Had Chancellor Merkel, her contemporaries and her predecessors thought this all through before transforming their continent, they could have consulted Aristotle among other great philosophers of Europe. From him they would have learnt why these questions seemed so complex. They were trying to weigh up the balance not between good and evil but between competing virtues: on this occasion ‘justice’ and ‘mercy’. When such virtues appear to be in contravention, Aristotle suggests, it is because one of them is being misunderstood. Throughout this era of uncontrolled migration ‘mercy’ has consistently appeared to triumph. It is the virtue towards which it is easiest to pay homage, the one with the swiftest short-term benefits and the one more admired in the society in which those benefits are received. Of course, it was rarely asked how ‘merciful’ it really was to encourage people to cross the globe to reach a continent with few houses and few jobs where they would be ever less wanted. Yet justice – which took such a back seat even as all the laws of the continent were trampled upon – also had a claim. And if the appeal to justice to enforce the Dublin III Treaty or the laws on the repatriation of failed applicants had seemed like so much paperwork, still there ought to have been an appeal to a greater justice. When justice did emerge in the argument it emerged only as the justice demanded by or for those arriving. The absent party in all this, for whom justice was never considered, were the peoples of Europe. They were people to whom things were done, whose own appeals – even when they could be voiced – were not listened to.

In the great migration movements the decisions of Merkel and her predecessors had overridden all their rights to justice. Those on the liberal wing of Europe’s political spectrum had reason to feel aggrieved about the way in which their customs and laws had been trodden upon and about the seemingly endless changes to their liberal societies: changes that endangered the carefully balanced ecosystems of which such societies were comprised. Liberals in Europe might rightly have wondered whether societies that are the product of lengthy political and cultural evolutions could be sustained with immigration at such rates. That the front lines of the mass migration era continually involved threats to sexual, religious and racial minorities should have alerted far more liberals than it did to the possibility that in pursuit of a ‘liberal’ immigration policy they might lose their liberal societies.