Liberal Holland Hits the Cultural Panic Button

The Sunday Times November 19, 2006

Liberal Holland hits the cultural panic button

The Dutch are backing out of multiculturalism after two high-profile murders. As Britain, too, gets jumpy about its social mix, Ian Buruma suggests a way out

Until a few years ago the Dutch prided themselves on being the most tolerant, most progressive people on earth. If multiculturalism was going to work anywhere, it would be in Holland. That was the view, at any rate, of the intellectual elite which was by and large of a leftist disposition.

Multiculturalism always was most popular with people who felt enlightened enough to take in their stride the presence of immigrants whom they rarely encountered in their own daily lives. They were also historically aware enough to realise the perils of racial or religious discrimination. As some people loved to point out, “Auschwitz” was the inevitable destination of bigotry. In Holland, a country that had lost 70% of its Jewish population in the Holocaust, this warning had a particularly grim potency.

After the murder of Theo van Gogh, the film maker, two years ago by a home-grown Muslim jihadi in Amsterdam (Van Gogh had made a film, Submisssion, about the oppression of Muslim women), a consensus rose among a section of the Dutch commentariat: multiculturalism had been a disaster; appeasement in the name of tolerance had led straight to the slaughter of a man who had simply exercised his right to free speech.

Van Gogh, a born provocateur who liked to test the limits of freedom by being as offensive as possible — to Jews, Christians, Muslims, or indeed anyone he disapproved of — has now been reborn as a kind of patron saint of Dutch liberty, the rightful heir of Erasmus and Spinoza. Van Gogh was no Spinoza, let alone an Erasmus, but there clearly is a problem (not only in Holland, of course) when people resort to extreme violence, or the threat to use extreme violence, against fellow citizens whose views they find offensive.

There can be no tolerance of Islamist revolutionaries who believe that people who attack their faith should die, just as there can be no tolerance for any other type of political or religious violence. But do the murders committed in the name of Islam in Amsterdam, Madrid or London really mean that the multicultural idea is dead?

The problem with much multicultural propaganda (as well as arguments against it) is the assumption that monoculturalism ever existed. When I grew up in the upper- middle-class part of the Hague during the 1960s, Dutch society was still pretty much lily-white. There were no Muslims or black people in my school.

However, society was hardly mono-cultural. Catholics had their own schools, football clubs, newspapers, broadcasting stations, political parties, student fraternities, retirement homes and probably stamp collecting associations too, and the same was true for Orthodox Calvinists, Dutch Reformed, Liberal Protestants and so on. Marriages between Protestants and Catholics were probably rarer than mixed marriages with Muslims are today.

If religious differences still mattered, class did as well. Accents were a giveaway, as they were in Britain, but you could also tell a man’s social background in the Hague just from the style of his shoes. The society I grew up in was riddled with social and religious barriers. People managed to rub along by sharing perhaps a keenness for over-boiled potatoes and the Dutch football team, but otherwise they stuck pretty much to their own kind.

All this began to change in the 1960s when the so-called “pillars” that held religious and class affiliations together crumbled under the assault of a generation that rebelled against traditional constraints on their sexual, cultural, social and political lives.

This was the time of sex festivals (organised by Suck magazine, for whom Germaine Greer once posed naked), smoke bombs tossed at the Queen’s golden coach and “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” on the cobbled streets of Amsterdam. None of this was unique to Holland but because of the country’s puritanical background the change was particularly dramatic.

At about the same time that the young let their hair down, Muslims from Turkey and Morocco arrived to perform jobs that the prosperous Dutch no longer felt like doing. In the beginning people barely noticed these shadowy figures cleaning trains and the like. It was only once their families arrived a decade or so later and children were born that old working-class neighbourhoods began to fill up with halal butchers, mosques and satellite dishes tuned to Arab and north African television stations. This happened after the economic boom was pretty much over.

The views of most Moroccan villagers and Turkish men who settled with their families in the shabbier parts of Amsterdam or central Rotterdam had little in common with those of the newly secularised and sexually liberated Dutch. But the progressive multicultural view was that this did not matter. Each to his own. We may not like the way Muslim men treat their wives and daughters, but who are we to say that our ways are better? High crime rates and unemployment in immigrant areas were rarely discussed and those who tried to were frequently dismissed as racists.

To point out that the welfare state often had the effect of trapping young immigrants in a state of dependency on government handouts, increasing anti-immigrant resentment, also flew in the face of progressive orthodoxy. A flexible and accommodating labour market is often the quickest way for immigrants to find their place in a new society, however humble the work. In Holland, as in France, too many rules and regulations, as well as a deep strain of racial discrimination, make it difficult for newcomers to find work. In such a situation young people are bound to find their way to petty crime and violent causes, no matter how much we preach the virtues of multiculturalism.

The reaction to the multicultural ideal in the 1990s came from two sides. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie mobilised metropolitan progressives, most of whom had been multiculturalists before, against Islamic intolerance. Further down the social scale people began to feel they had been betrayed by the elites who had, especially in Holland, put European idealism above national pride and taken no notice when people no longer felt at home in the streets they grew up in.

It is the same kind of sentiment tapped in Britain by Nick Griffin’s British National party. After a jury acquitted him of stirring up racial hatred two weeks ago, Griffin said the verdicts showed the “huge gulf between ordinary real people and the fantasy world, the multicultural fantasy world our masters live in”.

The late Pim Fortuyn, the right-wing Dutch politician murdered in 2002 by a fanatical vegan, based his political success on a peculiarly Dutch kind of populism. He was not a rabid rightwinger like Griffin. The genius of his politics was that he managed to appeal to both metropolitans and the disgruntled masses.

As an openly gay man, he promoted himself as a heroic defender of Dutch freedoms against “backward” Islam. As a “man of the people” he promised to take his countrymen back to the good old days before all those aliens arrived. Born and raised a Catholic, before turning to socialism, Fortuyn took the route of most new anti-multiculturalist, anti-relativist intellectuals. Always a believer, disillusion did not lead him to scepticism but to a different form of zealotry.

Immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants, became the main focus of a discontent that was rooted in deeper anxieties. A combination of global capitalism, European bureaucracy and excessive individualism made many people feel dislocated and powerless. Resentment of Muslim immigrants and the rejection, in Holland and France, of the European constitution were aspects of the same attack on multiculturalists, Eurocrats and the bien pensants metropolitans who ignored the common man.

Van Gogh, the film maker, was not concerned so far as I know with the European Union but he admired Fortuyn because he saw in him a contrarian and, above all, a scourge of established authority. If this was right wing, it was the rightwingery of the 1960s generation grown old.

To Fortuyn, Van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (who wrote the film script that led to Van Gogh’s murder) and her Dutch supporters, Muslim immigrants brought a clash of civilisation to the liberal heart of Europe. The notion of cultural incompatibility between Islam and liberal western culture was taken for granted. To see violent religious extremism through the prism of culture may seem tempting, but actually misses the point. The Moroccan villagers in Holland, like the Bangladeshis who came to Britain, did stick to their old cultures. But they are not revolutionaries. It is their children or grandchildren, such as Mohammed Bouyeri, Van Gogh’s killer, born and bred in the West, who are attracted to revolutionary Islam.

The purist Islam of Saudi Wahhabism, or the even more radical Taqfiri sects which promote the killing of all infidels and apostates, attract some young European Muslims precisely because of their lack of cultural tradition. The appeal lies in the promise of an abstract religious utopia, as far removed from Moroccan or Bangladeshi village life as from the contemporary mores of Rotterdam or Birmingham. This is a godsend, so to speak, for those who feel at home in neither world.

The attempts now being made in Holland, as well as in Britain, to enforce conformity to a rather fuzzy idea of Britishness or Dutchness by banning burqas and other face veils, or making it mandatory to speak only Dutch in public places, or fretting about Bradford-born lads who cheer for the Pakistani cricket team, miss the point too. Bouyeri spoke little but Dutch and the London suicide bombers in July 2005 were already far more British in habit and taste than their fathers, who never caused any trouble.

The women who choose to wear burqas, and most followers of Islamic neo-orthodoxy, do so in a spirit of defiance not just against the country in which they grew up, but also against their parents and their village ways. Far from being the products of some backward cultural community, the new believers are mostly loners who download their ideological extremism from the internet, just as Bouyeri did.

Imposing cultural conformity, or claiming that Islam is incompatible with European values, or denigrating it as “an inferior civilisation” is the best way to stoke up more defiance or, worse, to create more sympathy for the Islamist revolutionaries.

It would surely be better to rethink multiculturalism by saving the best bits of it and rejecting the cant. The United States has many flaws but one thing that works is the idea of the hyphenated citizen: the Chinese-American, the Iraqi-American. Being a devout Muslim does not stand in the way of being a patriotic American. This works because citizenship is not a matter of culture but of loyalty to institutions, the law, the constitution, the political system. This to me is the best legacy of the enlightenment.

Europeans, even those living in the most liberal societies, still find this difficult to accept. But Islam is now part of the European landscape. It is no betrayal of “our values” to be flexible towards habits and beliefs that not everyone shares.

Let people wear headscarves if they wish. Islam as such is not incompatible with citizenship of a liberal democracy. The violent imposition of a revolutionary faith is, but it will only be contained only if mainstream Muslims feel accepted as fellow citizens. The single demand we should make on immigrants and their offspring is respect for the law, including laws that guarantee the right to free speech. This is not a surrender to the Islamist revolution. On the contrary, it is the only way to combat it.

Ian Buruma’s book Murder in Amsterdam is published by Atlantic Books, £12.99.