Ever since the Balkan Wars of the 1990s I’ve been biased against Serbia because of its aggressive behavior toward its neighbors. Slobodan Miloševic and Radovan Karadžic were Serbian leaders who had no qualms about ethnically cleansing their country to be rid of all non-Serbs.

It’s a bit of a surprise to me, then, to see a Serbian leader say the following:

“What we expect from the E.U. is to tell us what the form of good European behavior is,” said Nebojsa Stefanovic, Serbia’s interior minister. “Is it what Germany is doing, where refugees are welcomed with medicine and food? Or is it where they are welcomed with fences, police and tear gas?”

The European Union, Mr. Stefanovic added, “needs to say not just what the law is, but what the European norm is, what the values are that Serbia should share.”

Granted that Miloševic is dead and Karadžic is in prison in The Hague, this sensitive approach to the problem is more than I expected from any Serb.

Contrast that to the Hungarian government which is fencing borders and tear gassing refugees. Their political leaders seem to have forgotten their history, when some 200,000 of their ancestors fled the country in 1956 when the Hungarian Uprising failed and Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest.

The Europeans are not covering themselves in glory in this crisis, but nobody else is either. Certainly the United States isn’t. One party’s leading candidate for President in next year’s elections got to the front by espousing the deportation of 11 million immigrants, legal and illegal, and only a couple of his competitors disagree. Our current President feels constrained by the rhetoric of the opposition party and has suggested we could take in 10,000 Syrian refugees. Croatia says there were 8,000 people who crossed its border from Serbia yesterday alone.

I don’t have any good solutions, but the world was able to solve a similar problem in the post-World War II era and it needs to work harder to find a solution now, 75 years later.