Eastern Europe's selective amnesia and return of ultra-nationalism
- By Sumantra Maitra
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E-mail China.org.cn, November 1, 2015
Hungary started it. Then Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Greece and Bulgaria followed suit. Now, even Austria and Germany are talking of bringing back border checks. Finland and Denmark are instituting stricter border checks and even threatening people who are not genuine war refugees, and German and Scandinavian government ministers are saying that the Somalians and Arabs headed north need to stay back to build up their own country, and cannot just leave and resettle somewhere else.
I find it very ironic that the Eastern Europeans are leading this movement, forgetting the immense benefits they gained from joining the European Union, including migration and the right to settle, if they wanted, in Britain, France and Germany.
They talk about the new migrants taking the jobs that should go to their own citizens, forgetting the vast movements west and north in search of a better life that led to fears they were taking over the British and German job market?
We might even go further back and recall the European refugee movements across the Atlantic to countries like America and Canada that provided the population for both to become strong economic powers. Refugees are nothing new, neither are the ways both good and bad that host countries have adopted to deal with them.
One might perhaps sympathize to some extent with the countries of eastern and southeastern Europe who thought EU entry was a passport to riches, and now find there is a downside. They didn't create the mess in the Middle East, but now are expected to share in cleaning it up.
However, it is unfortunate and shameful, that the teenagers of East Europe have forgotten history and what Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did to their forefathers, and why the latter sought to migrate en masse to the New World of America and Australia during the Second World War.
Equally, however, is the collective failure of the rest of Europe that failed to understand the region welcomed with open arms in the EU, and now revealing some of the dark forces of ultra-nationalism that long exited in their history and which now threaten to engulf the entire European continent.
The writer is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:
http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/SumantraMaitra.htm
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