WARSAW
— Even though the former Communist countries of Central and Eastern
Europe have been asked to accept just a tiny fraction of the refugees
that Germany and other nations are taking, their fierce resistance now
stands as the main impediment to a unified European response to the
crisis.
Poland’s
new president, Andrzej Duda, has complained about “dictates” from the
European Union to accept migrants flowing onto the Continent from the
Middle East and Africa.
Slovakia’s
prime minister, Robert Fico, says his country will accept only
Christian refugees as it would be “false solidarity” to force Muslims to
settle in a country without a single mosque. Viktor Orban, Hungary’s hard-line prime minister, calls the influx a “rebellion by illegal migrants” and pledges a new crackdown this week.
The
discord has further unsettled a union already shaky from struggles over
the euro and the Greek financial crisis and now facing a historic
influx of people attracted by Europe’s relative peace and prosperity.
When
representatives of the European Union nations meet on Monday to take up
a proposal for allocating refugees among them, Central and Eastern
European nations are likely to be the most vocal opponents. Their stance
— reflecting a mix of powerful far-right movements, nationalism, racial
and religious prejudices as well as economic arguments that they are
less able to afford to take in outsiders than their wealthier neighbors —
is the latest evidence of the stubborn cultural and political divides
that persist between East and West.
When
joining the European Union — as the former Communist countries have
done since 2004 — nations are asked to pledge support to a raft of
so-called European values,
including open markets, transparent government, respect for an
independent media, open borders, cultural diversity, protection of
minorities and a rejection of xenophobia.
But
the reality is that the former Communist states have proved sluggish in
actually absorbing many of these values and practicing them. Oligarchs,
cronyism and endemic corruption remain a part of daily life in many of
the countries, freedom of the press is in decline while rising
nationalism and populist political movements have stirred anti-immigrant
tensions.
“People
must remember that Poland has been transitioning from communism for
only 25 years,” Lech Walesa, who led that country’s independence
movement, said in an interview. “Our salaries and houses are still
smaller than those in the West. Many people here don’t believe that they
have anything to share with migrants. Especially that they see that
migrants are often well-dressed, sometimes better than many Poles.”
Few
migrants, in fact, are particularly interested in settling in Eastern
Europe, preferring to head to Germany or Scandinavia, where social
welfare benefits are higher, employment opportunities greater and
immigrant communities better established. In that sense, migrants are
aligned with leaders in Eastern and Central European capitals, who
frequently argue that the 28-member bloc should focus first on securing
its borders and figuring out a way to end the war in Syria before
talking about mandatory quotas for accepting refugees.
But
as often as not, the political discourse in these countries has quickly
moved toward a wariness of accepting racial and religious diversity.
“This refugee flow has outraged the right wing,” said Kenneth Roth,
executive director of Human Rights Watch. “If you scratch the surface,
why are they so upset? It’s not about jobs or the ability to manage them
or social welfare. What it is really about is that they are Muslim.”
Unlike
countries in Western Europe, which have long histories of accepting
immigrants from diverse cultures, the former Communist states tend to be
highly homogeneous. Poland, for instance, is 98 percent white and 94 percent Catholic.
“And the countries that have very little diversity are some of the most virulently against refugees,” said Andrew Stroehlein, European media director for Human Rights Watch.
Even
mainstream political leaders eager for closer ties to Brussels, the
European Union’s headquarters, feel pressure to appeal to this growing
nationalist wave.
“By
toughening up their rhetoric and showing a strong hand toward the Roma
minority, facing down the E.U. and refusing a common solution to the
refugee crisis, they are trying to outbid the far right and keep the
traditional political parties in power,” said Zuzana Kusá, a senior
research fellow at the Institute for Sociology of the Slovak Academy of
Sciences.
There
is also widespread disappointment with the pace of economic change
since communism’s fall, and a sense that the countries are too poor to
offer substantial support to immigrants.
“There
is a long history of victimization in our region,” said Csaba Szaló, a
professor of sociology at Masaryk University in Brno. “We are the ones
who have always been victims of injustice, the ones who have suffered.
And now there is somebody trying to grab that status. People find it
very difficult to accept that somebody might suffer more than us.”
While rising xenophobia is playing a role, there are other factors behind the East-West divide, said Marcin Zaborowski, executive vice president at the Center for European Policy Analysis and head of its Warsaw office.
“The
primary reason for this difference in attitude is that we come from a
region where the tradition of accepting culturally different refugees is
very weak,” he said. “And now there is this wave of refugees from
another continent that has no precedent, so people don’t know what to
think.”
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