Why eastern Europe is so hard on refugees
Heartless and mindless — that is how western eyes view how eastern European governments have reacted to the refugee crisis, enforcing their borders rather than opening their doors to those fleeing war. Some say this stance betrays a historical amnesia: That Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians seem to have forgotten how they were greeted and treated when they fled communism prior to 1948, and then again in 1956 and 1968.
What makes eastern Europeans so heartless and mindless? Instead of the plight of the refugees, they focus on their own poverty, and they feel themselves to be the ones in need of help. They are afraid of reversing the fragile economic progress they have made since the wall came down in 1989. They perceive themselves second-class citizens in Europe, and are determined to keep their sovereignty vis-à-vis the forced quota system. They live in incurious, insular societies to which an African or a Middle Eastern population is incurably foreign.
The most important factor for the ‘compassion deficit’ is fear. In eastern Europe, where borders were frequently redrawn, the nation is still widely seen as an ethnic/ cultural entity rather than a political one, and cultural and ethnic homogeneity is regarded as an asset that helps to prevent the disintegration of the state.
The two multinational countries of the region — Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia — broke up almost instantly after communist dictatorships were gone. The most multiethnic of the remaining Yugoslav units, Bosnia, was plunged into a bloody war again along ethnic lines. The disintegration of Czechoslovakia proceeded without violence, partly because its internal borders reflected Czech and Slovak ethnic division.
The newly established Czech Republic was basically unilingual because after 1945 more than 3 million of its German inhabitants had been exiled.
The only multinational confederation — Bosnia — is an artificial creation of the mid-1990s. Mainstream historians tend to portray national minorities as descendants of immigrants, practically aliens in the fatherland. As long as the concept of the ‘nation’ remains ethnically defined, the integration of immigrants is problematic.
Without a colonialist past, and living under Soviet occupation, eastern European nations did not experience the favourable economic impact of large-scale immigration in the 1960-70s. What they did experience was existential danger to their states, especially if cohabiting with ‘alien’ ethnic populations.
Political efforts of these nations to remain homogeneous may be bigotry, but if it is to be cured, the reasons behind it should be understood. Instead of historical amnesia, it is caused by a succession of national traumas of historic proportions.