Why eastern Europe’s resistance to refugee quotas is not ‘selfish’

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/16/eastern-european-migrants-refugees-selfish

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As Hungary seals its border with Serbia, Germany, in effect, exits the Schengen travel area and countries across the EU say they have run out of capacity to take more migrants, Europe seems to have split into the “compassionate” west and “selfish” east. That, at least, is the overriding media narrative in the west. It is true that central and eastern Europeans have not been willingly opening their borders, the welcome banners are rare and the European Commission’s proposal for a centrally agreed share-out of refugees among all EU states is running into strong resistance in Warsaw and Prague. While central and east Europeans are grudgingly accepting that they need to accommodate more refugees than they anticipated, the idea of doing this via compulsory quotas is proving particularly contentious.

Related: Refugees, Hungarians and me: walking together, transformed together | John Domokos

Several reasons help explain this reluctance, and most of them are missing from the coverage. First, central and eastern European states are already taking a huge number of both refugees and migrants from Ukraine. While many Poles work in British hospitals and cafes, in Poland’s service sector it is the Ukrainians who are doing many of the jobs. The same is true for other states of the region and few raise complaints.

Second, the decision of Angela Merkel to issue a broad welcome to the refugees is seen in central and eastern Europe as counter-productive and escalating the influx. This is why there is a reluctance to share in the implications of Berlin’s decision. Now as Germany is reintroducing checks on the border with Austria and as the entire concept of Europe with no internal borders is under threat, it seems that Berlin’s invitation to refugees was a little premature.

Third, central and eastern Europeans have little tradition of dealing with refugees from non-European cultures and lack the required infrastructure. The UK, France and Germany have for years been adjusting their systems – healthcare, education, language training – to assimilate migrants from all over the world. But for central and eastern Europe, which has no colonial past and is made up of mostly small and ethnically homogeneous nations, this is quite a new challenge. Even with all the tradition and experience in western Europe the success rate is mixed. None of this is to say that central and eastern Europe should not accept a bigger share of responsibility. What Europe requires, however, is solidarity and co-ordinated action – not just in distributing the existing refugee numbers but in preventing a humanitarian crisis from occurring.

First and foremost, the network of human traffickers should be destroyed and safe havens should be created within Syria. The EU’s external borders, in particular sea borders, should be made more secure. Meanwhile, refugees should be given more aid and the conditions in the UN camps in Turkey and Syria improved. All of these actions would require a stronger EU security and defence policy, which is what many central European governments have been promoting for years, alas, in vain, mostly because of the resistance from the same group of western European capitals that denounce the selfishness of their eastern neighbours.