Perhaps the European lifestyle, culture and outlook will survive in small pockets. A pattern that is already underway will mean that there will be some rural areas where immigrant communities choose not to live and towards which non-immigrants retreat. Those who have the resources will – as is already the case – be able to sustain a recognisably similar lifestyle for a while longer. The less well off will have to accept that they do not live in a place that is their home but in one that is a home for the world. And whilst incomers will be encouraged to pursue their traditions and lifestyles, Europeans whose families have been here for generations will most likely continue to be told that theirs is an oppressive, outdated tradition, even as they constitute a smaller and smaller minority of the population. This is not science fiction. It is simply what the current situation looks like in much of Western Europe and what the demographic projections show the continent’s future to be.

For although our societies integrated people better than some people feared, we are not after all such great melting pots that anything and anyone can be endlessly poured in with the results always coming out the same. To return to the analogy of the ship of Theseus, the ship can only be said to remain the ship if it remains recognisable. For that to happen, when the ship needs mending it needs to be repaired using recognisable parts that fit in with the whole. But European society today is ever less recognisable, and what chances it had to sustain the whole were lost when it chose to wage a war on its own design. The pieces of the ship that were added were not carefully selected and did not fit the old shapes. Rather, by government design and incompetence the ship was pulled apart and anything at all that stood in its place was crow-barred in and still called Europe.

Nonetheless, the political leadership of Europe will go around and around the same failed and contradictory ideas and repeat the same mistake. Which is why the analogy presented to me in the Bundestag mattered. My German interlocutor’s analogy presented Europe as a room into which a person in mortal danger in the corridor outside must be allowed to come and join us. Politicians from Britain to Sweden sometimes like to proclaim that our room is a large territory that we could easily concrete over in order to house the world’s needy. But our societies are not like that. Any sensible policy on immigration and integration would have taken into account that although this ship of Europe may occasionally save people in distress from the seas around us, there is a point – when we take too many people on board, take them on too quickly, or take on those with bad intent – at which we will capsize the only vessel that we, the peoples of Europe, have.