Neoliberal Xenophobia: The Dutch Case - Jolle Demmers and Sameer S. Mehendale
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Demmers-nb.qxd 3/24/10 4:31 PM Page 53
Alternatives 35 (2010), 53–70
1
Neoliberal Xenophobia:
5 The Dutch Case
Jolle Demmers and Sameer S. Mehendale*
10
This article argues for the need to identify and grapple with the
complexities of the relation between xenophobia and neoliber-
15 alism. In the case of the Netherlands, the rise of xenophobia is
part of a larger process of a mostly-market-controlled reclaiming
of symbolic forms of collectiveness in an increasingly atomized
society. The 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker-provocateur Theo
van Gogh played a crucial role in cementing a “culturalist,” anti-
Islam regime of truth. The analysis of the van Gogh murder in-
20 forms about how, in the atomized market society, the search for
new 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 project
has, largely unnoticed, abolished the collective standards and
25 solidarities of the post–World War II era, the faces of immigrants
have served as ideal, identifiable flash points for new repertoires
of belonging and othering. Keywords: neoliberalism, xenophobia,
uncertainty, collectiveness, Netherlands
30 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 become
35 prominent across the entire spectrum of politics. Generally, this xenophobic
turn is understood as reactive to September 11, to the Madrid and London
bombings, 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,
40 is that neither radical Islam nor immigration numbers is responsible for why
*Demmers, associate professor, Centre for Conflict Studies, Utrecht University. E-mail:
j.demmers@uu.nl; Mehendale, novelist based in Amsterdam. E-mail: mehendale@versatel.nl
53Demmers-nb.qxd 3/24/10 4:31 PM Page 54
54 Neoliberal Xenophobia: The Dutch Case
1 the Netherlands, once considered so progressive and open-minded, is now
among the most restrictive and punitive in the European Union when it
comes to asylum, integration, family reunification, and deportation policies.1
We propose to look beyond salonfähig truisms about the new cultural-
5 ism as a product of “ethnic entrepreneurs” or as the outcome of
media regimes of representation. While the mobilizing properties of
these phenomena must be recognized, the crux is something differ-
ent and more fundamental. What we argue for is the need to identify
and grapple with the complexities of the relation between xenopho-
10 bia and neoliberalism: in the case of the Netherlands, the rise of
xenophobia as part of a larger process of a mostly market-controlled
reclaiming 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-
15 tend to conduct an autopsy of the 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker-
provocateur Theo van Gogh by a twenty-six-year-old djellabah-clad
Dutchman of Moroccan heritage, an event that played a crucial role
in cementing a culturalist, anti-Islam regime of truth in Holland. Sec-
ond, we try to explain this shift in public discourse by connecting the
20 forces of “globalization” with specific local events and processes char-
acterizing Dutch society.
Van Gogh’s Murder: The Immediate Framing
25
A powerful, defining opening to the culturalist ebullition-to-come
forced its way into Dutch living rooms the very evening of the deed:
Something terrible has happened today. Today Theo van Gogh was
murdered. Society is shocked. Everyone present here tonight is
30 shocked.
The words of the Dutch minister of integration, Rita Verdonk, spoken
above the clatter of pots and pans, blowing of whistles, and shaking of
rattles by a crowd of some twenty thousand gathered on Amsterdam’s
35 Dam Square, engaging in a “Noise Protest” against an act that was al-
ready being characterized not as a response to van Gogh’s politics but
as an assault on Dutch tolerance and freedom of speech. Verdonk,
nicknamed Iron Rita for her tough stance on immigration, savoured
one of her finest moments when, within hours of van Gogh’s murder,
40 she climbed the stage and addressed the crowd. Stunned and startled
faces, many of them red-eyed, looked on as Verdonk continued,
posthumously claiming the victim’s support for her own politics:Demmers-nb.qxd 3/24/10 4:31 PM Page 55
Jolle Demmers and Sameer S. Mehendale 55
1 I knew Theo. And I got to know him better and better. Theo was the
one who said: “Rita, keep that back straight!” And Theo was also the
one 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 very
much. Theo—
5
She paused, and mechanically started to clap her hands, the crowd
cheering, “Theo! Theo! Theo!” Then she continued:
ranted and raved, against what he saw as wrongs in society. He was
10 outspoken. And at times on the edge. But in this country, that is al-
lowed! And in this country, nobody can be murdered for expressing
his opinion! We do not want that! We do not want that! . . . Where
the government is concerned, the choice is simple: This is the limit.
We will not change our tune. We will not [let ourselves] be cor-
15 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. Within
a couple of hours the victim’s stabbed body was fully exposed on the
20 front page of one of the largest Dutch newspapers, and shown later
covered with a white sheet in a blue forensic tent, surrounded by men
in white suits. Soon the talking heads appeared, all claiming the
Truth about their Theo. Even his most bitter enemy, in a rather ludi-
crous but no less exclusionist in memoriam published in a Dutch
25 weekly, wrote: “He was an asshole, but he was my asshole.”2
The sensationalism following the van Gogh killing had a high
degree of déjà vu: The murder was automatically paired with the
killing two years earlier of Pim Fortuyn, another highly controversial
“first-name-only” Dutchman. Pim was the flamboyant politician-
30 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. Pim
had been greatly, publicly admired by Theo van Gogh: they shared
an antiestablishment, fuck-it-all attitude, and both had declared
35 Islam as the great threat to Dutch society. The public ritualizations
of their deaths showed many—now hackneyed —similarities: the
same 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 the
40 meaning 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 concealed
pleasure; behind the tears, a glint of victory; behind the outrage, sub-
dued joy. Because whereas it turned out that the Fortuyn murder hadDemmers-nb.qxd 3/24/10 4:31 PM Page 56
56 Neoliberal Xenophobia: The Dutch Case
1 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,
5 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 opponents
alike—its subtext was crystal clear.
10
Van Gogh’s Murder: The Event
On the morning of November 2, 2004, while cycling to his studio, the
filmmaker and media personality Theo van Gogh was assassinated by
15 a man with a beard and a djellabah, also on a bicycle (the irony of
both aggressor and victim being on bicyc—an inconvenient Dutch
commonality that muddied the clear waters of Them-and-Us—went
unremarked). The act was committed in broad daylight on a just-
awakening shopping street in an eastern suburb of Amsterdam. After
20 overtaking van Gogh, the murderer fired multiple gunshots at him
from close range. He then chased down his victim, who had managed
to flee across the street, slit his throat, then stuck two daggers into his
chest. After a shootout with the police about half a mile away, in
which he was wounded, the killer was apprehended.
25 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 present
himself as the enfant terrible of Dutch TV: messy, chain-smoking, out-
rageous, combining a student-like immature flair with a populist
30 rhetoric calculatingly peppered with offensive language. With a long
reputation of publicly assaulting a range of self-declared “enemies”
(mostly rival columnists, but also intellectuals and politicians), over
the 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
35 “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 with
a then-member of parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, on the film Submission,
40 a quote-mining indictment against sexism in the Koran, where selected
passages 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 he
l’homme de la nature et de la verité? He was a twenty-six-year-old alloch-Demmers-nb.qxd 3/24/10 4:31 PM Page 57
Jolle Demmers and Sameer S. Mehendale 57
1 toon Dutchman, born to parents of Moroccan origin, who at some
point had traded his jeans for a djellabah. As to the question why this
once eager and diligent former student, who had successfully com-
pleted his HAVO (the educational rite of passage in Holland, which
5 gives admission to higher education) and who in his spare time gave
computer lessons to the elderly, came to his deed, we refrain from
what, here, could only be speculation.
10 Now Nobody Can Deny
The “truth-effect” of the image of van Gogh’s knife-abused corpse
rendered debate unnecessary—impossible: “Look, this is how it really
is!” the television screamed. Here lies the dead Dutchman, butchered
15 like a pig by a bearded, radical Muslim. This is good and evil. This is
the end of relativism and, above all, of complexity.
The national media immediately saturated itself with apocalyptic
exposés.4 TV academics, politicians, and pundits were selected for their
capacity to subtitle the image. In primordialist phrasings, these voices
20 proclaimed a fear of ever-larger numbers of outsiders (allochtoon in
general, and Muslim in particular), and the end of the “soft” ap-
proach named multiculturalism, sequencing the murder in a series of
events that ran from World War II (that other “foreign occupation”)
through the Twin Towers and the Madrid train bombings and into a
25 vague 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-
30 mative distinctions based on cultural criteria—was embraced by both
Left 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; the
conflation of Islam with Fascism; the equation of good citizenship
35 with pornography; and, above all, the search for collectiveness in the
production 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 of
40 Arabic language who became a prominent figure in the so-called de-
bate on the Dutch Muslim communities, interviewed a day after the
murder. Fear TV—although one could argue that toward the end he
rather clumsily cooks his own goose.5Demmers-nb.qxd 3/24/10 4:31 PM Page 58
58 Neoliberal Xenophobia: The Dutch Case
1 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 a
million, a lot of people.
Q: A large group that has radical ideas?
5 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 of
those [ten] is prepared to use violence?
10 A: Yes, but people are embedded in their families, in their
friends who they talk to in the mosque, who listen to the sermons of
their preacher. I would like to know to which preacher the killer of
Theo listened the past weeks. These aren’t nerds who by themselves
solve a crossword puzzle and then set out to kill someone. . . . An-
other two or three of these murders and nobody anymore will dare
15 refuse 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 be
20 afraid. 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 certain
favours, claim certain privileges, when certain demands are lent
force by terror, a sensible person will say, go ahead, go ahead.
25
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 death
of 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 this
30 can be denied. They can be many or few, but for the victims it is just
as 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 yet
35 ready.
On the renowned television debate program Buitenhof, on Sun-
day, November 7, a number of eminences grises took the floor. The
format was an autochthon Dutch professor of philosophy presenting
40 a “spoken column” interlineated by a series of interviews. Here again
was a variation on a common, seemingly paradoxical theme of those
days: 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 ground
for terrorism.Demmers-nb.qxd 3/24/10 4:31 PM Page 59
Jolle Demmers and Sameer S. Mehendale 59
1 Theo van Gogh has been slaughtered in a bestial manner by the rad-
ical Muslim Mohammed B. We now know that this discussion about
Islam in the modern world concerns us all. Muslim organisations
have started to take their responsibility. Some politicians have even
reached the point at which they have shed their naiveté: It is not the
5 case that radical Muslims will be sweet to us as long as we are sweet
to them.
The couleur locale of the Amsterdam former-Left antiestablishment,
referring to themselves now as “Friends of Theo,” also quickly
10 weighed in. A group of columnists, stand-up comedians, and media
entrepreneurs, these were children of the sexual revolution who re-
garded all religious belief as backward and provincial. On the local
Amsterdam channel AT5, the day after the murder, one of the
Friends, a newspaper columnist, gave his views on the case (including
15 the remarkable framing of the “clash of civilizations” as the Koran ver-
sus pornography):
I believed in the MTV notion. That is, if all those fundamentalists
and those Muslims who are dedicated to fundamentalist thoughts .
20 . . the thoughts of the Koran, if only they would watch enough MTV
and would nicely pick up our porn programmes, and if they would
normally work, and watch Buitenhof, and closely watch AT5, then
perhaps they would take over our norms and values, or at least find
them more appealing then that weird, dark mediaeval faith they
25 themselves abide to. I was wrong. Theo wasn’t—I increasingly have
had 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 that
he was right.6
30 Another interpretation was offered by one of the main critical
voices in Holland’s multiculturalism debate—a former chairman of the
liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD),7 long-time
Shell employee, and at the time EU commissioner. Here the embattled
majority’s feelings of intimidation aroused by a marginalized minority
35 are juxtaposed with those generated by the Third Reich’s occupying
army. The commissioner began by focusing on an incident that had
just 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 had
been ordered to remove it by a local policeman acting on an order to
40 suppress all signs of agitation. Again, on the Buitenhof show:
Commissioner: One of the worrying aspects of this case is that
one can see the early signs of intimidation. A crass example of this
is a recent incident in Rotterdam, where someone wrote “Thou
shalt not kill” on the front of his own house, in big letters, and thatDemmers-nb.qxd 3/24/10 4:31 PM Page 60
60 Neoliberal Xenophobia: The Dutch Case
1 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 Ten
Commandments. The fact that this happened in the proximity of—
as it appears—a mosque or some other Islamic centre does not
5 change things in any way. Of course it is madness that one of the
Ten Commandments can no longer be publicly depicted.
Interviewer: The Mayor of Rotterdam did apologise for what
happened.
Commissioner: That suits him. . . . But it is a straw in the wind.
10 And . . . we are coming to a situation where the absolute majority in
the four largest cities will be of non-Western origin, and within that
absolute majority Islam will be the dominating religion. And that is
when you see, you will see, I’m afraid, those signs of intimidation ap-
pear. And that is a sinister development, certainly for someone like
me who experienced the German occupation.
15 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?
20 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 murder
25 had lacked, offered unbridled room to the crafting and consuming of
full-throated culturalism. A textbook set of ingredients for dominant
discourse-formation rapidly took shape: the denial of contradiction;
the naturalization of the present; the taken-for-granted reification of
identity. All of it ceaselessly repeated. The key to this triumph of cul-
30 turalism was the cold fact of the dead body, van Gogh’s corpse—the
tangible 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 of
factual grounds: indeed, academic research, and even the occasional
35 policy 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, even
excitement, in certain political circles when it became known that van
40 Gogh was killed by a jihadist with a beard and djellabah: Now nobody
can deny, the chorus chanted. And its voice was heard. The country
now witnessed a rapid upsurge of newborn, or newly confident, as-
similationists.Demmers-nb.qxd 3/24/10 4:31 PM Page 61
Jolle Demmers and Sameer S. Mehendale 61
1 Great Transformations
How did this change occur? How did the gross coarsening of political
debate come about, and how did a once (seemingly, at least) relaxed,
5 tolerant, progressive country turn into one of the toughest hardliners
in Europe when it comes to the issues of immigration and ethnicity?
Since the marriage of the Socialists and the Liberals, represented
by Holland’s Purple Cabinet of 1994, one of the main divisions within
post–WWII political debate—how to run the economy—ended with
10 widespread consensus that neoliberalism was inevitable, the uncon-
tested new normalcy. Major, if largely silent, transformations during
the 1990s in the realms of the economy, governance, and media were
rapidly turning Holland into a fully marketized society: patients
turned into clients, public space into private opportunity, job security
15 into flex-work, subcontracting, and outsourcing, citizens into con-
sumers. These processes, however fundamental to the everyday life of
the Dutch (affecting education, welfare, housing, child care, health
care, work stability, pensions, social security) nonetheless failed to en-
gage the public. Both the accepted inevitability ( “the country’s econ-
20 omy is in a dismal state, something has to be done”) of the
implemented policies, plus the complexity of neoliberal technologies
of power—control of the image-world8 crucial among them—and its
hugely diverse, case-specific consequences upon the lives and futures
of individual citizens, limited not only the forms of possible resistance
25 but even the conceptualization of experience. In mainstream society
now, 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 are
doing it.”
30 An essential element of the neoliberal project is atomization
under the rubrics freedom, progress, and efficiency—what Bourdieu
has called a program of the methodical destruction of collectives.9 In
order to reach the neoliberal utopia of a fully commodified form of
social life, all collective structures that could serve as an obstacle to
35 the unfettered rule of capital are called into question: the state, in-
creasingly locked into a global regime of competing states; work
groups, through the individuation of labor and wages as a purported
function of individual competences; collectives that support the
rights of workers; even the family, which loses part of its control over
40 basic patterns of consumption through the constitution and targeting
of market age groups.
In our analysis of how neoliberalism has affected Dutch public
imagination, an understanding of the erosion of earlier modes of col-
lectiveness (both real and imagined), and their replacement by newDemmers-nb.qxd 3/24/10 4:31 PM Page 62
62 Neoliberal Xenophobia: The Dutch Case
1 “liquid” forms of belonging, is crucial. In particular, we focus on the
disintegration of two preeminent icons of postwar Holland: social wel-
farism and “merchantness.”
Our discussion of the demise of older forms of collectiveness and
5 the rise of new forms of belonging begins with a brief history of mod-
ern Dutch societal structures. Until the 1960s, as a result of religious
and political clashes in the early twentieth century, Dutch society was
characterized by a system of voluntary social apartheid,10 within
which different vertically organized communities (“pillars”) lived par-
10 allel lives, each with their own social institutions and represented by
their own set of political elites. Dutch generations born in the middle
two-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,
15 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 Second
World War, now rose to prominence as a national identifier. The ac-
20 companying omneity of welfarist policies, attitudes, and beliefs were
to set Holland apart from most other Western countries, in particular
from the United States. In its remade image, Holland stood out (par-
ticularly in its own eyes) as a bastion of civilization and urbaneness
juxtaposed against the crude winner-take-all mentality from across
25 the Atlantic, its sense of moral superiority importantly shaping the
collective imagination of the nation.12
Over the past two-plus decades, however, the welfarism project has
lost ground, and is now actively in reverse: slowly in the 1980s, due in
part to the decade’s economic crisis; in the 1990s, with the defeat of
30 Communism and the rise of neoliberalism, with greater speed and ide-
ological vivacity. Achievements such as the longstanding “social safety
net” were now presented as outdated, pampering, inefficient. As the
new ideological certitudes demanded, slowly but steadily the state re-
treated from the public domain, handing its institutions—including
35 the 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 was
turned into a shopping mall), reducing the state to its bureaucratic,
monitoring, and surveillant core.
40 Another fading national identifier, one with proclaimed “ancient
roots,” 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 (when
unemployment hit a post–WWII record high) to explain a rapid im-Demmers-nb.qxd 3/24/10 4:31 PM Page 63
Jolle Demmers and Sameer S. Mehendale 63
1 plementation that might be described as a national embrace. But the
new 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-multinationals
5 into fully globalized corporations and engineered a surrender to the
market of its once-prided state enterprises. Recently, the Dutch min-
ister of finance, in defence of neoliberal ideology and reacting to
public concern about yet another national-multinational going
global, remarked: “The sale of Holland is a myth that leads to an un-
10 warranted Orange feeling,”13 laying normative claims on the “Orange
feeling” as he dismisses it, but at the same time acknowledging its ex-
istence.
We, too, note the discomfort and uneasiness this double-sided
transformation is causing among many sectors of Dutch society. With
15 the implementation of neoliberalism, certain segments of the economy
certainly prospered, while the flip-side realities of the gold coin were
at best considered collateral: amid the consumption boom of the
1990s, beggars and the homeless began to show their faces on the
streets of Holland. And with them, looming, for the first time in re-
20 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 through
the recently marketized media. To fully understand the role that com-
25 mercial media played in this new dynamics, it is important to sketch
the 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 and
catering to a more or less specific audience, could broadcast their pro-
30 grams, the amount of air time for each pillar being based on the size
of its membership. The advent of the neoliberal order, however, saw
the dismantling of the legal barricades that had safeguarded this spe-
cific public broadcasting system (or “State Television,” as van Gogh
made a point of calling it). New legislation allowed for the introduc-
35 tion of commercial channels, and by the second half of the 1990s
seven new commercial stations had appeared. Segmented, broadcast-
ing that was ideologically and religiously based made way for market
populism, with the new TV channels rapidly entering into a battle for
ratings, outbidding each other in vulgarity and coarseness. [In this
40 context, it is interesting to note that the tsunami of “eviction” shows
(where an individual is “othered” and eliminated by those who remain
in group) that has swamped the world this past decade started in Hol-
land with the show Big Brother, whose creator and producer, a Dutch
billionaire, is now one of Rita Verdonk’s14 main financial benefactors.]Demmers-nb.qxd 3/24/10 4:31 PM Page 64
64 Neoliberal Xenophobia: The Dutch Case
1 The new market media catered to the looming societal uncer-
tainty and corresponding need for predictability. These were readily
captured in icons and incidences (often short-lived) of collectiveness
and belonging, particularly around “issues” of safety and criminality,
5 as repertoires of us/them. The mid-1990s became the time of massive
“silent marches” and “popular ceremonies” honouring victims of
street crime in what became a national obsession with what was
coined as “senseless violence.” Here the images and practices of col-
lectively mourning an innocent victim served as instant satisfiers for
10 the atomized citizen’s need to belong. The focus on random vio-
lence, however, failed to offer a durable enough dichotomy, and in
the 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-
15 ness that the recent Dutch hostility toward “Europe” must be under-
stood. Increasingly, the European Union is perceived in Holland as
contributing to a loss of self-determination and disintegration of the
nation. This ambivalence and even outright hostility toward “Brus-
sels” among the electorate, as expressed by the Dutch “No” vote in
20 the 2005 referendum on the EU constitution, has been viewed by
some 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, coining
a phrase, called “chauvinism of prosperity.” Not incidentally, in the
25 light of Dutch anti-Islam sentiments, the possible inclusion in the Eu-
ropean Union of “Muslim” Turkey was seen as the hauling in of the
Trojan Horse and added to the strong anti-Brussels response.
30 Freedom as Boundary
In the economically prosperous 1990s, the neoliberal consensus within
mainstream politics and the accompanying loss of even the illusion of
a national economy left the cultural field as the main battleground for
35 political 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 of
mosques, the headscarf, the burqua, and the handshake into sites of
contestation. Finally, the nation could vent its long-felt discomfort with
40 the ever-larger numbers of foreigners, so the story went.15
Of course the question of minorities and foreigners—different
things, but almost always conflated in public discourse—was not new
on the Dutch political agenda. However, the logic and form of the tar-
geting of minorities was now fundamentally different from that ofDemmers-nb.qxd 3/24/10 4:31 PM Page 65
Jolle Demmers and Sameer S. Mehendale 65
1 earlier decades. The 1980s, with economic decline and high levels of
unemployment, 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 prove
5 expedient as political mobilizers, and the issue of migration was taken
up formally only by a small nationalist party, the Centre Party (CP),
and carefully kept out of mainstream politics. In those days, racism
was still simply racism, readily countered by the antiracist discourse of
the postwar era. The CP’s bashing of guest workers from Italy and
10 Spain, and later from Turkey and Morocco, was described by most in
the political class as provincial and inferior, something that belonged
to the past. In line with this, the state’s 1980s immigration policies de-
fined integration solely in socioeconomic terms, supporting the idea
of “integration with identity retention.”
15 In the 1980s, migrants had been presented as a threat to the
order 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 has
20 become increasingly sensitive to the drawing and maintaining of iden-
tity boundaries. And since “we” can exist only in relation to “what we
are not,” there is a now-flourishing market for the ritualization and
eviction of the “other”—no matter his or her Rotterdam or Amster-
dam birthplace, no matter how fluent his or her Dutch, and “well-be-
25 haved” his or her manners—which clearly legitimates segregation
and antagonistic group dynamics on the ground.
In the neoliberal era, targeting of minorities has not only become
both socially meaningful and politically functional, it has also
changed form: from racist to culturalist, something that has highly
30 complicated the formulation of a counterargument. The culturalist
defence that “people are equal, cultures are not” or “we are not
against Muslims, we are against Islam” did not have any of the emo-
tionally charged and messy connotations that associated racism with
Holland’s traumatic, Nazi-occupied past.
35 The first mainstream politician advocating this culturalist turn was
the then-leader of the right-wing People’s Party for Freedom and
Democracy (VVD), who in 1991 argued for a “tougher” assimilationist
stance on immigrant integration. The overrepresentation of allochto-
nen in crime statistics and unemployment were no longer to be under-
40 stood as related to their marginalized, underclass position, but instead
were 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.Demmers-nb.qxd 3/24/10 4:31 PM Page 66
66 Neoliberal Xenophobia: The Dutch Case
1 The emerging market of identity politics was now to code inci-
dents of urban violence and criminality committed by young people
of North African, and particularly Moroccan, heritage and reported
instances of the repression and abuse of women as symbols of a clash
5 of cultures (premodern Islamic tribalism versus Western civilization).
Repeatedly, these acts were framed as characteristic of the bounded
community of “Moroccans” (which became the synecdoche for all Is-
lamic allochtonen). By the end of the millennium, any untoward
local incident concerning immigrants (or Dutch-born allochtonen),
10 but in particular “Moroccans,” became national news. Moreover, it
was 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 of
the “real” (meaning autochthon) Dutch—secularism, individualism,
15 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 Butler
20 rather understatedly noted regarding Holland, “So a certain paradox
ensues in which the coerced adoption of certain cultural norms be-
comes a requisite for entry into a polity that defines itself as the avatar
of freedom.”16
Following on the heels of sexual freedom as an instrument of co-
25 ercion and boundary-drawing was the invocation of freedom of
speech, 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 no
means exceptional example. The two stuffed goats placed beside the
30 coffin during van Gogh’s “funeral party,” with the sign “If You Feel
the Urge,” was widely seen as morbid but funny. This combination of
a dead-serious anti-Islam political discourse and a popular culture of
ridicule, accusing Muslims of lacking “resilience” and a “sense of
humor,” now openly displayed the pervasive underlying cultural
35 racism 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 system
that offers no electoral compulsion to bid for the minority vote.17
Although some sectors in the political arena immediately wel-
40 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 watershedDemmers-nb.qxd 3/24/10 4:31 PM Page 67
Jolle Demmers and Sameer S. Mehendale 67
1 essay by a journalist of socialist stock—a somewhat incoherent, mildly
assimilationist piece but with an emblematic title: “The Multicultural
Drama.”18 The essay argued that the integration of immigrants had
failed, that the policy of multiculturalism had locked up migrants in
5 their 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 and
language. Here, finally, discourses on integration from both Left and
Right merged: The similarities between the leftist essay of 2000 and
10 the 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, “failed
integration” was identified as the source of societal malaise in Hol-
land. Multiculturalism’s death rattle echoed in all corners of the pub-
lic domain.
15 This blurring of the political positions of Left and Right, first in
the economic realm and then also on the highly mediatized issue of
minority/immigrant integration, resulted in a kind of cultural-na-
tionalist bidding war, with the new eponymous political party of Pim
Fortuyn leading the way. His populist anti-Islam and antiestablish-
20 ment rhetoric, greatly enhanced by the September 11 events, found
fertile ground among the Dutch electorate: political correctness was
out, Islam-bashing in. The media, needless to say, loved him—he was
automatic ratings. Fortuyn presented a puzzling merger of old antag-
onisms and new style: a former Socialist, part-time academic, a dandy
25 who 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”), who
declared Islam a “backward culture” but didn’t mind sex with Moroc-
can boys. In the polls, his party skyrocketed. Holland seemed to be on
the brink of a new order.
30 A key to Fortuyn’s rapid rise was the incapacity of the old style
politicians 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 it
had caused. The economy was booming, there was no reason to worry,
35 they thought. When it came to issues that fed into the exclusionist
repertoires building up in society, such as the arrival of large numbers
of asylum seekers in the 1990s, they seemed unable or unwilling to
deal with them. Obsessed with enacting the coalition’s mantra, “Work,
Work, Work,” they had no feel for the new depression and needs cre-
40 ated by the neoliberal transformation, leaving all the “gut” issues to
Fortuyn. The week before the elections, Fortuyn was murdered. The
elections went ahead, and his List Pim Fortuyn (LPF) won a stunning
victory of twenty-six seats, which obliged the Christian DemocratsDemmers-nb.qxd 3/24/10 4:31 PM Page 68
68 Neoliberal Xenophobia: The Dutch Case
1 (CDA) and right-wing VVD to form a coalition. But the new party’s
members were a hastily assembled bunch with little real political savvy,
and the “revolution” quickly fizzled out. The government lasted
eighty-six days, and in the following elections the LPF lost most of its
5 voters. “The heritage of Pim,” however, lived on, actively embraced by
a 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 Mohammed
B, each in his own parallel world, drew up their plans of action.
10
“To What Issue Will This Come?”
The murder of van Gogh was telling in many ways. On a political dis-
15 cursive level, it served to definitively secure the new culturalist regime
of truth, paving the way, for example, for a recent heated debate in
the 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
20 “The country is on fire,” “The people are fed up,” and “We must de-
naturalize and deport.” There were even appeals to withdraw troops
from Afghanistan to deploy them against “Moroccans” in Dutch
cities.20 More fundamentally, it informs about how in the atomized
market society the search for new forms of togetherness has trans-
25 lated, in Holland, into a turn to the ethnos, with fantasies of purity
and the moralization of culture and citizenship. Where the neoliberal
project has, largely unnoticed, abolished the collective standards and
solidarities of the post–WWII era, the faces of immigrants have served
as ideal, identifiable flashpoints for new repertoires of belonging and
30 othering.
Neoliberalism may be technically agnostic on matters of culture
and race, but the neoliberal project is well-served by the permanent
construction of an enemy (either within or without) who can satisfy
the otherwise alienated consumer-citizen’s need for inclusion and be-
35 longing. As Horatio said to Marcellus in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “To
what issue will this come?” For the time being, at least, the current
Dutch marriage of convenience between cultural racism and the ne-
oliberal project is certainly not an unhappy one.
40
Notes
1. In recent months, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and
the European Commission have criticized various aspects of Dutch immigra-Demmers-nb.qxd 3/24/10 4:31 PM Page 69
Costas M. Constantinou 69
tion policies as inhumane and discriminatory toward “non-Westerners.”
These punitive, criminalizing practices include the open-ended (some lasting
more than a year) detention of migrant minors, families with children, and
torture victims, in cramped conditions of up to six persons in a cell, with lit-
tle communication with the outside world, and an “integration” process with
costly compulsory exams and a hierarchy of countries of origin, effectively
blocking 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, the
word would be scrotum.
3. This is how the Dutch institutionalization of difference works: You
are either an autochtoon or an allochtoon. An allochtoon is a person living in
the Netherlands who has at least one foreign-born parent. The Central Bu-
reau of Statistics (CBS) makes a distinction between a Western (one might
substitute “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 widely
used, although in everyday parlance only those from the non-Western group
are labeled as allochtonen, and the theoretically nonexistent third generation
of allochtonen is still generally covered by the term (e.g., the City of Rotter-
dam officially speaks of third-generation allochtonen, who are individuals who
have 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 the
CBS, Holland has a total of 850,000 Muslims.
4. Amsterdam itself was something of an exception, where authorities
successfully made use of an inclusionist discourse by strongly playing on a
shared identification with the city of Amsterdam.
5. The translations here and below stay as close as possible to the text
as 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 not
the 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 the
right, 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 for
the Social Democratic Labour Party, watch the programs of the VARA, read
the Vrije Volk, and send your children to a state university.
12. This shift from pillar to welfarist state was both symbolized and sig-Demmers-nb.qxd 3/24/10 4:31 PM Page 70
nificantly reinforced by the establishment of the NOS (Dutch Broadcasting
Institute), 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 her
own political “movement,” TON (Proud of Holland), which will take part in
the 2010 elections.
15. It is important to point out differences between the high level of such
symbolism in national politics and the practical, depolarizing approaches of
local authorities. A case in point is the latest controversy between the national
leader of the Labour Party and the Labour mayor of Amsterdam, the latter
allowing his “street coaches” to not shake hands with members of the oppo-
site sex because of (Islamic) religious mores. The national leader loudly
protested stating that “in this country, the handshake is the norm,” conve-
niently forgetting that the country’s chief rabbi had refused to shake hands
with women from time immemorial (a fact nobody ever politicized).
16. Judith Butler, “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time,” British
Journal 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 allochtoon
minority 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.You can also read
