Nothing here is possible to predict. But everywhere in Europe new things have already started to happen that signal a direction of travel. In terms of foreign policy, for years Europe has found itself incapable of expressing a coordinated strategic view. And now thanks to our immigration policies international politics has also become domestic politics, making Europe all but incapable of acting discriminatingly on the world stage with either soft or hard power. In June 2016, when the UN accused the Eritrean government of committing crimes against humanity, thousands of Eritreans protested outside the UN building in Geneva.3 The Swiss people had been told, like everyone else in Europe, that here were people who had come to Switzerland because they were fleeing a government they could not live under. Yet thousands of them turned out to support that same government when someone in Europe criticised them. In 2014 a leaked report from Britain’s Ministry of Defence revealed that military planners believed that ‘an increasingly multicultural Britain’ and ‘increasingly diverse nation’ meant that British military intervention in foreign countries was becoming impossible. The government would gain less and less public support for British troops being deployed in countries ‘from which UK citizens, or their families, come’.4

Domestically, the situation has the potential to become infinitely worse. Just one consequence of having ‘diversity’ and ‘difference’ rather than ‘colour blindness’ and proper integration as a goal is that Europe in the twenty-first century is obsessed with race. Rather than diminishing, the subject grows larger by the day. It is the same story in politics, sport and even television, where not a single reality-TV programme seems immune from the endless obsession with race. If a non-white, non-European does well he or she is hailed as an example to everyone and a model of successful integration. If that person is voted out there is yet another national debate about racism and whether the individual was voted out because of their ethnicity. On a more serious level, nobody has any idea long term where any of this will go.