The emergence of new kinds of racism in European societies – referred to variously as ‘Euro-racism’, ‘symbolic racism’, ‘cultural racism’ or, in France, as racisme différentiel – has been widely discussed (see for example Holmes 2000; Macmaster 2001). While these accounts differ, there is widespread agreement that racism in Europe is on the increase and that one of its characteristic features is hostility to migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers who are positioned in exclusionary discourse as the new ‘Others’. In this respect European racism is characterized by a hostility that is not exclusively defined by the traditional terms of ‘colour’ and ‘race’, as was typical of ‘biological’ racism in the industrial and colonial period (Fekete 2001).

Accordingly, in many European countries the extreme right has refined its electoral programmes under the rubric of nationalist-populist slogans and has adopted more subtle (or coded) forms of racism. The move away from overt neo-fascist discourse has in fact allowed these parties to expand their electoral support as populist-nationalist parties concerned with a defence of ethnonationalist ‘culture’ (Rydgren 2003, 2005; Delanty and O'Mahony 2002; Wodak and Pelinka 2002; Pelinka and Wodak 2002). But this has led to an increase in racist and anti-Semitic discourse, not its decline, since contemporary racism often takes more pervasive, diffuse forms, frequently – and paradoxically – to the point of being expressed in the denial of racism (Van Dijk 1985).