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Journalism of Courage
When Crown Princess Maxima accompanies her mother-in-law Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands on a state visit to India next week, chances are her compatriots will still be arguing over a remark she made recently. Speaking in Dutch at a function on September 24 at The Hague, she said that Dutch identity doesn8217;t exist.
So did the popular and pretty princess refute 8216;a Dutch identity8217; or 8216;the Dutch identity8217;? Maxima is a 8216;foreigner8217; herself: she was born in Argentina. Should her words be read in the context of her own personal journey? Still others ask: is there a Dutch identity anyway, that accounts for all 16 million or so of natives and immigrants 8212; beyond those easy clicheacute;s of cheese and clogs, organisation and thrift, bikes, dikes and windmills?
But there is a sense in which the debate on immigration and integration now playing in the Netherlands is peculiar to it. It borrows from that country8217;s fascinating socio-political history. It brings several complex issues of contemporary Dutch society together to a boil.
Traditional Dutch society had worked out its own model of unity in diversity, distinctively different from the fuzzier mix in India. Called 8216;pillarisation8217;, it consisted of allowing different segments of a society 8212; none of them a majority 8212; to form vertical and self-enclosed 8216;pillars8217;. In a society divided by religion and occupation, the pillars were mainly the Catholics, the Protestants and their denominations and also the working and middle classes.
If you were born to Roman Catholic parents it would have to be in a Catholic hospital, you would go to a Catholic school, join a Catholic trade union or farmers8217; association, vote for a Catholic political party, marry a Catholic, avail of Catholic healthcare, retire to a Catholic old age home, to be buried by a Catholic undertaker. It was the same separateness for Protestants and other groups.
To govern a society as clearly divided as this, a model of inter-group negotiation was worked out at the level of elites. 8216;Consociational democracy8217; was a system of decision-making that, while keeping the pillars apart, relied on consensus-making at the top. In practice, it evolved rules of the game that differ sharply from the majority rule inscribed in the Westminster model. One, government delegated as much of policy-making as possible to the groups themselves and to associations run by them. Two, it observed strict proportionality vis a vis these groups 8212; they had proportional representation in parliament and all money and subsidy was distributed to each according to size. The third rule of the game was, if you can8217;t find a resolution, find a compromise. Compromise does not have a bad odour for the Dutch. It is considered better than outright victory 8212; in the latter, one side is the loser and becomes a threat to the stability of the system.
Consociationalism in the polity was paralleled by the 8220;polder model8221; in the economy. This is a system of tight cooperation that harks back to the common fight against the elements in a country in which an important part 8212; one third 8212; lies below sea level. Much of the Netherlands has been built on land reclaimed from water. The 8216;polder area8217; was cleared by pumping out the water, dikes were built all around it to keep the high waters out and only then the land was built upon, keeping a wary watch on the sea levels. The Dutch realised it was impossible to vanquish the water through individual effort. They had to come together and join hands. Water affected them all.
Today, the growing calls for integration of immigrants, especially Muslims and particularly the Moroccans who came into the country to work in the 1960s and stayed on, have brought the hidden tensions and evasions within the 8220;Dutch way8221; to the fore. If pillarisation served as a system of social organisation for the Dutch for so long 8212; it started breaking down only in the 1960s and now exists largely in its residue 8212; why are efforts by immigrant groups to maintain their separate identity frowned upon now? Is the growing emphasis on knowing the Dutch language also a coded call for an assimilation that demands the erasing of difference?
On the other side, for a significant majority of the native Dutch, consociationalism and its insistence on consensus and compromise have resulted in a culture of denial. The meteoric rise of Pim Fortuyn 8212; the flamboyant Dutch politician who railed against the perceived political correctness of the 8220;cosy cartel8221; in The Hague on Islam and immigration, and who famously declared 8220;Holland is full8221; 8212; fed upon this discontent. Fortuyn was assassinated in the course of the national campaign of 2002 but his party, List Pim Fortuyn, went on to do exceedingly well. The second spectacular murder in 2004 of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, after he made a film on the predicament of women in Islam, reinforced the panic that Fortuyn8217;s politics had placed centrestage.
It is Fortuyn8217;s legacy, and 9/118217;s as well, that the so-called culture of political correctness has shattered in the Netherlands, replaced by a public discussion that congratulates itself for its plain-speaking but is palpably harsher for immigrants and asylum seekers. It has also given new traction to parties on the far Left and far Right. Ironically, these parties unite against the Centre in their conservative stand on immigration.
Can Dutch society fully confront the challenge that has been put into words after 9/11? And what if the problem runs deeper? Could the dike be seen as a metaphor for Dutch historical identity? It proclaims a sense of siege, it sees anything strange or foreign as a potential threat to the security of the dike. Will mainstream Dutch politicians engage with these questions and decisively win back the political initiative from the fringe?
As tiny, dense Netherlands, home to some of the most renowned social experiments, sheds old complacencies and struggles with tough questions, the world could watch and learn.
