Neoliberal Xenophobia: The Dutch Case

Neoliberal Xenophobia: The Dutch Case

Jolle Demmers and Sameer S. Mehendale*

This article argues for the need to identify and grapple with thecomplexities of the relation between xenophobia and neoliber-alism. In the case of the Netherlands, the rise of xenophobia ispart of a larger process of a mostly-market-controlled reclaimingof symbolic forms of collectiveness in an increasingly atomizedsociety. The 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker-provocateur Theovan Gogh played a crucial role in cementing a “culturalist,” anti-Islam regime of truth. The analysis of the van Gogh murder in-forms about how, in the atomized market society, the search fornew forms of togetherness has translated, in the Netherlands,into a turn to the ethnos, with fantasies of purity and the moral-ization of culture and citizenship. Where the neoliberal projecthas, largely unnoticed, abolished the collective standards andsolidarities of the post–World War II era, the faces of immigrantshave served as ideal, identifiable flash points for new repertoiresof belonging and othering. Keywords: neoliberalism, xenophobia,uncertainty, collectiveness, Netherlands

He was an asshole, but he was my asshole.—A Dutch writer and columnist,

referring to the murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh

Throughout Europe, xenophobic and culturalist repertoires have becomeprominent across the entire spectrum of politics. Generally, this xenophobicturn is understood as reactive to September 11, to the Madrid and Londonbombings, and to the increased influx of non-Western, “illegal” immigrants.This is certainly true in the Netherlands, which recently seems obsessed with“protecting” the indigenous against the foreign. What we will argue, however,is that neither radical Islam nor immigration numbers is responsible for why

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*Demmers, associate professor, Centre for Conflict Studies, Utrecht University. E-mail:[email protected]; Mehendale, novelist based in Amsterdam. E-mail: [email protected]

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the Netherlands, once considered so progressive and open-minded, is nowamong the most restrictive and punitive in the European Union when itcomes to asylum, integration, family reunification, and deportation policies.1We propose to look beyond salonfähig truisms about the new cultural-ism as a product of “ethnic entrepreneurs” or as the outcome ofmedia regimes of representation. While the mobilizing properties ofthese phenomena must be recognized, the crux is something differ-ent and more fundamental. What we argue for is the need to identifyand grapple with the complexities of the relation between xenopho-bia and neoliberalism: in the case of the Netherlands, the rise ofxenophobia as part of a larger process of a mostly market-controlledreclaiming of symbolic forms of collectiveness in an increasingly at-omized society.

In that regard, we aim to do two things in this article. First, we in-tend to conduct an autopsy of the 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker-provocateur Theo van Gogh by a twenty-six-year-old djellabah-cladDutchman of Moroccan heritage, an event that played a crucial rolein cementing a culturalist, anti-Islam regime of truth in Holland. Sec-ond, we try to explain this shift in public discourse by connecting theforces of “globalization” with specific local events and processes char-acterizing Dutch society.

Van Gogh’s Murder: The Immediate Framing

A powerful, defining opening to the culturalist ebullition-to-comeforced its way into Dutch living rooms the very evening of the deed:

Something terrible has happened today. Today Theo van Gogh wasmurdered. Society is shocked. Everyone present here tonight isshocked.

The words of the Dutch minister of integration, Rita Verdonk, spokenabove the clatter of pots and pans, blowing of whistles, and shaking ofrattles by a crowd of some twenty thousand gathered on Amsterdam’sDam Square, engaging in a “Noise Protest” against an act that was al-ready being characterized not as a response to van Gogh’s politics butas an assault on Dutch tolerance and freedom of speech. Verdonk,nicknamed Iron Rita for her tough stance on immigration, savouredone of her finest moments when, within hours of van Gogh’s murder,she climbed the stage and addressed the crowd. Stunned and startledfaces, many of them red-eyed, looked on as Verdonk continued,posthumously claiming the victim’s support for her own politics:

54 Neoliberal Xenophobia: The Dutch Case

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I knew Theo. And I got to know him better and better. Theo was theone who said: “Rita, keep that back straight!” And Theo was also theone who said, “But think of yourself, and think of the people, too.”And I knew Theo well enough to respect him, and to like him verymuch. Theo—

She paused, and mechanically started to clap her hands, the crowdcheering, “Theo! Theo! Theo!” Then she continued:

ranted and raved, against what he saw as wrongs in society. He wasoutspoken. And at times on the edge. But in this country, that is al-lowed! And in this country, nobody can be murdered for expressinghis opinion! We do not want that! We do not want that! . . . Wherethe government is concerned, the choice is simple: This is the limit.We will not change our tune. We will not [let ourselves] be cor-nered. . . . Stop!

The murder of Theo van Gogh had an extraordinary performa-tive quality, and the official media lost no time in seizing on it. Withina couple of hours the victim’s stabbed body was fully exposed on thefront page of one of the largest Dutch newspapers, and shown latercovered with a white sheet in a blue forensic tent, surrounded by menin white suits. Soon the talking heads appeared, all claiming theTruth about their Theo. Even his most bitter enemy, in a rather ludi-crous but no less exclusionist in memoriam published in a Dutchweekly, wrote: “He was an asshole, but he was my asshole.”2

The sensationalism following the van Gogh killing had a highdegree of déjà vu: The murder was automatically paired with thekilling two years earlier of Pim Fortuyn, another highly controversial“first-name-only” Dutchman. Pim was the flamboyant politician-dandy who, at the time of his murder, was running for the Dutch par-liament at the head of his modestly-named List Pim Fortyun party,claiming that he was aiming for no less than the premiership. Pimhad been greatly, publicly admired by Theo van Gogh: they sharedan antiestablishment, fuck-it-all attitude, and both had declaredIslam as the great threat to Dutch society. The public ritualizationsof their deaths showed many—now hackneyed —similarities: thesame stack of teddy bears, flowers, and candles at the murder site;the same high-profile funeral parade; and the same seemingly end-less array of “experts” appearing in Dutch living rooms to analyze themeaning of the murders.

But there was something new this time: an underlying sense of re-lief, almost of satisfaction. Behind the solemn faces was a concealedpleasure; behind the tears, a glint of victory; behind the outrage, sub-dued joy. Because whereas it turned out that the Fortuyn murder had

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been committed by an autochthon3 animal-rights activist, and there-fore had been so difficult to fit into the post–September 11 clash-of-civilizations framework, the murder of van Gogh was a perfect match.This time there was an unambiguous Them, who had to be stopped,implying a just-as-unambiguous Us, who had to be defended. Al-though to the outsider Verdonk’s speech might have seemed some-what enigmatic, to the Dutch public—supporters and opponentsalike—its subtext was crystal clear.

Van Gogh’s Murder: The Event

On the morning of November 2, 2004, while cycling to his studio, thefilmmaker and media personality Theo van Gogh was assassinated bya man with a beard and a djellabah, also on a bicycle (the irony ofboth aggressor and victim being on bicyc—an inconvenient Dutchcommonality that muddied the clear waters of Them-and-Us—wentunremarked). The act was committed in broad daylight on a just-awakening shopping street in an eastern suburb of Amsterdam. Afterovertaking van Gogh, the murderer fired multiple gunshots at himfrom close range. He then chased down his victim, who had managedto flee across the street, slit his throat, then stuck two daggers into hischest. After a shootout with the police about half a mile away, inwhich he was wounded, the killer was apprehended.

About the two protagonists we will be brief, and narrowly de-scriptive. First the victim. Theo van Gogh was a paunchy, middle-aged, blue-eyed blond, with a savoury smile. He loved to presenthimself as the enfant terrible of Dutch TV: messy, chain-smoking, out-rageous, combining a student-like immature flair with a populistrhetoric calculatingly peppered with offensive language. With a longreputation of publicly assaulting a range of self-declared “enemies”(mostly rival columnists, but also intellectuals and politicians), overthe past decade he had come to focus his venomous energy on Islam,and on the Dutch Muslim community, whom he liked to refer to as“goat-fuckers.” This turn had brought him a new audience, who con-sidered him “refreshingly politically incorrect,” as well as new “friends”in upper political echelons, including members of the national cabinet.His major provocation toward Dutch Muslims was a collaboration witha then-member of parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, on the film Submission,a quote-mining indictment against sexism in the Koran, where selectedpassages from the Holy Book were projected on the body of an abused,naked woman.

And his slayer, the at-the-time unknown Mohammed B? Was hel’homme de la nature et de la verité? He was a twenty-six-year-old alloch-


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toon Dutchman, born to parents of Moroccan origin, who at somepoint had traded his jeans for a djellabah. As to the question why thisonce eager and diligent former student, who had successfully com-pleted his HAVO (the educational rite of passage in Holland, whichgives admission to higher education) and who in his spare time gavecomputer lessons to the elderly, came to his deed, we refrain fromwhat, here, could only be speculation.

Now Nobody Can Deny

The “truth-effect” of the image of van Gogh’s knife-abused corpserendered debate unnecessary—impossible: “Look, this is how it reallyis!” the television screamed. Here lies the dead Dutchman, butcheredlike a pig by a bearded, radical Muslim. This is good and evil. This isthe end of relativism and, above all, of complexity.

The national media immediately saturated itself with apocalypticexposés.4 TV academics, politicians, and pundits were selected for theircapacity to subtitle the image. In primordialist phrasings, these voicesproclaimed a fear of ever-larger numbers of outsiders (allochtoon ingeneral, and Muslim in particular), and the end of the “soft” ap-proach named multiculturalism, sequencing the murder in a series ofevents that ran from World War II (that other “foreign occupation”)through the Twin Towers and the Madrid train bombings and into avague but frightening future. This was Holland’s September 11.

The fragments, presented below, of the mediatized Dutch con-cert introduce an Anglophone audience to the emblematic and dom-inant lines of argument in the Dutch public domain of these days.These voices illustrate how, by 2004, culturalism—the making of nor-mative distinctions based on cultural criteria—was embraced by bothLeft and Right in Holland. Here are the mantras that we try to ac-count for in the second part of this article: the careless, baseless ex-trapolations from the level of the individual to the group; theconflation of Islam with Fascism; the equation of good citizenshipwith pornography; and, above all, the search for collectiveness in theproduction of the “other” (the sheer absurdity of the dialectics em-ployed being almost conclusive alone in demonstrating the con-trary).

Let’s start with an autochthon university professor, a scholar ofArabic language who became a prominent figure in the so-called de-bate on the Dutch Muslim communities, interviewed a day after themurder. Fear TV—although one could argue that toward the end herather clumsily cooks his own goose.5


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Q: What is known about the size of such groups?A: That is secret-service work. The most widespread estimates

are 10, 15 percent very radical. And that would imply on a total of amillion, a lot of people.

Q: A large group that has radical ideas?A: It perhaps is a small percentage that has radical ideas but still

amongst them are individuals who turn to violence. That has be-come clear, that no longer can be denied.

Q: Ten percent has radical ideas and a small percentage ofthose [ten] is prepared to use violence?

A: Yes, but people are embedded in their families, in theirfriends who they talk to in the mosque, who listen to the sermons oftheir preacher. I would like to know to which preacher the killer ofTheo listened the past weeks. These aren’t nerds who by themselvessolve a crossword puzzle and then set out to kill someone. . . . An-other two or three of these murders and nobody anymore will darerefuse any Muslim anything

Q: What do you mean?A: Just as I said. Because of this murder of Theo van Gogh,

when it is followed by other murders on opinion makers an atmos-phere will be created in which people will be intimidated and beafraid. People are already afraid.

Q: But refuse what? What are we refusing?A: When a Muslim . . . I am sorry, I am expressing myself rather

poorly. . . . When Muslims claim a certain space, claim certainfavours, claim certain privileges, when certain demands are lentforce by terror, a sensible person will say, go ahead, go ahead.

Q: You are exaggerating?A: Theo van Gogh is dead, Farakh Foda is dead, Sukri Mustafavi

is dead, in the WTC a few thousand have died. . . . Since the deathof Sadat it is no longer unclear that there are groups among Mus-lims who murder in the name of Islam. I do not understand how thiscan be denied. They can be many or few, but for the victims it is justas unpleasant to be killed.

Q: How can we contain extremists?A: Syria and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq managed very well in con-

taining them, but those are methods for which Holland is not yetready.

On the renowned television debate program Buitenhof, on Sun-day, November 7, a number of eminences grises took the floor. Theformat was an autochthon Dutch professor of philosophy presentinga “spoken column” interlineated by a series of interviews. Here againwas a variation on a common, seemingly paradoxical theme of thosedays: highly educated, “enlightened” liberals speaking in terms of col-lective (Muslim) responsibilities, and of multiculturalism (the refer-ence, immediately below, to being “sweet”) as the breeding groundfor terrorism.


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Theo van Gogh has been slaughtered in a bestial manner by the rad-ical Muslim Mohammed B. We now know that this discussion aboutIslam in the modern world concerns us all. Muslim organisationshave started to take their responsibility. Some politicians have evenreached the point at which they have shed their naiveté: It is not thecase that radical Muslims will be sweet to us as long as we are sweetto them.

The couleur locale of the Amsterdam former-Left antiestablishment,referring to themselves now as “Friends of Theo,” also quicklyweighed in. A group of columnists, stand-up comedians, and mediaentrepreneurs, these were children of the sexual revolution who re-garded all religious belief as backward and provincial. On the localAmsterdam channel AT5, the day after the murder, one of theFriends, a newspaper columnist, gave his views on the case (includingthe remarkable framing of the “clash of civilizations” as the Koran ver-sus pornography):

I believed in the MTV notion. That is, if all those fundamentalistsand those Muslims who are dedicated to fundamentalist thoughts .. . the thoughts of the Koran, if only they would watch enough MTVand would nicely pick up our porn programmes, and if they wouldnormally work, and watch Buitenhof, and closely watch AT5, thenperhaps they would take over our norms and values, or at least findthem more appealing then that weird, dark mediaeval faith theythemselves abide to. I was wrong. Theo wasn’t—I increasingly havehad to recognize that he was right. More and more, he was right.The Finale is . . . that he now is murdered by the thing he was al-ready afraid of. . . . This is really, absolutely the ultimate proof thathe was right.6

Another interpretation was offered by one of the main criticalvoices in Holland’s multiculturalism debate—a former chairman of theliberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD),7 long-timeShell employee, and at the time EU commissioner. Here the embattledmajority’s feelings of intimidation aroused by a marginalized minorityare juxtaposed with those generated by the Third Reich’s occupyingarmy. The commissioner began by focusing on an incident that hadjust taken place in Rotterdam, where, in response to the murder, some-one had painted “Thou shalt not kill” on the front of his house and hadbeen ordered to remove it by a local policeman acting on an order tosuppress all signs of agitation. Again, on the Buitenhof show:

Commissioner: One of the worrying aspects of this case is thatone can see the early signs of intimidation. A crass example of thisis a recent incident in Rotterdam, where someone wrote “Thoushalt not kill” on the front of his own house, in big letters, and that


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the local policeman on service did not allow this. And that it was re-moved and that the cameraman who wanted to film this was put be-hind bars. We are talking here about one of the TenCommandments. The fact that this happened in the proximity of—as it appears—a mosque or some other Islamic centre does notchange things in any way. Of course it is madness that one of theTen Commandments can no longer be publicly depicted.

Interviewer: The Mayor of Rotterdam did apologise for whathappened.

Commissioner: That suits him. . . . But it is a straw in the wind.And . . . we are coming to a situation where the absolute majority inthe four largest cities will be of non-Western origin, and within thatabsolute majority Islam will be the dominating religion. And that iswhen you see, you will see, I’m afraid, those signs of intimidation ap-pear. And that is a sinister development, certainly for someone likeme who experienced the German occupation.

Interviewer: Don’t you think that is a rather far-fetched anal-ogy?

Commissioner: Well, not for me, no. I was born in 1933.Interviewer: But I assume you do not see the same things now

as happened during the years of Occupation?Commissioner: Certainly not. Certainly not. But the sense of a

lack of freedom could arise, with such a majority in the largest cities.. . . That you can no longer say what you want to say.

The killing of van Gogh, with all the pieces the Fortuyn murderhad lacked, offered unbridled room to the crafting and consuming offull-throated culturalism. A textbook set of ingredients for dominantdiscourse-formation rapidly took shape: the denial of contradiction;the naturalization of the present; the taken-for-granted reification ofidentity. All of it ceaselessly repeated. The key to this triumph of cul-turalism was the cold fact of the dead body, van Gogh’s corpse—thetangible evidence for culturalist logic. The doom scenarios had be-come fact. Until November 2, 2004, the culturalist approach to Hol-land’s heterogeneous population had rested on the flimsiest offactual grounds: indeed, academic research, and even the occasionalpolicy report, contradicted accounts of the “tribalization” of society,and instead demonstrated slow but steady improvements in the posi-tion of the country’s ethnic minorities. This lack of any concrete sup-port for the culturalist position helps explain the sense of relief, evenexcitement, in certain political circles when it became known that vanGogh was killed by a jihadist with a beard and djellabah: Now nobodycan deny, the chorus chanted. And its voice was heard. The countrynow witnessed a rapid upsurge of newborn, or newly confident, as-similationists.


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Great Transformations

How did this change occur? How did the gross coarsening of politicaldebate come about, and how did a once (seemingly, at least) relaxed,tolerant, progressive country turn into one of the toughest hardlinersin Europe when it comes to the issues of immigration and ethnicity?

Since the marriage of the Socialists and the Liberals, representedby Holland’s Purple Cabinet of 1994, one of the main divisions withinpost–WWII political debate—how to run the economy—ended withwidespread consensus that neoliberalism was inevitable, the uncon-tested new normalcy. Major, if largely silent, transformations duringthe 1990s in the realms of the economy, governance, and media wererapidly turning Holland into a fully marketized society: patientsturned into clients, public space into private opportunity, job securityinto flex-work, subcontracting, and outsourcing, citizens into con-sumers. These processes, however fundamental to the everyday life ofthe Dutch (affecting education, welfare, housing, child care, healthcare, work stability, pensions, social security) nonetheless failed to en-gage the public. Both the accepted inevitability ( “the country’s econ-omy is in a dismal state, something has to be done”) of theimplemented policies, plus the complexity of neoliberal technologiesof power—control of the image-world8 crucial among them—and itshugely diverse, case-specific consequences upon the lives and futuresof individual citizens, limited not only the forms of possible resistancebut even the conceptualization of experience. In mainstream societynow, neoliberalism was not discussed, let alone politicized or con-tested: Its benefits were simply too obvious. The longstanding defini-tion of ideology was fully realized: “They do not know it, but they aredoing it.”

An essential element of the neoliberal project is atomizationunder the rubrics freedom, progress, and efficiency—what Bourdieuhas called a program of the methodical destruction of collectives.9 Inorder to reach the neoliberal utopia of a fully commodified form ofsocial life, all collective structures that could serve as an obstacle tothe unfettered rule of capital are called into question: the state, in-creasingly locked into a global regime of competing states; workgroups, through the individuation of labor and wages as a purportedfunction of individual competences; collectives that support therights of workers; even the family, which loses part of its control overbasic patterns of consumption through the constitution and targetingof market age groups.

In our analysis of how neoliberalism has affected Dutch publicimagination, an understanding of the erosion of earlier modes of col-lectiveness (both real and imagined), and their replacement by new


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“liquid” forms of belonging, is crucial. In particular, we focus on thedisintegration of two preeminent icons of postwar Holland: social wel-farism and “merchantness.”

Our discussion of the demise of older forms of collectiveness andthe rise of new forms of belonging begins with a brief history of mod-ern Dutch societal structures. Until the 1960s, as a result of religiousand political clashes in the early twentieth century, Dutch society wascharacterized by a system of voluntary social apartheid,10 withinwhich different vertically organized communities (“pillars”) lived par-allel lives, each with their own social institutions and represented bytheir own set of political elites. Dutch generations born in the middletwo-thirds of the twentieth century grew up belonging to one or an-other more-or-less defined pillar, roughly classified as Protestant,Roman Catholic, Socialist, or Liberal, each with its own political party,church, sporting club, union, newspaper, broadcast organization,housing corporation, school, university, and old people’s home.11

After the 1960s, however, a process of de-pillarization began,within which welfarism, steadily gaining ground since the SecondWorld War, now rose to prominence as a national identifier. The ac-companying omneity of welfarist policies, attitudes, and beliefs wereto set Holland apart from most other Western countries, in particularfrom the United States. In its remade image, Holland stood out (par-ticularly in its own eyes) as a bastion of civilization and urbanenessjuxtaposed against the crude winner-take-all mentality from acrossthe Atlantic, its sense of moral superiority importantly shaping thecollective imagination of the nation.12

Over the past two-plus decades, however, the welfarism project haslost ground, and is now actively in reverse: slowly in the 1980s, due inpart to the decade’s economic crisis; in the 1990s, with the defeat ofCommunism and the rise of neoliberalism, with greater speed and ide-ological vivacity. Achievements such as the longstanding “social safetynet” were now presented as outdated, pampering, inefficient. As thenew ideological certitudes demanded, slowly but steadily the state re-treated from the public domain, handing its institutions—includingthe emblematic national railways, postal service, and telephone com-pany—to private ownership. Quite literally, public space was over-whelmingly commodified (Amsterdam’s central post office wasturned into a shopping mall), reducing the state to its bureaucratic,monitoring, and surveillant core.

Another fading national identifier, one with proclaimed “ancientroots,” is Dutch merchantness. Indeed, this centuries-old national sym-bol may have provided fertile ground for the new ideology of neolib-eralism, combining with the economic crisis of the1980s (whenunemployment hit a post–WWII record high) to explain a rapid im-


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plementation that might be described as a national embrace. But thenew forces proved treacherous, for in the end, globalization discon-nected the Dutch “ethnos” from its earlier symbols of entrepre-neurism. Neoliberalism turned Holland’s national-multinationalsinto fully globalized corporations and engineered a surrender to themarket of its once-prided state enterprises. Recently, the Dutch min-ister of finance, in defence of neoliberal ideology and reacting topublic concern about yet another national-multinational goingglobal, remarked: “The sale of Holland is a myth that leads to an un-warranted Orange feeling,”13 laying normative claims on the “Orangefeeling” as he dismisses it, but at the same time acknowledging its ex-istence.

We, too, note the discomfort and uneasiness this double-sidedtransformation is causing among many sectors of Dutch society. Withthe implementation of neoliberalism, certain segments of the economycertainly prospered, while the flip-side realities of the gold coin wereat best considered collateral: amid the consumption boom of the1990s, beggars and the homeless began to show their faces on thestreets of Holland. And with them, looming, for the first time in re-cent memory, the fear of falling.

This erosion of national collective identifiers in the context of ne-oliberal atomization opened up spaces for the production of new sym-bols of othering and belonging, rapidly filled and exploited throughthe recently marketized media. To fully understand the role that com-mercial media played in this new dynamics, it is important to sketchthe major changes during this period in the Dutch broadcasting sys-tem. Until 1988, Dutch TV consisted of two public channels where var-ious broadcasting companies, representing different pillars andcatering to a more or less specific audience, could broadcast their pro-grams, the amount of air time for each pillar being based on the sizeof its membership. The advent of the neoliberal order, however, sawthe dismantling of the legal barricades that had safeguarded this spe-cific public broadcasting system (or “State Television,” as van Goghmade a point of calling it). New legislation allowed for the introduc-tion of commercial channels, and by the second half of the 1990sseven new commercial stations had appeared. Segmented, broadcast-ing that was ideologically and religiously based made way for marketpopulism, with the new TV channels rapidly entering into a battle forratings, outbidding each other in vulgarity and coarseness. [In thiscontext, it is interesting to note that the tsunami of “eviction” shows(where an individual is “othered” and eliminated by those who remainin group) that has swamped the world this past decade started in Hol-land with the show Big Brother, whose creator and producer, a Dutchbillionaire, is now one of Rita Verdonk’s14 main financial benefactors.]


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The new market media catered to the looming societal uncer-tainty and corresponding need for predictability. These were readilycaptured in icons and incidences (often short-lived) of collectivenessand belonging, particularly around “issues” of safety and criminality,as repertoires of us/them. The mid-1990s became the time of massive“silent marches” and “popular ceremonies” honouring victims ofstreet crime in what became a national obsession with what wascoined as “senseless violence.” Here the images and practices of col-lectively mourning an innocent victim served as instant satisfiers forthe atomized citizen’s need to belong. The focus on random vio-lence, however, failed to offer a durable enough dichotomy, and inthe search for more lasting categorizations of togetherness and oth-ering, ultimately the ethnos proved more resilient.

We also contend that it is in the light of this search for collective-ness that the recent Dutch hostility toward “Europe” must be under-stood. Increasingly, the European Union is perceived in Holland ascontributing to a loss of self-determination and disintegration of thenation. This ambivalence and even outright hostility toward “Brus-sels” among the electorate, as expressed by the Dutch “No” vote inthe 2005 referendum on the EU constitution, has been viewed bysome international commentators as resistance to neoliberalized Eu-rope. We would argue that this was not the case for most such votes;that instead they had much more to do with what Habermas, coininga phrase, called “chauvinism of prosperity.” Not incidentally, in thelight of Dutch anti-Islam sentiments, the possible inclusion in the Eu-ropean Union of “Muslim” Turkey was seen as the hauling in of theTrojan Horse and added to the strong anti-Brussels response.

Freedom as Boundary

In the economically prosperous 1990s, the neoliberal consensus withinmainstream politics and the accompanying loss of even the illusion ofa national economy left the cultural field as the main battleground forpolitical constituency-building and opened a “market” for ethnos-based politics. Minorities soon became the flashpoint for heated pub-lic discourse that marked the invasion of “others,” the building ofmosques, the headscarf, the burqua, and the handshake into sites ofcontestation. Finally, the nation could vent its long-felt discomfort withthe ever-larger numbers of foreigners, so the story went.15

Of course the question of minorities and foreigners—differentthings, but almost always conflated in public discourse—was not newon the Dutch political agenda. However, the logic and form of the tar-geting of minorities was now fundamentally different from that of


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earlier decades. The 1980s, with economic decline and high levels ofunemployment, had seen the more classic type of scapegoating: “Hol-land is full;” “They are stealing our jobs;” “They abuse our social se-curity system.” However, xenophobic repertoires did not proveexpedient as political mobilizers, and the issue of migration was takenup formally only by a small nationalist party, the Centre Party (CP),and carefully kept out of mainstream politics. In those days, racismwas still simply racism, readily countered by the antiracist discourse ofthe postwar era. The CP’s bashing of guest workers from Italy andSpain, and later from Turkey and Morocco, was described by most inthe political class as provincial and inferior, something that belongedto the past. In line with this, the state’s 1980s immigration policies de-fined integration solely in socioeconomic terms, supporting the ideaof “integration with identity retention.”

In the 1980s, migrants had been presented as a threat to theorder of the nation, to its socioeconomic security. Increasingly now,however, migrants are portrayed as a threat to the nature of the na-tion, to the essence of Dutchness. In the context of societal atomiza-tion and the loss of collective standards, the consumer-citizen hasbecome increasingly sensitive to the drawing and maintaining of iden-tity boundaries. And since “we” can exist only in relation to “what weare not,” there is a now-flourishing market for the ritualization andeviction of the “other”—no matter his or her Rotterdam or Amster-dam birthplace, no matter how fluent his or her Dutch, and “well-be-haved” his or her manners—which clearly legitimates segregationand antagonistic group dynamics on the ground.

In the neoliberal era, targeting of minorities has not only becomeboth socially meaningful and politically functional, it has alsochanged form: from racist to culturalist, something that has highlycomplicated the formulation of a counterargument. The culturalistdefence that “people are equal, cultures are not” or “we are notagainst Muslims, we are against Islam” did not have any of the emo-tionally charged and messy connotations that associated racism withHolland’s traumatic, Nazi-occupied past.

The first mainstream politician advocating this culturalist turn wasthe then-leader of the right-wing People’s Party for Freedom andDemocracy (VVD), who in 1991 argued for a “tougher” assimilationiststance on immigrant integration. The overrepresentation of allochto-nen in crime statistics and unemployment were no longer to be under-stood as related to their marginalized, underclass position, but insteadwere to be framed in cultural terms, particularly the purported incom-patibility of Islam and Western democracy. The only successful strat-egy, the VVD claimed, was to drop “political correctness” and“cultural relativism” and to pressure migrants to conform.


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The emerging market of identity politics was now to code inci-dents of urban violence and criminality committed by young peopleof North African, and particularly Moroccan, heritage and reportedinstances of the repression and abuse of women as symbols of a clashof cultures (premodern Islamic tribalism versus Western civilization).Repeatedly, these acts were framed as characteristic of the boundedcommunity of “Moroccans” (which became the synecdoche for all Is-lamic allochtonen). By the end of the millennium, any untowardlocal incident concerning immigrants (or Dutch-born allochtonen),but in particular “Moroccans,” became national news. Moreover, itwas now their alleged incapacity to deal with “freedom,” and the “un-freedom” characterizing “Muslim culture,” that made them “uncivil,”“unintegrated” citizens. More and more, the “hard-won” freedoms ofthe “real” (meaning autochthon) Dutch—secularism, individualism,sexual liberality, homosexuality, and even pornography—were juxta-posed against Muslim immigrants’ unfreedoms on these same terrains.

Increasingly, integration was to require the adoption of these spe-cific moral choices—integration instrumentalized to a specific cul-tural grounding as a precondition for citizenship. As Judith Butlerrather understatedly noted regarding Holland, “So a certain paradoxensues in which the coerced adoption of certain cultural norms be-comes a requisite for entry into a polity that defines itself as the avatarof freedom.”16

Following on the heels of sexual freedom as an instrument of co-ercion and boundary-drawing was the invocation of freedom ofspeech, particularly including the freedom of gross insult. In this con-text, van Gogh’s systematic categorization of (Moroccan) Muslims as“goat-fuckers” and imams as “pygmies” was an extreme but by nomeans exceptional example. The two stuffed goats placed beside thecoffin during van Gogh’s “funeral party,” with the sign “If You Feelthe Urge,” was widely seen as morbid but funny. This combination ofa dead-serious anti-Islam political discourse and a popular culture ofridicule, accusing Muslims of lacking “resilience” and a “sense ofhumor,” now openly displayed the pervasive underlying culturalracism of Dutch society. There is no effective civil rights or ethnic mi-nority movement to successfully counter this phenomenon, and mi-nority political lobbies have little effect within a parliamentary systemthat offers no electoral compulsion to bid for the minority vote.17

Although some sectors in the political arena immediately wel-comed the VVD chairman’s assimilationist discourse as “brave “ and“outspoken,” for several years it largely remained a right-wing issue,influential but not dominant. This changed in 2000 with the publica-tion in one of Holland’s major national newspapers of a watershed


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essay by a journalist of socialist stock—a somewhat incoherent, mildlyassimilationist piece but with an emblematic title: “The MulticulturalDrama.”18 The essay argued that the integration of immigrants hadfailed, that the policy of multiculturalism had locked up migrants intheir inward-looking communities, creating an apathetic, isolated un-derclass. It emphasized the need for unconditional assimilation of mi-grants through the (coerced) learning of Dutch history andlanguage. Here, finally, discourses on integration from both Left andRight merged: The similarities between the leftist essay of 2000 andthe right-wing position of 1991 were such that the former VVD chair-man referred to it as “a feeling of déja vû.”19 More and more, “failedintegration” was identified as the source of societal malaise in Hol-land. Multiculturalism’s death rattle echoed in all corners of the pub-lic domain.

This blurring of the political positions of Left and Right, first inthe economic realm and then also on the highly mediatized issue ofminority/immigrant integration, resulted in a kind of cultural-na-tionalist bidding war, with the new eponymous political party of PimFortuyn leading the way. His populist anti-Islam and antiestablish-ment rhetoric, greatly enhanced by the September 11 events, foundfertile ground among the Dutch electorate: political correctness wasout, Islam-bashing in. The media, needless to say, loved him—he wasautomatic ratings. Fortuyn presented a puzzling merger of old antag-onisms and new style: a former Socialist, part-time academic, a dandywho toured the country in a Bentley-with-chauffeur and two lap dog-gies, talking in sound bites (“I say what I do and I do what I say”), whodeclared Islam a “backward culture” but didn’t mind sex with Moroc-can boys. In the polls, his party skyrocketed. Holland seemed to be onthe brink of a new order.

A key to Fortuyn’s rapid rise was the incapacity of the old stylepoliticians in the Purple Cabinet to respond to the new populism. Al-though they had been largely responsible for the economic transfor-mations of the 1990s, they never recognized the silent discontent ithad caused. The economy was booming, there was no reason to worry,they thought. When it came to issues that fed into the exclusionistrepertoires building up in society, such as the arrival of large numbersof asylum seekers in the 1990s, they seemed unable or unwilling todeal with them. Obsessed with enacting the coalition’s mantra, “Work,Work, Work,” they had no feel for the new depression and needs cre-ated by the neoliberal transformation, leaving all the “gut” issues toFortuyn. The week before the elections, Fortuyn was murdered. Theelections went ahead, and his List Pim Fortuyn (LPF) won a stunningvictory of twenty-six seats, which obliged the Christian Democrats


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(CDA) and right-wing VVD to form a coalition. But the new party’smembers were a hastily assembled bunch with little real political savvy,and the “revolution” quickly fizzled out. The government lastedeighty-six days, and in the following elections the LPF lost most of itsvoters. “The heritage of Pim,” however, lived on, actively embraced bya series of split-off factions of the VVD but also within mainstream pol-itics. Culturalism remained ascendant.

It was within this political climate that van Gogh and MohammedB, each in his own parallel world, drew up their plans of action.

“To What Issue Will This Come?”

The murder of van Gogh was telling in many ways. On a political dis-cursive level, it served to definitively secure the new culturalist regimeof truth, paving the way, for example, for a recent heated debate inthe Dutch parliament, where pre-teenage kids (of Moroccan her-itage) who had created a nuisance were referred to as “street-terror-ists.” All the major political parties joined in, with statements such as“The country is on fire,” “The people are fed up,” and “We must de-naturalize and deport.” There were even appeals to withdraw troopsfrom Afghanistan to deploy them against “Moroccans” in Dutchcities.20 More fundamentally, it informs about how in the atomizedmarket society the search for new forms of togetherness has trans-lated, in Holland, into a turn to the ethnos, with fantasies of purityand the moralization of culture and citizenship. Where the neoliberalproject has, largely unnoticed, abolished the collective standards andsolidarities of the post–WWII era, the faces of immigrants have servedas ideal, identifiable flashpoints for new repertoires of belonging andothering.

Neoliberalism may be technically agnostic on matters of cultureand race, but the neoliberal project is well-served by the permanentconstruction of an enemy (either within or without) who can satisfythe otherwise alienated consumer-citizen’s need for inclusion and be-longing. As Horatio said to Marcellus in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Towhat issue will this come?” For the time being, at least, the currentDutch marriage of convenience between cultural racism and the ne-oliberal project is certainly not an unhappy one.

Notes

1. In recent months, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, andthe European Commission have criticized various aspects of Dutch immigra-


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tion policies as inhumane and discriminatory toward “non-Westerners.”These punitive, criminalizing practices include the open-ended (some lastingmore than a year) detention of migrant minors, families with children, andtorture victims, in cramped conditions of up to six persons in a cell, with lit-tle communication with the outside world, and an “integration” process withcostly compulsory exams and a hierarchy of countries of origin, effectivelyblocking family reunification of people of Moroccan and Turkish origin. See“Discrimination in the Name of Integration: Migrants’ Rights Under the In-tegration Abroad Act,” Human Rights Watch (May 2008); “The Netherlands:The Detention of Irregular Migrants and Asylum Seekers,” Amnesty Inter-national (June 2008), EUR 35/02/2008; “Evaluation of the Family Reunifica-tion Directive,” EU Commission (October 2008), 610/3.

2. “Hij was een klootzak, maar hij was mijn klootzak.” Leon de Winter,“Bliksemstraal,” Elsevier 6, November 2004, p. 21. Translated literally, theword would be scrotum.

3. This is how the Dutch institutionalization of difference works: Youare either an autochtoon or an allochtoon. An allochtoon is a person living inthe Netherlands who has at least one foreign-born parent. The Central Bu-reau of Statistics (CBS) makes a distinction between a Western (one mightsubstitute “civilized”) allochtoon (a parent from Europe, North America,Oceania, but also Indonesia and Japan) and a non-Western allochtoon(Turkey, Latin America, Asia, and Africa). The terms are common and widelyused, although in everyday parlance only those from the non-Western groupare labeled as allochtonen, and the theoretically nonexistent third generationof allochtonen is still generally covered by the term (e.g., the City of Rotter-dam officially speaks of third-generation allochtonen, who are individuals whohave at least one foreign-born grandparent). In 2008, the CBS counted 1.8 mil-lion non-Western allochtonen in a population of 16 million. According to theCBS, Holland has a total of 850,000 Muslims.

4. Amsterdam itself was something of an exception, where authoritiessuccessfully made use of an inclusionist discourse by strongly playing on ashared identification with the city of Amsterdam.

5. The translations here and below stay as close as possible to the textas actually voiced, with errors syntactical or otherwise left uncorrected.

6. Probably meaning the leader of the Islamist group Takfir wal–Hijra,executed by Anwar Sadat in 1978.

7. In contrast to the US/UK context, ‘liberal’ in the Dutch sense is notthe opposite of “conservative.” Rather, it means pro–free market and anti-So-cialist, though progressive on “moral” issues such as abortion, gay marriage,and euthanasia. In the Dutch political landscape, the VVD is placed on theright, the Labour Party (PvdA) on the left, and the Christian Democrats(CDA) in the center.

8. Television-watching by the Dutch doubled between 1965 and 2005,to an average of three hours, twenty-two minutes a day.

9. Pierre Bourdieu, Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market (Lon-don: Verso, 2004).

10. See, e.g., A. Lijphart, The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and De-mocracy in the Netherlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).

11. As a member of, for instance, the Socialist pillar, you would vote forthe Social Democratic Labour Party, watch the programs of the VARA, readthe Vrije Volk, and send your children to a state university.

12. This shift from pillar to welfarist state was both symbolized and sig-

Costas M. Constantinou 69


nificantly reinforced by the establishment of the NOS (Dutch BroadcastingInstitute), a national coordinating and facilitating institute that also broad-cast the daily news, sports, and reporting on other events of “national” im-portance.

13. Minister of Finance Wouter Bos, during a seminar at the Holland Fi-nancial Center, Amsterdam, on September 6, 2007.

14. After being ousted from the VVD party, Rita Verdonk established herown political “movement,” TON (Proud of Holland), which will take part inthe 2010 elections.

15. It is important to point out differences between the high level of suchsymbolism in national politics and the practical, depolarizing approaches oflocal authorities. A case in point is the latest controversy between the nationalleader of the Labour Party and the Labour mayor of Amsterdam, the latterallowing his “street coaches” to not shake hands with members of the oppo-site sex because of (Islamic) religious mores. The national leader loudlyprotested stating that “in this country, the handshake is the norm,” conve-niently forgetting that the country’s chief rabbi had refused to shake handswith women from time immemorial (a fact nobody ever politicized).

16. Judith Butler, “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time,” BritishJournal of Sociology 59, no. 1 (2008): 4.

17. The Netherlands has a parliamentary system of proportional repre-sentation, in which the main parties strategically opt for the national major-ity vote. In the current setting of polarization, reaching out to the allochtoonminority could prove to be counterproductive.

18. Paul Scheffer, “Het Multiculturele Drama,” NRC Handelsblad, Janu-ary 29, 2000.

19. NRC Handelsblad, May 20, 2000.20. Emergency debate, Dutch parliament, September 25, 2008, about

youth misbehavior in Gouda.


Neoliberal Xenophobia: The Dutch Case

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