Them and us in liberal Dutch society

Toby Vogel asks how it was that one of the EU’s most liberal societies began to question multiculturalism.

In the space of just a few months in late 2001, Dutch politics was turned upside down by Pim Fortuyn, a flamboyant gay columnist and former sociology professor. His assassination in May 2002, days before a general election that could have made him prime minister, was perhaps less astounding than the shockwaves that it sent across the Netherlands and the entire continent, suggesting that Fortuyn was quite possibly the most divisive politician western Europe had seen in decades. What made his message so explosive was not so much that it was anti-immigrant; many other European politicians - just think of Jörg Haider, whose party had entered government in Austria just a year earlier - had also found electoral success on the back of anti-immigration sentiment. What set Fortuyn apart was his attack on immigration and the policy of multiculturalism from a liberal perspective. By force of personality but also with arguments to back him up, he redefined the very terms of the debate on immigration and multiculturalism and forced an examination of the unspoken assumptions on which public debate and policymaking rested across western Europe. Indeed, as Sniderman and Hagendoorn write in this exceptional book: "Fortuyn was the first to turn the moral tables in the argument over multiculturalism."

The principle of multiculturalism was adopted by policymakers in previous decades not because they thought it was popular - it was not - but because they believed that it was the right thing to do in the face of an unprecedented cultural diversity created by immigration across western Europe. (The other main reaction was to pretend, as did Europe’s German-speaking countries, that immigration was temporary and demanded no particular policies.) Hence, from its very inception the politics of multiculturalism operated top-down, not bottom-up; mainstream parties on the left and right refrained from questioning the principle that the distinctive identities of minorities needed special protection and support and kept it off the public agenda. (A similar mechanism was at work in the countries which operated guest-worker programmes. Here, the debating ban concerned not multiculturalism but immigration.)

But multiculturalism with its accentuation of difference has produced a number of paradoxical effects, and nowhere are they more apparent than in the Netherlands. The Dutch state operates the most ambitious programme of multiculturalism in Europe outside the UK, with its separate systems of education (in children’s native languages), public housing and welfare for immigrant minorities.

The most striking outcome is that immigrants to the Netherlands are worse off relative to the native population than immigrants in other major European countries. At the same time, the principle of preserving separate identities has sharpened conflict over values such as the separation of religion and politics; the role of women in public and social life; and the relative merits of individualism and family solidarity. These differences are especially acute when immigrants come from conservative, rural backgrounds (often Muslim) and bring few skills to their new countries.

The agenda-setting of mainstream parties created an opening for anyone prepared to break through the boundaries of acceptable discourse. In fact, it created an incentive for a new political and social discourse to emerge, and to capture voters. Where Haider et al could be dismissed as racists - which they are/were - and tended to galvanise core constituencies of xenophobes, the label of racist did not stick to Fortuyn, who managed to mobilise a larger set of voters. He attacked immigrants because they questioned, or indeed threatened, his way of life, a way of life that was possibly seen as abhorrent by the Haider types. "Bringing considerations of collective identity to the fore enlarges the coalition opposed to immigration - above and beyond those already predisposed to oppose it. And the people who are brought into the coalition tend to be among the most educated and have the highest occupation status," write Sniderman and Hagendoorn. "It is the responsiveness of those who ordinarily do not view their national identity as important that helps explain, we believe, the ‘flash’ potential of identity politics."

Sniderman and Hagendoorn, who teach at Stanford and Utrecht, respectively, have written that rarest of books - built on solid empirical investigation and sophisticated theoretical models, it is nonetheless highly readable and makes important, if subtle, points. (Shortcuts can be taken. The key findings of the empirical chapters and their statistical analysis are aptly summarised in the last chapter, and the lay person will not miss much.) When Ways of Life Collide is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of multiculturalism and immigration - in fact, of contemporary society and politics in western Europe more generally.

• When ways of life collide: multiculturalism and its discontents in the Netherlands. By Paul M. Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn. Princeton University Press. 176 pages. €21.99

Toby Vogel asks how it was that one of the EU’s most liberal societies began to question multiculturalism.