The east is just like the west, only more so: Islamophobia and populism in Eastern Germany and the East of the European Union

ABSTRACT

Islamophobia in Eastern Germany and in East Central Europe has very similar characteristics to Islamophobia in Western Europe and the USA. The difference, of degree rather than kind, is in the success of Islamophobia as a political instrument. This is somewhat more pronounced in the East of Germany and of the European Union as a whole. It is a mistake to attribute this difference mainly to the alleged authoritarian heritage of ‘Eastern Europe’. Much of the postsocialist public as a whole has characteristics similar to specific populations in the West who have been shown to be particularly prone to Islamophobic populism. These include precariously employed white working and lower-middle-class workers and rural residents. What East and West have in common is that they have both felt the negative impact of neoliberal policies, which have weakened social safety nets and made jobs more precarious. That impact was stronger in the postsocialist East, including eastern Germany, and that goes a long way towards explaining the greater degree of Islamophobia there.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamophobia
• Germany
• Visegrád Alliance
• East Germany
• neoliberalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘The Jews are just like everyone else, only more so.’ The saying is frequently attributed to Heinrich Heine, among others.

2. The fieldwork is being conducted under the terms of my research grant, ‘Islamophobia in the East of the European Union,’ funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I gratefully acknowledge this assistance.

3. When subjects were asked if they agreed with the statement, ‘The many Muslims here sometimes make me feel like I’m a stranger in my own land’, the number of Eastern and Western responses in the affirmative was roughly equal. However, this may be explained partly by the fact that compared to the West, there are fewer Muslims in the East.

4. For an assessment and a map based on official election data, see Kirby (2017).

5. Alexander Yendell (2019) reviews this explanation and some of the relevant literature.

6. The term seems to have been first used by Zakaria (1997). However, it gradually gained wide currency after Orbán used it in his policy speech at Băile Tușnad in an ethnically largely Hungarian part of Romania in 2014 (Budapest Beacon 2014).

7. For one important study of one aspect of this phenomenon, see Gordon (2010).

8. A mid-level executive of Royal Dutch Shell, a British citizen, described to me in the late 1990s the company’s interaction with ‘bribe brokers’ in the Czech Republic.

9. The Czech president, Andrej Babiš, combines in his own person the roles of political leader and major businessman. He has been notoriously accused of misusing EU funds (Reuters 2018).

10. For a discussion of some of the relevant research data, see Kalmar (2018).

11. See (Kalmar 2012, 12) and Lewicki and Shooman, in this special issue.

12. They are the local representatives of a Europe-wide mobile elite called ‘Eurostars’ by (Favell 2008).

13. The Slovak version is slniečkari. See Havran (2019).

14. This phenomenon goes back to at least the nineteen-nineteens (Charron 2011).

15. Among the many cogent arguments the authors raise against oversimplifying the role of the working class among Trump voters, they also note that large numbers of working-class people abstained from voting.

16. Walley’s article appears in a special issue of The American Ethnologist (Edwards, Haugerud, and Parikh 2017) that also provides insight into parallels between the election of Donald Trump in 2016 in America, and the victory of the ‘yes’ side in the ‘Brexit’ referendum during the same year in the United Kingdom.

17. This is so even though the precise rhetorical content varies from country to country. In Poland (Pęziwiatr 2018) or Slovakia, hostility to Muslims may be expressed in terms of allegiance to the Catholic Church. In Hungary, the Protestant prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who has strong sympathies for evangelical Christianity, pushes a strongly gendered rhetoric of ‘family values’, aiming to induce women to have more children in order to obviate the need for non-Christian immigrants (Witte 2019). In Eastern Germany and the Czech Republic, which are among the most atheistic areas of the world, ‘Christian values’ is even more brazenly a term of euphemism for white supremacism, pure and simple.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Insight Grant to the author from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.