If that fear did ever arise, it did next to nothing to still the instincts of many liberals. Indeed, while liberals in the Western European democracies spent years discussing increasingly niche aspects of the women’s rights and gay rights movements, they continued to argue for the importing of millions of people who thought such movements had no right starting in the first place. And while in the second decade of the present century the question of non-binary, transgender rights began to preoccupy those who thought in terms of social progress, those same people campaigned to bring in millions more people who did not think that women should enjoy the same rights as men. Was this a demonstration of belief in enlightenment values? A belief that the values of liberalism are so strong, so all persuasive, that they must in time convert the Eritrean and the Afghan, the Nigerian and the Pakistani? If so, then the daily news from Europe in recent years must stand at the very least as a rebuke to their presumption.

A recognition of this must cause immense pain for those through whom it runs. And that itself could lead in various directions. It could result in a denial of these realities (for instance, through the claim that all societies are in fact at least equally ‘patriarchal’ and oppressive). Or it could result in the insistence ‘Fiat justitia ruat caelum’ (‘Let justice be done though the heavens fall’): a noble sentiment right up until the moment that the first debris descends. There are also those of course who so hate Europe – what they are and what they have been – that they are willing for literally anyone to come in and take over. In Berlin during the height of this crisis I spoke with a German intellectual who told me that the German people were anti-Semitic and prejudiced and that for this reason if no other they deserved to be replaced. He would not consider the possibility that some of the people being brought in to replace them could make many mid-twentieth-century – let alone modern – Germans look like paragons by comparison.

More likely is a growing acceptance that people are different, that different people believe different things, and that our own values may not in fact be universal values. This is an acknowledgement that could lead to even more pain. For if the rights movements that sprang from the social progress of the twentieth century, and the movement towards reason and rationalism that has spread throughout Europe since the seventeenth century, are not the preserve of all mankind, then it means that these are not universal systems but a system like any other. This means not only that such a system may not triumph, but that it may in fact be swept away in turn like so much else before it.