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Antiminority Riots in Unified Germany: Cultural Conflicts and Mischanneled Political Participation

2002; City University of New York; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/4146935

2151-6227

Roger Karapin,

Migration, Refugees, and Integration

Anti-foreigner riots in eastern Germany in the early 1990s have usually been explained by ethnonationalism or racism, ethnic competition for scarce resources, and opportunistic political elites.If anti-minority riots are analyzed as a distinct phenomenon with a cross-sectional approach, local political processes emerge as more important causes.Cultural conflicts, the channeling of mobilization from nonviolent into violent forms, local political opportunities for success, and mobilization by social movement organizations convert ethnic conflict and violence into riots.A comparison of riot and non-riot localities in eastern Germany supports this argument.Two large anti-foreigner riots in eastern Germany (at Hoyerswerda in September 1991 and at Rostock in August 1992) created a political sensation, attracting far more attention, outcry, and veiled approval from political leaders than two thousand smaller assaults on foreigners which took place across unified Germany during those two years.Explanations of the riots in unified Germany, and also much of the theoretical work on anti-minority riots in other democratic systems, have focused on three sets of causes: ethnonationalism, insecure ethnic identities, and racism; poverty, inequality, and competition between ethnic groups for scarce resources; and political elites stirring up enmity to mobilize groups along ethnic lines. 2 These analyses are flawed in two ways, which this article addresses.First, they often treat riots as simply the most extreme manifestation of ethnic conflict and violence, rather than as a qualitatitively different phenomenon.But because of their nature and their political significance,