It came as no surprise when, on the last Friday before Christmas, a man of Middle Eastern origin drove his car at high speed into a crowd of families at a Christmas market in Germany, this time in Magdeburg. It happens every year now. I decided to wait until after Christmas Day to write about it; but already it’s half forgotten, barely a full week since the atrocity took place at the time of writing. It’s such a routine occurrence it no longer warrants more than a few days in the headlines.

In the days that followed the carnage, there was an unseemly squabble by various political factions to assign the suspect, Taleb Al Abdulmohsen, to their opponents’ camp. The fact that, unlike the attackers in previous similar cases, Abdulmohsen did not appear to be inspired by straightforward Jihadi doctrine added room for speculation and accusation. If anything, he seemed to be opposed to fanatical Islam. Progressives pointed out that the suspect had indicated support for the populist right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) and had been a fan of the self-styled “alpha male” and suspected people trafficker Andrew Tate, and that the Right should therefore take responsibility for one of their own. Germany’s Interior Minister said it was clear that Abdulmohsen held “Islamophobic” views.

Those on the Right retorted that Abdulmohsen’s primary grievance seemed to be Germany’s failure to have taken in more refugees; especially women and ex-Muslims from his native Saudi Arabia. He claimed Germany had shared information with the oppressive Wahhabi government about those fleeing religious persecution. The suspect was therefore a supporter of immigration and open borders, and those on the progressive Left who shared those views also shared his culpability.

Others were not going to let Islam and its political variants off the hook so easily. The term “Taqqiya” became popular for a day or so, as various observers made the claim that Abdulmohsen was taking advantage of a doctrinal loophole which allows Muslim believers to deny or disguise their faith if that is necessary in order to survive or to carry out their religious objectives. Although it was not clear why Abdulmohsen would have needed to have denied his faith when plenty of Muslims have been able to carry out similar attacks across Europe without ever feeling the need to disguise their true beliefs. Furthermore, those looking to dismiss any link to Islamism pointed out that Saudi Arabia had issued diplomatic notices warning the German authorities about Abdulmohsin’s extreme anti-Islamist views and requesting his extradition.

There is still a meaningful English culture left for newcomers to integrate with, but it is far harder to access

The entire debate was as depressing and tedious as the regularity with which such attacks are expected each year. And it didn’t seem to be bringing us any closer to a true understanding of exactly why these dreadful atrocities — and the grim, imposing physical infrastructure aimed at stopping them — have become such a staple of a European Christmas.

A day or two after the atrocity, a British Muslim commentator made an apparently unconnected observation about the children of outwardly observant and pious Muslim families in Britain wearing Father Christmas hats and indulging in normal Christmas children’s culture. This, it was stated, confirmed that integration was still working successfully, despite the gripes and whines of cranks and moaners. As a fully paid-up crank and seasoned moaner, I offered the uncheery response that I would be more inclined to believe that integration was working successfully once the bollards designed to prevent Magdeburg-type attacks could be removed from British cities. One or two replies came back pointing out that it used to be Irish republican terrorism that necessitated protective infrastructure in major cities, and the preventative measures such as the removal of rubbish bins.

My initial reaction to this kind of reply was that it was fatuous — it seemed to insist that the risk of terrorism was the natural order of things, and that we were only moaning now that the offenders were of non-European origin. However the comparison between the violence and terrorism associated with the troubles in Northern Ireland, and the kind of attacks that we’ve become used to in Europe since around 2015, serves as a useful means of analysing the nature of the threat that we currently face. And it was particularly interesting that this arose following an observation about social and cultural integration.

The tactics used by the Provisional IRA and associated groups were vile, inhuman and cowardly. However, the IRA eventually had some semblance of a willingness to compromise, morally dubious as such compromises were. Looking back on the earlier wave of Jihadi atrocities following 9/11, there too, there was some vaguely coherent ideological objective, albeit one with which there could be absolutely no compromise. Pan-Islamism, Muslim supremacy and and religious absolutism was an impractical and unattainable goal, but it did at least exist as a body of thought.

The wave of violence that we’ve experienced in Europe over the last decade feels far less connected to any real world programme of political change, or even any specific political grievance. Organisations like Al Qaeda and later ISIS were destroyed militarily in their home regions, and in the West they were infiltrated and rendered inoperable even in their most disparate, cell-structured forms due to surveillance. But where they took steps to keep individual cells of operation as isolated from one another as possible to evade detection, a new generation of attackers have emerged who are far more authentically isolated, operating truly alone.

Where it took logistics and expertise to source the equipment and prepare an improvised suicide explosive device, the attackers of the 2020s tend to use far more simple and readily available means of doing damage — most notably vehicles and knives. Whereas the early 2000s wave of Jihadi terrorists aimed for the greatest possible death tolls in dramatic attacks that forced people in the West to alter the way they lived their lives, the new wave goes for fewer, but more shocking deaths. Little girls at a dance class, and families with their children doing Christmas shopping. Without the large organisational structure, and processes of recruitment that larger Jihadi groups from twenty years ago had, there is nothing like the same degree of ideological or religious sophistication. Indeed, as we’ve seen with the case of Abdulmohsin, there isn’t even the requirement that they be outwardly religious at all.

Rather than fanaticism or zealotry, our new generation of violent attackers seem to be displaying signs of nihilism. In fact, there is a genuine question as to the extent to which this kind of activity can even be described as “terrorism” anymore, given that it seems to be lacking any particular political cause or objective in whose name they are trying to terrorise the populace. They are not driving cars into crowds of Christmas shoppers to unite the Ummah, or to bring down the corrupt imperialist hegemon. Rather, it is the ultimate expression of contempt and resentment for a society they do not understand, and feel no connection to.

The term “integration” in the context of immigrants to Europe is one that most sceptical people now react to dismissively. It’s become associated with so many attempts over the years to lower whatever common social and cultural denominators remained, in order that recently arrived communities could superficially appear to be living within the system and the law, and not actively posing a threat. In Britain, it has become particularly associated with a political and educational project that sought to strip down the national culture to a set of “values”, like fairness, a belief in equality and respect for the law that, to put it mildly, did not appear to be unique to the United Kingdom.

The actual national culture; the unspoken, unwritten tapestry of social customs, behaviours and norms; bonds of obligation to place and to neighbours, as well as the particular institutions of town, village and nation, played no part in this. Partially, this is because culture like that is very difficult to perceive by individuals in their own societies, as it is the water in which we swim. But it is also because that culture was atrophying due to economic change, by new patterns of internal migration amongst the native population, and much more recently due to disruption caused by immigration itself. Recent migrants and their children are not the only people in modern Britain to find themselves alienated, isolated and deprived of the familiar patterns of life, sociality and behaviour that they had grown up to be accustomed to.

“Integration” as a concern amongst policy-makers in the UK and most of Europe emerged reactively, as a response to security concerns following the rise of Islamist terrorism after 9/11. So the security state began stepping into an area of policy that had been seen as unnecessary by two previous generations of policy makers in education, home affairs and social services since the dawn of mass immigration in the 1950s. As a result, the focus was on preventing young people (predominantly young Muslim men) becoming “radicalised” and being drawn into a path that could lead to political violence. There was some attempt to look at this at a more holistic level than that solely of the individual, leading to the indiscriminate proliferation of the patronising euphemism “communities” to describe tight-knit South Asian kinship networks, black people, and white people who lived in terraced housing outwith the M25 and who might vote for the BNP.

The security state and the police formed links with the critical “communities” from which problem individuals were most likely to emerge, and learned to use biraderi networks to exchange information, and to keep a lid (albeit a very loose one) on the materials being disseminated in the mosques. The result was a cultural detente in which South Asian Muslims would continue living largely parallel lives to the British mainstream, and in which the elders would monitor their youth for signs of the most dangerous strains of violent radicalism in return for the state keeping out of their business. Parallel institutions such as schools and family courts took care of business within “the community” on their own terms.

This framework can largely be said to have worked on its own decidedly unambitious terms. The kind of conspiratorial activity amongst second or third generation Muslim immigrants in Britain that led to the 7th July 2005 bombings in London, or that were depicted in Chris Morris’s “Four Lions”, is no longer the concern that it was 15 years ago. The threat now comes from young men of first or second generation immigrant backgrounds, living outside of those tight-knit religious and family networks. Individuals like the Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi, the Southport attacker Axel Rudakubana or the Hartlepool knifeman Ahmed Alid — individuals who arrived or whose parents arrived in Britain largely for want of anywhere else in the world to be, and for whom Britain exists as a form of purgatory.

For such people, “the UK” as they know it is the Home Office and the Department for Work and Pensions. It is a terraced house or a flat in a former industrial town or an inner city neighbourhood from which the original inhabitants have long since departed, leaving only the physical shells and the ghosts of what had once been their workplaces and their homes and their pubs. It is a place to drift about in. Even if they wanted to, and even if they had the social wherewithal to do so, there is nothing there for them to “integrate” themselves with. One can disapprove of the various inward-looking, ghettoising kinship social models of the South Asian Muslim groups in England, but at least they provide a sense of belonging and place in the world for the individuals who live with in them, even if they act as a barrier to participation in mainstream British society.

This is not to argue that there is no longer a meaningful English culture left for newcomers to integrate with — far from it. But where it still endures, it does so as a far more middle class, suburban or rural phenomenon, which is far harder for the average new arrival to access. Somebody being granted asylum in the UK today is likely to be put up somewhere where vacant housing is relatively abundant, which usually means a town or a neighbourhood in the Midlands or the North with few jobs, and from which the local population has moved out due to lack of prospects.

Where in the past, there was a robust working class culture in the towns and cities, with common institutions, in which new arrivals could learn the language, learn how things worked, and eventually fit themselves into the patterns of life — today, somebody arriving and being given basic accommodation is likely to find themselves surrounded by individuals of dozens of nationalities, very few of whom are likely to be women, and all just as out of place as they are themselves. The only native British people they are likely to meet will also be locked out of mainstream society; by unemployment, disability or addiction.

For a man living by himself in such a place, or the child of a couple placed there, the “England” or “Britain” as those of us who have grown up here and call the place home understand it, still remains an entirely foreign country. There is very little means by which they can ever meaningfully come to know it as we do; the kind of institutions in which they might once have are now gone, particularly the workplaces. In the sort of schools that the child is likely to be sent to, a kind of pidgin culture is emerging, stripped of cultural and linguistic depth to facilitate interactions between Somalis, Kurds, Kosovans and Eritreans.

And occasionally, someone with a knife or a vehicle steps out from that world and into ours to do harm to a people who essentially remain aliens to them. Whether they were nominally inspired by bits and pieces of Islam that they might have picked up isn’t really relevant — these are not people who are going to build a new caliphate in Greater Manchester. These are people who have ended up somewhere that they’re not meant to be, surrounded by people with whom they share no affinity, stripped of any of the authentic social systems that human beings are sustained by. It’s really not much of a surprise that there are one or two amongst them who will lash out at whatever target presents itself. Pretty much any source can provide the fuel — religion, politics, Andrew Tate; whatever. It doesn’t matter.

This pattern has clearly not been replicated evenly across Europe. For a start, I think it’s far less likely that an individual of Taleb Al Abdulmohsen’s level of education and social capital could have ended up quite so adrift in Britain as he did in Germany. But still, his bizarre and unique case seems to underline that across the continent, our focus on radicalisation and Islamist ideology may be outdated, and that a far more unpredictable brand of nihilism is being incubated amidst the deracinated cosmopolitanism of post-2015 Europe.