The Strength of Far-Right AfD in Eastern Germany: The East-West Divide and the Multiple Causes behind ‘Populism’

This article sheds light on one of the key developments in recent German politics and relates it to the broader debate on the electoral success of the far right. The rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany) is also a story about Germany’s internal political divide three decades after reunification, as the party has roughly twice as much support in the east than in the west. The article analyses the country’s east-west divide, strongly visible in widespread sentiments of societal marginalisation among eastern Germans. The key socio-structural differences between the east and the west relate to matters of economics, migration, and representation—and provide a setting suitable to AfD strength in the east. In explaining the party’s electoral success in eastern Germany, the article echoes recent scholarship which rejects narrow explanations for the strength of ‘populism’, and instead highlights its multiple causes.     

Europeanisation and social movements: The case of the Stop TTIP campaign

Over the past years, the economic crisis has significantly challenged the ways through which social movements have conceptualised and interacted with European Union institutions and policies. Although valuable research on the Europeanisation of movements has already been conducted, finding moderate numbers of Europeanised protests and actors, more recent studies on the subject have been limited to austerity measures and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has been investigated more from a trade unions’ or an international relations perspective. In this article, the TTIP is used as a very promising case study to analyse social movements’ Europeanisation – that is, their capacity to mobilise referring to European issues, targets and identities. Furthermore, the TTIP is a crucial test case because it concerns a policy area (foreign trade) which falls under the exclusive competence of the EU. In addition, political opportunities for civil society actors are ‘closed’ in that negotiations are kept ‘secret’ and discussed mainly within the European Council, and it is difficult to mobilise a large public on such a technical issue. So why and how has this movement become ‘Europeanised’? This comparative study tests the Europeanisation hypothesis with a protest event analysis on anti‐TTIP mobilisation in six European countries (Italy, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Austria) at the EU level in the period 2014–2016 (for a total of 784 events) and uses semi‐structured interviews in Brussels with key representatives of the movement and policy makers. The findings show that there is strong adaptation of social movements to multilevel governance – with the growing presence of not only purely European actors, but also European targets, mobilisations and transnational movement networks – with a ‘differential Europeanisation’. Not only do the paths of Europeanisation vary from country to country (and type of actor), but they are also influenced by the interplay between the political opportunities at the EU and domestic levels.     

The Rise of the Far Right in Debtor and Creditor European Countries: The Case of European Parliament Elections

While the 2014 European Parliament elections were marked by the rise of parties on the far right‐wing, the different patterns of support that we observe across Europe and across time are not directly related to the economic crisis. Indeed, economic hardship seems neither sufficient nor necessary for the rise of such parties to occur. Using the cross‐national results for the 2004, 2009 and 2014 EP elections in order to capture time and country variations, we posit that the economy affects the rise of far right‐wing parties in more complex ways. Specifically, we compare the experience of high‐debt countries (the ‘debtors’) and the others (the ‘creditors’) and explore the relationship between far right‐wing party success on the one hand, and unemployment, inequality, immigration, globalisation and the welfare state on the other. Our discussion suggests there might be a trade‐off between budgetary stability and far right‐wing party support, but the choice between Charybdis and Scylla may be avoided if policy‐makers carefully choose which policies should bear the brunt of the fiscal adjustment.     

Managerial Ambivalence and Electronic Civic Engagement: The Role of Public Manager Beliefs and Perceived Needs

This article addresses an important yet often neglected component of electronic civic engagement efforts: managerial ambivalence about public participation. We examine how managers’ beliefs about public participation and their perceived needs for participation in agency decision making work together to shape electronic engagement efforts. Based on observational data collected in 2010 and 2014 and data from a 2014 survey of managers in 500 U.S. municipal governments, we find that managerial beliefs about participation and their perceived needs for participation are two valid and separate constructs. There is a positive relationship between managerial beliefs and electronic engagement. Perceived needs for participation interact with managers’ beliefs to affect electronic civic engagement. A high level of perceived needs for participation reinforces the effect of managerial beliefs on electronic engagement efforts, but a low level does not offset the effect of managerial beliefs on electronic engagement.     

The psychological roots of populist voting: Evidence from the United States,the Netherlands and Germany

What are the psychological roots of support for populist parties or outfits such as the Tea Party, the Dutch Party for Freedom or Germany's Left Party? Populist parties have as a common denominator that they employ an anti‐establishment message, which they combine with some ‘host’ ideology. Building on the congruency model of political preference, it is to be expected that a voter's personality should match with the message and position of his or her party. This article theorises that a low score on the personality trait Agreeableness matches the anti‐establishment message and should predict voting for populist parties. Evidence is found for this hypothesis in the United States, the Netherlands and Germany. The relationship between low Agreeableness and voting for populist parties is robust, controlling for other personality traits, authoritarianism, sociodemographic characteristics and ideology. Thus, explanations of the success of populism should take personality traits into account.     

The Politics of Postcapitalism: Labour and our Digital Futures

This article introduces the special issue on the politics of postcapitalism. Considering the theoretical foundations, empirical perspectives and political ramifications of claims made about a coming ‘post-work’ or ‘postcapitalist’ society, it maps existing debates through a discussion of two key recent texts, Paul Mason’s Clear Bright Future and Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism. It first surveys how the relationship between labour market trends, technological change and wider political-economic shifts is articulated in the postcapitalist literature. It then explores how concepts from Marx are deployed to depict social relations as a constraint on technological development and its utopian potentialities, leading to political demands for new class actors and electoral blocs centring on the new forms of economic and political activity associated with digital networks. It also considers the role of the state and how this theoretical and political approach envisions historical change, situating utopian visions of an incipient postcapitalist alternative to capitalism within the contemporary political context of authoritarian populism and challenges to liberal democracy. Finally, it explores the continuing relevance of humanism as a critical counterpoint to the social and philosophical agenda of present day ‘posthumanism’. It concludes that, in unfavourable political conditions, it would be strategically unwise to stake too much on an over-optimistic approach to the unfolding future. This outlook, it is suggested, carries considerable risks and consequences for a contemporary left in search of a viable electoral coalition and route back to power.     

Islamism,secularization, secularity: the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as a phenomenon of a secular age

The paper outlines parallels between the processes of secularization and secularity in the West, as interpreted by José Casanova and Charles Taylor, and Islamism as a modern social and political phenomenon. It focuses on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s history and ideas and specifically on a number of public documents detailing its social and political vision. I argue that if we define ‘secularization’ not only as the weakening of religious belief, but as the institutional differentiation of modern state structures and the marginalization of religion, and ‘secularity’ as the process whereby faith becomes one option among others and religion becomes an identifiable set of beliefs seen as guidelines for reform, the Brotherhood, similarly to other Islamist entities, is a phenomenon of a ‘secular age’.     

The Stein Rokkan Lecture 2016 Mission impossible? Reconciling economic and social Europe after the euro crisis and Brexit

During the crisis, the European Union's ‘social deficit’ has triggered an increasing politicisation of redistributive issues within supranational, transnational and national arenas. Various lines of conflict have taken shape, revolving around who questions (who are ‘we’? – i.e., issues of identity and inclusion/exclusion); what questions (how much redistribution within and across the ‘we’ collectivities) and who decides questions (the locus of authority that can produce and guarantee organised solidarity). The key challenge facing today's political leaders is how to ‘glue’ the Union together as a recogniseable and functioning polity. This requires a double rebalancing: between the logic of ‘opening’ and the logic of ‘closure’, on the one hand, and between the logic of ‘economic stability’ and ‘social solidarity’, on the other. Building on the work of Stein Rokkan and Max Weber, this article argues that reconciliation is possible, but only if carefully crafted through an extraordinary mobilisation of political and intellectual resources. A key ingredient should be the establishment of a European Social Union, capable of combining domestic and pan‐European solidarities. In this way, the EU could visibly and tangibly extend its policy menu from regulation to (limited, but effective) distribution, reaping the latter's benefits in terms of legitimacy. The journey on this road is difficult but, pace Rokkan, not entirely impervious.     

Gender,HipHop and Pop-Islam: the urban identities of Muslim youth in Germany

While many opponents construe the growing presence of Muslim headscarves in Germany as evidence of creeping Islamicization, religious activism can also be interpreted as an attempt on the part of migrant offspring to forge positive ‘hyphenated identities’, rooted in urban culture, material consumption, and specific mosque communities. Islam has become ‘young, chic and cool’ among ethnic minorities, often denied citizenship and opportunity in their country of birth owing to jus sanguinis and/or other complex naturalization requirements. Religiosity, in turn, is slowly giving rise to new types of civic engagement, leading more ethnic youth to pursue German citizenship. Drawing on representative surveys, inter alia, this essay argues that while not problem free, an emerging Pop-Islam movement has provided Muslimas especially with an important platform for breaking with traditional gender roles, building social capital and acquiring the participatory skills necessary to bring ‘civil society’ into their own communities. It moreover infers that national policies banning headscarves in public service professions are increasingly at odds with European Union directives addressing gender equality and religious discrimination.     

Kenneth B. Clark and the problem of power

ABSTRACT

During the early 1960s African American psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, known primarily for his involvement in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court desegregation decision, began organizing an ambitious anti-poverty programme called Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Inc. (HARYOU). Dissatisfied by the lack of progress in school desegregation in New York City and discouraged by the inability of traditional social welfare organizations to address the problems of race and poverty, Clark argued that a new approach had to be developed to mobilize the black poor to gain the political and economic power that would solve their problems. At the same time, he theorized that a new form of racial segregation was beginning to develop in urban areas that foreshadowed increasing social isolation, economic dependence and declining municipal services for many African Americans. He called this new development ‘internal colonialism’ and hoped that HARYOU would be a demonstration project in the Kennedy–Johnson administration's War on Poverty that would address these problems from multiple perspectives. Nonetheless, the plan aroused the political opposition of Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. The dispute with Powell drove Clark from HARYOU and caused him to re-evaluate his thinking regarding African American leadership. He increasingly viewed the ‘ghetto’ as both a prison and a cocoon that satisfied white and black social, economic, political and psychological needs. By the end of his HARYOU experience, Clark coined the term ‘the new American dilemma’ to describe and theorize about an increasingly isolated and powerless black population in many urban centres. The term also signified his belief that the problem of power was intricately tied up in, while also separate from, the problem of race.     

Explaining the electoral success of the new right: The German case

Immigrants are blamed for economic and social problems throughout Europe. This article explores the theoretical argument that electorates support new right parties because they are placing more emphasis on specific issues like immigration. The findings provide evidence that immigration explains much of the electoral support for the new right parties in Germany. Areas with larger immigrant populations provide fewer votes, while areas where immigrants ‘commit more crime’ provide greater support. This suggests the problems associated with immigration explain the new right's support, rather than simple xenophobia. As long as such problems continue, the potential for new right success will remain.     

Race,Islamophobia and the politics of citizenship in post-unification Germany

ABSTRACT

In the immediate aftermath of German reunification, as in the wake of the recent humanitarian crisis, Germany experienced notable ‘peaks’ of racist agitation and violence. In the 1990s, as today, the post-Communist eastern regions of Germany tend to be perceived as the hub of such racism. In this article, Lewicki revisits both ‘peaks’ via an examination of numerical evidence for verbal and physical racist violence in the former East and West of Germany. Rather than conceiving of racism as ‘cyclical’ or a specific legacy of the Communist dictatorship, her analysis suggests that political projects in Germany’s past and present have retained distinct structural incarnations of race. Far-right activists could thus successfully channel animosities resulting from the terms of unification into nationalist and racist resentment: momentarily more so in the East, but increasingly also in the West. The politics of citizenship, Lewicki argues, has provided a key means of perpetuating, reaffirming and cementing racialized hierarchies in the two post-war German states, but also in reunified Germany.     

Not life but the world is at stake: Hannah Arendt on citizenship in the age of the social

This article evaluates Hannah Arendt's contribution to ‘thinking citizenship’ in light of her controversial account of the modern rise of ‘the social’. It argues that Arendt's writing on the social is best understood not primarily as analytical and normative but as an historical argument about the effect of capitalism and modern state administration on meaningful citizenship. This short piece analyses one important element of Arendt's story about the historical rise of the social: that it is a peculiar hybrid of polis and oikos, a scaled-up form of housekeeping, and its threat to the public, political world.     

Downbound spiral? Economic grievances,perceived social protection and political distrust

Abstract

Momentous events in Western democracies have brought renewed attention to how various aspects of government-controlled policy outputs and outcomes affect citizens’ trust in politics. Unlike most previous research, this study uses individual-level panel data to test the link between government performance evaluations and political trust. Moreover, it gauges performance in more policy areas than previous research, including key aspects of government-controlled social services as well as a wide range of economic risks. The study finds that evaluations of government performance affect political trust but that the evidence is stronger for evaluations of social protection than for economic risks. Crucially, the analysis suggests that the relationship between performance evaluations and distrust is reciprocal. The relationship may be described as a ‘downbound spiral’ where dissatisfied groups develop distrust, which in turn makes for a more pessimistic interpretation of economic risks and welfare state performance.     

From permanent employment to massive lay-offs: the political economy of ‘transitional unemployment’ in urban China (1993–8)

Abstract

The idea that economic activities may be described and studied as ‘embedded’ in social relations has been central to much debate in recent economic sociology. The present paper analyses legal struggles over the status of begging in US law and argues that conflicting rhetorical accounts of begging illustrate social actors’ efforts to articulate the interconnectedness of their social world, including the ways in which economic practices are embedded in their social and institutional contexts. The paper thus suggests that embeddedness is not just something identified by social researchers, but also a problem faced by social actors as they try to understand the socio-economic order in which they live and act. By arguing for or against the claim that begging is simultaneously an economic action and the exercise of the right to freedom of expression, the voices in this debate attempted to affect the future of this marginal economic activity.     

‘The clash of races’ and ‘the Jewish intelligence’: a specifically French form of social antisemitism

The phenomenon of ‘social antisemitism’ is well known. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, an idiosyncratic variant had emerged in France. Where, elsewhere, social antisemitism tended to be ingrained and unthinking, this French variant was (typically) more theoretical, and its practitioners tended to be among the most prominent authors and thinkers. It stressed the essential cultural differences between the ‘French’ and the ‘Israelites’, and the ‘separateness’ of the Jews within France, and also developed a series of facile generalizations about the essentially inferior nature of the Jewish intellect. Griffiths examines this phenomenon, both for its characteristics and for its widespread existence in French intellectual circles, by taking a specific subject: the reception of Lacretelle’s 1922 novel Silbermann. A wide range of writers and critics—a number of whom had in other circumstances a reputation for liberal values and attitudes, and had been among those who had deplored the excesses of the antisemitic mob during the Dreyfus affair—are found to echo the views put forward by Lacretelle in that novel, and even to elaborate on them. Many of these writers were to adopt a completely different attitude towards the Jews after the Second World War; when the position of the Jews was fully realized, their earlier ‘social antisemitism’ proved less powerful than their human sympathies. But this is not to devalue the importance of the danger posed by social antisemitism, which could provide the basis for far more virulent forms of racism to flourish.     

The great transformation and progressive possibilities: the political limits of Polanyi's Marxian history of economic ideas

Abstract

Polanyi's The great transformation remains one of the stand-out texts of twentieth-century political economy, yet it contains important conceptual ambiguities. Perhaps most significantly, the later chapters reveal the influence of Polanyi's own notion of an ‘always embedded economy’, whereas the earlier chapters are constructed around a much more abstract notion of ‘economy’ derived from an essentially Marxian history of economic ideas. Marx worked within the basic Ricardian conception of economy as a method of immanent critique, but then proceeded also to project that same conception backwards onto pre-Ricardian traditions of economics. Polanyi did likewise, I argue, consequently missing the opportunity to connect his own ideas about the non-market influences on all market outcomes to pre-Ricardian studies of the substantive basis of functioning economic relations. I use the following pages to try to restore one such link, in this instance to Adam Smith's account of the moral ‘sympathy’ underpinning the process of market co-ordination. This reconstruction also has implications for progressive possibilities today. Polanyian responses to the ongoing crisis have tended to be framed by the basic Ricardian conception of economy and have accordingly been restricted to a discussion of more market or less, more social protection or less, more austerity or less. By contrast, tracing the lineage from pre-Ricardian concerns to Polanyi's notion of an always embedded economy allows the potentially much more radical question to be asked of what sort of economic relations today best serve essential human needs.     

Political party and party system institutionalization in Southeast Asia: lessons for democratic consolidation in Indonesia,the Philippines and Thailand

Abstract

This article analyses the Kim Dae-jung government's industrial realignment (‘Big Deals’) policy in post-crisis Korea, which offers a valuable insight into the state's role in managing the transition from a developmental state to a free-market economy and into the changing nature of government–business relations. Although Kim was committed to creating a free-market economy in Korea, as the ‘Big Deals’ got under way critics accused him of violating market principles and employing tactics of intervention and coercion used by previous authoritarian regimes. The ‘Big Deals’ experience suggests a further stage in the evolution of the Korean developmental state; the dismantling of state powers and the implementation of neoliberal reforms in the 1990s had led to the emergence of a ‘transformative state’ in which the state acted as ‘senior partner’ rather than ‘commander-in-chief’. The transitional state charged with the task of rebuilding the economy after 1997 regained some of its lost powers and used some familiar methods of achieving its ends. However, it also demonstrated by the nature and scope of its interventions that it was gradually evolving and adapting to meet the changing economic environment. Although Kim's actions prompted allegations from the chaebol and their conservative allies of a return to autocratic economic management by the government, it was clear that the developmental state had not been resurrected. Rather, these criticisms serve to highlight the continuing antagonism in the state–business relationship; neither side had developed new strategies for dealing with each other and their relations were still characterized by mutual mistrust and staunch chaebol resistance to key reforms demanded by the government. Although suspicions of a permanent return to extensive state intervention were unfounded, they nevertheless diminished the prospects for the creation of a cooperative relationship between the state and big business that would be a crucial factor in revitalizing the Korean economy.     

Rhetoric and the recovery of civil society

By privileging the search for an overall order, both in its theorizing and in its aim, modern social theory has paid insufficient attention to the ‘zones’ of activity in between established institutions-called here the realm of civil society. This is an important neglect. For although the activity in such zones appears essentially disorderly, it permits many local and momentary orderings. Indeed, if one can speak of the ‘common sense’ of a social group at all, then it consists not only: 1) in the argumentative contesting of a whole range of not-as-yet wholly formulated visions of future ways of ‘going on’, but also in: 2) the provision of the historically developed socio-ontological resources required for their realization. Civil society thus contains the ‘seeds’ of future possibilities. Taking activity in this realm seriously means that our current task in social studies, is not the scientific one of discoveringan already existing order, but that of enabling the reinstitution of what, traditionally, was the task of rhetoric: to explicate, in a non-eliminative form of competition involving rival formulations, the implications of different accounts of the nature of our social lives together.     

Biometrics and anthropometrics: the twins of Turkish modernity

ABSTRACT

In the first half of the twentieth century, eugenic debates and policies revolved around positive (encouraging the reproduction of ‘superior’ individuals) and negative (preventing the reproduction of ‘inferior’ individuals) applications for the purpose of improving hereditary characteristics and preventing social problems. However, their particular manifestations varied because eugenic agendas responded differently to putative social problems in different local contexts. Despite the wealth of scholarly studies on eugenics, particularly in Germany and the United States, eugenic debates in Turkey have so far not received any attention. The significance of eugenics in the Turkish context stems from its conflation with republican modernization efforts. While Turkish republican reformers were diligently searching for anthropometric proof of the whiteness, Europeanness and ancientness of Turks, they also supported biometric scholarship that proposed eugenic measures to protect and improve recently ‘discovered’ historical essences. At a time when western eugenicists were classifying non-western peoples as inferior, Turkish reformers creatively adopted the methods and vocabulary of race science to establish the Turks’ innate ability to modernize. In order to demonstrate the wide appeal of eugenics in the Turkish context, Ergin presents findings from a content analysis of educational conferences organized by the government between 1938 and 1941, and argues that the future-oriented project of biometrics was as important as the past-oriented project of anthropometrics for the formulation of Turkishness in negotiation with race and modernity.