Next let us discuss our straightforward procedure for using these questions to generate an RCN index for the Muslim and non-Muslim publics in the countries. We calculate a religious-cultural negativity (RCN) index score for each respondent based on the seven items, each of which is scored “1” if a respondent indicated that the characteristic applied to the other group and “0” if the respondent indicated it did not. The index thus ranges from 0 (all positive assessments) to 7 (all negative assessments). The RCN score for each country is calculated by taking the weighted mean (average) of a country’s individual scores. As Table 1 illustrates, the mean RCN index for these countries ranges from 2.1 in France to 5.2 in Turkey.

Overall, the Muslim publics are more likely to associate negative traits with Westerners than vice versa. However, there is significant variation among Muslim populations. Turkey emerges as the country with the most negative views of Westerners, perhaps a surprising finding, given Turkey’s longstanding ties with many Western countries and its membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). However, as F. Stephen Larrabee has noted in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, “Turkey’s ties to the West have deteriorated” recently, and now this Muslim nation of over 70 million people is “in the unprecedented situation of having poor relations with the EU and the United States simultaneously.” Fueled by frustration with the stalled negotiations over their country’s bid to join the European Union (EU) and by deep opposition to American foreign policy, Turks have soured on both Europe and the United States. The most recent Pew Global Attitudes survey, conducted in April and May of 2007, found that the percentage of Turks with a favorable view of the United States had plummeted from 52 percent at the start of this decade to 9 percent in 2007. And the favorability rating for the EU dropped from 58 percent in 2004 to 27 percent in 2007.

Similar dynamics may be influencing opinions in other Muslim countries, as well. Among Muslims in Indonesia, Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, and Nigeria, attitudes toward the United States and American foreign policy also tended to be quite negative, although the EU was held in somewhat higher regard. Still, many sensed antagonism from Europe—at least half of the Muslims surveyed by Pew in 2006 in Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and Nigeria said that most or many Europeans were hostile toward Muslims.

Indeed, perceptions of hostility or threat from the West may be leading to negative views of Western people. A considerable body of literature from political science, sociology, and social psychology suggests that threat perception is linked to negative views of societal “outgroups” or groups that are perceived as political enemies. Recently, for example, in a 2006 article in Perspectives on Politics, Ronald Inglehart, Mansoor Moaddel, and Mark Tessler found that threats to “existential security”—essentially threats to survival—have led to extraordinarily high levels of xenophobia among Iraqis. In a similar manner, perceptions of security threats from Western nations may be linked to negative views of people from those nations, and, in fact, survey research in Muslim countries has found high levels of concern about threats to national security and to Islam itself. The 2007 Pew survey found that solid majorities in all eleven predominantly Muslim countries included in the survey believed the United States could become a military threat to their country someday. And in a 2005 Pew survey, at least 46 percent in the five Muslim countries included in the study said they believed there were serious threats to Islam today (in Jordan, for example, a remarkably high 82 percent thought so).

The findings among European Muslims in the 2006 survey generally support the notion that familiarity breeds favorability—the four European Muslim publics had the least negative views of Westerners. However, significant variations among these four Muslim publics were reflected throughout the Pew survey. As Martin Walker wrote recently in the Wilson Quarterly, contrary to some of the more alarmist analyses published in recent years, Islam in Europe is not monolithic—there is no “[single] such phenomenon as European Islam”—and important distinctions exist among Europe’s Muslim communities.