6. Synthesis: Grand Visions, Fractured Realities

The concluding pages in this chapter aim to synthesize the materials and draw out a number of implications for both the analysis and a more realist theorizing of democracy in Europe. The prominent, contemporary figure in which nearly all of the paradoxical constellations examined throughout individual chapters converge is, it is argued, not the Islamist terrorist but the refugee seeking protection. Whereas postcolonial migration could still be territorially contained, depoliticized, and remained largely invisible within national identity constructions and historical master narratives, the Syrian refugee crisis of 2015/2016 did no longer allow for any of those options. What European nation-states so vehemently reject—with possibly dire consequences for the future of liberal democracy itself—is their own lesson in alterity.