The Sources of Phobos

The classic understanding of phobos—an irrational fear of an immediate direct threat—can be applied to different cases of fear in the contemporary world. Using the previous case of Brexit, for example, the threat to people left behind by continuous in-migration from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) or third countries is plausible and can be perceived as near, thereby invoking Thucydides’ term phobos.

A helpful metaphor explaining this phenomenon can be found in the South Pacific. In rituals in some of the Pacific Islands as well as New Zealand, the war dance of the haka is given high priority before clashes with the adversary; some of the Islanders give it a different name. The performance displays the bravery—more, the ruthlessness and even murderous intent—of the assembled group carrying it out. In rugby, its purpose is utter intimidation of the opponent. The New Zealand All-Blacks rugby side is the best-known example. Creating fear in the adversary moments away from the start of a match surely conveys inescapable phobos.

The notion of an immediate threat to a way of life and culture can, in particular, be associated with particular regions of a country undergoing rapid demographic transformation. The example of Germany can be cited: in recent times a direct threat to a part of the country, Saxony, was transmitted by way of an “immigration wave” that brought Muslim groups from the Middle East and the southwestern Balkan states to what used to be east Germany. Some of the local population believed that the threat had been present even earlier with Germany's intake of guest workers (Gastarbeiters) in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s.

Thucydides’ example of phobos has been at play in the eastern region of Germany. It became manifest in what can be labeled as “rage against the newcomer”—in-migration into Saxony—where a history of xenophobia had been cultivated. Lying in the Soviet-created German Democratic Republic (GDR), the fear of the foreigner, and even of western Germans, had become palpable when the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961. Confined mainly to one hotspot Land (or county), for nearly five decades Saxony was sheltered and isolated from the pro-Western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).