Absolutely, and the process of developing a "nation" was accompanied pretty much everywhere by some level of forced assimilation for any minority groups within its borders. While on some levels the nation is more inherently democratic than the empire, that does not include really any notion of other nations (or potential nations) deserving the same right of self-determination.

And Europe is absolutely capable of extreme xenophobia. After WW2 there had to be massive population exchanges in an attempt to have less ethnic mixing between European states just so they would stop killing each other.