As a result, fear of Islam, terrorism, rising criminality and a general anxiety over the unfamiliar are at the core of the moral panic provoked by the influx of migrants.

Curiously, demographic panic is one of the least discussed factors shaping Eastern Europeans’ behavior. But it is a critical one. According to United Nations projections, Bulgaria’s population is expected to shrink 27 percent by 2050. The alarm of “ethnic disappearance” could be felt in many of the small nations of Eastern Europe.

For them the coming of the migrants signals their exit from history, and the popular argument that aging Europe needs migrants only strengthens the growing sense of existential melancholy. When you watch on television the scenes of elderly locals protesting the settling of refugees in their depopulated villages where no child was born in the last decades, your heart breaks for both sides — the refugees, but also the old, lonely people who have seen their worlds melt away.

The failed integration of the Roma also contributes to this compassion deficit. Eastern Europeans fear foreigners because they mistrust the capacity of the state to integrate the “others” already in their midst. And the fact that Eastern European states are democracies doesn’t make the situation easier. What we see is not a lack of solidarity; what we see is a clash of solidarities: national, ethnic and religious solidarity chafing against our obligations as human beings.

It has become clear that the migration crisis is existentially more threatening to the European Union than either the euro crisis or Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, openly warns against the dangerous divide between the East and the West of Europe.

That said, compassion is not enough to solve the migration problems overwhelming Europe. Some years ago, the Hungarian philosopher and former dissident Gaspar Miklos Tamas observed that the Enlightenment, in which the idea of the European Union is intellectually rooted, demands universal citizenship. But universal citizenship requires one of two things to happen: Either poor and dysfunctional countries become places in which it is worthwhile to become a citizen, or Europe opens its borders to everybody.

Neither of these things, it is increasingly obvious, will transpire. Building a Statue of Liberty on Lampedusa will hardly be enough to deal with the problem. Libya and Syria are frustrating examples: Neither the European intervention in Libya nor its nonintervention in Syria have been able to stop the wars in Europe’s neighborhood. Torn between its moral obligation to help others in extreme need and the practical impossibility of helping everybody, Europe will be forced to take some and expel others.

It is deeply distressing to see Eastern European societies and governments claiming that it is morally right to shut their doors to those running from death. The compassion deficit highlights the much deeper crisis at the heart of the European project.