ABSTRACT
Austria, a state located at the frontier of former state-socialist countries also has a long imperial history in the Balkans, namely in the countries of former Yugoslavia such as Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. After the Second World War, in the 1950s, the country’s immigration history began with the Hungarian exodus to the West in 1957 and after the repression of the ‘Prague spring’ in 1968. In the 1970s, so-called ‘guest workers’, mainly from Yugoslavia and Turkey were attracted to Austria looking for employment. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Yugoslav wars, refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina and later from Kosovo arrived in Austria. Today, the country is characterized by growing resentment towards immigrants and multiculturalism. These growing anti-immigrant sentiments, especially towards Muslims (Wodak 2013: 26), have been fostered by the right-wing extremist mobilization of the Austrian Freedom party, the FPÖ (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs), which jumped on the ‘new’ issue of immigration in the 1990s and has been mobilizing against immigrants, together with another right-wing populist party, the BZÖ (Bündnis Zukunft Österreich), since then.
