The image of the Jews in Hungarian public opinion

ABSTRACT

Nowhere has the debate about a ‘new antisemitism’ been as fierce and relevant as in France. In recent years this country has witnessed high recorded levels of antisemitism, prompting many commentators to claim the existence of an anti-sémitisme nouveau. Something has indeed changed, at least in terms of the nature, frequency and perpetrators of antisemitic violence in France. Previously connected exclusively to the extreme right, it has now also become associated with a group that is itself a victim of discrimination: ethnic minority youths living in the poor suburbs (banlieues). Peace first discusses and explains the statistics produced by the French watchdog on racism and antisemitism as well as the effects of the Middle East conflict. He then traces the debate on this ‘new antisemitism’ in the French context, contrasting the views of the label's promoters and opponents. He argues that, while antisemitism has undoubtedly evolved, the ‘new’ label is effectively erroneous as it fuses supposedly leftist and ‘Muslim’ antisemitism into one entity when they are not necessarily linked. In addition, he offers vital clarification of the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism along with suggestions for further research.     

In search of reliable results: Socialist values and political trust in unified Germany – A comment on Campbell's analyses and conclusions

In a recently published article in this journal, Ross Campbell argues that adherence to socialist values establishes a hitherto neglected factor when it comes to the explanation of differences in East and West German citizens’ political trust. As the results of his study indicate, adherence to socialist values impacts negatively on citizens’ political trust, this effect is more pronounced and more stable over time for East German as compared to West German citizens and is sufficiently strong to eliminate aggregate‐level differences in political trust between East and West Germany. However, this research note suggests that Campbell's article contains several substantial inconsistencies and obscurities that question the reliability and validity of the empirical findings presented. It provides a re‐analysis of Campbell's main arguments and shows to what extent his initial conclusions can be upheld after the shortcomings have been remedied. The results of this re‐analysis suggest that socialist values indeed exhibit a negative impact on German citizens’ political trust, which is relatively stronger for East as compared to West German citizens. However, contrary to Campbell's initial results, the negative effect of socialist values on political trust is robust over time for both East and West German citizens. What is more, there is no empirical evidence confirming that differences in adherence to socialist values between East and West German citizens are sufficiently strong to account for aggregate‐level differences in political trust. In light of these findings, two of Campbell's three main conclusions are dubious and call for further examination.     

Das institutionelle Erbe des „Treuhand-Regimes“ in Ostdeutschland: Zentralisierung oder Auflösung in der bundesstaatlichen Normalverfassung?

The unification of Germany in 1990 deeply affected the traditional structure and mechanisms of the former West German federal state. The grave and deeply rooted economic problems in East Germany as well as the strong position of the federal government and the relative weakness of the East German state governments during the economic transformation made it highly possible that a centralization within the federal state even beyond East Germany would occur. Empirical research on the privatisation agency ‘Treuhandanstalt’ and its successor organisations, which is presented in the article, demonstrates what development the relationship between the federal and the East German states has taken in this policy area since 1990. The article further analyses if the centralization thesis can be confirmed and what can generally be concluded about the essential characteristics of the current federal system.     

The decontamination of German history: Jürgen Habermas and the ‘Historikerstreit’ in West Germany

The ‘Historikerstreit’ in West Germany was opened by the non-historian Habermas who sought to expose what he saw as a ‘scandalous’ revision of aspects of the history of German fascism on the part of leading conservative historians like Nolte, Hillgruber and Stürmer. Habermas sees this revisionism in the wider context of the perceived need to foster a new German nationalism as a means of legitimation. The attempt to decontaminate German history would seem to derive from the need to resist the demands for political realignment in West Germany and to establish a strong pedigree of German anti-communism which takes in National Socialism and its membership of the Anti-Comintern Pact as well as West Germany's membership of NATO. Habermas's critique of conservative historians and the non-rational assumptions of their philosophy of history is essentially linked to his critique of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault and his identification of a common paralyzing influence on discourse.     

Gender as catalyst for violence against Roma in contemporary Italy

ABSTRACT

Silvio Berlusconi's use of ethnicity and immigration as national security issues in his successful campaign for election to the Italian presidency in 2008 was by no means unique in contemporary Europe. What was surprising was the speed of his right-wing government's legislative restriction of migrants in the form of the so-called ‘security package’, first introduced just five weeks after the election. Woodcock explores the striking fact that this ‘security package’, and the intense wave of racist violence by Italians against Roma that it legitimized and encouraged, was proposed and justified in response to media reports of Italian babies being stolen by ‘Zingari’ from the ‘nomad camps’ and of Italian women being raped and beaten by Romanian men of ‘Zingari’ ethnicity. Gender and ethnicity are the twin constitutive discourses of modern European society, and racialized subjects are necessarily gendered. The stereotype of ‘dangerous black men sexually threatening white women’ has been mobilized in a vast range of European and colonial nationalist projects in order to justify the policing of both racialized masculine subjects and women as objects of the patriarchy. Similarly, the depiction of women as hysterical, sexually vulnerable objects in need of (white) masculine protection is an old story that the Italian media recognize as a fairy tale even as they reproduce the discourse. Woodcock explores what has not been mentioned thus far, namely, that gender stereotypes are vital to the mobilization of violent racism against the Roma in contemporary Italy, and how conservative gender binaries are strengthened and policed in a time of social crisis through the stereotyping of Roma as racial threat.     

Die personalisierte Verhältniswahl unter den Bedingungen des gesamtdeutschen Parteiensystems. Eine Analyse der Entstehungsursachen von Überhangmandaten seit der Wiedervereinigung

Germany’s mixed-member proportional system, internationally known as the ‘German model’, has been recently criticized, since the 1994 Bundestag elections saw the genesis of several surplus mandates giving the CDU-FDP-government a safer majority in parliament. Due to this institutional effect, a lot of political scientists and lawyers have argued that the electoral system is no longer in conformity with the constitutional principle of electoral equality. From the perspective of empirical political analysis, two important aspects have not been taken into account in this debate. First, the complex relationship between different factors causing surplus mandates have not been analysed in a systematic-comparative manner. Second, the literature does not explain why so many surplus mandates have appeared in all national elections since 1990 whereas almost none were produced in Bundestag elections before the reunification. This study analyses the genesis of surplus mandates having appeared in the three German Bundestag elections since reunification (1990–1998). In contrast to monocausal explanations it confirms the hypothesis that in the present political context almost all surplus mandates result from complex relationships between generally known explanatory variables. Furthermore, the empirical analysis shows that the genesis of surplus mandates is not only caused by particularities of electoral districting in certain Bundesländer, but also by politico-structural differences between East and West Germany.     

Techno-cultural opportunities: the anti-immigration movement in the Finnish mediascape

ABSTRACT

Horsti's article analyses how transformations in the media environment shaped the political success of the anti-immigration movement in Finland from 2003 to 2013. The qualitative textual analysis of blogs and mainstream media debates that relate to racism and the national populist Finns Party demonstrates how changes in the mediascape in general and in new media technology in particular have provided opportunities for the emerging anti-immigration movement. These changes facilitated the earlier development of the Finns Party but the fragmentation of online space later hindered the internal coherence of the movement and its integration into the populist party political family. In order to regain unity, the Finns Party performed the public scapegoating of individuals for racist speech, thus distancing itself from racism. Horsti shows that, rather than being isolated and marginal, the anti-immigration movement and the ‘uncivil’ public sphere overlap with traditional politics and the mainstream media.     

Jews and coloureds in London's East End

In October 1981, Australia's Federal Commissioner for Community Relations said that the country's problem is ‘not blatant racism of the South African variety’ but ‘attitudinal discrimination’.     

Rebuilding public administration in the New German Länder: Transfer and differentiation

The rebuilding of public administration in the new German Länder can be described as a process of increasing differentiation. The new states share the common legacy of ‘democratic centralism’ and face similar reform challenges; but the analysis of the establishment of state administrations, local government reform and personnel policy reveals important differences amongst the states. West‐East institutional transfer plays a decisive role in creating effective institutions of governance in the East. However, it does not imply the imposition of a uniform West German ‘model'; rather, institutional transfer encourages administrative differentiation.     

Expected closeness and turnout: An empirical analysis for the German General Elections, 1983--1994

This paper investigates whether expected closeness had a significant impact on turnout in the different electoral districts of the German General Elections, 1983-1994. We find no closeness effect for the 1983 but a significant positive one for the 1987 election. The 1990 election revealed an asymmetry: In West Germany we find a positive and statistically significant closeness effect, in East Germany a negative but also significant one. This result is lacking a theoretical explanation so far. For 1994 we find a positive significant effect in West and a positive but not significant one in East Germany.     

Voters' party preferences in multiparty systems and their coalitional and spatial implications: Germany after unification

How should party preferences of voters in a multiparty system be measured, compared and aggregated? We use city block metric of distances between the pairwise comparisons of the five German parties (1995 survey data for West and East Germany). Neither in West nor in East Germany, a party gains the absolute majority of voters' preferences. We derive coalition preferences from the party rankings; the governing coalition of CDU/CSU and FDP is not the winner, compared with other feasible coalitions of the German party system. But the party rankings of the CDU/CSU-FDP coalition leaners are more homogeneous than other groups of coalition leaners. In the second part of the article, we analyze the common structure of all consistent party rankings. Do voters apply the same criteria to evaluate the political parties? Although only a slight majority of individual rankings fit the often used ideological left-right scale, there does not exist a competing one-dimensional order of the parties that would capture more voters. The joint scale of individual party rankings is interpreted as the collective order which facilitates political orientation of voters. This collective order is more pronounced in West than in East Germany where individuals are almost as consistent in their party rankings but where the rankings fit the collective order less well than in West Germany.

     

Tensions in Belgium

ABSTRACT

Musolff's study applies methods of cognitive metaphor analysis to Hitler's antisemitic imagery in Mein Kampf, especially to the conceptualization of the German nation as a (human) body that had to be cured from a deadly disease caused by Jewish parasites. The relevant expressions from the conceptual domains of biological and medical categories form a partly narrative, partly inferential-argumentative source ‘scenario’, which centred on a notion of blood poisoning that was understood in three ways: a) as a supposedly real act of blood defilement, i.e. rape; b) as a part of the source scenario of illness-cure; and c) as an allegorical element of an apocalyptic narrative of a devilish conspiracy against the ‘grand design of the creator’. The conceptual differences of source and target levels were thus short-circuited to form a belief-system that was no longer open to criticism. The results cast new light on central topics of Holocaust research, such as the debates between more ‘intentionalist’ and more ‘functionalist’ explanations of the origins of the Holocaust, and the question of how the Nazi metaphor system helped gradually to ‘initiate’ wider parts of the German populace into the implications of the illness-cure scenario as a blueprint for genocide. The Nazi antisemitic metaphor system thus provides a unique example of the cognitive forces that can be unleashed in the service of racist stigmatization and dehumanization.     

The role of East Timor's security institutions in national integration – and disintegration

Abstract

This article examines the interplay between security sector developments and national unity in East Timor since the Indonesian occupation ended in 1999. Particular attention is paid to the regional distinction between Loromonu and Lorosae – people from the west and east of East Timor, respectively. In 2006, East Timor experienced a crisis that saw the disintegration of the military and police forces, and widespread violence that led to massive internal displacement. It was during this crisis that the Loromonu–Lorosae distinction first emerged as a major societal cleavage. The article argues that the independence cause and the guerrilla force Falintil had been an important focus of East Timorese national unity in 1999. In the years that followed, however, the implementation of flawed security policies led to new military and police forces that were politicized, factionalized and lacking in cohesion. Prior to the 2006 crisis, the Loromonu–Lorosae distinction was primarily an issue within the army. As the crisis escalated, however, the violence was to a large extent framed by the east–west dimension, and popular perceptions of the military as ‘eastern’ and the police as ‘western’ hardened. A year after the crisis, little if any progress had been made towards reducing the increased salience of the Loromonu–Lorosae distinction in society. The main internal security challenges – gang activity, the unresolved issue of the so-called ‘petitioners’, and the destabilizing role played by fugitive former head of military police Alfredo Reinado – all had an east–west dimension. The article also finds that new initiatives aimed at reforming East Timor's military and police forces appeared to be lacking in both depth and relevance for addressing the country's new level of internal division, and its immediate, internal security challenges.     

The (im)plausibility of racism in Europe: policy frameworks on discrimination and integration

ABSTRACT

Rodríguez Maeso and Araújo analyse the reproduction of a dominant understanding of racism in policy discourses of integration and discrimination used by monitoring agencies in Portuguese and European Union (EU) institutional contexts. More specifically, they question the political concern over racism and discrimination vis-à-vis the idea of Europe ‘becoming increasingly diverse’ and the need to gather ‘evidence’ of discrimination. To that end, they examine periodic reports issued by EU monitoring agencies since the 1990s—paying specific attention to reporting on school segregation of Roma pupils in Portugal—and national integration policies and initiatives that, since the 2000s, have targeted mainly Roma and black families and youth. They argue that the dominant discourse of integration and cultural diversity conceives of racism as external to European political culture, and as a ‘factor’ of the ‘conflictive nature’ of social interactions in ethnoracially heterogeneous settings. This paves the way for calls for the ‘strengthening of social cohesion’—on the assumption that policy initiatives need to act on the ‘characteristics’ of so-called ‘vulnerable’ populations—whereas institutional arrangements and everyday practices remain unchallenged.     

Endogenous Development Dynamics of Multisectoral Network Management

ABSTRACT

Little is known about the effects of regime change on government workers’ job satisfaction. Conventional theories of work satisfaction have identified various individual or organizational antecedents of public employees’ well-being in many different contexts. In this study, we add an additional level of analysis to the study of job satisfaction. The German reunification in 1990 constitutes a natural experiment where public employees’ institutional work environment changed dramatically. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we show that, after the reunification, East German public employees who stayed in their jobs experienced a “satisfaction shock” by substantially decreasing their levels of job satisfaction. This finding is in line with what has been labelled as “survivor syndrome” in the general management literature. We also find that, after three years’ time, differences in satisfaction levels between East and West Germans reverted to pre-reunion levels. These findings are robust to various model specifications and alternative estimators. The theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.     

Framing PIGS: patterns of racism and neocolonialism in the Euro crisis

Van Vossole's article explores the racist framing of the peripheral member states of the European Union, the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland (and/or Italy), Greece and Spain). It demonstrates a strong connection between the processes of racialization and depoliticization, as well as the return of colonial dynamics in the Eurozone. Side-stepping political economy and history, the culturalization of politics perfectly complements the ‘post-political’ neoliberal hegemony. Political and media discourses reproduce it in both populist and corporate interests. The culturalization of politics reduces the differences between centre and periphery to certain ‘cultural characteristics and habits’, as reflected in stereotypes of laziness, non-productivity, corruption, wasteful spending and lying. These make it possible to blame the PIGS for the current crisis, legitimizing drastic austerity measures and a loss of sovereignty. The loss of sovereignty shows remarkable similarities with what Kwame Nkrumah defined as neocolonialism: the continuation of colonial power relations through processes of economic dependence, conditional aid and cultural hegemony. While this problematic only resurfaced during the recent Euro crisis, Van Vossole discusses how today's racist discourses and neocolonial politics have their roots in the past, particularly in anti-Irish and anti-Mediterranean racism and in the (semi-)colonial position of the PIGS in the British and Ottoman empires. Besides structural violence against the periphery, a major consequence of this racialization is that it jeopardizes any possibility of further democratic political integration on the basis of a common European identity.     

Cultural difference in the national state: from trouser-selling Jews to unbridled multiculturalism

ABSTRACT

Stoetzler explores a series of newspaper and journal articles published in Germany in 1879–81 that are part of what later came to be called the ‘Berlin Antisemitism Dispute’. In these articles, anti-Jewish remarks by the historian and right-wing liberal politician Heinrich von Treitschke were responded to by leading political and academic figures, including Theodor Mommsen, Moritz Lazarus and Ludwig Bamberger. Treitschke's texts have been seen as crucial to the development of modern antisemitism in Germany, but the debate that they provoked also points to some of the conceptual weaknesses of the liberal critique of antisemitism. Stoetzler suggests that both Treitschke's support for antisemitism and the ambivalence evident in the views of his opponents are rooted in the contradiction between inclusionary and exclusionary tendencies inherent in the nation-state. To the extent that liberal society constitutes itself in the form of a national state, it cannot but strive to guarantee, or produce, some degree of homogeneity or conformity in the form of a national culture that, in turn, cannot be separated from issues of morality and religion. Stoetzler argues that a discussion of the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute in its specific context of German nineteenth-century liberalism, if interpreted in the more general framework of modern liberal society, can contribute to current debates on nationalism, patriotism, ethnic minorities, immigration and ‘multicultural society’.     

The ‘Post-Holocaust Jew’ and the Instrumentalization of Philosemitism

Abstract

Altfelix attempts to examine and explain why xenophiles are politically prone to an ambivalent re-utilization of xenophobic images of the Other. In Germany both ‘the Jew’ and ‘the Ausländer’ have been instrumentalized xenophilically in their capacity as abstract notions by certain system actors and publics in a manner which appears to shed more light on the in-group than the Other. Xenophilia as a self-oriented, positive in-group evaluation may be identified as particularly evident in the post-war German political discourse on the Holocaust. In similar fashion to antisemitism, philosemitism represents an ‘allosemitic’ (Bauman) abstraction of ‘the Jew’, whose evocation is comparable to the idea of a ‘good foreigner’ as expressed in Ausländerfreundlichkeit (foreigner-friendliness). Xenophilia/philosemitism—like xenophobia/antisemitism—is dependent upon a relative opposition between ‘concretized Self’ and ‘abstracted Other’. Altfelix argues that this relationship emerges for two reasons. First, manifestations of xenophilia are generally preceded by bouts of xenophobia. Consequently, some publics may identify a need for creating a positive in-group focus. In this, the Other must not become too concrete for fear of distracting attention away from the xenophile's agenda. Second, the difference between Self and Other must be effectively maintained, since the xenophile's raison d'être depends upon it. Post-war German philosemitism appears to be a good exemplar for this definition of ‘xenophilia’. It demonstrates the dangers of moving within an allosemitic cycle in which difference becomes a method of keeping otherness at bay through abstraction. The fear of a misremembrance of the Holocaust resulting from an abstract memorialization seems to provide a very solid political basis for perpetuating a philosemitic identity construction of ‘the Jew’ as abstracted Other.     

Muslims in India

The Populist Party in the United States has close ties with many extremist, racist and antisemitic organizations, and shares with them a twisted ‘Christian’ ideology known as ‘Identity’.     

The Czech Islamophobic movement: beyond ‘populism’?

ABSTRACT

Sla?álek and Svobodová’s paper focuses on the ideology of the Czech Islamophobic movement as seen during the 2015–16 migration crisis. In their analysis of interviews with demonstrators and speeches by leaders of the movement, they discuss first how the movement imagined its enemies, and then describe its vision of positive core values. They conclude that the movement’s key ideological features are: an emphasis on social and civilizational decline (declinism); a return to an assumed naturalness in economic and gender relationships (naturalization); and the open evocation of violence and severity (brutalization). In terms of Rogers Brubacker’s distinction between xenophobic ethno-nationalism in Eastern Europe, and the xenophobic defence of liberal values in the West, Sla?álek and Svobodová find that the Czech case fits the allegedly western pattern better than the eastern one, which may cast doubt on the whole essentialization of distinctions between ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ populisms.