Germany has abandoned plans to remove the word “race” from its constitution due to legal problems and reservations from the Jewish community.
“No person shall be favored or disfavored because of sex, parentage, race, language, homeland and origin, faith or religious or political opinions. No person shall be disfavored because of disability,” reads section 3 of Article 3 of the German constitution, also known as the “Basic Law.”
The debate around the word “race” had been raging for several years in Germany. Following the anti-racism protests sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in the USA in 2020 and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement, members of the Green Party called for the amendment of this constitutional paragraph, arguing at the time that “there is no race, there are only people.”
Robert Habeck, then co-chairman of the Greens and current Vice-Chancellor of the Scholz government, and Aminata Touré, then Vice-President of the party for the state of Schleswig-Holstein and current Minister of Social Affairs, both instigated the debate but refrained from suggesting an alternative.
A first proposal in 2021
In February 2021, the Ministry of Justice presented an initial proposal to replace the term with “or for racist reasons.” This change was intended to “further distance the Basic Law from racial ideologies while maintaining protection against discrimination,” declared Minister Christine Lambrecht at the time.
Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, opposed the removal of the term, arguing that it recalled the persecution and murder of millions of people, “especially Jews,” as reported by the German newspaper Tagesspiegel.
The parliamentary groups of Germany’s three ruling parties agreed to put this project “on the back burner,” according to official sources cited by AFP last week, confirming a report by the Rheinische Post newspaper, explaining that no alternative could be found to “guarantee the same level of protection” from a legal perspective. The opposition CDU-CSU conservative alliance welcomed the decision, declaring that “common sense has prevailed.”
Relegating the word “race” to history books
A similar debate had agitated France before the word “race” was removed from the Constitution in 2018, during Emmanuel Macron’s first term (LREM). Members of the National Assembly had voted, unanimously of those present (119 voters), to remove the term from Article 1 of the constitution, which states that all citizens are equal before the law “without distinction of origin, race, or religion.”
The term “race” was then replaced by “sex,” with the new article stipulating that all citizens are equal “without distinction of sex, origin or religion.” The only drawback is that, although the term was removed from the 1958 Constitution, it still appears in the 1946 Preamble, which is still in force in French law.
During his 2012 election campaign, former President François Hollande had promised to relegate the word “race” to history books, asserting at the time that “there are no different races” and that “the term has no place in the Republic.” His rival Nicolas Sarkozy, the incumbent president at the time, had mocked the proposal to amend the Constitution. “If we do away with the word racism, does that mean that racism will no longer exist? That’s ridiculous,” he declared.
These debates on the use of the term “race” reflect the particular sensitivity of Germany, France, and other parts of continental Europe to a term that is widely used in the United States and Great Britain.
