Wilders conveniently casts aside history and economics The Dutch far-right leader’s new website is a stupid stunt that those further east would do well to ignore.

Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-immigrant politician, has launched a website that asks visitors: “Do you have trouble with CEE nationals? Or have you lost your job to a Pole, Bulgarian, Romanian or other central or eastern European?”

Migrants can indeed be disruptive. Readers with long memories (or a good education) may recall some eastern Europeans who arrived in force in a southern Dutch town a few years back and caused a lot of problems for some German visitors and their local friends.

It would be unfair to make too big a deal of this. As it happens the visitors – Poles living in Britain – did not plan to go to the Netherlands in the first place. They had wanted to go to Warsaw, where they had a prior engagement with some Germans and Russians. The expedition was poorly organised by the British, and when it went wrong, the Poles got the blame, quite unfairly. Few ever got home to Poland and scores never went anywhere again.

Anyway, it was a long time ago – September 1944, to be exact – when the 1st (Polish) Parachute Brigade suffered 25% casualties while fighting Germans (and Dutch collaborators) during the botched allied operation at Arnhem. To be fair, Wilders has not suggested revoking the honorary citizenship given to General Stanislaw Maczek, the legendary Polish tank commander, for his great feat of liberating Breda in October of that year, without a single civilian casualty. Nor does he want to exhume and repatriate the 500-odd Poles buried in war graves in the Netherlands – presumably fallen soldiers count as permanent residents.

Wilders may well feel that any historical debt that his country owes the Poles is long expunged. He may feel that the division of Europe, in which the Dutch ended up in safety, freedom and prosperity, and the ‘eastern Europeans’ ended up in communist captivity, was no big deal, or that it is not the job of the modern Dutch state to try to help the poorer half of Europe catch up on the decades that it lost.

But even the most cynical calculation suggests that it is a bad idea to sneer at people from the countries of the European Union that were once under communist rule. Dutch exports to Poland alone have rocketed from €1.2 billion a year in 1996 to nearly €7.4bn in 2010 (and they will be larger now, given Poland’s booming economy). The Netherlands exports more than €13bn to the other nine ‘new’ member states, far more than to Brazil, China and India combined. Add all ten together and ‘new Europe’ is a bigger export market than the US, accounting for a tenth of all Dutch exports; these make up 29% of Dutch gross domestic product. It would be a better question to ask how many of the seven million-strong Dutch workforce should thank demand from ‘central and eastern Europeans’ for their jobs.

Wilders might also be surprised to know that the EU-10 provided around €15bn in imports to the Netherlands, more than France (with €14.4bn). Dutch businesses and consumers benefit from that too.

Citizens in the countries insulted might decide to boycott Dutch products because of Wilders’s silly stunt. But I suspect most of them are too sensible. They recognise the huge benefits brought by the European single market, which allows the free movement of goods, capital and people across frontiers. They also know it would be unfair to penalise workers in the Netherlands because of attention-grabbing behaviour by one politician – not least because at least 200,000 of those workers are ‘eastern European’. That is how inter-dependent modern Europe works. Shame Wilders does not realise it.

The writer is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist.