The Dynamics of Right-Wing Extremism within German Society

Escape into Authoritarianism

Oliver Decker, Johannes Kiess, Elmar Brähler, David West, Oliver Decker, Johannes Kiess, Elmar Brähler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000586633
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Dynamics of Right-Wing Extremism within German Society explores the prevalence of right-wing extremist attitudes in Germany.

The book provides a thorough psychosocial and sociological theory of general authoritarian dynamics to explain broader societal attitudes, particularly focusing on right-wing extremism. It provides a uniquely long-term perspective on the different dimensions of right-wing extremism—the affinity for dictatorial forms of government, chauvinist attitudes, the trivialisation or justification of National Socialism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and social Darwinism. The first chapter delineates the theoretical framework of authoritarian dynamics, while subsequent chapters provide an in-depth analysis of empirical findings and distinguish authoritarian and democratic typologies. The authors focus on recognition of authoritarian statehood and anti-Semitism; the relationship between religion and right-wing extremism; and support for the radical-right populist party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The innovative theoretical approach of this book scrutinizes the theory of authoritarianism in the contemporary world.

This book provides unique empirical data and will be of interest to scholars of German politics, anti-democratic attitudes and prejudices, sociology, political science, and social psychology.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1Flight into AuthoritarianismThe Dynamics of Right-Wing Extremism at the Centre of Society

Oliver Decker

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003218616-1

We have been using representative surveys since 2002 to investigate political attitudes in Germany, with between 2,500 and 5,000 inhabitants of the country being interviewed every two years. The immediate backdrop to our research were the pogroms and politically motivated murders of the 1990s, a time when hundreds of thousands of people sought refuge and asylum in Germany. The reaction to this influx of people was severe, and names like Rostock-Lichtenhagen and Solingen still stand today for the atrocities that were committed against migrants and refugees there. It was against the background of these atrocities that the Bundestag passed the so-called “asylum compromise” in 1993 – a dreadful term for the de facto ending of the fundamental right to asylum, as the Peace Prize winner Navid Kermani told Bundestag members in his speech commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Basic Law. It was the first instance when solidarity with the weakest was withdrawn, long before the reforms to the labour market that followed at the beginning of the new millennium. If this “concession” was intended to quell extreme right-wing outrages, then it has sadly not succeeded. Arson attacks and murders, pogroms, and terror perpetrated by right-wing extremists – these continue to be part of German reality, more than 25 years after the “asylum compromise”. The National Socialist Underground is only the best-known example here – and at the same time it exemplifies the difficulties of dealing with the situation, since, following the long court hearings that brought some of the perpetrators to justice, there are still many questions left unanswered.

The police are constantly forced to correct upwards the number of victims of right-wing extremism. For example, the German government announced in 2018 that the latest investigations suggest that there have been an estimated 83 victims of extreme right-wing violence since 1990.¹ But independent observers, such as the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, Pro Asyl, and victim-support associations, say that their own data show that not even half of the cases that can be proven to be extreme right-wing killings are reflected in police statistics. For example, the five victims of the attacks at the Munich Olympic Shopping Centre are not included in police statistics, even though the experts commissioned by the Munich Office for Democracy (Matthias Quent, Christian Kopke, and Florian Hartleb) came to the clear conclusion that these murders were motivated by xenophobia. And even the Federal Ministry of the Interior was forced to admit in 2013 that, in an initial review of unsolved murders between 1990 and 2011, there were 746 cases where there was evidence of an extreme right-wing motivation for the crime.²

Whenever refugees, those who have a different opinion, or migrants are murdered or attacked, sections of the public have for years reacted in the same way. First, the actions of right-wing extremists are denied or depoliticized (see Schellenberg 2015); and, if this cannot be maintained, then the actions are relativized as was the case most recently with the hounding of foreigners in Chemnitz.³ This refusal to accept reality is flanked by another phenomenon that has become increasingly common recently: every mention of right-wing extremism is countered by the phrase “left-wing extremism”, an echo that is now as predictable as it is irrational, but that leads to inaction when it comes to the spread of right-wing extremism. Nor is the comparison correct, since the extreme left does not simply mirror the extreme right: they have very different political aims and ideologies (the ideology of the right, unlike that of the left, is an ideology of inequality); and they differ fundamentally in terms of the violence that they perpetrate, especially violence against people.⁴

However, two events in 2000 led to increasing recognition of the danger posed by the right: the bomb attack on migrants and Jews in Düsseldorf-Wehrhahn (which is still unsolved), and the attack on the Düsseldorf synagogue a few weeks later. These provoked a new reaction and marked a rethink. The call made by the then Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder for an “uprising of the decent” brought to an end the widespread denial that there were sections of the population who were violent and neo-Nazi.

This public mobilization was necessary and, although coming relatively late, it had an impact because it began discussions over the support in the population for the extreme right. When questioned, neo-Nazi perpetrators of violence have freely said that they saw themselves as “executing the will of the people”, with the proverbial silent majority nodding their heads in approval when they chased migrants through towns and villages, set fire to refugee shelters, and killed people. This is what led us to examine the political attitude of Germans. Our first survey in 2002 was based on the question: how widespread are extreme right-wing attitudes in the population? We also used a questionnaire on extreme right-wing attitudes in a representative survey for the first time (Decker et al. 2013), assigning three statements to each of the six dimensions in the questionnaire (support for a right-wing authoritarian dictatorship, chauvinism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, social Darwinism, and trivialization of Nazi crimes). The respondents given this questionnaire were asked for their opinion: they could either agree or disagree with these extreme right-wing statements.

The results from 2002 were shocking (Decker et al. 2003). For example, 42% of East Germans and 37% of West Germans agreed with the statement belonging to the dimension of “xenophobia” that “Germany is dangerously overrun by the many foreigners living here”; and, taken together, the three xenophobic statements met with approval among 24% of respondents in West Germany and 30% in East Germany. The proportion of those with xenophobic attitudes remained almost unchanged in the next survey of 2004 (Decker & Brähler 2005). The proportion of respondents in East Germany who agreed with xenophobic statements then rose steadily to reach almost 39% in 2012, while the proportion in West Germany fell temporarily to 18% in 2008, although about 22% of West Germans again expressed xenophobic attitudes during the economic crisis (2008–2012). In 2014, agreement with xenophobic statements fell to just over 22% in the East and 17% in the West. Although there were still a great number of people with xenophobic attitudes (too many for a democratic society), there were considerably fewer than in the previous survey waves. This number remained virtually unchanged in 2016 (West, 19.8% and East, 22.7%), but rose again in 2018 (overview in Chapter 2 of this book), with the proportion of those in the East agreeing with xenophobic statements again exceeding 30%, and in the West, above 20% again. Devaluation of groups deemed “foreign” or “deviant” also rose, with negative attitudes towards Sinti and Roma, asylum seekers, and Muslims continuing to increase. For example, while in 2010 around 33% of respondents felt that Muslims made them feel “like a foreigner” in their own country (Heitmeyer 2010), that figure climbed to 55% in both East and West in 2018 (see Chapter 2).

The centre of society

These findings led us to speak of right-wing extremism at the “centre of society”, and to give the study then carried out with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in 2006 the title Vom Rand zur Mitte (From the Margins to the Centre) (Decker & Brähler 2006). Since we noticed for the third time in 2006 that devaluation of other people, the desire for a leader, and chauvinism were present not only among voters of extreme right-wing parties, but also and even especially among supporters of democratic parties, i.e. parties that claim to represent the “centre”, we decided to focus in particular on right-wing extremism at the centre of society. Our results were not an error in measurement, as some critics of our study might have wished, and they have unfortunately been confirmed in recent years by the growth of the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) and Pegida.⁵ There had long been a great potential for extreme right-wing parties, but such parties as the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschland (National Democratic Party Germany, NPD) could simply not exploit this potential. But the fact that the spread of extreme right-wing attitudes did not manifest itself in action should not be a comfort to anyone. And to prevent people from coming to the wrong conclusion and thinking that extreme right-wing attitudes only occur among so-called “marginal groups”, we attached the term “centre” to the phrase “right-wing extremism”. That was a decision that has brought us much criticism since.

Our decision was not completely without precedent, though. For example, a study by the sociologist Theodor Geiger of the “old” and the “new middle class” led him to describe both as the “blessed ground of ideological confusion” (see Geiger 1930: 641). Where this “confusion” came from was a question that Georg Simmel had already answered: “The middle class alone has an upper and a lower border, and such that it continuously receives individuals from both the upper and the lower layer of society, and gives individuals to both” (see Simmel 1908: 451–452). Taking up this idea, Geiger argued that the “confusion” of the middle class is a product of its fear of being demoted from the centre and falling into poverty: “The false shame of being demoted is expressed often enough in hatred and disdain” (see Geiger 1930: 646). With this, Geiger had found an explanation that still has relevance today, namely, the threat or reality of being demoted is accompanied by extreme right-wing or fascist attitudes. For both Geiger and Simmel, the centre was a position in society that lay on a vertical axis. But Geiger was wrong in one respect: NSDAP (National-Socialistic German Workers’ Party) voters were often not themselves affected by the economic crisis, and those who were affected (such as the unemployed) were more likely to vote for the Social-democratic Party (SPD) or the Communist Party (KPD). People who voted for the NSDAP did so not because they themselves were suffering, but because the Weimar Republic was going through an economic crisis (Falter et al. 1983). But the very fact that the economy was able to strip the first democratic society on German soil of its legitimacy is anything but self-evident.

It was here that a gap in the explanation appeared, but one that did not obstruct the progress of the term “centre”. The US sociologist Seymour Lipset, who investigated changes in voting behaviour at the end of the Weimar Republic, was the first to speak of an “extremism of the centre” (Lipset 1959), by which he meant the source from which the NSDAP had recruited its supporters. Unlike Geiger, though, Lipset had in mind not the centre on a vertical axis, between a lower and an upper layer in society, but rather the centre on a horizontal axis. In doing so, he was, in fact, taking up a distinction that has been in use since the French Revolution: in the French National Assembly of 1789, the restorative, i.e. monarchist, forces took their place on the right of the plenary hall, those who wanted radical change sat on the left, and the “moderate” forces positioned themselves between the two. The political centre has since been regarded as a place of moderation – and as a shelter for democracy. Lipset, however, ascribed to the supporters of the centre parties their own extremism: that of fascism (Lipset 1959). Although Lipset’s empirical findings would be modified somewhat later, the Mainz political scientist Jürgen Falter describing the NSDAP as a “people’s party” (Volkspartei) whose voters came from various social backgrounds, even though it had a decidedly “middle-class belly” (Falter 1981), what remains undisputed is the involvement of the political “centre” in fascism. As the historian Heinrich Winkler has argued, there “can be no doubt that the reservoir of NS voters mainly comprised farmers, the self-employed middle class, and employees and civil servants (Winkler 1972: 181).

However, we also had something different in mind to Lipset when choosing the term “centre”, since he had used it primarily to characterize those in society who had supported National Socialism. We did not want to explore the essence of the centre – through, for example, investigating the income groups, level of education, and professions that constitute it – but rather the dreadful state of affairs in society that produces the potential for anti-democratic sentiments. The term “centre” is ideally suited to this purpose, since it is related to one of the oldest ideas in European thought: namely, the idea of a place in society where can be found the representatives of the normative order. The most important theorists of extremism, therefore, understand the centre as an “institutional structure of the constitutional state whose aim is to restrain, to guarantee freedom, and to control power” (Backes & Jesse 2005: 160). Aristotle had in fact already used the term “mesotes” (“center” or “mean”) in this sense in the fourth century BC, when in the Nicomachean Ethics he contrasted it with the “most peripheral”, i.e. the extreme, thus turning both terms into political-ethical dimensions. For Aristotle, virtue lies in the golden mean between two evils (namely, those of excess and deficiency), so that “in all things the mean is to be commended, while the extremes are neither commendable nor right but reprehensible” (Aristoteles & Dirlmeier 1999: 48). This holds true for the individual, who should moderate her actions according to the golden mean, as well as for the state, which should justify the hegemony of a certain economic position in the polis: “the goodness or badness of a constitution or city” depends to a large extent on the “centre” being “strong”. Here, the centre is for Aristotle, not the group who live their lives in moderat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Flight into Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Right-Wing Extremism at the Centre of Society
• 2 The Leipzig Authoritarianism Study 2018: Methodology, Results, and Long-Term Changes
• 3 The Authoritarian Syndrome Today
• 4 Recognition and Authoritarian Statehood
• 5 Anti-Semitic Attitudes in Germany: Their Prevalence and Causes
• 6 Religion as a Factor of Conflict in Relation to Right-Wing Extremism, Hostility to Muslims, and Support for the AfD
• 7 Authoritarian Dynamics and Social Conflicts: The Leipzig Authoritarianism Studies
• Index