From the back garden of Istvan Molnar's home, you can see Hungary's newly erected 'Iron Curtain' in the distance.

The razor-wire fence has become a defining symbol of the migrant crisis. The barricade — 4m high and constructed in six weeks on the back of prison labour — runs the length of the country's 110-mile border with Serbia.

The Berlin Wall, by comparison, was 96 miles long. This hinterland between Hungary and the Balkans was once the main entry point to the European Union for the diaspora pouring out of the Middle East.

Today, on the Hungarian side, waiting for anyone who breaches the barricade, are squads of police reinforced by SWAT teams from Hungary's elite Counter Terrorism Centre (TEC).

The role of these officers, in black commando uniforms, is to 'capture persons that pose a danger for themselves and the public' — a mission statement that leaves little doubt about the way Budapest views the wave of asylum seekers we have all seen on the TV news.

Scroll down for videos

Desperate: Migrants try to remove razor-wire fencing after Hungarian authorities closed their border on September 16

Exodus: Hundreds of migrants who arrived by train at Hegyeshalom on the Hungarian and Austrian border walk the four kilometres into Austria

Tear gas, pepper spray and water canons were used against them after they attempted to break through the fence — not far from Mr Molnar's house in the village of Roszke — on the morning it went up on September 15.

The day before, a record 9,380 migrants were rounded up on Hungary's Serbian border after crossing the frontier and put on trains to Austria; the day after, the number had slumped to just 366.

Now, little more than a fortnight after the 'Iron Curtain' sprung up in a field outside Istvan Molnar's house, provoking international condemnation, village life is returning to normal in Roszke (pop: around 3,000) after months of near-chaos.

Migrants, sometimes hundreds at a time, no longer pass Mr Molnar's window at all hours of the day and night. The people smugglers have moved on. The reception camp, where migrants were processed, is empty.

'There is no one to process at the moment,' the police officer manning the gate of the compound told us, shrugging his shoulders. Men, women and children who turn up in Roszke, and elsewhere on the Hungarian/Serbian border, are simply being turned away despite criticism from Germany and other EU partners.

Hungary's response? Another razor-wire barrier is in the process of being built on the border with Croatia. The strategy is trumpeted in giant government posters on roadsides and roundabouts. 'The country must be defended,' they read.

Mr Molnar, 61, a gardener, and his wife Irenke, 57, gave water and blankets to the migrants, but, like almost everyone else here, they approve of the crackdown. The couple voted for the man who is behind it, prime minister Viktor Orban.

Panic: A child cries after receiving tear gas thrown by Hungarian anti-riot police to disperse migrants who try to cross the Hungarian border with Serbia

'I think the police should certainly be allowed to use force where necessary to stop people coming through,' said Mr Molnar.

There is another, more fundamental, sub-plot to Hungary's brutally effective migrant policy, though.

It is encapsulated in Mr Orban's inflammatory public statements about 'Christian Europe' being under threat. 'If you're being overrun, you can't accept migrants,' he wrote in a German daily newspaper.

'We must not forget that those who are coming in have been brought up under a different religion and represent a profoundly different culture.

'The majority are not Christians but Muslims. That is an important question because Europe and European culture have Christian roots. Is it not already, and in itself, alarming that Europe's Christian culture is barely able to uphold Europe's own Christian values? The people want us to control the situation and protect our borders.'

The Crusader rhetoric conjures up an image of Muslim hordes at the gates of fortress Hungary. Indeed, to understand the psychological forces behind the hatred you need to understand how Christian-Muslim conflict is deeply embedded in the Hungarian DNA just as mutual suspicion and hatred have historically existed between Arab and Jew in the Middle East or Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland.

Mr Orban is both reflecting — and many, would say, exploiting — this primal fear of 'outsiders', especially Muslim outsiders, in Hungary.

The origins of that legacy can be found in Mohacs, a small town on the Danube, near the Croatian border. It was here in 1526 that a heavily outnumbered Hungarian army suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Ottoman invaders under Suleiman the Magnificent.

The Battle of Mohacs was Hungary's equivalent of the Battle of Hastings; one defeat led to the Norman conquest of England, the other to 150 years of Ottoman rule in Hungary.

Long journey: Refugees walk in the rain from railway station in Hegyeshalom in Hungary toward the Austrian border on September 25

The battlefield on the outskirts of Mohacs is now a memorial site. An inscription inside proclaims: 'Here began the ruination of a once strong Hungary.'

Mohacs, in fact, marked the end of the old independent Kingdom of Hungary. In the immediate aftermath, Christian churches were converted into mosques, a poll tax was levied on non-Muslims, and Hungarian landlords were dispossessed.

Children in Hungary are taught about this at school, just as British children are taught about 1066. Foreign domination, first by the Ottoman Turks, followed by Austria, then — after World War II — by the Soviet Union, lasted almost five centuries, with Hungary properly emerging only in 1989 as a fully independent republic, following round-table talks which led to the end of communist rule.

Viewed through the prism of history, recent events in Hungary become, if not acceptable, then at least more understandable.

If you take away the razor wire, tear gas and incendiary language, Britain's solution for dealing with the migrant crisis is little different from Hungary's. Both countries argue that creating a quota system will only encourage more new arrivals and both maintain that the emphasis should be on improving conditions in refugee camps in states neighbouring Syria.

Unlike Britain and the rest of Western Europe, however, Hungary and the reborn states of central Europe emerged from the Soviet era more ethnically homogeneous.

Hungary had no immigration during the Soviet era. Borders were effectively sealed. No one, as we well know, was allowed out, or in.

After the Iron Curtain came down, the immigrants that did come were mostly Christian Europeans. Consequently, Hungary was not prepared for the sudden arrival of large numbers of Muslim asylum seekers.

Local people, it is clear, do not want them. This fear has been exacerbated by the racial hatred, religious violence and ethnic cleansing on Hungary's doorstep, unleashed following the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia.

Exhausted: Migrants leave the registration camp and board the train heading to the Serbia after they crossed the border between Greece and Macedonia

There were atrocities on all sides, setting neighbour against neighbour, Muslim against Christian, in Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo and Bosnia. Some took place only miles from Istvan Molnar's home in Roszke on the other side of the new 'Iron Curtain'.

The fears of politicians reflect the fears of the people, and vice-versa.

The politician at the centre of the controversy, of course, is Viktor Orban, who insists that Hungarians have 'the right not to live together with populous Muslim communities'.

One statistic, in particular, has been used to justify the government's hardline position on migrants. The figure is 291,000 — the number of migrants who entered the country illegally this year before the border was fenced off. Of these, 80 per cent were single young men, according to the latest UN data.

The Hungarian authorities have no idea who these people are. They could be potential terrorists or economic migrants. But one thing is for sure, the Hungarians reason: they couldn't have been genuine refugees, otherwise why would they have entered the country illegally?

Mr Orban has described this most recent 'influx' as an invasion. The figure he quotes (291,000) does not include genuine asylum seekers.

Under the EU's controversial Dublin regulation, refugees have to claim asylum in the first 'safe' EU country they arrive in. Serbia is not in the EU and Greece, which would normally be responsible for registering many of those now crossing the Aegean Sea, is no longer considered a 'safe state' because of its austerity programmes.

So the burden has fallen on Hungary, because, geographically, it is first EU country that migrants travelling through the Balkans reach.

This, despite the fact that the country is run by an anti-immigration, Right-wing government. And this is the great irony at the heart of Hungary's migrant crisis.

In fact, Hungary received the most applications per million of population in the entire EU during the second quarter of 2015. In that period alone the number totalled 32,675.

Guards: Hungarian soldier are seen as they work on reinforcing the fence along the borderline with Croatia

So what will be the political repercussions if Hungary continues to refuse to follow EU regulations?

Hungary's defiant response has already set off a chain reaction among some like-minded countries. Bulgaria, for example, is already building a 100-mile fence on the border with Turkey to prevent immigrants from entering its territory, and Macedonia recently put its army on the border with Greece.

Will Hungary back down? Having spent the past week here, I can tell you that the answer to that is categorically no. The migrant crisis is a vote winner for Mr Orban.

Will Hungary be kicked out of the EU? Perhaps that question can be answered with another one. When was the last time anyone got kicked out of the EU? French President François Hollande says: 'States that don't respect European values should ask if they belong within the EU.'

We know Mr Orban's response: 'I think we have a right to decide that we don't want to have a large number of Muslim people in our country. I don't see any reason to force us into a way of living together in Hungary that we don't want to see.' He has no wish to repeat the West's 'failed experiments' in multiculturalism. In Britain, Mr Orban says, we have de facto segregation, with parallel societies in towns and cities.

Anyone who has been to Dewsbury in West Yorkshire, where even the ice cream lady wears a burka, might recognise what he is saying.

In Hungary, by contrast, less than one per cent of the population of just under 10 million is Muslim. There are a mere 15 mosques in the country. They are small, mostly based in converted homes, and are without minarets which, significantly, are not allowed.

The Muslim community is, to all extents and purposes, invisible.

The Hungarian Islamic Community (HIC) is housed in a mosque in an old pharmacy in the back streets of Budapest.

Muslim women from this mosque are reluctant to wear Islamic clothing on public transport. Two Muslim women were threatened on a bus a few days ago by a woman with a knife because they were wearing traditional headscarves.

For its part, Hungary is a predominantly Catholic country. Earlier this month, Pope Francis called on every Catholic parish across Europe to help alleviate the migrant crisis.

Helping hand: Migrants carry an elderly woman as they walk on a field, after they crossed the border with Serbia, near Tovarnik

He said: 'Faced with the tragedy of tens of thousands of refugees who are fleeing death by war and by hunger . . . the Gospel calls us to be neighbours to the smallest and most abandoned, to give them concrete hope.

'May every parish, every religious community, every monastery, every sanctuary in Europe host a family, starting with my diocese of Rome.'

In Hungary, his call mostly fell on deaf ears. The Catholic community in Budapest was alone among churches in the city for not contributing towards an appeal for clothes and provisions for migrants.

The unwillingness to help reflected a deeper split between Budapest and Rome over the migrant issue.

The tensions were laid bare in an extraordinary interview given by a Hungarian bishop. 'They're not refugees,' declared Laszlo Kiss-Rigo, Bishop of Szeged-Csanad in southern Hungary.

Like Mr Orban, he called what is happening an 'invasion'. But he went further. 'They come here with cries of 'Allahu Akbar',' he said. 'They want to take over. The Pope doesn't know the situation. Most of them behave in a way that is arrogant and cynical.'

Back in Roszke, Jozsef Turi, who runs the village supermarket, showed me the bushes outside his shop where migrants used to hide when they saw police.

On other occasions, they came into his store to buy SIM cards for their iPhones and other mobiles. Some female staff were too scared to start work early in the morning in case they ran into them.

Over at Istvan Molnar's home, there is a discarded blanket near a chicken coop at the back of his house where he once found a migrant sleeping.

Almost every night, he said, huge groups would pass by. Sometimes they would knock on his window and shout: 'Taxi, taxi.'

Ani Horvath, a Hungarian journalist, witnessed the clash mentioned earlier between hundreds of migrants, including women and children, and the Counter Terrorism SWAT teams at the border fence.

The situation, she said, was contained with water canons, and there was no need to unleash tear gas. 'They were making a point, sending a message,' she said.

It's a message that has resonated with the residents of Roszke and most of Hungary.

Not so long ago, Viktor Orban faced criticism of his increasingly authoritarian style.

Today, however, his popularity is soaring. A recent poll showed around 82 per cent of Hungarians were in favour of tighter immigration controls.

'Brussels is failing to understand just how deeply Hungarians feel about this issue,' said Neil Barnett, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank in London, who lived in Hungary for more than a decade.

'For centuries the Magyars have felt themselves to be the unthanked guardians of European Christendom. However much arching of eyebrows this causes in Brussels, here is a question that threatens to tear Europe apart at the seams.'

Because, for Hungarians, the 'Iron Curtain' is a source of pride, not shame.