contacts. From another perspective: There is no better soil for xenophobia than the enduring absence of contacts with strangers.
All in all, this tells us that although a great deal has been achieved 25 years after re-unification, it will take some time before all political-cultural differences between East and West fade away, especially regarding attitudes towards immigrants. The current political challenges such as the rise of the AfD, Pegida and anti-asylum marches are nothing but a direct result of the clash of East German political culture with the current refugee crisis. This challenge will certainly not disappear overnight, which is why politicians would be well-advised not to rail against East Germany every time people rally against refugees and their camps. Such a strategy would strengthen their sentiment of being forgotten by the political class as well as their disenchantment with politics. Instead, politicians should try to seriously attend to the matters of the people, to their anti-immigrant claims, to their racism. That does not mean these demands should be implemented, but rather listened to. A people cannot be expected to become open-minded, pluralistic, and unprejudiced by choice from one day to another. A cursory look at the political elite’s reactions of the last months, however, does not put one in an overly optimistic mood. Pegida and AfD’s offerings close a representational gap in the political system: A considerable amount of citizens does not feel represented by “their” parties and politicians any longer. The recent refugee crises certainly did not evoke this gap, but it brought this gap into the minds of many and was the final straw.
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1 Countless studies emphasize the willingness of a growing share of people to sacrifice elements of the rule of law or basic rights of some social groups for inner security or jobs (Mannewitz, 2015).
COPING WITH WAR, ECONOMIC CRISIS AND MIGRATION
Mario Sznajder
It is difficult to measure the impact of war in any given society since it depends not only on the intensity of the fighting, use of different kinds of weapons, length of the fighting period and other empirical factors, but also on the stage of development of the country, the state and society resources employed in defending the population, and cultural traditions about war. War can be defined as an armed conflict between societies, within societies or a combination of both, which is the more common type of war in the last decades. Richard Smalley (Nobel Prize of Chemistry) has defined war as the sixth most important problem (together with terrorism) between the ten main issues that affect human life.
| 1. Energy2. Water3. Food4. Environment5. Poverty6. Terrorism & War7. Disease8. Education9. Democracy10. Population |
Source: Smalley, (2003).
Looking at the list, it is clear that all the problems mentioned are interlinked in a cause-effect-cause relationship. The military-theoretical aspect of this assessment was developed in the 1930s by Erich Ludendorff when he enunciated his theory about Total War, which influenced perceptions and attitudes towards the 2nd World War and even more so, afterwards (Ludendorff, 1935). For the purposes
