The goal of our paper is to provide some conceptual arguments and empirical results to the phenomena of xenophobia based on two quantitative sociological surveys. The researches were carried out a few years before the recent refugee crisis, so the surveys can be recognized as antecedent to the shocking events of the last year. The dramatic year of 2015 with the refugee crises makes extremely interesting to examine how the attitudes towards strangers in different countries of Europe have changed earlier, and how the crises led to changes in the general attitudes toward immigrants, towards Europe and towards nation-states. On the other hand, from an analytical point of view to understand xenophobia in operation the temporal distance has advantages because attitudes towards strangers and immigrants can be examined in a significantly less tense and politically less hysterical world. Besides, we are not only interested in the extent of xenophobia but also searching for more typical sociological determinants, and also cognitive-affective social psychological mechanisms which may influence everyday attitudes towards foreigners.
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