Calling us names doesn’t help

In the past week a number of European leaders have come out against the fence on the southern border of Hungary. Among the “interesting” comments was Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s belief that “today the real risk to Europe is not Russia but Hungary, which is building a new wall”. For former Italian president Giorgio Napolitano, Putin was not enough. He went and compared Hungary to the Nazis, when he asked: “Is it possible to tolerate Hungary… erecting a barbed-wire fence reminiscent of Hitler’s reign of terror in Europe?” I’m honestly not trying to play devil’s advocate here but I actually don’t understand these statements. Hungary is not building a new Iron Curtain, simply a border with crossings, where anyone who has any kind of business in Hungary or the EU and has their documentation can cross legally. Let’s separate the fence from the whole – incredibly complicated – refugee issue. Even if we are talking about statements from left-wing politicians, how did protecting the borders all of a sudden become this thing, which warrants a comparison to Hitler or the Cold War? French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira (also leftist) even went so far as to warn of Article 7, which in an extreme case is a sort of anteroom towards the exclusion of an EU member state. I’m not going to get into a legal argument but this is so far out that even the leader of the Hungarian Liberal Party – hardly a fan of the government – said there is no sufficient reason to activate Article 7. So instead of calling Hungary various names, these people should start to focus on how to solve the underlying problem of migration. And by the way, if they had done so sooner, perhaps there wouldn’t have been a need for a fence at all.