EDITED BY CATALIN GHITA AND ROBERT BESHARA

FEAR AND ANXIETYIN THE 21ST CENTURYTHE EUROPEAN CONTEXT AND BEYOND

INTER-DISCIPLINARY PRESS

Fear and Anxiety in the 21st Century

Series Editors

Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard

Dr Ken Monteith

Advisory Board

Simon Bacon Ana Borlescu

Katarzyna Bronk Ann-Marie Cook

John L. Hochheimer Peter Mario Kreuter

Stephen Morris John Parry

Peter Twohig Karl Spracklen

S Ram Vemuri

A Probing the Boundaries research and publications project.

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/

The Hostility and Violence Hub

‘Fear and Anxiety’

2015

Fear and Anxiety in the 21st Century:

The European Context and Beyond

Edited by

Catalin Ghita and Robert Beshara

Inter-Disciplinary Press

Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2015

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First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2015. First Edition.

Table of Contents

Introduction vii

Catalin Ghita and Robert Beshara

Part I Xenophobia

‘The Invasion from the East’: European Fears over 3

Romanian Migration

Stefania Alina Cherata

Patriotism as Fear of Alterity 17

Catalin Ghita

Part II Islamophobia

Tough Asher: Mass Sport after 9/11 31

Leonore Bell

Liminal Moments: Fears and Anxieties between Peace and War 39

Ismee Tames

Part III Russophobia

Fear as an Integrating Factor in Post-Soviet Countries 53

Katarzyna Czerewacz-Filipowicz

Transnistrian Conflict: The Next Stage of Putin’s Scenario? 63

Agnieszka Konopelko

Part IV Cultural Dimensions of Fears and Anxieties

What Are Romanians Afraid Of? Romanians’ Fears and 79

Anxieties in Today’s Press

Melitta Szathmary

Anxiety and Dyslexia: A Cross-Cultural Study 91

Shally Novita and Evelin Witruk

Part V Imaginary Aspects of Fears and Anxieties

Fear, Ghouls and Politics: Obscure Power Games in an 107

Equally Obscure Village in the Danube Plains

Nicolae Panea and Vlad Preda

Is Literary Interpretation Conditioned by Inherited 117

Determinants? The Case of the Haunted House

Clara Pallejá Lopez

Part VI Fears and Anxieties: Between the Transcendent and

the Immanent

Scientific Explanations of Fear and Anxiety Relating to 129

the Choice of Deity

Sukran Karatas

Fear of Commitment: Fear of ‘I Love You’ 141

Izabela Dixon and Magdalena Hodalska

Introduction

Catalin Ghita and Robert Beshara

*****

This e-book contains a selection of the exciting chapters which were read and

thoroughly discussed at the 1st global conference on Fears and Anxieties in the 21st

Century: The European Context, a project initiated and led by Magdalena

Hodalska and Catalin Ghita with the support of Inter-Disciplinary.Net, which took

place at Mansfield College, Oxford between 29 and 31 July 2014. As volume

editors, we have decided to title this e-book Fears and Anxieties in the 21st

Century: The European Context and Beyond mainly because, though the main

focus of the inaugural edition remained present-day Europe, we have sought to

remain faithful to Inter-Disciplinary.Net’s global ethic and solid scientific

commitment. In 2012, the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The irony of this award becomes manifest as soon as one has noticed the obvious:

that its citizens are deeply and constantly disturbed by different forms of fears and

anxieties. Some of these are nurtured by real events, whilst others are rooted in

imaginary phenomena. What is even more relevant is that the fate of Europe

mirrors the fate of the world itself: events are no longer localized, but, as soon as

they have occurred, they have become part and parcel of our experience as a

genuinely cosmopolitan species.

What has happened in these 14 years since the inception of this unpredictably

tense and bloody century, which began under such boring auspices? Let us

summarize the main facts, for, as often is the case, they speack for themselves. In

2000, Vladimir Putin became President of Russia. In 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists

destroyed the World Trade Centre in New York City, the ‘War on Terror’ was

declared, the War in Afghanistan began, and Wikipedia was founded. In 2002, the

Guantanamo Bay detention camp was established. In 2003, the Iraq War began. In

2004, NATO was enlarged and the European Union incorporated most of the

former Eastern Bloc. In 2005, the 7/7 London bombings happened and Angela

Merkel became Germany’s first woman Chancellor. In 2006, Saddam Hussein was

executed. In 2007, the Global Financial Crisis began. In 2008, Barack Hussein

Obama became the first African American President of the United States. In 2009,

the Great Recession officially ended. In 2010, the Greek Depression became a

reality, the largest oil spill in US history occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, the

Website Wikileaks released thousands of classified US documents, and Mohamed

Bouazizi set himself on fire on 17 December 2010 in Tunisia. In 2011, the Arab

Spring began, the Syrian Civil War began, the Occupy movement inspired

worldwide protests, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster occurred, riots flared

across England, and Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gaddafi, and Kim Jong-Il died,

and the Iraq War ended. In 2012, the Higgs Boson was discovered and the world

Introduction

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viii

did not end.1 In 2013, Edward Snowden released classified documents concerning

mass surveillance by the NSA, the Euromaidan protests began, Hugo Chávez,

Nelson Mandela, and Margaret Thatcher died, and Uruguay became the first

country to fully legalize cannabis.

Taking into account the afore-mentioned chronology, we may move ahead to

state, in a prudent manner, that fear and anxiety signify two related yet different

affects that are a part of the vast range of experiences which human beings can

have in this world. But one should equally note that fear and anxiety are two

concepts that have several meanings in distinct historical contexts, languages,

discourses, cultures, theories, etc. It is obvious, for space constraints, that it is not

our task, as editors, to give verdicts in this delicate respect, but, rather, to allow and

synchronize the various voices of the researchers, who set the tone during the

conference in diverse aspects of investigation, such as philosophy, literature,

linguistics, media studies, psychology, anthropology, history, cultural theory or

economics. We all shall have learnt more about the concepts of ‘fear’ and ‘alterity’

not by trying to define them outright, but by seeking to find their hidden meaning

by perusing the texts gathered in what we believe to be an exceptionally

challenging collective volume.

Thus, one may say that physiological psychologists have tested various theories

of emotions over the years to explain what causes emotions such as fear and

anxiety. Of course, they presuppose a reductionist paradigm as they attempt to

explain said emotions through linear, cause-effect relationships. We find such

explanations dissatisfactory because they do not honour the primacy, subtlety, and

complexity of human experience. According to physiological psychologists, fear

and anxiety are but neurochemical processes that are primarily associated with a

part of the brain called the amygdala, which is division of the limbic system—one

of the older sections of the brain according to the triune brain theory.2 An alarming

stimulus causes fear, which in effect results in the arousal of the sympathetic

nervous system, that element of the autonomic nervous system, which mobilizes

the body in a fight-or-flight response.

Expressed in a different manner, fear refers to a type of relating to a concrete

object/event in the world (be they definite, such as snakes, spiders, or indefinite,

such as darkness), which signals danger to us (i.e., the possibility of dying),

whereas anxiety refers to a fearful way of being in the world in relationship to no

specific object/event. Neurobiologically, fear is one of the six basic emotions,

according to Paul Ekman,3 that we are born into the world with; fear is beneficial

to mammals from an evolutionary perspective because it has survival value, which

explains why fear is an inheritable trait and why we adapted as a species to include

it as part of our makeup. After all, to experience fear in a dangerous situation

motivates us to instantly respond in proportion to circumstance: this is known as

the fight, flight, or freeze response, or simply, the stress response. Phobias, on the

other hand, activate our stress response as well, only disproportionately and to an

Catalin Ghita and Robert Beshara

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ix

imagined object/event (e.g., the other) that does not signal danger to us in any

concrete or immediate way.

Along a well-known Freudian line of thought, if the primordial human fear is

fear of thanatos (death), which can be disguised in many forms as fear of

mutilation or fear of rejection (symbolic death), the remedy would be embracing

eros (sex/life/love). And if anxiety is deeply connected with uncertainty (or that

pervasive fear of the unknown), then hope may well be the long-awaited panacea.

After all, what is anxiety but untapped creativity that needs to be released in some

way, through, for example, sex, physical exercise, meditation or artistic

expression?

Without further ado, it is high time we briefly introduced the chapters contained

in this e-book. Concretely, in Part I, Xenophobia, Stefania-Alina Cherata presents

us with a case study which dissects Western Europeans’ irrational, yet constant,

fears of Romanian immigrants, whereas Catalin Ghita explores a theory of literary

xenophobia based on Emmanuel Levinas’s flexible concept of ‘alterity’. In Part II,

Islamophobia, Leonore Bell and Ismee Tames are curious about understanding

practices related to Islamophobia in a post-9/11 world as exemplified by popular

fitness movements (e.g. Crossfit and Tough Mudder) and emotional discourses in

digital Dutch newspapers, respectively. In Part III, Russophobia, Katarzyna

Czerewacz-Filipowicz and Agnieszka Konopelko are trying to unpack

Russophobia by trying to make sense of the complex and, at times, utterly

deceptive power dynamics between Russia and a number of post-Soviet countries.

In Part IV, Cultural Dimensions of Fears and Anxities, Melitta Szathmary, Shally

Novita and Evelin Witruk investigate cultural dimensions of fears and anxieties.

Szathmary scans the fears and anxieties of Romanians via a ‘radiography’ of the

Romanian press, whilst Novita and Witruk attempt to show the correlation between

anxiety and dyslexia among German and Indonesian children in relation to cultural

factors (e.g., individualism versus collectivism). In Part V, Imaginary Aspects of

Fears and Anxieties, Nicolae Panea and Vlad Preda, as well as Clara Pallejá Lopez

examine the way in which fears and anxieties are externalized via the faculty of

imagination. Panea and Preda focus on a case study in a Romanian village that

involves ‘ghouls’ and on how that story was taken up in the media and

subsequently creatively politicized, whereas Lopez is curious about the biology of

fear in relation to the haunted house in horror fiction. In Part VI, Fears and

Anxieties: Between the Transcendent and the Immanent, Sukran Karatas attempts

to prove scientifically that nonbelief in a deity presumed to have created the

universe is the cause of our fears and anxieties, whereas, using attractive anecdotes

and urban folklore as data, whilst Izabela Dixon and Magdalena Hodalska point to

European men’s insidious fear of commitment.

It is our hope that, though different and, at times, even dialectical, the various

voices which make up this volume are harmonized by their common commitment

to the integrity of research, as well as to the humanistic values which are menaced

Introduction

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x

by the seemingly-endless conflicts which beset present-day society. In the case of

this volume, at least, difference strives not to beget grim conflict, but stimulating

diversity.

Notes

1 This is, of course, a reference to the ‘2012 phenomenon’ that was a

misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar. 2 Paul D. MacLean. The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral

Functions. New York: Plenum Press, 1990, passim. 3 Tim Dalgleish and Michael J. Power. ‘Basic Emotions’. In Handbook of

Cognition and Emotion, 45-60. Chichester: Wiley, 1999.

Bibliography

Dalgleish, Tim and Michael J. Power. ‘Basic Emotions’. In Handbook of Cognition

and Emotion, 45-60. Chichester: Wiley, 1999.

Dalgleish, Tim and Michael J. Power. Handbook of Cognition and Emotion.

Chichester: Wiley, 1999.

MacLean, Paul D. The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral

Functions. New York: Plenum Press, 1990.

Catalin Ghita is Senior Lecturer at the University of Craiova, Romania and author

of numerous volumes of essays and literary criticism. He holds a PhD in Romanian

literature from the University of Craiova (2003), a PhD in English literature from

Tohoku University, Japan (2007) and Dr Habil title from the Alexandru Ioan Cuza

University of Iasi, Romania (2014). His main research interests include romantic

literature, the aesthetics of terror and the cultural relationship between Europe and

Asia.

Robert Beshara is a doctoral researcher at the University of West Georgia, where

he is also an instructor of Psychology. He is currently studying the relationship

between fear and identity vis-à-vis certain mediated political discourses.