2. Demography and population trends

These wider considerations have until recently tended to be ignored or treated with scepticism by some well-intentioned people in Western countries who, moved by the plight of travellers, often asylum-seekers fleeing persecution, have made care, sympathy and response to need their priority concerns. For others, the impact of unplanned inward migration combined with an inability to control the numbers of a new and increasing population poses a serious challenge. This is a matter affecting not only a few specific European countries but of the consequences for Europe as a whole. Viewing the situation from outside, the former prime minister of Australia (2013–15) Tony Abbott offers an independent but bleak point of view: ‘Make no mistake, the European project is in deep trouble. Open borders have exposed the continent to peaceful invasion.… And long-cherished national identities are under threat because establishment leaders have been too dismissive of their peoples' instinctive love of country in favour of a nebulous European ideal.’ His conclusion is brief but unqualified: ‘The only way to save Europe is to acknowledge that it is a union of sovereign states.’Footnote ²

Of course, population growth is not only brought about by mass movements of people. Typically, it comes about as a result of naturally rising birth-rates, and this is more readily accepted than growth resulting from unmanaged immigration. But population growth viewed on a broader or even worldwide scale has long been seen as a threat to human continuity. Books such as Paul Erlich's The Population Bomb have been influential in warning of potential planetary catastrophe brought about by the sheer weight of human overload.Footnote ³ Recently, though, popular opinion has begun to shift away from what some see as purely academic concerns as global issues such as climate change have moved to centre stage. Nevertheless, the numbers challenge remains, and it continues to be taken seriously both politically and practically. It is probably true to say that there is today a closer and more personal awareness of the adverse impact of excessive population growth. But the focus now is not so much on the increasing number of people on the planet but on localised unplanned additions to settled populations. There is also an increased awareness of the way in which decision-making in this area is more likely to be entrusted to distant political leaders than to be locally determined. The most striking recent example of this has been the attempt of the European Union to distribute migrants amongst EU members on the basis of fairness or equality – concepts not easily defined in circumstances in which, for most EU countries, echoes of sovereignty still linger and attempts to press unwanted strategies on unwilling members are unlikely to be welcome.

The search for solutions to the problem of excessive population increase is hardly new, but population numbers can also diminish without the deliberate intervention of human beings. As Thomas Malthus noted two centuries ago, they can be reduced as the unintended result of their own actions. These unanticipated consequences, combined with the uncontrollable events of the natural world, could be viewed as natural controls of human populations – unplanned, unrecognised, and unsought. Malthus identified three such unscheduled developments and, whatever their effects on controlling numbers, they are not likely to be welcome, for the three in question are war, famine and disease. At the root of Malthus' thesis was the principle that population and territory must be kept in balance, and that if a population exceeds the carrying capacity of its land, nature will intervene to restore the balance.Footnote ⁴ While the form the threats take may have changed, the Malthusian diagnosis remains disturbingly convincing, for humans still face these oldest of enemies: war in new and more destructive forms; famine in the shape of shortages of the basic foods needed to sustain life; sickness and premature death as well-tried antibiotics lose their effectiveness and familiar threats such as TB or malaria acquire increased resistance to modern medical science. Malthus' analysis reflected his time, but it transfers effortlessly into the modern world where media news outlets, supported by harrowing visual evidence, provide daily vindications of his thesis.

3. The identity issue – from the global to the personal

We should be careful, however, about immediately interpreting this as the message ‘close your borders, build your fences’ for population increase in some settings may be balanced by population decrease in others. In some Western and East European countries, for example, a low fertility rate (the number of children born per woman) means that population growth has fallen well below replacement level. The rate needed simply to reproduce a population is a little over two, but in many parts of the developed world it is now just over one.Footnote ⁵ There are circumstances, then, in which population increase may be seen as a positive good. As far as individual nations are concerned, while some developing countries have been looking with cautious concern at the cost of their expanding populations, elsewhere some of the world's wealthiest countries have been overtaken by unwelcome and unanticipated reverse concerns: ageing citizens living in relative poverty and a decline in the number of young people able first to support, and then later to succeed them in needing care for themselves.

These concerns have played a significant role in the European debate about borders and, although they have been seen by some countries with declining populations and also by would-be migrants themselves, as justifying an open-door policy, the welcome given to migrants has met with diminishing enthusiasm. Population decline is far from unknown in human communities, even if some of its current causes are novel and specific to our own age. But continuing increases in life expectancy, when combined with declining fertility, inevitably generate new social problems, affecting tax rates, pensions and healthcare arrangements. So while well-founded speculation about a likely future for any particular group may continue to be important, not least for those responsible for resource-planning and health and environmental policy, it may be of more direct concern to individuals to know whether the numbers of their own group – cultural, ethnic or geographical – is increasing or decreasing. In a world of inter-group hostility and hatred, too, the relative increase or decrease of populations takes on political significance. Indeed, even apart from compounding factors of this kind, and independently, too, of concerns about the migration of displaced people from war zones, real fears have been expressed that European civilisations could gradually die out, as other groups defined by language and culture have done: the Aztecs, the Ancient Greeks, the Romans. Support for this apparently unlikely speculation can be found in some recent statistics. In the early years of the twentieth century, the inhabitants of Western Europe made up about fourteen per cent of the world's population. At the beginning of the twenty-first century this had fallen to six per cent, with a further decline to only four per cent expected. An earlier United Nations assessment was that the European population as a whole was likely to decline, even allowing for immigration, by almost one hundred million over the first fifty years of the twenty-first century – a fall at least as dramatic as that caused by the Black Death in the fourteenth century, when the population of Europe was reduced by about one third.

Recent immigration figures, however, have already cast a different light on this picture of declining Western populations, resulting mainly from the arrival of large numbers of newcomers and from births to the new arrivals.Footnote ⁶ The initial welcome of European countries, strongly and warmly represented by Germany and Sweden, was at least in part prompted by an assessment that immigration could be a mutually acceptable way of solving the problems of developed countries that are in need of new workers. Potential migrants themselves could, and some do, reasonably put this aspect into their own calculations as to whether or not they should embark on their perilous journeys. Along with the obvious advantage of moving from countries where living standards are low to others where they are higher, this provides individuals with an obvious reason for making that choice. For, attachment to place of birth apart, why should people remain in a setting which holds out only a prospect of life-long poverty – still more, war, conflict and an absence of the rule of law – if they can secure admission to one of the privileged locations of the world? From the point of view of the receiving countries, however, the position is more complex. To try to solve the problems of labour shortages and ageing populations by immigration is to chase a moving target. Immigration cannot in the longer term supply enough people of working age to provide for the needs of children and old people, since immigrants themselves will have children and will age. So while immigration might help with the demographic problem for a time, it cannot do so in the long run. The Cambridge economist Robert Rowthorn offers a striking analogy: ‘A country seeking to retain its youth through immigration is like the sixteenth century Princess Elizabeth of Transylvania, who sought to keep herself young by bathing in the blood of young maidens. Each bath appeared to restore her youth for a time, but the effect would soon wear off and she would then require another bath, and then another bath, and so on ad infinitum.’Footnote ⁷

Nevertheless, it is hardly surprising if populations affected by falling birth rates view their situation with concern and are ready to search for remedies. As far as the United Kingdom is concerned, the birth rate has been below replacement level for three decades. Of course, there are many reasons for declining birth-rates: the tendency for cohabitation to replace formal marriage, the increase in lone-parent and one-person households, delayed child-bearing, effective contraception, divorce and multiple relationships. There are also more positive reasons for the changing pattern in many European countries: the context now is one in which women are free to choose more involvement in the public world over child-bearing and family life or to opt for other preferred alternatives – they are not bound by the decisions of others – and both men and women are free to find their place in the world irrespective of origins or social standing. At the same time, reliable social provision means that people do not have to look only to their direct progeny for care in their old age. The fact is, though, that with too few women of childbearing age to reverse the decline, Europe's population would continue to decline even if birth rates were to rise. To compare the experience of the United States, as far as its population taken in its entirety is concerned and mainly due to the increase in its Hispanic population, the last year that Americans of Northern European ancestry reached replacement level in terms of births was 1971.Footnote ⁸

4. Cultural identity and kinship

The arrival of newcomers, then, has the potential to bring a welcome increase in the availability of people ready to work and contribute to the community, especially if there is little difference in culture, values or behaviour. For them, as much as for the host community, a sense of identity located in culture and community is fundamental. However, while culture can be defined in many different ways, one of the most readily recognised involves the notion of kinship. Often people see their kin relationships as part of their own identity. A stranger may be seen as a threat or potential enemy, but a common kinship generates a hope, if not an expectation, of a friendly response to need.

This natural sentiment is implicit in Edmund Burke's powerful description of society as a compact between the dead, the living and those not yet born. Such genealogical speculation provides not only a fascinating portrait of the past but also expectations about the future. While it links generations through time it also supplies a horizontal link, providing a sense of role and mutual interdependence. It would be wrong to read too much into the role played by awareness of individual or genetic identity – in the long run we are all related to one another and, within fifteen generations, each human being living today has more than half a million direct ancestors. But the search for ‘we’, however expressed, opens up the question of identity in a way that science is not able to give more than a partial answer.

So who are the ‘we’ that are the object of this search? And how far is our sense of our own identity affected by the territory we occupy and the limits that have been set to its boundaries? In the past, national borders usually marked out not only geographical boundaries but also the boundaries of a culture, and language was often, though not always, a defining feature. But identity is no more a purely geographical concept than a purely genetic one. However, most Western societies would now describe themselves as multicultural and it is commonplace to refer to, often to politicise, different identities within a common jurisdiction. But to describe some of these different identities as cultural groups can lead to confusion, both about the notion of a culture and also about the way ‘multicultural’ is to be understood. Societies contain, and always have contained, many differences, and different ‘recognition’ features may be important in different contexts. Depending on that context, these features can include race, ethnicity, skin-colour, language, religion, gender, (dis)ability, or sexual orientation.

These multiple possibilities have little to do with the older, elite conception of culture, in which it means, in Matthew Arnold's words ‘the best that has been thought and known’.Footnote ⁹ Nor do they necessarily link directly to the popular conception of ‘culture’ in which the ‘culture’ of a group is to be found in the features that make up a common life - entertainment, food, life-styles and customs. These are indeed ways of recognising minority groups, but not all group characteristics have political importance, while others that modern societies have chosen to recognise as important, in particular skin colour, gender and sexual orientation, have little to do with cultural preferences or life-style. Indeed, many people would object to finding themselves singled out in these ways. Similar observations apply where gender is concerned, for women, too, may prefer to claim a broader cultural identity than one based on narrow gendered expectations. And although groups identified in these ways are often referred to as communities, denominations like these fail to pick out a community in any realistic sense. People do not, on the whole, live in groups marked out by gender any more than by sexual orientation and, in practice, a community is often recognised simply by the fact that its members choose to live in the same locality, or at least gather together in regular meetings and assemblies.

5. Religion, culture and demography

There is one feature, however, that does have a stronger claim to recognition as a cultural marker. That is religion. The case for allowing it this status is well founded, since a religion often determines a whole way of life. In addition, religious and ethnic communities, possibly marked out by a separate language, often live in distinguishable locations and they may also choose to raise their families separately from mainstream groups. Differences, though, can be exaggerated, and some faith groupings have more in common in their religious roots than is widely recognised. Judaism, as represented by the Old Testament, has provided a cultural basis for Islam as well as for Christianity. However, the potential for harmony is currently being put to the test; the picture today is bleaker and events do not always take a predicted course, but the possibility of peaceful co-existence for those living in some of Europe's newly multi-faith societies is still there to be breathed into life. Christianity, with its Judaic roots, has shaped and influenced Europe's law, politics and social practice over many hundreds of years, inspiring its literature, learning, and art; nor is the European cultural heritage the exclusive inheritance of believers – it is shared by its secular thinkers and is available to members of other religions. If today the rise of militant Islamist movements unsympathetic to Western values has intensified some divisions – in particular that between a Western culture which is broadly Christian and a strong Muslim culture whose roots lie south and east of the Mediterranean – it has also given a stronger profile to the notion of cultural identity based on religion – a notion that has been gradually dying away in increasingly secularised Western democracies.

Nevertheless, although Christianity has sought to show a tolerant and open attitude to newcomers of diverse faiths, it has become clear that the idea of a common approach in religious matters has complexities that have been too easily discounted. Many of the new arrivals, for example, come from areas where irreconcilable enmities still exist or where, for example, respect for the Jewish religion is inseparably linked to and dependent on attitudes to the state of Israel. In these circumstances, conflicts can spread from one region to another, shattering hopes of integration and mutual understanding. Recent attacks in France and Belgium, for example, included both Jewish and non-Jewish targets. Such events have changed attitudes and also public perceptions of how Islamic religion is to be understood. They may have also brought what Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, has described as a newly developed narrative within Islam – a narrative, he suggests, that has intensified its religiosity, changed the character of its interaction with those of different faiths, and is fundamentally incompatible with the modern world. Despite objections to this interpretation, seen by some Muslims as a distortion of their faith, Blair insists that even in a more moderate and non-violent form, this way of thinking is inconsistent with a pluralist and open-minded view of the world. In his words: ‘This ideology is not interested in coexistence. It does not seek dialogue but dominance.’Footnote ¹⁰

It is in this setting that a further feature – the demographic link between religion, culture, and kinship - takes on a new significance. Regular differences between communities in child-bearing and family size, often connected to religious and cultural tradition, create a potential imbalance in populations – the forerunner of significant population transformations. Robert Rowthorn cites the demographic background to the Kosovo conflict as an example of the potential political consequences such variations in population can have. He notes that in 1950, there was a rough balance in Kosovo between births to Albanian Muslims and births to Orthodox Serbs but by 1996, when the ratio had shifted to 4:1 in favour of the Albanians, the Serbs had begun to see themselves as an endangered minority.Footnote ¹¹ The significance of such a development for broader regional conflicts is a major theme of Misha Glenny's book, The Balkans. He writes: ‘Any serious consideration of the Balkan peninsula runs up against the unanswerable question of borders. Which countries belong there? A still more sensitive question is – which people does it embrace? Countless scholars, politicians, diplomats and journalists have offered definition, underpinned variously by geographical, political, ethnic and historical arguments, some of them measured, some preposterous. But a consensus has never been found, nor could it be.’Footnote ¹² Since Glenny made these observations, recurrent disagreements in many other European countries have brought more questions about borders and national identity, and increasingly conflicting opinions about how to handle the emerging issues but, however unanswerable the questions, it seems answers will have to be found. Britain, I might add, has so far been marginally protected from one aspect of this quandary by its status as an island with a surrounding sea, although that historic defensibility is now threatened by Euro-tunnel and also by the emerging vulnerability of Britain's own largely unprotected coast-line.

Meanwhile, the cultural changes which have already taken place in some European countries, while welcomed by some have generated troubled reflections in others. As mentioned earlier, there is a fear that Western communities as a whole face a realistic possibility of becoming a numerical minority in regions where their predominance was formerly unchallenged. This situation has already been reached in the great Dutch cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and demographic differences in particular localities such as these have led to speculation about how things might develop in the future. The historian Niall Ferguson warns of a clash of civilisations in which fertility and family play a role, bringing a dramatic confrontation between Islam and the West in a battle for religious and cultural supremacy. Ferguson's view is that time and the birth-rate could bring a Muslim Europe within fifty years.Footnote ¹³ The political commentator Patrick Buchanan, author of The Death of the West, looks at the speed of change on a broader scale: ‘In 1960, people of European ancestry were one-fourth of the world's population; in 2000, they were one-sixth; in 2050, they will be one tenth.’Footnote ¹⁴

Many Western countries either deny or seek to avoid this apocalyptic outcome by appealing to the principle of religious toleration within a multicultural ideal. Multiculturalism is not only a descriptive term. It is also a normative concept. Many respect it as a political position linked to the assertion of identity by neglected or marginalised groups, and as a demand for the recognition of that identity by others. Reference to the ‘politics of equal recognition’ carries with it the implication that there is some perspective from which all such judgements can be impartially surveyed and evaluated. This may be legitimate as a goal, but those who have embraced a culture, or more particularly a religion, can hardly, without inconsistency, avoid giving it a position of privilege in their own lives. In these vital matters, impartiality is both practically difficult and logically incoherent.Footnote ¹⁵

6. Partiality and preference

If we are obliged, then, to set aside the possibility that religious collaboration could provide a short-term solution to the current crisis – a crisis in which states may be asked to set aside long-recognised obligations to some for the greater and more immediate needs of others – it may well be time to consider the role an open and independent ethics could play in the debate. This means returning to a question raised earlier: can a preference for your ‘own’, whether your own culture, your own social group, or even your own family, be ethically justified? Is it, indeed, ethically required? Impartiality is often taken as the mark of morality, while the notion of partiality has a more disputed ethical status. Partiality can be understood in the present context, however, as the claim that, everything else being equal, it is morally right to give a higher priority in your actions to the good of those for whom you have a special responsibility.Footnote ¹⁶ Initially, this might seem to conflict with another important moral requirement: the widely held view that it is wrong to discriminate between people, other than for sound and relevant moral reasons. But there is an air of paradox about this principle – in some circumstances discrimination can be practical, logical and morally mandated. For example, few would criticise a father for trying first to save his child rather than a stranger from drowning, or condemn an aid-giver with limited supplies of food to distribute for prioritising the weakest rather than the strongest. The contrary view, particularly as defended by the philosopher Peter Singer, is often criticised because the idea that morality requires people to give priority to those with greatest needs, even when these are distant strangers, rather than to the needs of close others, conflicts with these widely-held intuitions.

These are often seen as irreconcilable views. However, the air of paradox can be resolved by recognising that the particularity principle – the duty to care for your own – does not stand alone. It is not an independent demand, but a widely accepted requirement that belongs within a universal morality. In other words, the duty to care for those for whom you have responsibility is a moral demand that everyone is required to respect; it is not a concession to personal selfishness but a universal obligation. As Lawrence Blum has argued in relation to the narrower area of family or genetic relationships: ‘Morally, the intuition that we have special ties to members of our family which we do not have to others is as secure a moral conviction as that every human being should be treated with dignity.’Footnote ¹⁷ The debate, then, really centres on obligations which exist within a world where choices are hard, but where situations may demand decisions that focus on a considered assessment of alternatives.

This is not a new ethical debate, however, even if the terms in which it is couched are new. A little over two centuries ago, in discussing the moral sentiments, Adam Smith wrote of the naturalness of partiality: ‘Every man feels his own pleasures and his own pains more sensibly than those of other people … After himself, the members of his own family, those who usually live in the same house with him, his parents, his children, his brothers and sisters, are naturally the objects of his warmest affections.’Footnote ¹⁸ In a more recent discussion of the classic confrontation between the personal and the impersonal, the British moral philosopher R.M. Hare took the opposite perspective, defending for legal and technical reasons the idea of norms that are not person-specific, writing: ‘If we are to be just between the competing interests of different people, it seems hard to give any other answer than that it is by giving equal weight, impartially, to the equal interests of everybody.’Footnote ¹⁹ As a novel illustration of this, described as the ‘utility principle’, Hare once suggested that it is a distinctive feature of a moral judgement that it must be capable of being expressed in a form that involves no proper names.Footnote ²⁰ Later, recognising that his position required the paradoxical mixing together of elements of Kantian ethics with utilitarianism – a moral theory that relates judgements of right and wrong, good and bad, to the consequences of voluntary actions – he went on to modify his own universal prescriptivist position to allow for some consequentialist considerations.Footnote ²¹ His conclusion was that even the impersonal ethics of Kant has to take account of the impact of our actions on the course of events in the world.Footnote ²² Whether or not Kant could ever have been persuaded to modify his belief in the universal nature of moral principles, consequentialists (or pragmatists) can afford to be more flexible. If they are genuinely seeking a way to reconcile these two powerful positions – universal prescriptivism and utilitarianism – they can reasonably argue that there is a general public benefit, helpful to the community as a whole, when special personal obligations are respected, especially when widely supported by a strong moral intuition.

It would be easy to see the partiality controversy as no more than a theoretical debate generated by academics and theoreticians and applying only to a narrow area of personal life. It has a place in the current debate, however, because that debate cannot be confined to the academy. When it moves out into the public world, as it does in relation to the issues currently preoccupying Europe, it acquires an important political dimension. In relation to the border crisis, it finds its expression in two competing political approaches: the first, an understanding of democracy which places on leaders of individual countries a primary obligation to consider the well-being of their own electors, the second a rigorous application of egalitarianism that may see the wishes of settled communities as secondary to the greater needs of others.

Underlying this is the gulf between an individualist political morality and a collectivist one. This is a difficult gulf to bridge. Partisan claims on behalf of specific groups are often seen as the preserve of nationalists and separatists. Nationalism itself has acquired a bad name, and this has left the broader area of individual human rights to be claimed as the prerogative of the liberal cosmopolitan. But, as Robert Rowthorn observes: ‘there will always be a tension between universalism and particularism, between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. The problem is not to choose one or the other, but to hold these two poles in balance.…’Footnote ²³

The current migrant crisis epitomises this dilemma, and the difficulty of holding the two poles in balance is becoming increasingly apparent. The question is, however, whether the tension involved in this classic confrontation might not be weakened by recognising that the familiar moral opposition between the personal and the impersonal is based on a false dichotomy. On the one hand, a universalist and impartialist position is commonly presented as altruistic and hence good, and, on the other, a partialist position is presented as essentially egotistical and hence bad. In much political and economic theory, too, ‘rational contractors’ are defined as people interested in maximising their own welfare. This leaves as the only counter to a selfish preoccupation with your own values and interests, a ‘view from nowhere’ approach, according to which everybody's interests count equally, including those of your own national, social or ethnic group. As Thomas Nagel describes the situation: ‘We see things from here, so to speak. But we are also able to think about the world in abstraction from our particular position in it – in abstraction from who we are.’ Developing his description of the impersonal viewpoint, Nagel adds: ‘Each of us begins with a set of concerns, desires and interests of his own, and each of us can recognize that the same is true of others. We can then remove ourselves in thought from our particular position in the world and think simply of all those people, without singling out as I the one we happen to be.’Footnote ²⁴

For Nagel, the emphasis on these two standpoints is central. There is, however, a third possibility – a midway position – that emphasises neither detached impersonality of judgement nor a purely selfish concern with your own interests – the difference between wanting something ‘for yourself,’ and wanting something for others. This is not incompatible, of course, with sometimes acting on the more familiar ethical basis represented by the parable of the good Samaritan, of putting out a hand to save a stranger, although he or she is a stranger. Where nations are concerned, the sentiment of ownership or belonging is called patriotism – a word formed to encapsulate the idea that a citizen of whatever country has a duty to be loyal to that country and no other, so long, at least, as it respects fundamental human rights. Applied to a culture rather than a nation, it is the claim that people may legitimately recognise a duty of loyalty to their own culture and seek to preserve it as their own heritage and way of life. Again, though, this is not incompatible with compassion for those beyond those national or political frontiers who are in need of help, nor with an active desire to address broader issues of global poverty and inequality.

It is to suggest, though, that shared identity does have a distinctive ethical status – that it is right to care in a special way for those to whom you belong, and who belong, in a sense, to you. But, of course, in asserting this, you assert the same on behalf of all those others whose group or identity is different from your own. They, too, have obligations to family, home and country. The challenge, then, is to find principles for co-existence and a moral basis that can be held in common. But when populations come into potential conflict with each other, the search for common values gains a critical urgency. It is in this context that there is a need, as well as a justification, for finding and occupying the moral ground between concern for all and concern for one's own. Another writer ably expresses this point. Summing up what he describes as a form of indirect universalism, philosophically acceptable to both Kantians and utilitarians, Paul Gomberg writes:

It may not be easy to apply these conclusions to the situation that Europe currently faces; borders are under challenge and unparalleled numbers of migrants are travelling in search of new, safer and better lives. Mass movements like these have never been possible before – speed of travel, transport and communications has produced a situation that could hardly have been contemplated in the past. Today's world has many, but not limitless, resources to meet the new challenges but, as the economist Ed Conway argues, predictions that globalisation and the internet would kill off the state have proved wrong and national sovereignty is resurgent.Footnote ²⁶ Forecasts of the consequences of the re-emergence of nationalism are hardly encouraging, particularly when set alongside ubiquitous speculation that the closing of borders could lead to the EU falling apart within months. So much, then, for speculation. And so I cannot, I'm afraid, end with a prediction of my own. But it may be useful to end with a brief summary of the story we were following over the last year.

It was a year in which insults were freely tossed about and wisdom collided with folly. The summer of 2015 brought the boat tragedies, the rise of unscrupulous people-smugglers, Angela Merkel's disastrously generous invitation, and growing fears for the future of the EU. Europe itself became seriously divided: Greece and Italy became for many migrants the first countries of arrival; the Balkan countries became a preferred route to Northern European countries, especially Germany, Sweden and the UK. An EU plan to cope with the numerous new arrivals by distributing migrants equally amongst EU members met with resistance. Fences went up in Hungary and elsewhere, including countries outside the EU and hence outside the Schengen agreement. Schengen itself was crumbling. Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia agreed a daily limit on arrivals and vowed to shut down the Balkan route. EU leaders continued the search for remedies by turning to Turkey for assistance in stemming the flow of applicants and an uneasy relationship continues to take forward this project. At the same time, political leaders in some affected countries have stepped into the debate to express views closer to those of many of their voters. In a speech at the Davos summit in January 2016, President Gauck of Germany spoke against what seemed to be the consensus ethical position by calling for ‘morally and politically necessary limits. Limits are not unethical… ’

At the end of 2015 a leading British newspaper offered its own prediction for the coming year: ‘Defending our borders will be the dominant issue in British politics’.Footnote ^{27 ,} Footnote ²⁸ The challenge was well expressed and debate continues unabated.