Jozef Chovanec, a Slovak traveller, boarded a plane at the Charleroi airport in Belgium on 23 February 2018. The 39-year-old, who suffered from episodes of mental illness, reportedly became violent before take-off. At 7:30 pm, the captain called the police, and a doctor approved placing Chovanec in a cell, where he was at first allowed to sleep. A video shows officers entering at about 4:30 am. They proceed to bind the man's hands and feet. Soon, as many as seven officers are seen in the cell. One applies pressure to his neck; another kneels on his chest for about 16 minutes. A policewoman presents a mock Nazi salute. Smiles on the other officers’ faces show they are quite amused. Initial reports said that Chovanec died in hospital a little later, but his lawyer and family maintain that he was dead on arrival. At the time of writing, a court investigation is still going on. Chovanec's wife Henrieta saw a parallel to the well-known death of an African American who choked to death under the knee of a white policeman in the summer of 2020. ‘After the videos of the arrest of the American George Floyd,’ Henrieta recalled, ‘I immediately thought, “my husband died the same way”. Except that police also laughed out loud at my husband and a policewoman next to him did a Hitler salute’.

How right was Chovanec's widow, to compare the police brutality toward her husband to one of the most notorious cases of police killing a Black man in America? Would Chovanec still be alive today if he was not a Slovak, like, we must surmise, Floyd would be alive had he not been an African American? Would he be alive if he wasn't an Eastern European?

I call racism against people seen as Eastern European (including Central Europeans), ‘Eastern Europeanism’. Eastern Europeanist racism reared its head quite visibly during the ‘Brexit’ debate in the United Kingdom. Decades after the end of Soviet hegemony, the Eastern Bloc certainly lived on – or was it revived? – as an enemy in the minds of the owners of a little fishing lake in Oxfordshire. ‘No Polish or Eastern Bloc fishermen allowed’, a warning they posted at the pond said.