“In Western Europe,” wrote Die Zeit columnist Martin Klingst, “everyone’s picking the Land of the Magyars to pieces.” (He declined to join in.) Perhaps the strongest condemnation has come from the Polish-born Princeton historian Jan Gross, author of a book, Neighbors, detailing the horrors perpetrated against Jews in the town of Jedwabne by their Polish neighbors. In the German newspaper Die Welt, Gross asserted that the European Union’s eastern states had “proven to be intolerant, narrow-minded, and xenophobic.”

“Have the Eastern Europeans no sense of shame?” he wrote. “For centuries their forbears emigrated en masse to escape from material misery and political persecution.” He argued that Eastern Europe’s xenophobia, in contrast to Germany’s more welcoming attitude toward migrants and refugees, is connected to its reluctance to confront its populations’ active and even enthusiastic participation in the extermination of Europe’s Jews and other ethnic minorities. “German society, which has become conscious of its historical crimes, has learned through them how to approach moral and political challenges like the current influx of refugees,” he concluded. “Eastern Europe, on the other hand, has yet to come to terms with its murderous past.” Only when it does so will it start to treat refugees better, he wrote.

These kinds of accusations have triggered defensive reactions—from Romanian President Klaus Iohannis’s tonally awkward statement, following an East-West split in a vote on an EU refugee-relocation scheme, that Romania is not “xenophobic, autistic, or separatist,” to a series of reader letters published in The New York Times in response to Kounalakis’s op-ed. “I dare say that very similar xenophobic voices would be heard across the political spectrum in the United States if Americans were confronted with a wave of refugees from Syria,” read one such letter. In Die Welt, Pawel Ukielski of the Institutes für Nationales Gedenken defended Poland from Gross’s attack by pointing out that the country was destroyed by Nazi and Soviet invasions in a way Western countries never experienced.

But is xenophobia really more rampant in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe—or than in the United States, for that matter? Social science turns out to be of limited value here. Few comprehensive or comparative studies on this topic have been carried out, perhaps in part because the very concept of xenophobia differs around the world, according to the University of San Francisco political-philosophy professor Ronald Sundstrom, who with David Haekown Kim authored a 2014 paper on the need for specificity with such terms: In discussing in-groups and out-groups, Europeans tend to talk about “xenophobia” while Americans tend to talk about “racism.”

“Racism is a quick thing that [Americans] can turn to because of our own particular history,” said Sundstrom. Europeans have less experience with the charged black-white dynamic and anti-racism activism that Americans know well, and are thus less inclined to frame immigrant debates in these terms. Additionally, “The Europeans, particularly the Germans, are allergic to the word ‘racism’ because of the Holocaust, so they more quickly go to discussions of xenophobia.”