Schools Act wants a lot and regulates little – will hardly offer an excuse.
Völkerverständigung – “the proof of the pudding is the eating”
Such references apparently do not express any idea of ”international understanding” that could lead to a normative formula with subsumption quality.
The jurisprudence does not express itself particularly clearly either, even where it does not fall back on “international understanding” as an auxiliary argument or in a mere rhetorical garland within the framework of a ban on associations. The Federal Administrative Court (BVerwG) stated, for example, in the guiding principle of its judgment of December 3, 2004 (Az. 6 A 10/02):
“An association is directed against the idea of international understanding within the meaning of § 3, Paragraph 1, Clause 1 of the Association Act in conjunction with Article 9, Paragraph 2 of the Basic Law, if it forms a group through financial donations over a long period of time and to a considerable extent supports, which brings violence into the relationship of peoples, and if the resulting impairment of the peaceful coexistence of peoples is borne by a corresponding will of the association. “
The ban hit an association whose funds are said to have been used by Hamas, the Sunni party and terrorist organization founded in 1987, among other things to support so-called “martyr families” – that is, to care for the relatives of people who have committed themselves and others in suicide attacks killed with the aim of destroying the state of Israel and establishing an Islamic state of God.
With a view to the legal literature on the term “international understanding”, the BVerwG declared that an “association would (also) be directed against the idea of international understanding if its purpose or its activity ran counter to the peaceful overcoming of the conflicting interests of peoples. This is above all then the case when violence is brought into the relationship between peoples. “
This interpretation that it is not conducive to the “idea of international understanding” if the forbidden association does not “exercise violence itself” but “supports a group which in turn affects the peaceful coexistence of peoples by exercising violence” is close the famous refusal of definition by US judge Potter Stewart (1915–1985) from 1963, he did not know how to explain “hard-core pornography” in an understandable way, but recognized it when he saw it.
If the determination of facts in which clubs show an illegal lack of international understanding is checked with almost naked self-evidence – “the proof of the pudding is the eating” – the audience is probably not disturbed as long as it is – as in this case the “Hamas” helpers – meets the “right people”. However, this is problematic insofar as the state forbids private associations here, which he may cost himself a lot of money in the European union of states or at least allow it to happen in the absence of adequate corruption controls: That a political party with denominational ideology and (state) terrorist practice is financed from Europe.
In that the courts and constitutional law doctrine so lifelessly handle the concept of “international understanding”, negotiating it primarily not positively but only negatively using the case study of the peace evidently disturbed by “martyrs” terrorists, they contribute to the deficit of perception: the political public has It has not learned for decades to describe the processes in the Middle East in an economically, sociologically, ethnologically and also legally correct manner, to blame it solely on the wild confessional conditions.
Satisfying concept of “international understanding”
In order to gain a bit of saturation and to be able to define the term “international understanding” in a positive way, one would have to go back to the world of ideas from around 1900 – a time that was still present in the Bremen constitution in 1947.
At that time, for example, “international understanding” did not mean to formulate a separate legal obligation to integrate ethnic or social minorities in Bavarian schools – German was spoken so that the peoples of the Free State could communicate – but people came together who spoke the artificial language Esperanto learned. This movement of international understanding had so many members that it was persecuted under Hitler like Stalin, but the communists also tried to profit from its popularity by copying the five-pointed green star of the Esperantists in red.
There was also a vital force in the way in which Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle thought about “international understanding”: Hundreds of thousands of teenagers should, according to the first idea of the two old people, about the Franco-German youth exchange before the much more modest one Élysée contract from 1963, to spend the summer weeks in the other country every year. If something had come of it, not only would the “Umvolkungs” theorists in the bedrooms and children’s rooms between Bordeaux and Berlin (West) be laughed at in two languages, the word “international understanding” would also have significantly more semantic substance.
As a mere association and criminal catchphrase, “international understanding” is in any case traded below value.
The author Martin Rath works as a freelance editor in Ohligs.
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