In December Time magazine put Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, on its cover as its 2015 Person of the Year, for daring to show a “friendly face” to hundreds of thousands of refugees heading to Europe. As 2016 began, it was announced that Germany had offered asylum over the past year to a record 1.1 million migrants from the Balkans, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries.
Only two weeks into 2016 that friendly face seems like ancient history. The mood towards refugees in Germany and other parts of Europe has soured since gangs of young men – said to be of Arab and North African appearance – groped and robbed women in the German city of Cologne on New Year’s Eve. In the words of Der Spiegel, the news magazine, the events of New Year’s Eve have changed Germany.
So far more than 500 women have lodged complaints to the police, some 40 per cent for sexual violence. Similar incidents of gangs of foreign-born young men, some new arrivals and other longer-term residents, have been reported in other German cities.
The events have turned into a political bombshell because of the unique nature of German society, which is reflected in police mishandling of the events and subsequent attempts by police and the media to hush them up.
As it tries to overcome the legacy of its Nazi past, German society has shied away from ascribing particular characteristics – such as sexual predation – to ethnic groups. On January 1, the police made no mention of the incidents. Media were slow to report it, with the state-owned ZDF apologising for failing to give any coverage for four days.
The result is that populist and right-wing parties have seized control of the narrative, forcing Mrs Merkel to defend herself against charges she has betrayed the German nation with her open-door policy to refugees.
It was inevitable that there should be a backlash. For Germany, a country of 80 million, integrating more than 1 million refugees from last year, with perhaps hundreds of thousands expected this year, will be a daunting task.
And it is a task that Germany faces almost alone: Sweden, the other European country with a generous asylum policy, is making it harder for refugees to enter, while Denmark has announced that refugee families will have to hand over any valuables worth more than 10,000 kroner (Dh5,350) to help pay for their stay. So Mrs Merkel, so recently acclaimed as the political, moral and financial leader of Europe, finds herself very much alone in the refugee crisis.
Even as the flood of migrants swelled through Europe last summer, the opponents of Mrs Merkel’s smiling face pointed out that this did not look like a traditional refugee crisis. It was overwhelmingly young men of military age. Where were the frail grannies being pushed on wheelbarrows who featured in Second World War documentaries? To some it looked like a Trojan horse of jihadists infiltrating Europe.
This is not true. In any mass movement of people there will be some infiltrators, but young men fleeing conscription into the Syrian army are as worthy of refugee status as anyone else. After the New Year’s Eve assaults, there is a new charge – of "sexual jihad", playing on old stereotypes of the oversexed Arab.
Due to the slowness of the German police, the identities of the perpetrators are not known. But the magazine Stern has published some crime figures for refugees in Cologne for the year up to November 2015. Syrians and Afghans registered as refugees in Cologne barely figure – less than 1 per cent of the total population of these communities have been arrested. But the figure for Tunisians, Algerians and Moroccans is 40 per cent.
So the criminal background in Cologne is not unlike what tourists experience in parts of Paris – pickpockets and bag-snatchers of mainly North African origin.
What brought thousands of young men to engage in mass sexual assaults on December 31 is still being investigated, although alcohol was clearly a part of it. The political effect, however, is devastating.
The right-wingers who denounced the open-door policy are now joined in an uneasy coalition by feminists who question why Germany has been importing, in the words of Mrs Merkel, “groups that harbour contempt for women”. As gender equality is now the core value of European elites, there is a huge gulf between European aspirations – no one is pretending that sexual violence is not still rampant in Europe – and the cultural and religious norms of the southern shore of the Mediterranean.
Young men without families are a threat to social stability in any society – whether it is China (thanks to the shortage of girls caused by the one-child policy and the abortion of female foetuses) or in migrant communities. Where the young men are jobless and isolated from mainstream society, as is often the case in Europe, this is a recipe for criminal gangs.
The first response of some European governments has been to delay family reunification by up to three years, which would only worsen the problem.
What is clear is that a superhuman effort of cultural inclusion is required, along with vast numbers of new jobs. But these are few for young men with no qualifications.
The only certainty is that the migration problem is not going to go away. With populations booming in Africa and widespread state failure in the Middle East, the pressure on Europe is not going to subside.
The European Union, with a population of 500 million, has the ability to accommodate many migrants.
But politically the peoples of Europe cannot be comfortable with mass immigration so long as its southern border is unsecured, a task which the EU is at present incapable of completing.
If it can find the way to manage immigration flows, everything is possible. If not, then New Year’s Eve 2015 will go down in history as the beginning of the end of united Europe.
Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs
On Twitter: @aphilps