Debating Islam in Austria, Germany and Switzerland: Ethnic Citizenship, Church–State Relations and Right-Wing Populism

Abstract

This article explores public debates regarding Islam and Muslim immigration in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. The authors are interested in which issues dominate the debates, which actors participate, which positions are taken, and which arguments are mobilised. Exploring three countries with an ethnic model of citizenship allows them to control for important cultural factors and to focus on three other explanatory variables: the dominant model of political participation, the relationship between the state and church/Islam, and the strength of right-wing populism. To test their arguments, they rely on a new dataset based on content analyses of quality newspapers from 1998 to 2007 that enables them to go beyond existing studies, which concentrate on state activities or on mass-level attitudes. The authors demonstrate that above all the relationship between the state and church/Islam, i.e. issue-specific opportunity structures, influences the debates to a great extent.

Notes

1. Despite the fact that the German citizenship law has become much more liberal in the last years, all three countries can still be clearly distinguished from countries with a more liberal citizenship model such as France, Great Britain or the Netherlands (Koopmans et al. 2005: 73).

2. The data were collected as part of a larger project: ‘Political change in a globalising world: a comparative study of national and transnational campaigns’. This project was co-financed by the German Research Foundation (SFB 536, project C5) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (project 100012-111756), and directed by Edgar Grande (Munich) and Hanspeter Kriesi (Zurich).

3. Sources: Austria http://www.statistik.at/web_de/statistiken/bevoelkerung/volkszaehlungen/index.html; Switzerland http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/de/index/themen/01/05.html (accessed 12 December 2008).

4. Source: the federal government's response to a parliamentary inquiry; http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/14/045/1404530.pdf (accessed 12 December 2008).

5. Source: US Department of State, International Religious Freedom Report 2008 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

6. Source: Federal Office for Migration, http://www.bfm.admin.ch/bfm/de/home/themen/asyl/humanitaere_tradition.html (accessed 12 December 2008).

7. Questions C11 and C12 refer to terrorist attacks in general, but we assume that respondents in the three countries analysed equate the current threat of terrorism more or less exclusively with Islamist acts.

8. We deliberately disregard the situation in some French speaking cantons that follow a model of separation.

9. Other investigations have shown that the focus on one quality newspaper is a pragmatic and efficient solution (e.g. Koopmans et al. 2005: 261).

10. We used Factiva (http://global.factiva.com) for Die Presse and Süddeutsche Zeitung. In the case of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, we relied on CD-Roms for 1998–2006 and also on Factiva for 2007.

11. To systematically cover condensations of media attention, we did not select specific weekdays or take a random sample. In contrast, we ordered all articles chronologically and chose every ninth (Austria), twenty-first (Germany), and eleventh (Switzerland) to get a sufficient number of articles for each country.

12. Due to their different role in the three political systems, statements by the federal government were coded differently. If the actor of a core sentence is the government as a whole we duplicated the sentences in the Austrian and German case, but not in the Swiss one. The duplicated observations were then assigned to the two coalition parties.

13. In line with our first hypothesis, we look only at the effect of 9/11 on the overall salience of the debate and the specific issues raised. For the other aspects of the debates we had no specific expectations and did not find any particular patterns.

14. Above all mediated forms, such as interviews, belong into this category and they are, for example, more common in Die Presse and Süddeutsche Zeitung than in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

15. The figures do not include the statements on ‘terrorism/fundamentalism’ as they follow a rather different logic.

16. Due to the small number of cases (23 for Austrian and 36 for Swiss right-wing populist parties), these findings are very preliminary and in need of further empirical investigations.