Berlin • In one of contemporary history’s intriguing caroms, European politics just now is a story of how one decision by a pastor’s dutiful daughter has made life miserable for a vicar’s dutiful daughter. Two of the world’s most important conservative parties are involved in an unintended tutorial on a cardinal tenet of conservatism, the law of unintended consequences, which is that the unintended consequences of decisions in complex social situations are often larger than, and contrary to, those intended.
In 2015, Angela Merkel, the Federal Republic of Germany’s first chancellor from what was East Germany, chose to welcome into Germany about 1 million people, many of them Syrians, fleeing Middle Eastern carnage.