Construction workers build a refugee camp in Lepida, on the southeastern Greek island of Leros, February, 2016. Thanassis Stavrakis/Press Association. All rights reserved.Many observers see in the politics of the European member states a profound divide between the ‘old Europe’ and the so-called Visegrad group of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In their view, Viktor Orbàn’s xenophobic campaign against the ‘enforced relocation of non-Hungarians in Hungary’ supported by 98% of voters highlights this division, notwithstanding the small turnout (40% of registered voters) in the vote last Sunday.
The reluctance of Visegrad countries to receive refugees is supposedly out of step with the EU ‘values’. Yet, despite their electioneering speeches and populist anathemas, the leaders of these states are inspired by the same dominant European principles of border control: denial of all freedom of movement for those seeking asylum, and the aim of keeping exiles at an ever-greater distance from the Schengen area, preferably in detention.
Visegrad countries were not alone in protesting when, for a few weeks at the end of summer 2015, Germany and Austria opened their borders to exiles taking the ‘Balkan routes’. This welcoming policy, which broke with all European rules regarding asylum, resulted in a real panic in the heart of the EU and in various member states. Last February, the French prime minister publicly scolded the German chancellor when he said during a visit to Munich, ‘We can take no more refugees … The time has come to put into effect what has been discussed and negotiated: hotspots, controls at exterior frontiers, etc.’ Manuel Valls thus reminded us how, for more than 20 years, the EU has trampled over the founding principles of the right to asylum.
