Eastern Europe’s Compassion Deficit [View all]

[uawchild]

Sofia, Bulgaria — COMMENTING on the flow of migrants making their way through Hungary to Austria and Germany, a Hungarian journalist told me recently: “We don’t have cities anymore. Only an extended railway station.”

Twenty years ago, Hungary and its Eastern European neighbors were transitional, post-Communist societies, and several — Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia — still are. Now, overnight, these transitional countries have become transit countries. As a result, along with the influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants, Europe must also worry about the wedge that the crisis is driving between its eastern and western halves.

The “truck of shame” in Austria and the scenes of drowned migrants have forced a wave of compassion in many Western European countries. In Germany, 60 percent of the public supports its government’s giving shelter to as many as 800,000 refugees, equal to almost 1 percent of the country’s population.

Yet in Eastern Europe the public remains unmoved, and leaders there have lambasted Brussels’s decision to redistribute refugees among European Union member states. Majorities in the transit countries support building walls on their borders; a recent poll in the Czech Republic shows that 44 percent insist that the government not spend even one additional koruna to help the migrants."

"...What’s the matter with Eastern Europe? Just three decades ago, “Solidarity” was its symbol. Today, a more appropriate symbol would be a bumper sticker reading “Eastern Europe: Where Donald Trump comes off looking good.” "

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/09/opinion/eastern-europes-compassion-deficit-refugees-migrants.html?_r=0
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Good lord. These are EU and NATO members, by and large. How does such intolerance color the policies of both those organizations now? More militarism? More xenophobia?