One of the few people who had already done the thinking on this was Bassam Tibi. The academic who had himself migrated to Germany from Syria in 1962 spent years urging the integration of minority communities into Germany. In an initially discouraging atmosphere he also evolved a specific concept of how to go about this. European countries, he suggested, should move from a policy of multiculturalism towards one that advocated for a leitkultur or ‘core culture’. This notion – first put forward by him in the 1990s – argued for a form of multi-ethnic society that embraced people of different backgrounds but united them around a set of common themes.9 Like jazz it could work if everyone knew the theme that they were riffing around. But it could not possibly work if the theme was unknown, forgotten or lost. In such a situation a society would not only fail to hang together but would represent a cacophony. It was one of the first attempts to present a solution to the European multicultural problem, in particular the question of how to unite people of such disparate backgrounds as now existed in Europe. The most straightforward answer was that they should be united not necessarily by a dedication to precisely the same heritage but at least a unified belief in the core concepts of the modern liberal state such as the rule of law, the separation of Church and State and human rights. Yet even as a few figures like Tibi were thinking through this era, most of the rest of society was having to just live its way through it. If there was a painful slowness about finding any way through this, it was at least in part because of a set of ongoing and painful cognitive dissonances.

Once Europe had realised that the immigrants were going to stay, it held two wholly contradictory ideas that were nevertheless able to cohabit for several decades. The first was the idea that Europeans began to tell themselves from the 1970s and 1980s onwards. This was the notion that European countries could be a new type of multi-racial, multicultural society into which anyone from anywhere in the world could come and settle if they so wished. This never received public support, but it had some elite support and most importantly was propelled by the inability of any government to turn around the process of mass migration once it had started. During the first waves of migration (and certainly when it was expected that many immigrants at least would still go back home at some point) few people minded if the newcomers failed to assimilate. In fact, they rarely wanted them to.