Postwar guilt was also closely related to post-colonial guilt, and post-colonial guilt was the reason why some countries, notably France and Britain, initially opened their doors so widely to Algerians, Tunisians, Bangladeshis, and Pakistanis, among others. Surely, the argument went, their former imperial rulers owed something to the inhabitants of the British Commonwealth and the Francophone world. This argument even worked in countries that had never possessed any colonies, as all immigrants coming from ex-colonial countries were automatically classed as members of oppressed cultures who deserved the assistance of modern, anti-racist, anti-colonial, secular Europeans. In this sense, the postwar European project represented an admirable attempt to transcend Europe’s old and ugly anxieties about sameness and otherness. The European project also nurtured an admirable instinct to welcome asylum-seekers--people who had a justifiable fear of persecution in their own countries. Some European Jews had been saved during the war, after all, because they had successfully sought asylum elsewhere--and many had died because they had been refused.

Over time, however, European enthusiasm for the offering of asylum was dampened by the exponential expansion in numbers of asylum seekers, not all of whom, as it turned out, were truly suffering from political persecution. Still, the real problem for European immigration services was never the “bogus asylum-seekers,” as the British tabloids call them, but the real ones. At the end of 2008, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees counted more than sixteen million legitimate refugees, all of whom technically have a right to European asylum. Particularly when the humanitarian need to reunite them with their spouses, parents, and children is taken into account, along with the need to make amends for colonial cruelty, this is potentially a very large number of people.

Indeed, a very large number of people--in fact, an unprecedented number--arrived, and are still arriving. Some 1.5 million of the nine million people who live in Sweden are immigrants or the children of immigrants, as are some three million of the sixteen million inhabitants of the Netherlands. At current rates, one-quarter to one-third of the population of most Western European countries will be of non-European origin by the middle of this century. In many major cities--Rotterdam, Marseille, Leicester--Muslims may soon be in the majority. In some districts of major cities, including London and Amsterdam, they already are.

Once the immigrants had arrived, the complicated morality of the European project also made it hard, rather paradoxically, for Europeans to absorb the newcomers, especially those from the Muslim world. Europeans who were trying to abandon their own national identities were not going to thrust those identities on immigrants. After all, who was to say whose culture was better? No one saw the need to promote assimilation--to teach Turks to be German, or Moroccans to be Dutch. The very idea was embarrassing. Strangely, in retrospect, very few Europeans even felt that it was necessary to induct newcomers into the European project itself. No one explained to them that being “Dutch” now meant respecting womens’ rights, or that being “German” was incompatible with Holocaust denial, or that open distaste for homosexuals would be considered socially unacceptable. No one felt comfortable inflicting any moral or historical lessons upon them at all. This led to a great deal of mutual incomprehension. As Caldwell writes,