THE RACIALIZATION OF PUBLIC DISCOURSE: Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Italian society

It is now clear that neoliberal globalization has not improved the general condition of people, and has not freed societies from conflict, hostility, exclusion, and discrimination.¹ Racial prejudice, considered a relic of obsolete and outdated social systems, is re-emerging in the depths of modern Western societies. Forms of racial prejudice, such as antisemitism and Islamophobia, appear in unexpected forms inside European societies (Pew Global Attitudes Project 2008; Jensen 2010; Zick et al. 2011).

The objective of this research is to understand the nature and diffusion of antisemitism and Islamophobia in Italy. It is based on 1528 interviews carried on with the CATI technique (Computer Assisted Telephone Interview), based on a representative sample of the Italian population stratified according to age, gender, and residence.² The questionnaire used was built by a set of scales divided according to areas covered by our working hypothesis. We used an antisemitism scale in line with a well-established empirical tradition and an Islamophobic scale with less empirical validation. We added three others scales to take into account some aspects of the psycho-sociological dynamics of prejudice and aimed at the identification of authoritarian, ethnocentric, and anomic attitudes. To test the assumptions regarding the impact of these predictors on antisemitic and Islamophobic prejudice, it was decided to adopt the statistical technique of path analysis. This technique, considered as an extension of multiple regression models, allows us to estimate the weight and significance of hypothesized causal relations, direct or indirect, between different sets of variables (Duncan 1966; Bohrnstedt and Knoke 1994; Lleras 2005).

The paper is made up of four sections. In the first we discuss the construction of the two dependent variables: antisemitism and Islamophobia. In the second we illustrate the dissemination of antisemitism and Islamophobia in Italy and the four clusters of attitudes identified by the research. In the third we describe the construction of the other three scales used as predictors of antisemitism and Islamophobia. In the fourth we present and assess the ‘path model’ we used to explain the nature of these racisms.

Building up our short scale of antisemitism, we have pursued well-beaten paths. Antisemitic items were originally drawn up in 1944 by Levinson and Sanford. In the beginning they put forward 52 items but they reduced them to 10 to facilitate subsequent investigation (Adorno et al. 1950) and to deal with research situations with less scoring time (Jones-Wiley et al.2007). Some of these items are commonly used in a number of short scales at the international level aimed at exploring antisemitic attitudes (see Raden 1999; Anti-Defamation League 2005, 2007; Kaplan and Small 2006; Zick et al. 2011).

This balanced antisemitism scale is made up of two dimensions. The first combines five items designed to reveal conventional antisemitism (items 1, 3, 4, 5, 6) and three anti-Israel items that could work as predictors of antisemitism (items 2, 8, 10). The second dimension (items 7, 9, 11) refers to closure or openness in relation to Jewish culture and religion and the right of Jews to have places of worship (see Table 1).³

Items on Islamophobic attitudes are less evolved and are open to a number of objections because of the early stages of debate on them. We derived our scale mainly from the Runnymede Trust Report (1997). This balanced scale presents a double dimension of Islamophobia: on the one hand, we aim to reveal prejudice against Muslims as members of a negatively defined, homogeneous group. This focuses on the alleged closedness, intolerance, traditionalism, and anti-modernism of Muslims (items 1, 3, 4, 5). On the other hand, we tried to throw light on how far people feel open to or threatened by the historical civilization and religion of Islam (items 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; see Table 2).⁴

To evaluate the dissemination of these two sets of prejudices, we reclassified the responses regarding hostility to Jews (factor 1 which includes items on Israel) and Muslims (factor 1) into four classes (in a range between 0 and 100, namely 0–24.99; 25–49.99; 50–74.99; 75–100) through a uniform system of allocation of points in which higher scores expressed a higher level of antisemitism or Islamophobia. We indentified four clusters of attitudes that we renamed: tolerant, indifferent/neutral, loyalist, and intolerant. The ‘intolerant’ typology expresses the highest scores of prejudice (75–100).

Through these categories we seek to capture the different and often ambivalent feelings at work among people. We use the term ‘tolerant’ in a way close to Michael Walzer's use (1997). For him, tolerant people are those who have no difficulty making room for men and women whose beliefs they feel are different, nor do they try to imitate their practices; they are people living with otherness whose presence in the world they approve of but which still remains far from their experience. Among the ‘tolerants’ we include those we might call ‘xenophile’ who enthusiastically endorse differences.

The terms indifferent/neutral combine two types of social distance identified by Bogardus (1926). The pattern of indifference and neutrality is based on the scarcity of social contacts with members of other groups, on a stable separation from racial groups they do not understand, and on lack of (positive or negative) emotional reactions. No new experience can change their alleged neutrality and indifference to these other groups.

The loyalist model comes from a strong sense of loyalty to a ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’ community, which often hides the defects of the members of this group, thus creating an immutable social distance from others (Bogardus 1926). A complex of soft dominance leads many people to attitudes of superiority towards the ‘less fortunate’. Behaviour in line with a prejudiced paternalism characterizes this type of person, especially if their social status is not threatened by ‘inferior races’.

The intolerant model comes from a combination of different attitudes: a sense of superiority; the belief that the other races are intrinsically different and alien; the idea of having an exclusive right in certain areas of privilege and advantage, and the fear and suspicion that the ‘subordinate races’ intend to weaken the prerogatives of the ‘dominant race’ (Blumer 1958).

The data show that 12 percent of the sample are intolerant toward Jews and 38 percent toward Muslims. If we consider also the loyalists, the percentage who are antisemitic exceeds 50 percent and the percentage who are Islamophobic reaches nearly 79 percent (see Table 3). Tolerants are only 12 percent in relation to Jews and 4 percent in relation to Muslims, outcomes that indicate how few people in Italy are in favor of a multicultural or multi-religious society.

The results of the survey tell us that antisemitism and Islamophobia configure as a combination of ‘old’ and maybe ‘new’ patterns of prejudice (Heitmeyer and Zick 2004; Mayer 2007; Zick et al. 2011). The historical civilizations of Judaism and Islam raise little hostility, much less than the antipathy caused by the current secular order of those political communities which trace their origins back to these roots (i.e., Israel and Islamic States) and by individuals who claim to belong to that tradition. These latter are considered not very loyal to the country where they reside (Italy); oriented toward their own group; and bearers of habits and customs difficult to adapt or integrate into the Italian way of life and its house rules.

That is particularly true for the Muslim component (see EUMC 2006; Pew Global Attitudes Project 2008; Jensen 2010). Muslims are seen as intolerant, fanatical, anti-modern, closed in among themselves, with a clear and powerful identity, of doubtful loyalty to the country in which they live, and unreliable allies in the fight against terrorism. The typical representation of ‘the Muslim’ is that of a subject who expresses great distance from our lifestyles and values, confirming a discourse of the difficulty of integrating Islamic immigrants to Italian society. Even though Jews are perceived as less threatening, they are seen as members of a closed and cohesive group with too much power, who insist too much on their role as eponymous victims and are loyal to a foreign state.

The research design was based on the idea that prejudice and racism depend on other components of the system of beliefs of the subjects. This perspective was tested in the famous research on the authoritarian personality coordinated by Adorno et al. (1950). Usually, this system of ideas is called ‘ideology’ but this term has assumed since its coinage multiple and divergent meanings. One of the sharpest explorers of the meaning of the ideology is Teun van Dijk, who gave the concept a cognitive twist that makes it a more useful research tool (Van Dijk 1998).

Among those components of ideology that have long been considered by social scientists to influence harmful opinions and attitudes are ethnocentrism and authoritarianism. We have added a further explanatory variable, which is used repeatedly in research on prejudice, which we call anomie.

Ethnocentrism refers to the way we look at the world from our perspective or from our filter of meaning (Carignan et al.2005), assuming that our understanding is the only valuable understanding. In a stronger definition it is ‘a belief in the superiority of one's own group and a corresponding disdain for all other groups’ (Levine and Campbell 1972).

The concept of ethnocentrism adopted by Adorno was derived from William Graham Sumner (1906). It is formed around a linked dual attitude: one positive towards the in-group and the other negative towards the out-group. The stereotypical perception of ethnocentric people towards out-groups is evident: others are dirty, aggressive, lazy, undeserving of trust, and rude, while the in-group is considered clean, non-aggressive, hardworking, honest, and courteous. Sumner's definition of ethnocentrism can be called a negative co-variational approach where favorable attitudes toward in-groups and unfavorable ones toward out-groups are seen as concomitants of one another (Raden 2003). The importance of the distinction between the two lies in the possibility that the Sumnerian version is a stronger form of ethnocentrism because it involves explicit stigmatization of the out-group, whereas simple in-group bias does not (Raden 2003). While the weakest form of ethnocentrism might be called ‘nationalism’, there exists a difficult relationship between ethnocentrism and nationalism, both in the sense that a national way of life can arise from ethnic cultures and national identity can fragment into ethnic distinctiveness (Hechter 1975; Smith 1986; Hroch 1993). On the basis of factor analysis, ‘nationalism’ includes the majority of our sample and is based on two main items: ‘I am proud to be Italian’ and ‘If someone speaks ill of the Italians, it is as if he were speaking ill of me’. This might be considered a moderate type of ‘ethnocentrism’ (Sniderman et al.2004), whereas ‘ethnocentrism’ in the stronger sense of the term is based on the rest of items (see Table 4) and is not as widespread.

We argue that the ethno-national identity is a circumstance that favors the occurrence of prejudice. At the same time antisemitic and anti-Muslim prejudice contributes to national unity in a classic dynamic based on the identification of a threatening out-group. Ethnocentrism is not equivalent to racism, although it may encourage and facilitate its reception at the individual and group level because it holds to the ‘spiritual’ superiority of one people over another. In the case of racism, superiority tends also to embrace biological, anthropological, and sociological characteristics (Cornell and Hartmann 1998).

The different diffusions of nationalism and ethnocentrism suggest these considerations. On the one hand, we can see that the spread of nationalist sentiment is the result of a desire for conformity, to the point of including the requirement that ‘others’ behave in the same ways as ‘natives’. On the other hand we can see that those who appear ethnocentric not only claim a national identity but also consider it superior to the ‘others’ who are not part of the nation, building a hierarchy of nations and cultures on the basis of taken for granted information and stereotypes. The claim of protecting identity encourages individuals to consider others not only different but also inferior, defining themselves and others on the basis of a selection of the best characteristics of the in-group and the worst of the out-group (Tajfel 1981; Scheepers et al.1990). Nationalism and ethnocentrism are common ideological components in society, able to influence political orientations and social practices. They tell us much about common reactions to the complex processes of social change that Italy has experienced. Phenomena such as migration, competition with socio-economic systems of other countries and frustration in the face of the difficulties of stagnation fuel a kind of national self-sufficiency quickly slipping towards ethnocentrism or extreme forms of regional identity. In our case, ethnocentrism shows a strong statistical correlation with intolerance, while ‘nationalism’ does not appear to be as closely related.

The other explanatory variable used in this research, associated with ethnocentrism, is authoritarianism. In the literature authoritarianism is understood as the will to submit to an authoritarian power and a simultaneous need to subject the weaker other to our own authority. This attitude is fed by a high level of repression and anxiety associated with the social class to which a person belongs. Authoritarianism is a reaction to both individual and collective anxieties and insecurities. Under conditions of uncertainty and social fragmentation, authoritarianism becomes a ‘flight from freedom’ and from individual and collective responsibility. It crystallizes in punitive attitudes and an obsessive request for compliance.

Since Adorno's research, authoritarianism has been considered as a predictor of harmful and racist attitudes, attracting the interest of social scientists and leading to the publication of thousands of articles on the subject. The concept of authoritarianism embodies a variety of approaches and definitions from the psychoanalytic to the psycho-sociological. In this latter perspective authoritarianism is an ideological mix of different social factors such as punitiveness, ethnocentrism, conformity, and a hierarchical view of the world. It is acquired over a long learning process that encompasses the entire life of the subject (Farris 1956; McDill 1961; Billig 1978; Altemeyer 1981; Ray and Furham 1984; Meloen and Middendorp 1991).

Based on these characteristics, the authoritarian syndrome is a strong predictor of racism. Authoritarians, with high probability, tend to express hostility and animosity towards the out-group (in this case, Jews and Muslims). The high statistical significance of the scale of authoritarianism confirms the intuition of Adorno beyond all expectations, confirmed more recently by research conducted in Italy by Sniderman et al. (2000). They discovered a remarkable ‘reciprocal causation’ of authoritarianism and prejudice analogous to that revealed by our path analysis (see Table 5). Where authoritarianism enters into a relationship of ‘reciprocal causation’ with racism, it makes the latter a functional substitute for the social and juridical bonds that should ensure social harmony and cohesion. Racism is thus not only the source for new social ties, but also a tool to deal with the crisis of social and legal order. Here lies the thrust for the drive towards assimilation. Assimilation is being forced through by the adoption of a number of measures, which include the recasting of citizenship laws according to security considerations; the introduction of compulsory language and civics tests for citizenship applicants; codes of conduct for the trustees of mosques; a cultural code of conduct for Muslim girls and women who, in some areas of Europe, will be forbidden to wear the hijab in state schools and other state institutions. Our survey suggests that authoritarianism is a structured ideology able to provide the subject with a way to order the world and attribute blame or merit among social members and corporate actors. In the face of uncertainty and insecurity an authoritarian attitude provides unity and predictability, restoring an order shaken by circumstances.

Anomie is the third variable we included in the explanatory model of antisemitism and Islamophobia. It has often been used with mixed results, for a multitude of phenomena normally associated with individual and collective behaviour that deviate from the rules and customs. This concept, like the other two, is based on a long sociological tradition both in terms of conceptual reflection and operationalization for purposes of empirical research. Originally introduced into the sociological vocabulary by Durkheim, anomie has become a heuristic device to explain a variety of phenomena, from suicide to the perception of insecurity, from crime to racism.

For Durkheim, anomie was an objective condition of deregulation, a lack of boundaries and standards, a condition in which the individual does not know the limits between the possible and the impossible, the difference between right and wrong. But because of its difficulty in translating this classic concept into operational terms, sociological research has expanded the use of the term in other directions. From a broad perspective, anomie refers to a state where social norms do not control the actions of individuals in relation either to their purposes or the means used to achieve them. Individuals lose their grip on the consequences of their actions. From a narrower perspective, anomie refers to situations where appropriate means for the pursuit of certain goals are inaccessible or where institutional, economic or social factors block the way to meeting legitimate expectations by conventional means. Here anomie is the disappearance of the certainty of mutual expectations related to social action (Milton Yinger 1964).

The scales of anomie used in sociological research have attempted to meet these two sides. However, as suggested by Srole (1956), they have focused on individual perceptions of anomic discomfort by the subject, detectable mainly on the basis of the level of trust in people, situations, and objects. Studies have therefore tried to capture, first, how the model of individual expectations associated with social status has weakened and, second, how much uncertainty is now manifest at the level of expectations of reciprocity.

Applying factor analysis to the anomie scale, we noticed that the items were distributed along these two dimensions. We have linked them to the problem of trust in relation to institutions, ‘others’ in general and the future. These two anomic dimensions were finally labeled as ‘distrust in the future’, which we have defined as ‘fatalistic’ (Scamuzzi et al.2008), and ‘distrust in society’, a more general distrust indicating social disorientation of individuals both in relation to institutions and to a kind of social alienation. This latter conception of anomie is in line with the definition given by Robert Merton (1938); the former is closer to Durkheim's definition of a state of worried expectation of what might happen, on the basis of which it is difficult to act because there are no sufficiently clear and enforceable rules to steer the conduct of individuals.

The correlation between states of anomie and attitudes of prejudice and racism has been the subject of several studies and considerations (Srole 1956; Lutterman and Middleton 1970). A positive correlation has not always been found between the two phenomena. In the case of our research we found that only one of the two latent dimensions identified from the factor analysis (the fatalist ‘distrust of the future’) has a good correlation with the degree of intolerance. In terms of the multiple regression analysis used to make the path analysis, the effects of anomie on antisemitism and Islamophobia are ‘covered’ by the effects of authoritarianism and ethnocentrism to which anomie is however statistically very well correlated. In short, a widespread situation of anomie, or social uncertainty and distrust, feeds prejudice and produces the conditions for racism. It is also arguable that this general condition of social distrust is the starting point for new forms of social solidarity, based now on an aggressive ethno-racial identity (Table 6).

In this section, we discuss the results of our path analysis, keeping in mind that the relationship among independent and dependent variables ‘cannot be statistically tested for directionality and the models themselves cannot prove causation. However path models do reflect theories about causation and can inform the researcher as to which hypothesized casual model best fits the pattern of correlations found within data set’ (Lleras 2005: 25). Consequently, the use of path analysis is designed to test the assumptions made in the research design (Duncan 1966).

Through this model we intended to investigate the effects of authoritarianism, ethnocentrism and anomie on intolerance towards Jews and Muslims.⁵ The numbers shown in the following path diagrams are standardized beta regression coefficients calculated through multiple regressions and they show the strength of the relationship between the variables of the model.⁶

The results show that authoritarianism and ethnocentrism, which are highly correlated (+0.61), explain clearly intolerance toward Muslims and Jews. The more one is authoritarian and ethnocentric, the greater is one's level of intolerance towards Muslims and Jews (β coefficient = 0.29 and β = 0.26). In this model, distrust of the future is not in a significant relationship with intolerance because it is mediated by the other two indicators, with which it is strongly correlated: +0.45 with authoritarianism and +0.41 with ethnocentrism.

From the presentation of the diagrams showing the direct and indirect effects of the three main predicting variables of the model we can make some evaluations. First, authoritarianism proves to be a decisive factor in shaping negative opinion of Jews and Muslims. Ethnocentrism reinforces prejudice due to the high correlation between it and authoritarianism. In the sociological dialectic between in-groups and out-groups, such attitudes are often the result of a series of historically specific social circumstances. Though anomie has no direct effect on intolerance, it is nevertheless a condition that feeds an authoritarian and ethnocentric perspective, which provides ‘good reasons’ and motivated social cognition for the occurrence of prejudice and racism. In essence, anomie acts as a carrier of resentment that feeds on authoritarian and ethnocentric attitudes.

It is, however, important to note (Figures 1 and 2) that the two considered predictors – authoritarianism and ethnocentrism – act on intolerance to Jews and Muslims in a different and independent manner. In the case of antisemitism, authoritarianism turns out to be less important than ethnocentrism, thus revealing a nationalist prejudice fed by a special sense of irreducible distance between cultures. In the case of Islamophobia, authoritarianism prevails instead in the causal relation, confirming that prejudice against Muslims is more closely linked to a sense of social disorder and to the presence of people of Muslim religion who are in themselves seen as threatening or dangerous.

The research here summarized casts a glance at the pervasiveness of prejudice in Italy, a phenomenon that is often underestimated, if not entirely denied. It reveals a reality consisting of deep-rooted and pervasive hostile attitudes targeted both at minorities like Jews, which we believed had vanished from the ideological or cognitive horizon of the citizens of democratic societies, or to ‘old’ internal enemies such as Muslims. These prejudices have developed together, supported by coarse but clear ideologies, diffused by media and by so-called ‘political entrepreneurs of racism’. We might say that the prejudices here investigated seem to function as a ‘cultural code’ serving as shorthand for a world-view and helping to distinguish between political friends and political enemies. As Volkov puts it, Jew-hatred could, precisely at times when it has few practical ramifications, work simply as a sign of cultural identity, of one's belonging to a specific cultural camp (Volkov 1978).

This trend has grown on the basis of widespread authoritarianism, ethnocentrism and social distrust, within collectivities which express fear of the future and are living (or feeling) a deep socio-economic uncertainty. These feelings find an outlet in racism and prejudice, especially among people with few cultural resources who are more vulnerable in the face of a generalized political and economic crisis. In this light racism is no longer to be understood merely as a disorganized and confused jumble of prejudicial attitudes but rather as a well structured and reiterated public discourse able to gain trust and political support. The strength of intolerance calls for a comprehensive and thorough reflection on the reasons why so much of Italian society has become hostile, discriminatory and phobic.

Dario Padovan is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Turin and a member of the Department of Social Sciences. He works in the history of social sciences, ethnic relations, racism and prejudice, fear of crime and insecurity. They are member of ESA Research Network 31 on ‘Race Relations, anti-Semitism and racism’. Recent joint publications include: Sociology of Racism, Roma: Carocci, 2007; Metamorphosis of Racism. Anthology of Works on Social Distance, Prejudice and Discrimination, Milano: Franco Angeli, 2005.

Alfredo Alietti with a PhD in sociology, is Senior Researcher in Urban Sociology at University of Ferrara (Italy). He was involved in research at national and European level on racism, interethnic relations in urban settings, socio-spatial segregation and urban regeneration of deprived areas.