Many critics on the political left objected to the whole discussion, claiming that these were straw-man arguments and insisting either that such problems did not exist or that they did exist but were not problems. But by 2010 growing public concern about precisely such parallel societies was growing across Europe. The sharpest cause of this growth was the increasing tally of terrorist attacks and thwarted terrorist attacks involving people born and brought up in Europe. But while these attacks gave the concerns their edge, concern over the less violent or non-violent expressions of difference were also growing – and not always because they were being expressed by minorities.

In 2006 the Dutch Justice Minister, Piet Hein Donner, caused significant anger in the Netherlands when he suggested in an interview that if Muslims wished to change the law of the land to Sharia by democratic means (that is when Muslims were large enough in number), then they could do so. In 2004 Donner had briefly proposed the resurrection of the country’s blasphemy laws to address the concerns of some Muslims. Then in 2008 there was at least equal public outrage in Britain when the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, gave a lecture at the Royal Courts of Justice that addressed parallel legal jurisdictions growing inside the country. During his lecture the archbishop had suggested that the adoption of elements of Sharia law in the UK ‘seems unavoidable’. In the wake of the initial public anger the archbishop had insisted he had been misunderstood. But in a BBC radio interview the following day, intended to clarify his remarks, he went even further, stating that the idea ‘there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said’ was ‘a bit of a danger’.7

Coming on top of years of growing concern about immigration and security it suddenly seemed as though some of the absolute bases of Western civilisation were being offered up for negotiation. It also sometimes seemed as though the past was up for grabs as well. Only a fortnight before Merkel’s Potsdam speech the President of Germany, Christian Wulff, gave his speech on the ‘Day of German Unity’. Among his comments, also aimed at answering the Sarrazin question over the place of Islam in Germany, Wulff implied that Islam was as much a part of the country’s history as Christianity and Judaism had been. There was an outcry in Germany, including from within his own party. But the President was not alone in appearing willing to alter the past in order to adapt to present realities.