By July the Hungarian government had begun constructing a protective fence along the Serbian border. This meant that the flow across the Croatian border increased. And so they constructed another fence along that border. The flow then moved further along, concentrating on the Slovenian border. These fences hundreds of kilometres long were the only way in which the Hungarian government could stem the numbers. They were roundly condemned by the Austrian government among others. Yet soon everybody was at it. In August, Bulgaria began building a new fence along its border with Turkey. In September, Austria imposed controls on its border with Hungary while Germany temporarily introduced controls at its border with Austria. When the German Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizière, announced on 13 September that his country would reintroduce border controls, nobody seemed to know who he was speaking for. Even people within the German government seem to be aghast at what their Chancellor had set in motion.

In the middle of September, Hungary declared a state of emergency and closed its border with Austria. Then Croatia closed its border with Serbia. Soon Austria began the construction of a barrier along its border with Slovenia. How was this Austrian fence different from what the Hungarians had put up? According to a shamefaced Austrian government, the difference was that their border fence was ‘a door with sides’. Soon Slovenia was constructing a fence along its border with Croatia while Macedonia began constructing a barrier along its border with Greece. By this point the European Commission itself was urging the Macedonian authorities to seal their border with Greece on behalf of the whole EU, effectively forcing Greece unilaterally out of the Schengen area.

Every action in Berlin set off a chain reaction across the continent. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom had no way to provide for themselves, had wholly predictable consequences. Some of them were practical – how to house, clothe and feed all these new arrivals. In Germany the government began to threaten the owners of empty buildings with state-enforced requisition unless they were rented out to the government to house the migrants. Across the wider continent there was a growing concern about who the people coming actually were. Hungarian officials estimated that around half of their arrivals in early 2015 were from the western Balkans, notably Kosovo. Like everywhere else, most of the migrants had no papers. Around half of those waiting at Keleti railway station in Budapest claimed to be Syrian, but officials and volunteers who asked them questions about Syria often discovered that the migrants knew little or nothing about the country. Again, as with everywhere else, the vast majority of people (always more than 60 per cent) were young men.