In every country the early criticisms alighted around the same issues. The most extreme and unacceptable practices of some communities became the first way in to split open the prevailing orthodoxies. In each country the issues of ‘honour’ killings and female genital mutilation received massive attention. This was partly because many people were genuinely shocked that such things were going on and had feared saying so if they had known about it before. Partly it was due to the fact that these issues were the ‘softest’ or easiest concerns to express about the multicultural era. If not entirely unopposed, these issues were at least capable of uniting opinion from the widest possible political spectrum: from a left-wing feminist to a right-wing nationalist. Almost everybody could agree that murdering young women was wrong. And most people could unite in expressing their horror at the thought of a young girl’s genitals being mutilated in twenty-first-century Europe.

Over the course of the 2000s the criticisms of such extreme examples of multiculturalism in European society grew. Everywhere the questions Europeans were pondering coalesced around the limits of tolerance. Should liberal societies tolerate the intolerant? Or was there a moment when even the most tolerant society should say ‘enough’? Had our societies been too liberal and in the process allowed illiberalism or anti-liberalism to thrive? Around this time, as Rumy Hasan pointed out, the era of multiculturalism quietly transformed into the era of ‘multifaithism’. Ethnic identity, which had previously been the focus of the multiculturalism debate, began to recede and faith identity, which to many people seemed to have come from nowhere, instead became the crucial issue. What had been a question of blacks, Caribbeans or North Africans now became a question of Muslims and Islam.

As with each of the previous periods of post-war change, the process of seeing through this period did not occur overnight. It had taken European governments decades to recognise that the Gastarbeiter era had not gone as planned. In the same way it took time for European governments to realise that if migrants were staying in their adopted country then they needed laws to protect them from discrimination. The period of multiculturalism also took a couple of decades to burn itself out. But like those previous episodes, even as its death was recognised and in this case announced, it was unclear what all this meant and what might replace it.

A CORE CULTURE?