ABSTRACT
Xenophobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are on the agenda of the current European debate on how to deal with an increasing immigrant population, including refugees. In this paper I will discuss attitudes towards foreigners or strangers such as immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees who are in Europe, from the perspective of inter-group relations. It is my claim that primitive group processes create fundamentalism on both sides and that latent, historically conditioned fundamentalist functioning is provoked by the fundamentalism of the other party. This creates vicious circles resulting in more or less open reciprocal xenophobia and tendencies towards systematised prejudices. In Europe we have recently seen a frightening tendency to dehumanise those who appear as “strangers”, such as asylum seekers and the Roma.
