Hungary has defended its opposition to Brussels’ plans for compulsory migrant quotas, saying it did not wish to repeat the West’s “failed experiments” in multiculturalism.

We are all aware of how everyone high and low in the West cowers before charges of “racism,” “xenophobia,” etc. It’s beautiful to see Hungary’s PM Viktor Orban rejecting such talk out of hand and calling attention to the failure of multiculturalism. Whereas other European leaders, like Angela Merkel have already noted that multiculturalism has “ utterly failed, ” their response is to double down on multiculturalism by bringing in yet more unassimilable, low-IQ immigrants. Perhaps the Ossis will indeed save Europe .

Frans Timmermans, the Dutch vice-president of the European Commission, said that “diversity was the future of the world,” and that Eastern European nations would just have to “get used to that.”

The comments were a direct challenge to remarks last week by one of the EU’s most senior figures, who criticised Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, for opposing the quotas plan and for fencing off its borders to migrants trying to reach Europe.

In a defiant rejection of diktats from Europe’s high command, the country’s right-wing government said it was not interested in “lectures” from the European Union about taking in Middle Eastern refugees.

“Contrary to Mr Timmerman’s vision, we can’t see into the future,” Mr Kovács said. “But we are aware of the past, and multi-culturalism in Western Europe has not been a success in our view. We want to avoid making the same mistakes ourselves.” …

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Orban’s spokesman, Zoltán Kovács, responded by saying that integration in much of Western Europe had been at best a limited success. Hungary, he said, felt neither the wish nor the obligation to follow suit.

On Wednesday, a plan drawn up Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, for EU states to redistribute 120,000 asylum seekers across the 28-member bloc was pushed through by a qualified majority vote, in the teeth of opposition from Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Both Hungary and Slovakia have threatened legal challenges to the ruling.

While critics accuse Mr Orban of racism over his comments that “Christian Europe” is now under threat, Budapest insists that ex-Communist states have neither the money nor the cultural history to host large numbers of non-European migrants. The prescriptions from Brussels bureaucrats on what constitutes the make-up of an ideal society has also revived memories of Soviet rule from Moscow.

“Mr Timmermans is right that we have not had the same experience as Western Europe, where countries like Holland, Britain and France have had mass immigration as a result of their colonial legacies,” added Mr Kovács. “But we would like to deal with our problems in a way that suits us.

“And we especially don’t like it when people who have never lived in Hungary try to give us lectures on how we should cope with our own problems. Calling us racists or xenophobes is the cheapest argument. It’s used just to dodge the issues.”

The wrath directed at Hungary was prompted by its decision to fence off its borders, and to then use tear gas and water cannon when migrants continued to enter the country.

But while Mr Orban has been cast as a bogeyman for his blunt and often inflammatory language, his solution for dealing with the migrant crisis is little different from Britain’s, arguing that creating a quota system will only encourage more new arrivals.

Instead, both countries say the priorities should be improving conditions in refugee camps in Syria’s neighbouring states, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, and greater funding of the Frontex border control agency in so-called “frontline” states like Greece, from where thousands of migrants are now arriving every week across the Aegean Sea from Turkey. Mr Kovács also queried why the Greece’s 100,000 strong army – historically large because its past war with Turkey – could not do more.

His comments came as Hungary’s ambassador to London, Péter Szabadhegy, also spoke out to claim common cause with Britain on the issue. In a briefing to British journalists last week, he said the British public had been jamming the switchboard of Hungary’s embassy to London in support of Budapest’s controversial stance. Of the 300 phone calls, emails and letters that were reaching the embassy’s Belgravia HQ every day, 70 per cent described Hungary’s actions as “God’s gift to Europe.” The rest were mostly insults such as “heartless scum”. …