WHY SWISS-GERMANS DISLIKE GERMANS

ABSTRACT

This paper considers two common assumptions that often arise in the empirical literature on xenophobia – namely that xenophobic attitudes are found mostly among the poorly educated, and that xenophobia mainly concerns immigrants from low social classes and from geographically and culturally disparate nations. These arguments will be discussed in the context of the migration of high-skilled Germans to Switzerland, a phenomenon that has increased markedly in the last few years, leading to major controversies. A survey conducted in the city of Zurich has shown that Germans are considered less likable than other Western Europeans. Over the course of our analyses, two arguments are tested. First, I consider whether the boundaries between culturally similar groups are actually less fragile than those occurring between more dissimilar groups. Following this line of reasoning, I consider whether Swiss-Germans perceive German immigration as a cultural threat. Second, I consider whether well-educated people in high positions or people who seek to improve their job positions may feel threatened by new arrivals who are similarly well-educated. This rationale corresponds to the classic argument that working class people are xenophobic out of a fear that immigrants will take their jobs. Ultimately, this study finds empirical support for both arguments.

Keywords:

• education
• employment status
• high-skilled migrants
• realistic individual threat
• symbolic group threat
• Switzerland
• xenophobia

Acknowledgements

I like to thank Jörg Stolz for providing the dataset, Pascal Sciarini and Elmar Schlüter for useful comments and Lisa Anders for her research assistance. This paper also benefited from fruitful (and sometimes emotionally laden) discussions with Charlotte Reinisch on Swiss-German/German relationships.

Notes

1. This is not a totally new phenomenon. In the second half of the nineteenth century and until the 1930s Germans made up the largest group of foreigners living in Switzerland (between 38 and 49 percent) (Hoffmann-Nowotny 1973: 43–5; see also Zimmer 2006: 109; Riaño and Wastl-Walter 2006: 1696–8).

2. This is not to imply that all immigrants from culturally distant countries are poorly educated and that all German immigrants are highly educated. However, as a matter of fact, engineers from India and waitresses from Germany have so far sparked less controversy than the groups discussed in this paper.

3. The survey was organized by the Institute of Sociology of the University of Zurich. Since the interviews were conducted face-to-face, the data collection took place over a relatively long period of six months. To my knowledge there was no event during that period that could have had an impact on attitudes towards Germans. The people were randomly chosen from the local residents’ registration office (Einwohnerkontrolle) and the response rate was 72 percent (see Stolz 2000: 336; 2001: 35).

There have also been other surveys that asked respondents how much they liked Germans and other groups of immigrants (Frei and Kerr 1974: 81; Frei et al. 1983: 47; Schläpfer et al. 1991: 148–50; Widmer and Buri 1992: 380–1; UNIVOX 2002). The problem of the older surveys is that data are not available. Moreover, they were not conceptualized for the study of attitudes towards immigrants, and included many other topics instead – excluding questions that would have been necessary for our analyses. The more recent UNIVOX 2002 survey also lacks some crucial questions. However, I was able to test the impact of some of my variables (education and job position) and came to the same conclusions evidenced in the Table. Although attitudes towards Germans have been measured at different points in time, it is not possible to show a trend over time. As all surveys included different samples, and formulated relevant questions in different ways, it would be too dangerous to directly compare the relative numbers of people that expressed negative feelings towards Germans. In all surveys, it did appear that Germans are far more disliked than other Western nationalities. In 2002 Portuguese were more disliked than Germans.

4. The response categories were ‘very likable’, ‘rather likable’, ‘not sure’, ‘not very likable’ and ‘not at all likable’.

⁵. Kriesi et al. (1996: 61–2) found that the Swiss French and Italians feel rather close to the French and Italians respectively, whereas this is not the case for Swiss-Germans and Germans (for a similar result see Widmer and Buri 1992: 380–1).

⁶. For those not familiar with the ‘language-situation’ regarding Swiss- and High German, some clarifications are necessary: Germans (and especially the well-educated that migrate to Switzerland) speak what is commonly called ‘High German’ that is very close to the written German. Swiss-Germans, however (even the well-educated), speak a strong German dialect and High German only in formal situations (lecturers at the university, for example) or when non-native speakers like Swiss-French are present (see Schläpfer et al. 1991; Lüdi 2008).

7. I have also run a liner regression analysis and obtained the same results.

8. The question on job improvement has only been asked to the persons who had a job at the time of the interview (N = 1,024, 77 percent of the entire sample). See also Table A1 in the Appendix.