Yet despite the prolific nature of these debates, it was unclear even at the time what these statements meant. The word ‘multiculturalism’ (let alone multikulti in German) already sounded notoriously different to different people. For many years, and still today for many people, the term seemed to mean ‘pluralism’ or simply the reality of living in an ethnically diverse society. To say you were in favour of multiculturalism might mean that you didn’t mind people of different backgrounds in your country. Or it might mean that you believed that the future for all societies was to become a great melting pot in which every possible culture contributed: a sort of miniature United Nations in each country. On the other hand, saying that ‘multiculturalism had failed’ may have sounded to some voters as a concession that post-war immigration as a whole had been a bad idea and that immigrants should not have come. It may even have sounded like a call to stop mass immigration and even reverse such policies. In each country these different understandings of the same phrase were undoubtedly politically beneficial, giving politicians the opportunity to embrace voters they might otherwise have had to avoid courting. It was no coincidence that each of the political leaders who took this plunge was from the political right and trying to keep together a fractious political movement that risked going on the move.

But the confusion over what these speeches meant also had an old cause, because ‘multiculturalism’ had always been a hard-to-define term. To the extent that it was possible to draw any clear inferences from their speeches it would seem that Merkel, Cameron and Sarkozy were addressing a specific variety of state-sponsored multiculturalism. Theirs was certainly not a criticism of a racially diverse society or a society that welcomed immigration. On the contrary, outside the headline-grabbing parts of their speeches, all professed their support for large-scale immigration. What they were claiming to criticise was ‘multiculturalism’ as a state-sponsored policy: the idea of the state encouraging people to live parallel lives in the same country and particularly in living under customs and laws that stood in opposition to those of the country they were living in. These European leaders appeared to be calling for a post-multicultural society in which the same rule of law and certain societal norms applied to everybody.6 Late in the day to argue such things, but a significant step perhaps.