Islamophobia is said to be stronger in the East than in the West, both in Germany and in the European Union as a whole. Is this true? Yes, but only with qualifications. On some counts, there is no difference. On others, most of the East is more Islamophobic than much of but not all of the West (again, both within Germany and within the European Union). On a few, all of the East is more Islamophobic than all of the West. Always, the difference is relatively small. The greatest difference is in the degree of political success that Islamophobic rhetoric and/or practices have had. In eastern Germany, Islamophobic organizations have more political support than in the West. In the eastern EU, not only the governments but even most of the opposition reject Islam and Muslims as incompatible with their country’s national character and with the civilizational character of Europe. In the West, the situation is better, but the governments of Austria and Italy, or of a German federal state like Bavaria, seem to be moving ever closer to the positions and practices of an eastern EU member like Hungary. And even within the mainstream parties in the West of Europe, as in America, Islamophobic voices and sometimes policies are far from universally contested.
We are dealing with a difference in degree, not kind. If the contrast between East and West were categorical, then it might make sense to explain it, as many do, as a consequence of a cultural predisposition, of some kind of East European character essence operating in the postsocialist regions of the European Union. I argue against such a culturalist explanation. In my view, the differences – small but significant – are better understood in relation to the postsocialist region’s relations to the West than by its history, culture, and political persuasions taken in isolation. Relations between East and West in the European Union are impacted by the very same economic and political forces that have encouraged Islamophobia and populism globally, meaning also in the West. The situation may be summed up by adapting a classic aphorism about the relationship between Jews and others.1 In this paper, I propose that ‘The East is just like the West, only more so.’ And I explore the extent to which the aphorism applies to Islamophobia (and its populist and ethno-nationalist context), equally in the postsocialist East of Germany and in the postsocialist East of the European Union. For one of my objectives is to demonstrate the methodological value of studying the East-West difference in Germany in the broader context of postsocialism in the European Union as whole.
The proposition, that the East is just like the West only more so, is an aphorism, rather than a hypothesis. One solid counterexample invalidates a hypothesis, but not an aphorism. Islamophobia, populism, and ethno-nationalism form a highly overdetermined complex with a multilayered genealogy and material etiology, for which it is impossible to find a single cause or even just a few related causes. An aphorism usually sheds light on only one aspect of the whole truth, but its value is that it also helps to illuminate the rest. It is, obviously, not literally true that Islamophobia and populism in the East are just like in the West. There are many differences, some of which I explore below. My goal is not to prove that there are no dissimilarities, but to highlight the similarities, in the hope that understanding these will also help with understanding the differences. The same goes for the similarities and differences between the East of Germany and the East of the European Union.
What I mean by the ‘East of the European Union’ is the postsocialist area of East Central Europe. I focus on the so-called Visegrád Four: Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, as well as the former German Democratic Republic. I do not mean ‘Eastern Europe,’ which would include non-EU members such as Russia and Ukraine. The political context and the use of Islamophobia are quite different in Russia, an influential outsider that is widely suspected of fomenting Islamophobia and ethno-nationalism in the East as much as the West of the EU (Conley et al. 2016). The parts of ‘Eastern Europe’ that may well resemble the portrait painted here of eastern Germany and the Visegrád countries are the EU members in the Balkans, as well as Croatia and Slovenia. However, I am limiting my scope to the Visegrád Four and eastern Germany because of their geographic proximity and singularly intertwined history. At times I will use ‘East Central Europe’ as a shorthand for this area.
My data come from the relevant literature, academic and, with caution, journalistic. Quality journalistic literature must be included not only because of its facts and insights but also because of the bewildering speed of change in the circumstances examined here. Journalists are able to publish much faster than academics. The perspective on Islamophobia in the East of the European Union that I develop here is also influenced by early data from fieldwork.2 Our research team is conducting semi-structured interviews with participants in each of the four countries of the Visegrád Alliance. The results of this ongoing large-scale research project will need to be reported elsewhere, but some brief references to it are included in this paper.
Overall, the data hardly reveal any major differences in the form of Islamophobia. Everywhere, Islamophobic rhetoric includes accusations against Muslim men of terrorism, of sexual violence, of repressing women, of lacking democratic values, and of misusing social services, among others. Islamophobes say that Muslim women are forced to wear their burkas and niqab by their men, and require liberation by the more progressive West, or, alternatively that they wear their distinctive garb as a defiant gesture against ‘integration.’ There is no difference between East and West in the nature of such accusations. The difference is only one of the degree: the degree of uptake of this uniform prejudice, and the degree and kind of its political instrumentalization.
Those are greater in the East than in the West: not overwhelmingly but still significantly so. This is, at least on the face of it, a fact. People in the East of the European Union are more Islamophobic than people in the West. Of the many quantitative studies on the subject, one might choose the Pew Research Center’s 2016 study, summed up in Table 1.
Table 1. Percentage of Europeans who have an unfavourable view of Muslims and Jews (Spring, 2016). Source: Pew Research Center (Wike, Stokes, and Simmons 2016). *The Czech statistics are by the Czech Centre for the Study of Public Opinion (2017), and compared ‘Jews’ and ‘Arabs’ (not ‘Muslims’). | Unfavorable view of | Czech* | Italy | Poland | Hung. | Greece | Spain | Netherl. | France | Germ. | UK |
| Jews | 17% | 55% | 55% | 24% | 24% | 21% | 16% | 10% | 5% | 7% |
| Muslims | 75% | 69% | 66% | 66% | 65% | 50% | 43% | 29% | 29% | 28% |
In Germany, East Germans are similarly more intolerant and populist than West Germans. For example, the ‘Leipzig Authoritarianism Study’ of 2018 found that 50.7% of East Germans believed that Muslim should be forbidden to immigrate to Germany, compared to 42.2% of West Germans. This hardly justifies thinking that Islamophobia is something peculiar to the West, especially since when compared to 2016 these percentages represent a decrease in the East but an increase in the West (Decker et al. 2018, 102).3 Yet there is a difference in attitudes, and this is reflected in a difference in political behavior.
The greater political instrumentalization of Islamophobia in the East of Germany can be gauged by the popularity of the grassroots organization, PEGIDA, and of the populist and openly Islamophobic political party, AfD or ‘Alternative for Germany.’ In the decisive second round of the 2017 federal election, the AfD, originally a western creation, has been much more successful in the East than in the West.4
Many analysts try to find the reason for this East-West imbalance in the distinctive character of eastern Germany and of eastern Europe. This is an explanation that I reject. It is true that Islamophobia and populism are greater in the East of both the EU and of Germany. But the main reason for this is that certain global factors that have also affected the West have been particularly strong in the postsocialist East. The West is as much a player in this story as the East.
I would like to illustrate this point with a survey of two sets of explanations – wrong explanations, in my view – for Islamophobia that essentialize the East in isolation from the West. My aim is to show that looking at the East alone will reveal some interesting facts, but at the same time obscure their causes and context. I will then follow this with a discussion of analytical frameworks that examine the situation in the East in the light of global influences that mostly originate from, and also affect, the West.
The first example of an explanation that looks at the East in isolation is one that focuses on the low number of Muslims in the area: ‘Islamophobia without Muslims.’ The second example is based on the assertion that East-Central Europe (including eastern Germany and, really, ‘Eastern Europe as a whole) is an underdeveloped area. I call this explanation ‘arrested development.’
