Press reports inside Germany speculated that the Chancellor was positioning herself ahead of elections scheduled for the following spring. An opinion poll published the same month had shown a sharp increase in the percentage of the German public who were becoming concerned about levels of immigration, revealing that 30 per cent feared their country was being ‘overrun by foreigners’ who had come to Germany because of the social-security benefits the country provided them with.3 The political ingenuity of Merkel’s speech is that these people would, like almost everyone else, hear what they wanted from a speech that was also careful to give credit to immigrants and insist on how welcome they still were in Germany. Nevertheless, the uttering of the idea – and the use of that particular word twice, that multiculturalism had ‘failed, utterly failed’ – struck a chord. From the moment that her audience in Potsdam gave her a standing ovation, Merkel found herself praised for having the courage to speak out on such a difficult issue. Across Europe she was compared favourably with other political leaders, with the newspapers of other nations suggesting that only the German Chancellor had the strength and courage to tell such a difficult truth.

So it was not surprising that other political leaders soon wanted a bit of this, and dived into waters that Merkel had shown to be surprisingly warm. The following February Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, used a speech at the Munich Security Conference to declare that, ‘Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream. We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.’4 A few days later, in a televised debate, the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, also pronounced multiculturalism to be a ‘failure’ and said, ‘The truth is that in all our democracies we have been too preoccupied with the identity of those who arrived and not enough with the identity of the country that welcomed them.’5 These leaders were soon joined by others, including the former Australian Prime Minister John Howard and the former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar.

Within the space of a few months the apparently unsayable had been said by almost everybody. In each country, on each occasion, a great debate began. Was David Cameron right to twin the issue of national security and national cohesion? Was Merkel simply trying to respond to pressures and cleverly keeping a bloc of the centre-right within her political fold? Whatever the reasons, in each country the ‘multiculturalism has failed’ debate seemed to mark some kind of watershed moment.