Eastern Europe’s Short Memory

Even as Europe’s greatest refugee emergency since World War II grew more acute, prompting Germany and some other states to temporarily shut their borders, European Union interior ministers failed on Monday to agree on even a limited mandatory distribution of refugees for resettlement among member states. That tragic reaction was all the more shameful because those most adamantly opposed to quotas were some East European states that recently basked in and richly benefited from the embrace of their Western neighbors. The Central and Eastern Europeans were not alone in their resistance, and there are explanations for their reaction. Most of the countries that were liberated from the Soviet yoke 25 years ago are still poorer than their neighbors and have not shed a sense of victimhood; many have never had large numbers of people from distant parts of the world on their lands, and many have only a limited familiarity with the crises of the Middle East. continue