"The values needed for a core culture are those of modernity: democracy, secularism, the Enlightenment, human rights and civil society."
Friedrich Merz, then leader of the Christian-Democratic CDU in the Bundestag, wrote an article for Die Welt, rejecting multiculturalism, and advocated controls on immigration and compulsory assimilation in a German core culture.
Merz, supported by the Brandenburg interior minister Jörg Schönbohm (CDU), proposed an annual immigration limit of 200 000, about 0.25% of the German population.
Bassam Tibi now protested that politicians had appropriated his proposal for their own purposes, and pronounced the entire debate a 'failure'.
Forcing immigrants to assimilate at any price would in any case, according to Özdemir, deny the reality that Germany was a multicultural society.
The proposal, he said in an interview in Die Zeit, has been summarily dismissed without argument; "The noticeable thing about the very short national debate is that the Leitkultur concept was widely rejected, as a negative reflex, but that there was a wide recognition of the problems underlying the debate" ("Das Parlament hat kein Diskussionsmonopol", Zeit 43/2005).
The 'constitutional patriotism' (proposed by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas) would not suffice, since all constitutions are based on non-random cultural assumptions.
Jörg Schönbohm also remains a vigorous advocate of a German core culture: in 2006 he suggested changing the name of the Berlin radio station radiomultikulti into 'Radio Schwarz-Rot-Gold' (black-red-gold, the colours of the flag of Germany).