Ethnicity and Racism in Cyprus

National Pride and Prejudice?

P. Stevens

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137411020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137411037
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Investigating the relationship between ethnic pride and prejudice in the divided community of Cyprus, this book focuses on the ethnic stereotypes that Greek and Turkish Cypriot secondary school students develop of each other and other ethnic groups in Cyprus.

1

Introduction

But vanity, not love, has been my folly. Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our aquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment I never knew myself. (Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice)

In this passage from Jane Austen’s famous novel, the protagonist Elizabeth discovers that she has misjudged Darcy, and blames her prejudice on her vanity, which is described by her sister Mary as ‘what we would have others think of us’ while she relates pride more ‘to our opinion of ourselves’. More specifically, Elizabeth realizes that Darcy’s initial proud and condescending attitudes towards her family had touched her pride. Through this incident she developed strong feelings of dislike towards Mr Darcy, which she can only rationalize or put in context towards the end of the story. One of the main themes in this novel is how two people overcome their own pride and prejudice to discover that they actually love each other. Is there then an intrinsic relationship between these two social psychological traits? Does pride lead to more prejudice, and are both fundamental barriers to the development of close and positive relationships between people?

This book addresses this question, albeit not applied in the context of two individuals, but in relation to people’s feelings of national pride and prejudice towards ethnic out-groups. The question if and how feelings of collective, national pride relate to feelings and attitudes of and behaviour to ethnic out-groups has been a topic of interest in a broad range of social science disciplines, including (political) sociology, history, social psychology, and educational and communication sciences. Chapter 2 critically evaluates key qualitative and quantitative research contributions in this field. It suggests that the relationship between national pride and prejudice is complex owing to the different ways in which national pride can be conceptualized, as illustrated in Mary’s distinction between vanity and pride. Furthermore, it shows that researchers should look beyond the limits of ‘national’ identifications and explore what kinds of ethnic (racial, cultural, national, religious) in-group and out-group identities become meaningful in particular social contexts and how properties of in-group ethnic identities relate to prejudice towards meaningful ethnic out-groups. It also emphasizes the importance of considering the underlying social and sociological processes and characteristics that mediate the relationship between ethnic pride and prejudice. This chapter concludes with a description of the key research questions that will be addressed in this study, and a description of the context of Cyprus, in which this research has been carried out. Cyprus constitutes a theoretically important ‘extreme case’ to study the relationship between ethnic pride and prejudice as processes of nation building (and related national identities) go hand in hand with the positioning of ethnic groups as outsiders and even enemies. Furthermore, in its specific political and demographic processes, Cyprus allows for an analysis of the relationship between ethnic pride and prejudice in relationship to ethnic out-groups that differ in terms of their historical and political relationship with dominant ethnic in-groups.

A key argument that this book hopes to demonstrate is that research on ethnic pride and prejudice can benefit from adopting a particular methodology, in which qualitative and quantitative research techniques are used in combination to address specific, interrelated research questions. Chapter 3 briefly describes the characteristics of the mixed methods research design that underpins this study.

Chapter 4 is the first empirical chapter that looks at how Greek Cypriot (GC) and Turkish Cypriot (TC) students develop ethnic boundaries in the context of Cyprus and the underlying socio-psychological motivations for doing so. Such an analysis allows us to explore what kinds of ethnic in- and out-groups are meaningful for GCs and TCs in the context of Cyprus, how they distinguish these groups from each other, and what kinds of socio-psychological motivations they have for doing so.

Chapter 5, as a second empirical chapter, builds on this base by investigating more inductively how the structural environment in which these young people operate stimulates them to opt for particular cultural scripts in describing their ethnic in- and out-groups in a particular way. In the context of Cyprus, and with the students included in our sample, it identifies the school and the family as two key institutions that inform students’ ethnic prejudice. More specifically, it highlights the importance of school institutional features (related to their anti-racism and pro-multiculturalism policies and the politicized nature of the school board) and characteristics of social networks in school (the size and composition of the school in terms of ethnicity and the occurrence of discrimination in school) as important factors that contribute to young people’s inter-ethnic attitudes and relationships. In addition, it suggests a strong overlap between young people’s ethnic in- and out-group opinions and those of members of their family, as presented by these young people. Finally, it also suggests the importance of peer-groups, sports activities and youth clubs in developing (or reducing) ethnic prejudice.

Chapter 6 is a final empirical chapter, which tests particular hypotheses about the relationship between ethnic pride and prejudice; hypotheses that developed through the analysis of the qualitative data and review of existing research in this field. It suggests the importance of socio-psychological and sociological theories of prejudice in partially explaining the relationship between ethnic pride and prejudice. In addition, it also shows how different general dimensions of national pride (such as patriotism on the one hand and nationalism and centrality on the other) relate differently to prejudice and how context-specific characteristics of ethnic identities (such as the distinction between a Cypriot, Greek Cypriot and Greek identity and the attachment to a refugee identity) influence students’ prejudice. Finally, it shows that research should consider the variety of meaningful ethnic out-groups in studying the relationship between ethnic pride and prejudice.

Chapter 7 summarizes these findings and discusses the limitations of this study, and suggests how the findings and limitations can stimulate further research in this area.

By focusing on the relationship between national pride and prejudice in one particular national context, this study deviates somewhat from the comparative approach employed in the Mapping Global Racism series, edited by Ian Law. While this book looks primarily at factors and processes specific to a national context in shaping prejudice, the other contributions in this series rely more on a national comparative approach to identify overlap and links between racisms in different national settings (Law 2012, 2014). However, these differences in approach should be perceived more as complementary to each other, rather than competing with each other, as they both use a different lens to study the same phenomena. As both approaches help to put together different parts of the same puzzle, their combined efforts allow us to draw a more detailed picture of the manifestations of racism and its underlying causes in different social contexts.

2

Studying the Relationship between National Pride and Prejudice in Context

Ethnic pride and prejudice

Within the fields of (political) sociology, history, social psychology and educational and communication sciences there has been considerable interest over the relationship between various forms of collective ethnic, national or racial pride and ethnic, national or racial prejudice (e.g. Harnetz 2002; Kyriakides, Virdee and Modood 2009; Wagner et al. 2012). There is no agreement between social scientists in how to define related concepts such as prejudice, racism, stereotypes and discrimination. Sociologists usually fall back on Allport’s (1954) definition of prejudice (Quillian 2006), as something that consists of both an affective (antipathy or a negative emotion or feeling towards a particular group) and a cognitive dimension (a stereotype or a poorly founded beliefs about a particular out-group). Racism is then conceptualized as prejudice and/or discrimination, the latter representing a behavioural dimension. However, the socio-psychological ABC model of attitudes assumes that an attitude has three components: an affective (prejudice), a behavioural (discrimination) and a cognitive (stereotypes) component. Stereotypes are then perceived as a set of beliefs about the group or individual, which determine (rationalize) prejudice, or negative feeling towards a person or group based on their affiliation with a group (Dovidio et al. 1996). In this study, ethnic prejudice will be defined as individuals’ negative beliefs about and/or negative feelings towards a particular ethnic group and will be considered as an indicator of racism.

Most of the quantitative research in this area restricts its focus on the relationship between national pride and prejudice to ethnic minority groups, and concludes that different forms of national pride impact differently on prejudice. Research in this area consistently shows that respondents’ belief in the national superiority and dominance of their nation over other national groups (labelled nationalism) increases prejudice. On the other hand, research is less clear about the influence that the respondents’ attachment to the nation, its institutions and founding principles (labelled patriotism) has on prejudice: while most studies show that patriotism has a negative impact on prejudice (i.e. more patriotic people are less prejudiced), some studies report a positive or no relationship with prejudice (for recent reviews, see Jeong 2013; Wagner et al. 2012).

Some authors argue that the inconsistent findings regarding the relationship between patriotism and prejudice can be explained by differences in the measurement of this concept in the quantitative research literature (de Figueiredo and Elkins 2003; Schatz, Staub and Lavine 1999; Wagner et al. 2012). For example, some authors argue that the measurement of patriotism often includes items that measure respondents’ support of democratic values, rather than their level of patriotism; and that it is not patriotism per se, but primarily the support of democratic values that is associated with less out-group derogation (Bar-Tal 1997; Cohrs et al. 2004; Wagner et al. 2012).

Despite the fact that there is no consensus on how these variables should be measured, most of these empirical studies have relied on Kosterman and Feshbach’s (1989) definition and measurement of nationalism as a ‘perception of national superiority and an orientation toward national dominance’ (p. 271) and patriotism as ‘the affective component (of) one’s feeling toward one’s country […] the degree of love for and pride in one’s nation – in essence, the degree of attachment to the nation’ (p. 271). According to this definition, the key difference between these two dimensions of national pride is that while patriotism constitutes a self-referential assessment of the extent to which people regard their own group in positive terms, nationalism refers to an (almost exclusively, downwardly) comparative assessment between groups (de Figueiredo and Elkins 2003; Jeong 2013). Related to this, social psychological research has shown that respondents indicate higher levels of prejudice when they were asked to compare their in-group with an out-group, but not when they were asked to compare it with their in-group in the past (Mummendey, Klink and Brown 2001). In other words, while patriots feel positive towards their own national group, nationalists feel better compared to people who do not belong to their national in-group.

This suggests that underlying social psychological mechanisms play an important role in explaining why different forms of national pride impact differently on ethnic prejudice. In addition to the difference between self- and other-referential comparisons, some studies show that essentialist notions of national in-group belonging (Meeus et al. 2010) and the centrality of the national identity of individuals increase ethnic prejudice (Pehrson, Brown and Zagefka 2009). Furthermore, while very few studies in this area seem to do so, it appears important to consider the mediating influence of key social psychological theories of prejudice, such as the Contact Hypothesis (Esses et al. 2005; Pettigrew 1998) and the Symbolic/Realistic Group Threat Theory (Esses et al. 2005; Pettigrew 1998), in testing the relationship between national pride and prejudice. Put differently, nationalists might feel more negative towards ethnic minority groups because they have less contact with members of these groups (or in contexts with conditions that do not facilitate the development of positive out-group attitudes) and/or because they feel threatened by these ethnic out-groups in terms of their control of or access to cultural (such as language, religion) and material (such as jobs and access to welfare) resources.

In sum, quantitative studies highlight the importance of distinguishing between different types of national pride, such as nationalism and patriotism, and hypothesize that nationalistic interpretations of the in-group will increase prejudice and patriotic feelings can decrease prejudice; and that the latter concept requires a more valid and reliable form of measurement. In addition, they emphasize the importance of considering general, social psychological characteristics of national identities, and hypothesize that the centrality and essentialized understanding of such identities and the extent to which they involve out-group comparisons rather than in-group evaluations increase prejudice. Finally, research in this area should pay more attention to the mediating role of social psychological explanations for prejudice, such as the Contact Hypothesis and the Symbolic/Realistic Group Threat Theory.

Most of the qualitative studies on the relationship between national pride and prejudice originate from the fields of history and education and communication sciences, and focus on the overlap between and presentation of racist and nationalist discourses, as expressed in different forms of text, including interviews with young people (e.g. Kyriakides, Virdee and Modood 2009) and/or teachers (e.g. Christou 2007), school curricula (e.g. Papadakis 2008), educational policies (Bryan 2009), state propaganda (e.g. Roos 2012) and popular culture (Harnetz 2002). A recurrent concept in this line of research is that of racialized nationalism, which refers to the introduction of racist discourses in nationalist projects through the discursive construction of nationhood according to visibly identifiable features.¹ The rise of racialized nationalism is a global feature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Arendt 1951; Law 2012), as racist ideas and practices became a fundamental part of processes of nation building, and related to this, colonization and decolonization. The categorization of certain groups of people as biologically and/or culturally inferior did not only serve to legitimize colonial rule, but also the rule of (formerly) colonized elites over less powerful groups in the process of building new nation states (Law 2014). Studies focusing on more contemporary contexts have applied the concept of racialized nationalism in the cases of British (Gilroy 1987; Gilroy 1993), English and Scottish (Kyriakides, Virdee and Modood 2009), and Hindu and Australian (Patil 2010) national belonging. All these studies have identified the construction of a racialized belonging to a particular national in-group, evident in the exclusion of members on the basis of fixed, usually physical features. These studies suggest that the construction of racialized nationalism is complex and can be reinforced and/or undermined by other observable indicators of collective belonging and exclusion related to cultural expressions, such as accent, dress, mannerisms and religion (Kyriakides, Virdee and Modood 2009).

Regarding the local context, there is a substantial number of qualitative case-studies that explore the manifestation of and relationship between nationalism and racism in the context of Cyprus (the Republic of Cyprus, i.e. the Greek-speaking part). It is important to discuss these studies more in depth not only because they are good examples of the key research questions, findings, strengths and weaknesses of qualitative research in this area, but also because they report on a context in which this study takes place.

Five themes emerge from these studies conducted in Cyprus: (1) The importance of the educational system in developing racialized nationalism as expressed in school policy documents, textbooks used in classrooms, interactions between ethnic minority students and school staff and ethnic majority students and through school memorial services. (2) The role of other socializing institutions, particularly the family and the media, in offering cultural scripts to young people that foster particular perceptions of the ethnic in- and out-groups. (3) The consequences of contact between ethnic groups in developing in- and out-group attitudes. (4) The intersections between race, class, gender and nationalism in developing ethnic in-group identities and ethnic out-group stereotypes. (5) The multitude of sometimes overlapping, meaningful ethnic identities, and related national, supra-national, racial and cultural boundaries that young people draw between their ethnic in- and out-groups in the context of Cyprus.

It is striking that most of the research on racism and nationalism in Cyprus has been carried out in schools, usually through qualitative, ethnographic case-studies in which researchers observe interactions between students and teachers in school settings, conduct interviews with both and/or analyse policy documents or curriculum textbooks.

In a now classic study in the context of Cyprus, Spyrou (2002) relied on ethnographic data to explore how GC (Greek Cypriot) elementary school children and their teachers perceive, imagine and talk about Turks as people. In interviewing GC students, Spyrou found that they perceived Turks in a very negative way, as: barbarians, bad, egoists, terrorists, torturers, warmongers, quarrelsome, rapists, wild, murderers, vandals, looters, heartless, revengeful, hateful, malicious, devious, ungrateful, unfair, jealous, illiterate, impolite, dirty, liars, foolish, crazy and thieves. These stereotypes were motivated by pointing to history lessons in which they were taught what Turkey did to Cyprus. In analysing the role of teachers in developing such views, Spyrou identified four ways in which teachers help to construct such negative views of Turks, and simultaneously construct an image of Greek Cypriots as ‘peaceful victims’ of Turkish aggression. First, teachers were perceived to use highly loaded and emotional language in describing what Turks did to GCs (e.g. ‘They slaughtered the Greeks in Constantinople’). Second, in teaching about history, teachers actively constructed national heroes and assigned them super-human powers (‘They (the Turks) heard his (our hero) voice, and they ran away’). In so doing, they give their students a sense of collective, national and cultural belonging, power and hope over their situation and feelings of gratitude and debt to those who had made sacrifices for the greater, national good. Third, by describing the more general role of Turkey in international politics as immoral and not trustworthy (e.g. by describing Turkey as an ally of Germany, Japan and Italy during WW II, even if they were officially ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Studying the Relationship between National Pride and Prejudice in Context
• 3 Methods
• 4 Greek and Turkish Cypriot In- and Out-Group Perceptions
• 5 Cultural Repertoires within Context: Institutions, Resources and Social Networks
• 6 Testing the Relationship between Ethnic Pride and Prejudice in the Context of Cyprus
• 7 Conclusions and Discussion: National Pride and Prejudice?
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index