Xenophobia

The word xenophobia comes from the Greek words xénos (“stranger” or “guest”) and phóbos (“fear”), which, when combined, mean “fear of strangers.” The word was first used in a novel by Anatole France in 1901 and first appeared in a French dictionary in 1906. Several years later, it began appearing in English-language dictionaries.

The word xenophobia is widely used by the mass media and by political actors and has entered everyday language. It is not a word commonly used by psychologists, who prefer more theoretically defined concepts, such as stereotypes, prejudice, and ethnocentrism.

In social psychology, xenophobia is normally interpreted as a logical extension of ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism was originally coined by William Graham Sumner and denotes a process that simultaneously produces in-group solidarity and out-group hostility as a result of the human striving for belonging, for “we-ness.” The us is defined against them. Like ethnocentrism, xenophobia is characterized by a belief that it is natural for people to live among others of their own kind and have a corresponding hostility toward people of another kind. However, this hostility need not be activated until strangers come too close to the in-group (in geographical space or in social space) and are believed to threaten the identity (beliefs, practices, mores, and traditional values) or the material interests of the in-group. Strangers at a distance will not meet with the same hostility or be as feared. The ambiguous etymological meaning of xenophobia, fear of strangers or guests, is thus very apt: it is strangers as unwanted guests that are being feared or met with hostility.

Yet, in social science, as in everyday speech, xenophobia has increasingly come to mean hatred of strangers rather than fear of strangers. Simultaneously, social scientists have increasingly used the concept of xenophobia to denote hatred of immigrants or other ethnic minorities, rather than of strangers. This is an unfortunate development. The strength of the concept of xenophobia is in its broader definition, which includes more than racism and ethnic prejudice. As shown by Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson's study of the small English city “Winston Parva,” xenophobia may be highly manifest also when members of two opposing groups belong to the same race, ethnicity, religion, and social class. In the case of Winston Parva, one group happened to have lived in the city longer (they were the established) than the other (the newcomers). The established defined themselves against the newcomers and did not want to mingle with the newcomers, whose badness and impurity the established feared would infect them. Xenophobia may thus result from either a real or a perceived threat to the identity or interests of an individual or an ingroup to which one belongs, posed by someone belonging to an out-group or by the out-group as a whole.

Therefore, one may argue that xenophobia (understood as fear of strangers—or as hostile skepticism toward strangers—as unwanted guests) is a relatively [Page 484]basic and mostly unconscious phenomenon. Xenophobia thus understood is not something that has to be learned during the course of one's life or that emerged at some point in history, but rather is something that one has to learn how to become free of.

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