What’s going on?

Letters

Vol. 29 No. 2 · 25 January 2007

From Lammert de Jong

Peter Mair could have said more about Ian Buruma’s simplistic sense of the ‘multicultural’ crisis in Holland (LRB, 14 December 2006). Buruma is right to describe a society at loggerheads with itself and its allochtoon citizens – citizens of foreign origin – but he overstates his case when he says that the Dutch national reflex is to recall the Holocaust when the question of ethnic or religious minorities comes up. It’s true that a high percentage of Jews from the Netherlands ended up in death camps – more than from any country except Poland – while many Dutch people stood by. But Buruma goes on to say: ‘That is the horror that still hangs over Dutch life.’ Really? Buruma’s generation (also mine) had to cope with this legacy, but successive generations have grown up in an ever more secular, progressive, cosmopolitan and prosperous Holland, insulated from the memory of the Nazi transports, and feel no obligation to answer for what happened between 1940 and 1945. Buruma is plainly out of touch when he speaks of the Dutch nation feeling most sorry for itself on 4 May, Memorial Day, which nowadays has more to do with oppression wherever it may occur than with the Nazi occupation.

The strains on multiculturalism in the Netherlands are more straightforward. You may be born in Holland and you may be a Dutch citizen but neither automatically confers ‘Dutchness’. In Dutch statistics, first and second-generation immigrants qualify as allochtonen, distinct from the autochtonen, the ‘true’ Dutch, with both parents born in the Netherlands. Citizens with at least one foreign-born parent are allochtonen, classified as non-Western or Western according to the origin of the parent(s). Consequently, there are many more allochtonen than immigrants. The allochtoon concept inflates the degree of foreignness in Dutch society. Generations of Dutch nationals are stigmatised with the label allochtoon: in effect, it reads ‘not Dutch’.

Nearly one out of every five inhabitants is allochtoon, but only 6.2 per cent of the population are immigrants from non-Western countries. In Amsterdam and Rotterdam, Buruma imagines a collective foreign body in the lily-white bosom of the Dutch nation, an Allochstan as it were. ‘In 1999, 45 per cent of the population was of foreign origin,’ he writes. ‘If projections are right, this will be 52 per cent in 2015. And the majority will be Muslim.’ He fails to point out that the number of first-generation non-Western immigrants in these cities hovers around 20 per cent and is declining.

Over the last three decades, the Netherlands has changed from a nation of churchgoers into a largely secular one. A belief in the good and the green has replaced religion; the Dutch believe in generous public welfare, asylum for refugees, multiculturalism, environmental legislation, public transport, development aid, no more war. However, this alternative religion has begun to fail its followers. ‘True Dutch’ nationals and immigrants alike have fraudulently exploited welfare. The number of migrants in search of a better life has made asylum a thing of the past. The events of 9/11 and subsequent Islamist attacks in Madrid, London and Amsterdam have given leverage to those who oppose immigration. Allochtonen are discriminated against, while segregation, both residential and educational, is rampant. Toxic waste is shipped off to the Third World. Development aid has done little. No wonder modern-day believers in good and green causes are losing faith.

The South African writer Antjie Krog, who knows Holland, has written about the way Dutch discourse on integration and exclusion has come to resemble Afrikaner thinking during the apartheid years. Postwar Dutch civic values, she says, have given way to an unbending self-righteous sense of ownership, fixated on the idea that the ‘true Dutch’ have earned what they own by hard work. Some ten years ago the prime minister Ruud Lubbers spoke of ‘the calculating Dutch citizen’ who operates on a quid pro quo basis in civil and public affairs. Typical of this attitude is the notorious policy whereby refugees are denied admission to the country if they are judged lacking in the quality of integreerbaarheid – the capacity to be integrated. In recent years, the country has rejected more than 50 per cent of refugee applications on these grounds.

Even more striking than the loss of faith in the good and the green is the perceived absence of national security. The Dutch economy thrived during the postwar era under the international security umbrella of the Cold War. The Netherlands counted on the UN and the big powers, the US in particular, to keep the world at peace. The Dutch enjoyed a free ride, but things have changed. In the Netherlands, as elsewhere, it is felt that the US can no longer be relied on. Nuclear proliferation, environmental degradation, rising international terrorism and the unending Palestinian drama have all been intensified by US actions, which have also weakened the UN. The Dutch media talk about a turning point in the Western alliance, but appear baffled as to what might come next.

The no-vote on the European Constitution in 2005 expressed what Tony Judt calls ‘a defensive provincialism’, a desire to protect the borders of the Dutch ‘homeland’ and retreat to a bygone past. The church is out, secularism in, but Pim Fortuyn inspired a nation of secular believers with his folkloric evocation of a pre-immigrant ‘true Dutch’ era, when Islam was still something that happened elsewhere, Dutch schools were small and their pupils white, mother was home at teatime, hospital care was personal – no paperwork involved – and the doctor still made house calls. Had he not been murdered, Fortuyn might well have won in 2002.

Enlightened, prosperous and cosmopolitan (they travel to all corners of the world, in great numbers, laden with euros), the Dutch must be aware, in the end, that this myth is of very little use to them. They are troubled by the immigrant believers in their midst, by their own loss of faith in the good and the green and by the collapse of their confidence in the US as a bulwark of European security. Buruma’s insistence that the long shadow of World War Two has defined (and complicated) Dutch tolerance obscures the fact that the Dutch have lost their bearings.

Lammert de Jong
Amsterdam