Extremismus und Migration

Within the last few decades the European political landscape changed significantly with the rise of extreme right and far left populist parties in countries of Western Europe and various extremist and populist parties in countries of Eastern Europe. The appeals of these parties differ, but their commonality is that they represent a large group of disaffected citizens who view themselves as losers of changes brought by deindustrialization, European integration and globalization. My proposed research aims to offer a theoretically driven empirical investigation of the impact of welfare state capacity to respond to social and economic changes generated by these processes on the rise of radical political appeals and the support for radical political parties. I expect that the strength of populist appeals and support for populist political parties across Europe is strongly affected by the failure of welfare states to address problems of economic insecurity, inequality and social exclusion. The research will provide a comprehensive mapping of the performance of European welfare states in responding to challenges of post-industrial period with respect to employment, social inequality, the handling of new social risks and the integration of immigrants. It will also provide a comprehensive mapping of radical and populist political actors, their appeals and their electoral performance across European countries. Furthermore, the research will conduct a comprehensive analysis of the impact welfare state performance; exposure of countries to economic globalization; immigration and the extent of benefits brought by European integration have on support for radical populist parties, national political systems and European integration. It will rely on multilevel methods to assess the impact of macro-level variables on variations in individual-level behavior and attitudes across European countries.

Modern societies have increasingly thematised themselves with ecological issues as their basic problems. However, the ‘legitimacy’ publicly ascribed to ecology renders its appropriation possible by groups widely viewed as ‘illegitimate’, enabling such actors to attract not only their core audience, but also a moderate wider public. This project analyses such appropriation, i.e. both the assessment of as well as the potential for self-legitimisation via ecological topics. This is done via an analysis of the politically relevant case of increasingly popular far-right populist and radical parties, and looser groups of organised intellectuals in Austria, Germany and Switzerland between 2001 and 2011. Existing research on these actors has investigated, e.g., their stance on immigration but similarly extensive research into their public discourses on ecology does not exist. Little is known about ‘how’ and ‘why’ some far-right actors reject ecological issues, while others appropriate the protection of nature. Through triangulating quantitative corpus-linguistics (direct comparison of the investigated discourses on ecology), quantitative appropriation analysis (mapping assessments of and potential self-legitimation via ecology) and qualitative discourse analysis (how ecology is performed in detail), I ask: Which topics characterise far-right discourses on ecology? How are these performances affected as soon as these actors address a moderate wider public? (How) Do these actors draw on traditional right-wing narratives about the humans-and-nature relationship? Successful appropriation of the ‘legitimate‘ topic of ecology might enable these actors to legitimise their core topics, attract a moderate wider public and transvalue (liberal-)democratic values. Thus, the project provides, for the first time and in a historical and comparative perspective, an analysis of such attempts, enabling a better understanding of increasingly successful far-right populists and radicals.

Over the past 150 years, non-territorial autonomy has been one of three models for dealing with linguistic or ethnic minorities within several European states. Compared with the other two, i.e. the recognition of minority rights as individual rights and territorial self-rule, non-territorial autonomy has received little attention. This project proposes to write the first history of non-territorial autonomy as an applied policy tool in minority protection and as an intellectual concept with a chequered history across Europe. Intellectuals, politicians, and legal scholars across the political spectrum from the far left to the far right supported this idea, although they were aware of the risks of strengthening national differences by promoting such a collective approach to minority protection. The project explores how this idea of granting cultural rights to a national group as a corporate body within a state, as a means of integrating diverse nationalities, travelled and transformed throughout the Habsburg Empire from 1850 to the present. We propose to 1) trace the development/circulation of theoretical conceptions and political applications of non-territorial autonomy within the Habsburg Empire, by mapping the networks of scholars as well as politicians who advocated for it; 2) explain the continuities in the development of the idea, and its manifestations in policies adopted by interwar Central and Eastern European nation states, where communists, socialists, liberals and fascists alike were able to translate elements of non-territorial autonomy into their ideologies and programs; 3) analyse the treatment of non-territorial autonomy, which was advocated by minority lobby groups, in international minority protection in the 20th century despite strong opposition to practices based on it by international organisations. We rely on a mixture of historiographical methods developed in nationalism studies to analyse the idea’s translation in entangled transnational spaces.

Research on trade unions has identified the crises and challenges trade unions face, not only in relation to employers and the state, but also regarding how to keep the trade union and workers together. One particular challenge is how to build solidarity in a context in which the number of migrant workers is increasing and working class support for anti-immigrant extreme right parties is growing. The research question framing this proposal is how an important organisation for Swedish industrial relations negotiate what seems to be a fundamental contradiction among its members. The aim is to analyse the strategies and actions taken by trade unions in relation to migrant workers, ethnic diversity and members and activists displaying support for extreme right parties. The theoretical framework is drawn from labour studies and industrial relations research along with migration and ethnic studies, supplemented with gender studies.. Methodologically, the project is an ethnographic study of five blue collar trade unions and Landsorganisationen, employing semi-structured interviews and participant observation, complemented with document analysis.

"Theoretical background and objectives The project continues research on the causal dynamics behind anti-immigrant violence in Germany during the 1990s. With a total of about a hundred deaths and many thousands of acts of violence over an extended period of time, this constitutes by far the most important outbreak of ethnic violence in post-war German or indeed West European history. In combination with the availability of a uniquely detailed event data set (see below) studying this wave of violence can make important contributions to our knowledge of the causal dynamics behind mobilisation processes generally, and ethnic mobilisation and violence in particular. Earlier research (e.g., Koopmans 2004; Koopmans and Olzak 2004) has shown that the violence was spurred by political opportunities in the form of highly mediatised controversies between government and opposition over immigration control. Although this connection is well-established, it is less clear, which social mechanisms linked opportunity structures to acts of anti-immigrant violence. The current project investigates two social mechanisms: spatial diffusion processes across localities and the role of bystander publics. The data on anti-immigrant violence display strong temporal clustering and a non-random geographical distribution, suggesting that diffusion processes have played an important role. We investigate whether violent events that were widely mediatised and that occurred during periods of intense immigration debates increased rates of violence in other localities; whether local opportunity structures affected variation in rates of violence across localities; and whether diffusion was more likely to occur between socially homophilous localities. We then investigate the role of bystander publics. On several occasions (e.g., Hoyerswerda, Rostock, but also less well-known instances) local bystander crowds were present when groups of right-wing youths attacked immigrant hostels. Sometimes these crowds ""just"" watched, at other times they signalled support by applauding or cheering, or signalled opposition by verbally or physically intervening in defence of immigrants. We investigate whether such bystander public reactions – which often received much media attention – contributed to the diffusion or containment of violence and acted as an intermediate mechanism between national political opportunities and local activism. Research design, data and methodology The data are drawn from content analyses of German newspapers, supplemented with violence statistics of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz and Reuters news agency data gathered by Ron Francisco. The newspaper data contain detailed information (including the exact timing and geographical location) on altogether around 12,000 events, including public statements on immigration control or the extreme right, political decisions on immigration issues, repression of the extreme right, as well as 700 violent attacks against immigrants, of which for 81 a bystander public reaction was registered. Data are analysed using event history analysis (diffusion across localities) and negative binomial regression (bystander effects). Findings Diffusion processes indeed played an important role in mediating between opportunity structures and anti-immigrant acts. Widely mediatised acts of violence, as well as those that occurred during periods of heightened immigration debate were more likely to lead to copycat events in other localities. Local opportunities also played a role: violence was less likely to occur where the moderate right (CDU or CSU), and even where extreme right parties were electorally strong. This goes against the common sense idea that strong right parties fuel anti-immigrant action, but fits political opportunity structure theories that state that extra-institutional mobilisation is more likely to occur when a constituency is less well represented in institutional politics (e.g., Kriesi et al. 1995). Further, we showed that the recurrent finding from diffusion studies that geographical distance matters can be made sociologically more meaningful when one substitutes – as Gabriel Tarde suggested long ago – geographical by social distance. We investigated three aspects of social homophily: socio-economic (% of the workforce in the agrarian sector), political (% CDU/CSU votes), and demographic (% immigrants). Diffusion was significantly more likely to occur across localities that were more similar along these dimensions and once this was taken into account geographical distance did not matter anymore. Regarding reactions of bystander publics, first results indicate that they were an extremely important mechanism. In particular bystander reactions that supported anti-immigrant activists had a strongly positive impact on the subsequent rate of violence. Bystander reactions that disapproved of the violence did not have a significant effect, probably because they inadvertently generated more media attention for the violence and its perpetrators. Importantly, once bystander public reactions are taken into account, effect sizes for the political opportunity variables become weaker and in some cases insignificant, suggesting that bystander public reactions were indeed important in signalling to activists the opening or closure of opportunities for successful mobilisation."