Can governments continue to dodge the consequences of their own actions and inactions? Perhaps in some countries they will. Others may cynically switch track in a second. During this crisis I spoke with one French politician of the centre right who could hardly locate any remaining differences between his own party’s immigration policies and those of the Front National. Asked how he would deal with a particular set of challenges to do with people who were already nationals, he replied with remarkable nonchalance that it would ‘probably be necessary to change some bits of the constitution’. Perhaps cynical land-grabs for political ground will become commonplace. In lieu of any more meaningful policies German politicians have already suggested that citizens with dual nationality who fight with foreign terrorist groups should lose their German citizenship. Denmark has introduced a law allowing authorities to seize valuables from migrants in order to cover the cost of their presence in the country. And everywhere the question of what to do with people who subvert the state is going through various iterations of a debate. Currently, all countries refuse to break international law by making people stateless, but the sense prevails that Europe is not much more than one terrorist attack away from the rules of the game changing completely. At which point Europeans may choose to name almost anyone as their umpire.

Perhaps in one European country in the near future a party of the kind previously described as ‘far right’ will come to power. Perhaps a party even further to the right will then come to power at some point later. One thing is certain, which is that if the politics are to turn bad it will be because the ideas turned increasingly bad. And if the ideas turn bad it will be because the rhetoric became increasingly bad. In the wake of Cologne and other similar attacks one could hear the language deteriorate around the fringes. Street movements began to talk of all arrivals into Europe as ‘rapefugees’. In Paris I met an elected official who referred to all migrants as ‘refu-jihadists’. These were unamusing as well as insulting terms for anybody who knew first hand that some at least of the people who had come were fleeing rape or escaping jihad. But such deterioration in the language seems inevitable after a period of dishonesty from the other direction. If you pretend for long enough, in the face of clear evidence, that all the arrivals into the continent are asylum seekers, you will eventually spawn a movement that believes none of them are.