LAUSR

There is some truth in the common view that hostility to Muslims and Islam is more prominent on the eastern flank of the European Union (EU). Yet this East–West difference appears to be diminishing, as governments in Austria and Italy follow Donald Trump’s America by turning Islamophobia into a political platform. On the whole, East–West differences in Islamophobia are often seen as greater than they really are. In terms of content, the discourse of Islamophobia is practically identical to that in the East of the EU and the West, as well as in North America and other parts of the world. Charges of terrorism, immigrant crime, the oppression of women and homosexuals, and/or a desire to invade and ‘Islamize’ Europe and change its Christian character are directed at Muslims as a whole on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. What is different is not so much in the character or degree of antiMuslim prejudice as such. Rather, it is in the extent to which its political expression is entrenched in national consensus, and to which it is able to undermine resistance by the judiciary, the media and human rights organizations. Islamophobia is discussed in this issue not as the latest incarnation of an ‘East European’ cultural inclination towards racial prejudice, but as an example and a warning about a process that is also happening, though it may not have advanced quite as far (yet?), in most of the West. The most promising avenue of research into the specifically East Central European situation is to study how the fear and rejection of Muslim migrants has been employed in negotiating a new place for the formerly socialist eastern