This innovative and thought-provoking study puts forth a compelling analysis of the constitutive nexus at the heart of the European refugee conundrum. It maps and historically contextualises some of the distinctive challenges that pervasive ethnic and cultural pluralism present to real politics as on the level of political theorizing. By systematically integrating hitherto insufficiently linked research perspectives in a novel way, it lays open a number of paradoxical constellations and regressive tendencies in contemporary European democracy. It thereby redirects attention to the ways in which liberal thought and liberal democratic institutions shape, interact with, and may even provide justification for illiberal and exclusionary practices. This book thus makes an important contribution to the analysis of post-migrant realities in Europe and the ways in which they are defined by imperial legacies, punitive migration regimes, the culturalization of mainstream politics, and the discursive construction of a European Other.