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Understanding international Schadenfreude: the pains of Europe as a protective shield of the Israeli self-perception

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Abstract

Schadenfreude, the arousal of positive emotions in view of negative experiences of another, is considered one of the most inappropriate emotions in social life. Its international manifestation is puzzling, as it arouses the question of why people in one state enjoy seeing the residents of a friendly country suffer. To address this, the article offers a conceptualisation of international Schadenfreude and treats it as an emotion with purifying and cleansing qualities. I argue that Schadenfreude assists in self-justifying our policies, behaviours, and beliefs within political interactions. I suggest four interrelated conditions that are responsible for the emergence of Schadenfreude. The likeliness of the emotion is thus high when one side (1) perceives an imbalance vis-à-vis the other as unjust; (2) views the other’s misfortune as relevant to the perceived imbalance of the relations; (3) already carries negative sentiments towards the other; and (4) considers the trouble of the other as a minor one. The significance of international Schadenfreude is illustrated here through the Israeli responses to the terror attacks in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. Aiming to link official and popular emotional expressions, the research is based on both discourse analysis and elite interviews.

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Notes

  1. Taken from the song ‘Misfortunes of Gentiles’ by the Israeli Alternative-Pop band Shmemel. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKQFL6dMiY4.

  2. Macro approaches aim at developing generalisable theories about the emergence, the nature, the function, and the impact of emotions in the political context, while micro research deals with the ways in which specific emotions function in specific circumstances (Hutchison and Bleiker 2014, p. 493).

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List of interviews

  • Interview by the Author with a European Diplomat (8 August, 2016).

  • Interview by the Author with a European Diplomat (22 August, 2016).

  • Interview by the Author with an Israeli Diplomat (16 June, 2016).

  • Interview by the Author with an Israeli Diplomat (27 July, 2016).

  • Interview by the Author with an Israeli Diplomat (23 August, 2016).

  • Interview by the Author with an Israeli Diplomat (29 August, 2016).

  • Interview by the Author with an Israeli Diplomat (4 September 2016).

  • Interview by the Author with an Israeli Journalist (24 August, 2016).

  • Interview by the Author with an Israeli Politician (3 August, 2016).

  • Interview by the Author with an Israeli Politician and Diplomat (16 January, 2014).

  • Interview by the Author with a Norwegian Diplomat (25 July, 2016).

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Journal of International Relations and Development for their wise suggestions and for challenging my thinking again and again. I am also grateful to a list of people who shared with me their comments on earlier versions of the text: Oded Löwenheim, Gadi Heimann, Galia Press-Barnathan, Simon Koschut, Oren Barak, Amir Lupovici, Brent E. Sasley, Sharon Pardo, Dov Waxman, Shani Bar-Tuvia, Benjamin Schvarcz, Yoram Haftel, Mira Sucharov, Gad Yair, and Kathrine Tschemerinsky.

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  1. Department of International Relations, University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus Campus, 9190501, Jerusalem, Israel

    Aviad Levy

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Levy, A. Understanding international Schadenfreude: the pains of Europe as a protective shield of the Israeli self-perception. J Int Relat Dev 23, 996–1025 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-019-00179-3

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