Yet all of this raises another question. Why is Eastern Europe so different? Why has its attitude throughout the migrant crisis, towards borders, national sovereignty, cultural cohesion and many other points besides been so wholly at odds with that of Western Europe? Throughout the crisis, as in the years before, it was unimaginable that a right-wing Western European leader would have said half of what a left-wing Eastern European leader would. From the summer of 2015 up to the present whatever the threats and imprecations from the German government and the European Commission, the Visegrad Group of Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic took a line entirely contrary to that of Angela Merkel and Brussels. They criticised the Chancellor’s shortsightedness and they held firm in their refusal to take in migrant quotas dictated from Berlin and Brussels.

In January 2016, when the Swedish authorities, European Commission and others began publicly to acknowledge that the majority of the people they had taken in the previous year had no right to claim asylum in Europe, Jean-Claude Juncker continued to insist on the Commission’s proposed quota system to share out the migrants between each country. Slovakia continued to refuse to have any part in what its government described as a ‘nonsense’ and ‘complete fiasco’. While volunteering to add 300 guards to the Schengen area’s external borders, they nevertheless continued to insist that they would not take in any quotas of migrants. The left-wing Slovakian Prime Minister, Robert Fico, said in despair, ‘I feel that we in the EU are now committing ritual suicide and we’re just looking on.’13 The other Visegrad countries held the same view as Fico. The difference from their Western European partners could not have been more stark. What was it that made the East and West of the same continent think so differently on such central issues?

Chantal Delsol noticed the seeds of this difference in the mid-1990s. Spending time in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she saw that Eastern Europeans ‘increasingly considered us as creatures from another planet, even while at a different level they dreamed of becoming like us. I later became convinced that it was in these eastern European societies that I should seek some answers to our questions … the divergences between us and them led me to the belief that the last fifty years of good fortune had entirely erased our sense of the tragic dimension of life’.14 That tragic dimension of life had not been erased in the East. And nowhere have the consequences of this been more clearly displayed than in the attitudes of Eastern Europe’s leaders, with the support of their publics, to the migration crisis.