"Politicians in Poland, Slovakia, Austria and Serbia were equally out of tune with the liberal ethos of the EU. In a 2018 poll, just twenty-one per cent of Slovaks said they ‘belonged’ to the west. Most were reluctant to enforce tighter western sanctions on Russia and were fiercely anti-immigrant. The old ideological fault-line between east and west was re-emerging, while a gulf was also widening between rich north and poor south."