During the migration crisis it was not only ‘open borders’ activists who believed that bringing the whole world on board was a sensible policy. It was members of the Greek government and of governing parties across Europe. Some believed it as ideology. Others simply could find no reasonable moral way to deny entry to the world’s inhabitants. Others flailed around for an excuse. After the British vote to leave the EU, Daniel Korski, the former deputy director of David Cameron’s Policy Unit, recalled how before the vote Britain’s European counterparts tried to persuade the country to take in more migrants, using the argument – among others – that migrants paid more in taxes than they consumed in public services. Even at this point – at the height of the crisis – the continent relied on old and disproven lies. What made it worse was that Korski claimed, ‘We were never able to counter these arguments’, claiming that although they looked, ‘There was no hard evidence.’1 The evidence – had they looked properly – was all around them. They could have gone to the schools in their local area, the A&E wards of any local hospital, and wondered how all these incomers could possibly have paid their way already. That was what the British people were wondering. Only their representatives remained unbothered, incurious or in denial.

And so the policies that had already made the native British a minority in their own capital city ineluctably sped up a change in the demographics of the entire continent. The ‘dark specialism’ of the French turned out to be the dark discovery of Europe. Promised throughout their lifetimes that the changes were temporary, that the changes were not real, or that the changes did not signify anything, Europeans discovered that in the lifespan of people now alive they would become minorities in their own countries. And it did not much matter whether the country had a reputation for liberalism or a reputation for fire-breathing conservatism, the direction of travel was the same. When the Vienna Institute of Demography confirmed that by the middle of this century a majority of Austrians under the age of 15 would be Muslims, the Austrian people were – like everybody else in Europe – simply expected to ignore or wish away their own cultural end point. The dark Brechtian joke appeared after all to be true: the political elites had found their publics wanting and had solved the problem by dissolving the people and appointing another people in their place.