How should the German government deal with regular terrorist attacks by muslim immigrants?
Prosecute and deport individuals who commit or plan attacks. Do not govern by religious category.
Schmidt draws on his 1977 hostage crisis: the state holds its nerve by holding to law, not by abandoning it. Sen points to the 2006 mechanism: when policy reduces a Berliner of Turkish background to only a Muslim, it does the recruiter's work for him. Arendt's eighteen years of statelessness after 1937 supply the warning: a religious-ethnic category, once named in law, gets administered and then exclusionary.
Ibn Khaldun closes the case with the Almoravids: external pressure on a group with internal solidarity does not break it, it consolidates it. Germany's Muslim communities are not yet a unified political force; policies that treat them as one will make them one.
Confidence summary: High convergence on legal principle; genuine split on whether cultural integration failure demands a harder institutional response.
1. The core argument
The sharpest insight the council surfaces is structural, not moral. When a state designates a religious-ethnic population as a security category, it does the organising work that violent recruiters cannot do themselves. Germany's Muslim residents are not a unified political bloc. Treat them as one and they become one. That is not a liberal sentiment. It is an observation about how group solidarity forms under external pressure, and Ibn Khaldun made it from watching empires collapse, not from defending minorities.
The council's verdict follows: prosecute and deport individuals who commit or plan attacks; pursue intelligence-led pre-emption where the law permits; do not govern by religious category. Schmidt's 1977 precedent is instructive. He held the constitutional line when the RAF held a hostage. The discipline required then was refusing to let terrorists dictate terms. The discipline required now is refusing to let terrorists dictate the state's self-definition.
2. How each member frames it
Helmut Schmidt is the member most likely to be misread here. His 2010 statement that multiculturalism had failed is frequently quoted as endorsement of harder restriction. He would reject that reading. What he endorsed was the obligation of immigrants to integrate into a functioning civic order, not the abandonment of legal process toward those who do not. His 1977 decision cost a man's life. He bears that cost precisely because he treats constitutional order as non-negotiable in both directions: it constrains terrorists and it constrains the state's response to terrorism. He would support aggressive deportation of convicted individuals and pre-emptive detention where evidentiary thresholds are met. He would not support category-based surveillance.
Hannah Arendt brings a weight of personal experience the others cannot match, and she uses it carefully. She does not argue that security concerns are illegitimate. She argues that the administrative logic of religious-ethnic categorisation has a known trajectory, and she watched it from inside. Her 18 years of statelessness began with a legal designation, not a pogrom. The danger she identifies is not the politician who wants to strip rights but the bureaucrat who administers a category with procedural normality. She would press hardest on the question of who counts as a member of the political community when attacks occur, and on whether emergency measures quietly revise that membership in practice rather than law.
Amartya Sen provides the mechanism that connects Arendt's warning to a testable prediction. The recruiter for a violent movement needs the target to feel that his German identity, his professional identity, his local identity are all secondary to his religious one. Policy that confirms that hierarchy is not security policy. It is subsidy for radicalisation. Sen would not oppose prosecution or deportation. He would insist that every security measure be designed to preserve the plurality of identities among the population it touches, because that plurality is itself a counter-radicalisation instrument.
Ibn Khaldun is the coldest voice in the room. He is not arguing ethics. He is describing a historical regularity. Peripheral groups under sustained external pressure consolidate asabiyya, the internal solidarity that enables collective action. The Almoravids and Almohads began as marginalised communities; central-state pressure did not dissolve them. Germany's Muslim communities currently lack the political unity that would make them a coherent rival force. Categorical security policy, on his reading, is the most efficient way to supply that unity. He would add one point the others understate: the state also loses cohesion by pursuing this path, because it signals to all minority residents that civic membership is conditional.
3. Where the council agrees
The most surprising point of agreement is practical, not philosophical: all four members support individual-level prosecution and deportation. This is not a council defending open borders or opposing firm security responses. Schmidt, who refused to release terrorists under hostage conditions, establishes the frame. The disagreement is never about whether the state should act. It is about which instruments of action are constitutional and which are counterproductive.
The council also agrees that the failure of integration policy is real and not to be wished away. Schmidt named it in 2010. Sen's framework acknowledges that when plural identity is not cultivated institutionally, singular identity fills the gap. Arendt would add that integration into a political community requires that the community actually offer membership. Ibn Khaldun would say that a state which excludes residents from its asabiyya should not be surprised when they build their own.
Finally, all four agree that the speed of a security response matters less than its sustainability. Measures that produce short-term disruption of attack networks while generating long-term radicalisation pipelines are not net security gains. That is a point of genuine convergence, not diplomatic hedging.
4. Where the council splits
The real line is between Schmidt and the other three on the question of how far cultural-integration failure justifies harder institutional levers short of categorical suspicion. Schmidt accepts that liberal states can require more from immigrants: language acquisition, civic knowledge, demonstrated adherence to constitutional norms. He would consider conditioning residency renewal on these criteria. Arendt, Sen, and Ibn Khaldun, each from different angles, worry that any such conditional membership framework creates an administered category that expands under pressure. Schmidt's counter is that a constitutional state without enforceable membership criteria is not sustainable either. Neither side is wrong. One prioritises the state's right to set terms; the other prioritises the danger of what happens once terms become categories.
5. For a policymaker to decide on
The council cannot decide this: whether Germany should introduce conditional residency renewal tied to civic-integration benchmarks for non-citizen residents from high-risk profiles. The case for it is Schmidt's: a constitutional order must be able to enforce its own membership conditions. The case against it is Arendt's and Ibn Khaldun's combined: a conditional-membership instrument, once created, expands its scope and consolidates exactly the rival solidarity the state is trying to prevent. Both consequences are real. The value judgment is yours.