Hearing such things, at such times, from people who have been in such places, the instinct that Chancellor Merkel and her ministers displayed in 2015 can seem eminently justified. She and her colleagues landed on a portion of the answer by recognising that our continent is probably doing the only thing that a civilised people can do in rescuing such people, welcoming them and trying to give them safety. But this generous instinct may well prove – both for the people who have crossed the water and for the continent trying to welcome them in – to be the easiest part of the journey.

6. Multiculturalism

6

Multiculturalism

It was in Berlin, on 31 August 2015, that the German Chancellor indicated her new intentions and provided her motivational statement: ‘Wir schaffen das’ (‘We can do this’). Yet even these few words raised questions. What was the ‘this’ that she wanted to be done? What were its aims and intentions? Was there an endpoint or a point of completion to the process? What would success in this endeavour look like? These would be large enough questions on their own. But her three short words begged another equally considerable question. Who was this ‘we’? What was the entity being urged to accomplish this hard-to-define thing? In making her statement Angela Merkel had taken for granted the existence of a ‘we’. But in the years preceding her speech Europe had been scrutinising itself deeply and constantly to find an answer to this question. And this constant reversion to the psychiatrist’s couch was not an abstract question, but one with an urgent aspect, all the time fuelled by an awareness – as the Dutch author Paul Scheffer had put it eight years previously – that ‘without a “we” it’s not going to work’.1

Chancellor Merkel herself was more than aware of this. Five years before her grand gesture she had given another speech in which she had addressed one of the fastest-growing concerns of her nation. In the process she led a stampede of European leaders into saying what had gone wrong with the reigning European policy regarding immigration and integration. In October 2010 Merkel gave a major ‘state of the nation’ speech in Potsdam. She did so in the middle of a significant public debate already going on in her country. Weeks earlier Thilo Sarrazin, a former Senator and member of the executive board of the Bundesbank, had published a book titled Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Is Abolishing Itself), which was like an explosion in such a consensus-driven society. In his book Sarrazin had explained how low birth rates among Germans and an overly high level of immigration – Muslim immigration in particular – was fundamentally transforming the nature of German society. What perhaps caused most controversy was his argument that a higher birth rate among less well-educated people and a lower birth rate among more highly educated people was putting at risk Germany’s post-war success and prosperity.