People under communist regimes never really got the "xenophobia & racism are bad" message instilled in them. One, those regimes pretended they had no such problems; two, to the extent those messages existed, they were seen as part of official propaganda (& taken w/grain of salt)
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That's interesting. I thought they had student exchange programs with socialist African states etc. So I'm curious how race and ethnicity was played on in official messaging.
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Cathy's right: official messaging was discounted as propaganda.
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What makes people anti immigrant is (in some cases) a version of the narcissism of small differences. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences …. When there is not much to differentiate you from the immigrants in terms of opportunity
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Anti immigrant feelings are driven by insecurity. Macro/collective insecurity of East Germans transitioning to new world amplified typical human insecurities. Such insecurity is “easily cured” by superiority feelings
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Yes! I think this is it. Also explains xenophobia in poorer parts of rural Britain and the US despite substantial differences in former political ideologies.
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Quite possible the difference predates German separation. The Elbe river had been a political border long before.
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the really good papers on east-west differences these days generally have identification strategies including local estimates just around the east west border, plus tests with synthetic borders for old divisions in those areas
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but this paper probably does not have a big enough dataset to get so fancy, so they don't adress that, actually the methodology is far from great here, given how far the lit on east west germany has moved
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Something something late capitalism
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Berlin is an egalitarian exception: we hate everyone equally.
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The authoritarian culture of Prussia pre-dates communist rulehttps://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2017/09/what-britain-needs-understand-about-profound-and-ancient-divisions-germany …
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An obvious way to test this hypothesis is to look at communist parties implentation in different regions of continental european countries and xenophobia. France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands etc..
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I’m certain this can also be applied to Poland and why Poles are still so xenophobic to this day, which helped PiS to gain control on an anti-immigration platform.
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The Scandinavian countries are having their racist/anti-immigrant breakouts, too. But I don’t wanna do too much Anglo-American rainbow melting pot back-patting for the obvs
#Chumpist reasons.

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Very true.
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The simplest explanation for this seems to be that under communism East Germany and other Eastern European countries had very few immigrants and places with few immigrants have negative attitudes to immigration.
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