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Multiculturalism in the Netherlands began with major increases in immigration during the 1950s and 1960s. As a consequence, an official national policy of multiculturalism was adopted in the early 1980s. This policy subsequently gave way to more assimilationist policies in the 1990s and post-electoral surveys uniformly showed from 1994 onwards that a majority preferred that immigrants assimilated rather than retained the culture of their country of origin. Even though the general acceptance of immigrants increased, opinion polls from the early 1980s and after showed that many were critical of immigration.[1][2] Following the murders of Pim Fortuyn (in 2002) and Theo van Gogh (in 2004) the political debate on the role of multiculturalism in the Netherlands reached new heights.[citation needed]
Lord Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, distinguishes between tolerance and multiculturalism, and says that the Netherlands is a tolerant, rather than multicultural, society.[3]
Government policy
After the Second World War, an immigration took place of guest workers and migrants from the former colonies. There was low pressure to culturally assimilate, it was easy to gain citizenship and government agencies translated documents and services for immigrants who lacked Dutch language skills. Until the 1970s it was generally assumed that immigrants, especially guest workers, would eventually return to their countries of origin.[4] After the Afrikaanderwijk riots the Rotterdam municipality adopted a 5% policy: people of Mediterranean, Surinamese and Antillean background should not exceed 5% of a neighbourhood population. In 1974, the Council of State nullified this decision.[5]
Multiculturalism was adopted as a government policy by the Netherlands in the early 1980s,[6] largely from a conviction that a quick assimilation of Muslim immigrants was impossible, and to stimulate remigration. In 1983 an "Ethnic Minorities Policy" was adopted.[7]
The Second Oil Crisis led to a collapse of Dutch industrial labour and caused massive unemployment for the former "guest workers", who were not easily integrated into the newly developing postindustrial society. Dutch low-skilled labour as a fraction of the total workforce declined from 18% to 2% between 1979 and 1985, disproportionally affecting immigrants.[8] State programs to rectify the situation were ineffective during the 1980s. The economic boom of the 1990s improved the situation. The unemployment rate of Moroccans, the most disadvantaged large immigrant group, declined from 50% to 10% between 1989 and 2001.[9] In the post-1998 period government policies have become stricter and while previous integration policies furthered diversity, diversity now was perceived to obstruct integration into Dutch society.[4]
The Netherlands has attracted international attention[when?] for the extent to which it reversed its previous multiculturalist policies, and its policies on cultural assimilation have been described as the toughest in Europe.[10]
Immigration and opposition to it
After the Second World War there were three successive waves of major immigration into the Netherlands.[6] The first originated in the former Dutch colony of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) in the 1940s and 1950s. The second wave originated in Southern Europe (Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal) and from Turkey and Morocco during the 1960s and 1970s, coinciding with a wave from the Dutch colony of Suriname. The second wave was largely in the form of labour migration of workers recruited by the Dutch state, a policy ended in 1974. The third wave consisted of asylum seekers from different countries such as Iran, Iraq, and former Yugoslavia since the mid-1990s. The waves should be discerned from a general high and rising 'background' level of labour immigration from European countries, that accounts for the majority of people settling in the Netherlands.[citation needed]
By 2007, nearly 20% of the country's population were either (western and non-western) immigrants or children of immigrant parents.[4]
Demand for unskilled labour
The multicultural policy consensus down-played negative aspects of the presence of immigrant cultural communities, and stressed beneficial effects. Immigration was not subject to limits on cultural grounds: in practice, the immigration rate was determined by demand for unskilled labour, and later by migration of family members. The total Western and non-Western immigration and re-migration resulted in an immigrant population of about 3.5 million.[12] In 2014, about two million inhabitants were non-Western immigrants (1,095,731) or the direct descendants of these. Net immigration and the initially higher birth rate of the immigrant communities, have transformed the Dutch population structure since the 1950s. In 2006 one fifth of the population was of non-Dutch ethnicity, about half of which were of non-Western origin.[12] Immigration transformed Dutch cities especially: in Amsterdam, 55% of young people are of non-Western origin (mainly Moroccan, Surinamese and Turkish).[citation needed]
Cliteur's 1999 work is indicative of the polemic tone of the debate in the following years. Most of the "immigrant barbarities" which he names are regularly cited by opponents of multiculturalism, sometimes as a reductio ad absurdum, but also as supposed factual practices of immigrants in the Netherlands.[citation needed]
In 2000, Paul Scheffer — a member of the Labour Party and subsequently a professor of urban studies — published his essay "The multicultural tragedy",[14] an essay critical of both immigration and multiculturalism. Scheffer is a committed supporter of the nation-state, assuming that homogeneity and integration are necessary for a society: the presence of immigrants undermines this. A society does have a finite "absorptive capacity" for those from other cultures, he says, but this has been exceeded in the Netherlands. His position more specifically included the following points:
a huge influx of people from diverse cultural backgrounds, in combination with multiculturalism, resulted in spontaneous ethnic segregation.
the Netherlands must take its own language, culture, and history seriously, and immigrants must learn this language, culture, and history.
multiculturalism and immigration led to adaptation problems such as school drop-out, unemployment, and high crime rates.
a society which does not respect itself (its Dutch national identity) also has no value for immigrants
multicultural policy ignored Dutch language acquisition, which should be a priority in education.
immigrants must always lose their own culture - that is the price of immigration, a "brutal bargain" (quote from Norman Podhoretz).
Scheffer approvingly quoted the Dutch sociologist J.A.A. van Doorn as saying that the presence of immigrants in the Netherlands had "put the evolutionary clock back" by fifty years or more. The high immigration rate and the lack of integration threatened society, and must be stopped. His essay had a great impact, and led to what became known as the "integration debate". As in the essay, this was not simply about multiculturalism, but about immigration, Islam, the national identity, and national unity.[15]
In 2002, the legal scholar Afshin Ellian, a refugee from Iran, advocated a monocultural Rechtsstaat in the Netherlands.[16] A liberal democracy cannot be multicultural, he argued, because multiculturalism is an ideology and a democracy has no official ideology. What is more, according to Ellian, a democracy must be monolingual. The Dutch language is the language of the constitution, and therefore it must be the only public language — all others must be limited to the private sphere. The Netherlands, he wrote, had been taken hostage by the left-wing multiculturalists, and their policy was in turn determined by the Islamic conservatives. Ellian stated that there were 800 000 Muslims in the country, with 450 mosques, and that the Netherlands had legalised the "feudal system of the Islamic Empire". Democracy and the rule of law could only be restored by abolishing multiculturalism.
Overturning the political stability of the 1990s, Fortuyn in early 2002 swiftly gained popularity.[17] He was assassinated during the 2002 Dutch national election campaign by a militant animal rights activist Volkert van der Graaf, who claimed in court to murdering Fortuyn to stop him exploiting Muslims as "scapegoats" and targeting "the weak parts of society to score points" in seeking political power.[18] His supporters saw Fortuyn as a national martyr in the struggle against islamisation.
Following Fortuyn's death, open rejection of multiculturalism and immigration ceased to be taboo. The new cabinet, under premier Jan-Peter Balkenende instituted a hard-line assimilation policy, enforced by fines and deportation, accompanied by far tighter controls on immigration and asylum. Many former supporters of multiculturalism shifted their position. In a 2006 manifesto "one country, one society",[19] several of them launched an appeal for a more cohesive society by "unity in diversity", while deploring what they saw as increasing intolerance. Piet Hein Donner, the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations in the Rutte cabinet, said that "Dutch culture, norms and values must be dominant".[20]
Feminist opposition
The most prominent figure in the post-Fortuyn debate of the issue was Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Her first criticisms of multiculturalism paralleled those of the early liberal-feminist critics in the United States — the emphasis on group identity and group rights diminished individual liberty for those within the minorities, and especially for women. As time went on, her criticism was increasingly directed at Islam itself, and its incompatibility with democracy and Western culture. By 2004 she was the most prominent critic of Islam in Europe. She scripted a short film on Islamic oppression of women, featuring texts from the Quran on the naked bodies of women; its director Theo van Gogh was later assassinated by Mohammed Bouyeri. Threatened with death and heavily guarded, she spent most of her time in the United States, and moved to Washington in 2006 to work for the American Enterprise Institute. In 2006, she also expressed support for the Eurabia thesis — that mainstream politicians are conspiring to fully Islamise Europe —, and that its non-Muslim inhabitants will be reduced to dhimmitude.[21] In a speech for CORE in January 2007, she declared that Western culture was overwhelmingly superior:
... my dream is that those lucky enough to be born into a culture of "ladies first" will let go of the myth that all cultures are equal. Human beings are equal; cultures are not.[22]
Patriotic measures
Some of the measures, especially those seeking to promote patriotic identification, include: In the Netherlands, the naturalisation ceremony includes a gift symbolising national unity. In Gouda it is a candle in the national colours red-white-blue, in Amsterdam a Delftware potato with floral motifs.[23]
There are proposed measures which go much further than these. They typically, but not always, come from firmly right-wing parties and their supporters. The proposals illustrate the "post-multicultural" climate: a loyalty oath for all citizens, legal prohibition of public use of a foreign language, cessation of all immigration, expulsion of criminal, unemployed or not integrated immigrants, withdrawal from the European Union, a compulsory (non-military) national service;[24] a ban on the construction of mosques,[25] closure of all Islamic schools,[26] a closure of all mosques, or a complete ban on Islam.
The Party for Freedom of anti-immigration politician Geert Wilders opposed the nomination of two ministers because they had dual nationality. The party subsequently proposed a motion of no confidence in both ministers. The party doubts their loyalty to the Netherlands, in cases of conflict with their countries of origin (Turkey and Morocco).[27] According to an opinion poll more than half the population agrees with the party.[28] Opinion is sharply divided by political party: 96% of Wilders' voters agree with him, and 93% of GreenLeft voters disagree.
Likelihood of polarization
Although such policies often have the stated aim of reviving national unity, one result has been an increased polarization.[29] Muslims in Britain or the Netherlands hear that their culture is backward, that Western culture is superior, and that they are obliged to adopt it. In turn, defensive reactions[30] include an increased self-identification as "Muslims", and adoption of Islamic dress by women and "Islamic" beards by men. Part of the Muslim minority is now hostile to the society they live in, and sympathetic to terrorism.[31] In Amsterdam's secondary schools, about half of the Moroccan minority does not identify with the Netherlands: they see their identity as "Muslim", and regularly express anti-Western views.[32]
New terms for minorities
New terms for minorities of immigrant descent have come into use: the term allochtoon in Flanders (Dutch speaking part of Belgium) and the Netherlands. Both are applied regardless of citizenship. The renewed emphasis on historical culture places higher demands on cultural assimilation; immigrants may be encouraged to learn, for example, to identify and describe cultural heroes and historical figures such as Thorbecke and William of Orange.[33]
Wilhelmus Simon Petrus Fortuijn, known as Pim Fortuyn, was a Dutch politician, author, civil servant, businessman, sociologist and academic who founded the party Pim Fortuyn List in 2002.
The Pim Fortuyn List was a right-wing populist political party in the Netherlands named after its eponymous founder Pim Fortuyn, a former university professor and political columnist. The party was considered nationalist as well as adhering to its own distinct ideology of Fortuynism according to some commentators.
Multiculturalism is the coexistence of multiple cultures. The word is used in sociology, in political philosophy, and colloquially. In sociology and everyday usage, it is usually a synonym for ethnic or cultural pluralism in which various ethnic and cultural groups exist in a single society. It can describe a mixed ethnic community area where multiple cultural traditions exist or a single country. Groups associated with an indigenous, aboriginal or autochthonous ethnic group and settler-descended ethnic groups are often the focus.
Acculturation is a process of social, psychological, and cultural change that stems from the balancing of two cultures while adapting to the prevailing culture of the society. Acculturation is a process in which an individual adopts, acquires and adjusts to a new cultural environment as a result of being placed into a new culture, or when another culture is brought to someone. Individuals of a differing culture try to incorporate themselves into the new more prevalent culture by participating in aspects of the more prevalent culture, such as their traditions, but still hold onto their original cultural values and traditions. The effects of acculturation can be seen at multiple levels in both the devotee of the prevailing culture and those who are assimilating into the culture.
Cultural assimilation is the process in which a minority group or culture comes to resemble a society's majority group or assimilates the values, behaviors, and beliefs of another group whether fully or partially.
General elections were held in the Netherlands on 15 May 2002. The elections were amongst the most dramatic in Dutch history, not just in terms of the electoral results, as they were completely overshadowed by the assassination of leader Pim Fortuyn only nine days before election day.
Islam is the second largest religion in the Netherlands, after Christianity, and is practised by 5% of the population according to 2018 estimates. The majority of Muslims in the Netherlands belong to the Sunni denomination. Many reside in the country's four major cities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht.
Forced assimilation is the involuntary cultural assimilation of religious or ethnic minority groups, during which they are forced by a government to adopt the language, national identity, norms, mores, customs, traditions, values, mentality, perceptions, way of life, and often the religion and ideology of an established and generally larger community belonging to a dominant culture.
Cultural conservatism is described as the protection of the cultural heritage of a nation state, or of a culture not defined by state boundaries. It is sometimes associated with criticism of multiculturalism, anti-immigration sentiment, and opposition to illegal immigration. Because their cultural preservationist objectives are in conflict with those of anti-racists, cultural conservatives are often accused of racism. Despite this, however, cultural conservatism can be more nuanced in its approach to minority languages and cultures; it is sometimes focused upon heritage language learning or threatened language revitalization, such as of the distinctive local dialect of French in Quebec, Acadian French, Canadian Gaelic, and the Mi'kmaq language in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, or the Irish language in Newfoundland. Other times cultural conservatism is more focused upon the preservation of an ethnic minority's endangered ancestral culture, such as those of Native Americans.
Theodoor "Theo" van Gogh was a Dutch film director. He directed Submission: Part 1, a short film written by Somali writer and politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, which criticised the treatment of women in Islam in strong terms. On 2 November 2004, he was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-Moroccan Islamist who objected to the film's message. The last film Van Gogh had completed before his murder, 06/05, was a fictional exploration of the assassination of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. It was released posthumously in December 2004, a month after Van Gogh's death, and two years after Fortuyn's death.
Leitkultur is a German concept, which can be translated as 'guiding culture' or 'leading culture', less literally as 'common culture', 'core culture' or 'basic culture'. The term was first introduced in 1998 by the German-Arab sociologist Bassam Tibi and from 2000 onward the term figured prominently in the national political debate in Germany about national identity and immigration.
Eén NL is a Dutch political party founded in September 2006. It took part in the 2006 Dutch election under the leadership of Marco Pastors and Joost Eerdmans, but a dismal election result leaves the political future of the party quite uncertain. The party is seen as one of the political heirs of the late Pim Fortuyn.
Fortuynism is the political ideology of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. Observers variously saw him as a political protest targeting the alleged elitism and bureaucratic style of the Dutch purple coalitions, as offering "openness, directness and clearness", populism simply as charisma. Another school holds Fortuynism as a distinct ideology, with an alternative vision of society. Some argue that Fortuynism is not just one ideology, but that it contained liberalism, populism and nationalism.
Turks in the Netherlands, also Dutch Turks or Turkish Dutch, refers to people of full or partial Turkish ethnicity living in the Netherlands. They form the largest ethnic minority group in the country; thus, the Turks are the second-largest ethnic group in the Netherlands after the ethnic Dutch. The majority of Dutch Turks descend from the Republic of Turkey; however, there has also been significant Turkish migration waves from other post-Ottoman countries including ethnic Turkish communities which have come to the Netherlands from the Balkans, the island of Cyprus, as well as from other parts of the Levant. More recently, during the European migrant crisis significant waves of Turkish minorities from Syria and Kosovo have also arrived in the Netherlands. In addition, there has been migration to the Netherlands from the Turkish diaspora; many Turkish-Belgians and Turkish-Germans have arrived in the country as Belgian and German citizens.
Canadians are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their being Canadian.
Criticism of multiculturalism questions the ideal of the maintenance of distinct ethnic cultures within a country. Multiculturalism is a particular subject of debate in certain European nations that are associated with the idea of a nation state. Critics of multiculturalism may argue against cultural integration of different ethnic and cultural groups to the existing laws and values of the country. Alternatively critics may argue for assimilation of different ethnic and cultural groups to a single national identity.
Multiculturalism in Canada was officially adopted by the government during the 1970s and 1980s. The Canadian federal government has been described as the instigator of multiculturalism as an ideology because of its public emphasis on the social importance of immigration. The 1960s Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism is often referred to as the origin of modern political awareness of multiculturalism, resulting in Canada being one of the most multicultural nations in the world. The official state policy of multiculturalism is often cited as one of Canada's significant accomplishments, and a key distinguishing element of Canadian identity and Canadian values.
The Indo people or Indos are Eurasian people living in or connected with Indonesia. In its narrowest sense, the term refers to people in the former Dutch East Indies who held European legal status but were of mixed Dutch and indigenous Indonesian descent as well as their descendants today.
Denk, legally registered as Politieke Beweging Denk, is a political party in the Netherlands, founded on a minority rights platform.
Ruud Koopmans is a Dutch sociologist and professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research focuses on migration, social integration and transnationalization.
↑ Paul Dekker and Josje den Ridder, 2017, “Publieke opinie,” in: De sociale staat van Nederland 2017, eds. Rob Bijl Jeroen Boelhouwer and Annemarie Wennekers (The Hague: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau, 2017), p 75
1 2 Saskia R.G. Schalk-Soekar, Fons J.R. van de Vijver and Mariëtte Hoogsteder (November 2004). "Attitudes toward multiculturalism of immigrants and majority members in the Netherlands". International Journal of Intercultural Relations. 28 (6): 533–550. doi:10.1016/j.ijintrel.2005.01.009.
↑ Ellie Vasta (2007). "From ethnic minorities to ethnic majority policy: Multiculturalism and the shift to assimilationism in the Netherlands". Ethnic and Racial Studies. 30 (5): 713–740. doi:10.1080/01419870701491770.
↑ Niesing, W. 1993, The labor market position of ethnic minorities in the Netherlands, Dissertation Erasmus University Rotterdam, p. 21
↑ Jonkers, A.P, 2003, Diskwalificatie van wetgeving: de totstandkoming en uitvoering van de Wet bevordering evenredige arbeidsdeelname allochtonen (Wbeaa). Dissertation Radboud Universiteit, p. 255
↑ City of Amsterdam policy document, February 2006. Wij Amsterdammers II: investeren in mensen en grenzen.
↑ Both came second, in polls to find the Greatest Briton and the Greatest Netherlander. Winston Churchill beat Brunel, and Pim Fortuyn beat William of Orange. BBC reports and .
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