Heartless and mindless – that is how western eyes view how eastern European governments have reacted to the refugee crisis, enforcing their borders rather than opening their doors to those fleeing war. Some say this stance betrays a historical amnesia: that Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians seem to have forgotten how they were greeted and treated when they fled communism in hundreds of thousands prior to 1948, and then again in 1956 and 1968. At the very least, the criticism goes, eastern Europeans are wooden-headed: they strip themselves of immigrant talents that made America great, and of the young workforce that could reverse the alarming demographic trend which renders their economies and their pension systems unsustainable.

What makes eastern Europeans so heartless and mindless? Articles come up with a variety of answers. Instead of the plight of the refugees, they focus on their own poverty and insecurity, and they feel themselves to be the ones in need of help. They are afraid of reversing the fragile economic progress they have made since the wall came down in 1989. They perceive themselves second-class citizens in Europe, and are determined to keep their sovereignty vis-à-vis the forced quota system. They live in incurious, insular societies to which an African or a Middle Eastern population is incurably foreign, even more so than the Roma, whom they also failed to integrate.

‘The most important factor for the “compassion deficit” is fear – and not only on the personal level.’ Photograph: Cropix/Sipa/Rex Shutterstock

All these reasons may to an extent explain why the closed doors and barbed wire policy is so popular in the region. Less relevant explanations also come up. One British tabloid speculated that because of the Ottoman conquest after 1526: “Christian-Muslim conflict is deeply embedded in the Hungarian DNA.” In fact, anti-Ottomanism in Hungarian historical consciousness is eclipsed by the anti-Habsburg and anti-Soviet legacy, and it hasn’t got much to do with religion. (Prior to 2015, Hungarian nationalists tended to sympathise with Muslim nations, and the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, approached many of their leaders as ideological comrades in establishing illiberal democracies.)

The most important factor for the “compassion deficit” is fear – and not only on the personal level. In eastern Europe, where borders were frequently redrawn, the nation is still widely seen as an ethnic/cultural entity rather than a political one, and cultural and ethnic homogeneity is regarded as an asset that helps to prevent the disintegration of the state.

The two multinational countries of the region – Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia – broke up almost instantly after communist dictatorships were gone. The most multi-ethnic of the remaining Yugoslav units, Bosnia, was plunged into a bloody war again along ethnic lines. The disintegration of Czechoslovakia proceeded without violence partly because its internal borders reflected Czech and Slovak ethnic division.

The newly established Czech Republic was basically unilingual because after 1945 more than 3 million of its German inhabitants had been exiled. That cruel policy itself was the outcome of what one might call the “Munich syndrome”, the national shock that was caused by western powers conceding to Adolf Hitler’s demand to grab the German-speaking chunk of Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland) in 1938. Hungary’s Trianon trauma was, similarly, caused by the post-first world war dissection of the historical multinational kingdom founded by St Stephen, which is popularly considered and officially remembered to be one of the greatest Hungarian national tragedies. Current expressions of this grievance, in turn, cause unease in neighbouring countries with large Hungarian minorities.

There are no Belgiums or Switzerlands in eastern Europe. The only multinational confederation – Bosnia – is an artificial creation of the mid-1990s, which would not survive without outside intervention. Mainstream historians throughout the region tend to portray national minorities as descendents of immigrants, practically aliens in the fatherland. As long as the concept of the “nation” remains ethnically defined (Hungarian-speaking Slovak citizens are generally considered Hungarians both in Slovakia and in Hungary), the integration of immigrants is much more problematic than in those western countries where nationality basically equals citizenship.

Without a colonialist past, and living under Soviet occupation, eastern European nations did not experience the favourable economic impact of large-scale immigration in the 1960-70s. What they did experience was existential danger to their states during historical turning points, especially if cohabiting with “alien” ethnic populations.

Political efforts of eastern European nations to remain homogeneous may be bigotry, but if it is to be cured, the reasons behind it should be clearly understood. Instead of historical amnesia, it is caused by a succession of national traumas of historic proportions.