Notwithstanding Macron’s defeat of Le Pen in the French Presidential election, Mark Rutte besting Geert Wilders in the Dutch general election and Alexander Van der Bellen beating Norbert Hofer to become Austrian President, there are many respected commentators, like Niall Ferguson, who argue that Europe is experiencing a major political realignment in which the centre-left has imploded and social democracy is in terminal decline, as the old coalition between progressive elites and the proletariat has been sundered.

According to this analysis the wedge that has driven these two apart is the issue of national identity, with centre-left elites too liberal on immigration and too much in love with multiculturalism, whilst their erstwhile working-class supporters revile both. Multiculturalism certainly tends to be a very dirty word on the Right, as illustrated by Allison Pearson’s 17 May 2017 ‘Daily Telegraph’ article about the Rochdale child-grooming scandal, headed ‘Poor white girls were sacrificed for multiculturalism’.

Angela Merkel has done more than anyone else to focus attention on these questions both by her 2010 Potsdam speech which declared that the attempt to build a multicultural society in Germany had “utterly failed”, and by her 2015 open-door policy towards immigrants fleeing Middle Eastern war zones.

Rita Chin’s ‘The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe’ is thus a very timely book and one of its strengths is that it provides a very clear pathway through the various meanings that have been attached over the years to the terms ‘multicultural’ and ‘multiculturalism’. This requires her tracing the origins of these concepts to the United States. She makes a mistake, however, in stating that the ‘Manchester Guardian’ was the first European publication to refer to multiculturalism, as the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ awards that honour to the ‘Stornoway Gazette’ in 1973 – a mistake which is all the more surprising given that Chin has clearly consulted the OED.

Chin’s primary focus is on Great Britain, France and Germany, with Switzerland and the Netherlands sometimes being drawn into the discussion to illustrate or support her argument. Her aim is to chart the history of “the migration of non-Europeans to Europe after World War II and the massive upheavals … that accompanied that process.” This is certainly ambitious but shouldn’t any study of multiculturalism in Europe also take some account of the substantial transfers of population that occurred within Europe in the immediate aftermath of World War Two? After all, it was this refugee crisis that helped shape the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees. It’s true that Chin briefly mentions internal “others” but this part of the story of multiculturalism deserves somewhat greater attention.

Chin is herself a first generation immigrant to the U.S. and her heart is clearly in the right place in seeing diversity as enriching and lamenting the way in which immigrants are routinely demonized. She also has interesting things to say about topics such as the way in which Islam has come to be widely regarded as the principal obstacle to the acceptance of other cultures, with elements on the Right sometimes even appealing to gender (presenting the veil as an instrument of oppression) in order to mask their own intolerance.

In short, there’s much of interest in Chin’s analysis but it does suffer from occasional errors (such as claiming that all 7/7 bombers were “British born sons of Pakistani immigrants”) and surprising blind spots. It certainly seems odd that a book so much concerned with open doors and open borders never once refers by name to the 1985 Schengen Agreement, let alone the transitional arrangements regarding free movement of workers from Romania and Bulgaria following their accession to the EU on 1 January 2007.