"But the most visible expression of Dutch wealth is the Dutch body. Over the last century the Dutch have shot up by an average of 20cm to become the world's tallest people."
"The most stressful change in the postwar Netherlands was mass immigration. In the early 1960s there were still only a few hundred Turks and Moroccans in an almost all-white nation. Then foreign "guest workers" were recruited. They were given brooms, hardhats and a ghetto apartment and put to work. Nobody bothered teaching them Dutch. Later their families followed. Growing up in Leiden in the 1970s and 1980s I never met a Dutch Turk or Moroccan. Now about 10 per cent of the Dutch population is non-white, higher than the approximately 8 per cent in Britain.. Yet racist politics were slow to take off.'
"In 1900 the Netherlands had 5 million inhabitants, fewer than Belgium, Portugal or Austria. In the next century the Dutch population more than trebled, thanks to wealth, relative peace, the procreation race between Dutch Protestants and Catholics, and immigration. It's the sort of growth-rate you would expect in a developing country. Today the Netherlands has 16.4 million inhabitants, 6 million more than Belgium or Portugal and twice as many as Austria. The Netherlands now averages 395 inhabitants per square kilometre, 152 more than the UK.Misuse of land increased Dutch claustrophobia. Farming now produces less than 5 per cent of Dutch GDP. Yet in 2000, farms still occupied two-thirds of the country's territory. The remaining third was crammed with people... This created a nostalgia for a lost Dutch landscape, felt by everyone who remembers the emptier country of a few decades ago."
"Fortuyn's anger at Muslims, at the European Union, and at the Netherlands' technocratic rulers, appealed particularly to less- educated voters. He thus introduced class struggle to a country previously so homogeneous that it had boasted of having "the poorest rich and richest poor" in the world. Bos told me a divide arose between the educated class and the common man. "Because intellectuals thought positively about Europe and the common man didn't like that. Because intellectuals said migration enriched society, and the common man was faced with the downsides of it."
"But in bigger ways too, Bos is a new Dutch politician: like Blair, he has got his party listening to voters. In another country this would be a platitude. But in the Netherlands it is a new idea. Here technocrats used to lead, and voters trusted them. Populism didn't exist. Bos - like most successful Dutch politicians today - learned it from Fortuyn. Dutch populism chiefly means being tough on immigrants. As Bos phrases it: "You have to ask whether it's solidarity to let people in who have no real chance of succeeding in your country because they are so far behind."... Bos says nice things about immigrants too, but no previous Dutch Labour leader ever said anything so sharp...Dutch anti-immigration extremists have been marginalised precisely because mainstream types like Bos have adopted much of their message...The new Dutch populism will be more rule-bound, more respectable, less hysterical than Verdonk's version. It will probably make the Netherlands more democratic. But it will also bury Dutch exceptionalism. The Dutch used to see their polity as uniquely liberal and tolerant. Now, after Fortuyn, it is a grubbier, sadder, less hopeful place, no longer a guide-land.
==
Gone Dutch
By Simon Kuper
Published: August 26 2006 03:00 | Last updated: August 26 2006 03:00
The Dutch national identity crisis of the past five years has featured several characters straight out of pantomime. First, around the time of the September 11 attacks in 2001, came Pim Fortuyn, a giant gay anti-immigrant politician in tailored Italian suits; later Theo van Gogh, a foul-mouthed filmmaker descended from Vincent van Gogh's brother; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a beautiful former Somali asylum-seeker who with Van Gogh made a silly little film against Islam. Fortuyn and Van Gogh were murdered, while Hirsi Ali has sought exile in the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in Washington.
The latest cartoon character to bestride Dutch politics is the country's minister for integration, Rita Verdonk. Once a far-left member of the "Union for Lawbreakers", later a prison governor, "Iron Rita" is possibly the toughest anti-immigrant politician in any European cabinet. At 5.30am one day in June, a disagreement involving her and Hirsi Ali brought down the Netherlands' centre- right coalition government. On November 22 this once placid country will experience its third election in under five years.
I wrote a book (Retourtjes Nederland - "Return Tickets to the Netherlands") to try to understand how the Dutch had changed. I had arrived in Leiden as a six-year-old immigrant in 1976, and stayed for 10 years, but after Fortuyn's murder in 2002 I could no longer recognise the country where I grew up. On visits nowadays, I often feel like a time-traveller from the 1980s. Recently I was stuck in a traffic jam in The Hague on a Sunday morning. I experienced a sequence of shocks: a traffic jam on a Sunday! Look, a hairdresser that's open on Sunday! The hairdresser is called "Istanbul!"
My research for the book showed me that in recent decades the Netherlands had undergone a transformation of a magnitude rare in western Europe. Fortuyn and the other pantomime characters were merely symptoms of this transformation.
Before September 11 2001 it had been hard to find a quieter and happier place than the Netherlands. "When the world ends I'll go to Holland, because there everything happens 20 years later," the German poet Heinrich Heine supposedly said, though no one can find the reference. After the 17th century the Dutch experienced a long holiday from history. They escaped civil wars, revolutions, the first world war and communism. With little to complain about, there were almost no Dutch political extremists. Even the country's National Socialists of the 1930s were relatively moderate and non- violent.
The archetypal story from Dutch history concerns the Trotskyist politician Henk Sneevliet, who in the early 1930s got into trouble with Stalinists. "The attacks were not limited to words," writes the historian Chris van der Heijden. "A communist gang waited for Sneevliet after a public meeting in Rotterdam in March 1931. He reached the train station only under guard." And then, darkly: "It wasn't the only time such a thing happened to him." At the same time Stalin was slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Trotskyists in the USSR and there were street battles in Weimar Germany.
History caught up with the Netherlands only when the Germans invaded in 1940. Three-quarters of Dutch Jews - about 100,000 people - were killed in the Holocaust. Altogether the Netherlands lost 200,000 people in 20th-century conflicts: a ghastly massacre, except when compared with practically any other country. Dutch gentiles have had three fairly placid centuries.
Ruled by boring technocrats, the Netherlands grew rich fast after the second world war. The discovery of large gas reserves helped. A country of poor pious farmers became a country of part-time office workers in new suburbs. On measures such as average income, education, longevity or use of internet, the Netherlands made the top 10 of most international league tables. But the most visible expression of Dutch wealth is the Dutch body. Over the last century the Dutch have shot up by an average of 20cm to become the world's tallest people.
The average Dutchman now stands 1.85 metres (6ft 1in) tall, and women 1.71 metres (5ft 7in). My classmates were raised on a regime of brown bread, dairy infusions and inoculations, in a climate where everyone of normal physique was in danger of being blown straight into the North Sea. My nickname at primary school was Mini Kuper, after the popular car of the time.
Worse, the Dutch keep getting bigger, as if in a horror movie. One of the scariest sights in modern Europe is a Dutch school playground at break-time. The national transformation is embodied by a friend of mine, a 1.99-metre tall London correspondent of a Dutch financial newspaper, whose great-grandparents were photographed in National Geographic magazine as typical Dutch cheese-farmers in 1954.
By 2001, anyone comparing the contemporary Netherlands with all societies that had ever existed had to conclude that it was doing well. Wim Kok, prime minister from 1994 until 2002, once rightly suggested in parliament that given all the good news they'd had, they might do the Mexican wave. Yet the populist uprising begun by Fortuyn had already been a long time brewing.
The most stressful change in the postwar Netherlands was mass immigration. In the early 1960s there were still only a few hundred Turks and Moroccans in an almost all-white nation. Then foreign "guest workers" were recruited. They were given brooms, hardhats and a ghetto apartment and put to work. Nobody bothered teaching them Dutch. Later their families followed. Growing up in Leiden in the 1970s and 1980s I never met a Dutch Turk or Moroccan. Now about 10 per cent of the Dutch population is non-white, higher than the approximately 8 per cent in Britain.
Yet racist politics were slow to take off. Politicians treated immigration as a taboo topic. In part, this was because of the memory of the Holocaust, and the Dutch failure to save their Jews. Wouter Bos, the leader of the country's Labour party and the most likely next prime minister, told me that whenever a Dutch politician raised problems of integration, "others evoked the memory of the second world war. There was such an enormous feeling of guilt about our own failure in the war that the discussion was immediately stopped".
But by 2001 the war was sufficiently long ago that Fortuyn could attack Muslims without being depicted as a new Hitler. He was a funny speaker, with a touch of Oscar Wilde about him - not like the technocrats. Fortuyn also introduced messianism into Dutch politics: the idea that you could create the perfect society, without traffic jams or hospital waiting lists or un-Dutch thoughts. The existing society could only be a disappointment after that.
The September 11 attacks on the US launched his brand of anti- Muslim populism. Fortuyn's description of Islam as "a backward religion" appealed to many voters. But his best work was his slogan "the Netherlands is full." Much of the turmoil of the past five years has happened because the Netherlands is one of the world's most densely populated countries.
In 1900 the Netherlands had 5 million inhabitants, fewer than Belgium, Portugal or Austria. In the next century the Dutch population more than trebled, thanks to wealth, relative peace, the procreation race between Dutch Protestants and Catholics, and immigration. It's the sort of growth-rate you would expect in a developing country. Today the Netherlands has 16.4 million inhabitants, 6 million more than Belgium or Portugal and twice as many as Austria. The Netherlands now averages 395 inhabitants per square kilometre, 152 more than the UK.
Misuse of land increased Dutch claustrophobia. Farming now produces less than 5 per cent of Dutch GDP. Yet in 2000, farms still occupied two-thirds of the country's territory. The remaining third was crammed with people. This created a nostalgia for a lost Dutch landscape, felt by everyone who remembers the emptier country of a few decades ago. The field behind my house in Leiden, to cite one tiny example, no longer exists. This nostalgia was shared by Fortuyn, by the green activist who murdered him, and by Fortuyn's voters, who demanded to live in a country without traffic jams. On May 15 2002, nine days after he was shot, his party won 18 per cent of the vote in parliamentary elections. Dutch anti-immigration fever is the consequence of too many people in too small a space.
Fortuyn's anger at Muslims, at the European Union, and at the Netherlands' technocratic rulers, appealed particularly to less- educated voters. He thus introduced class struggle to a country previously so homogeneous that it had boasted of having "the poorest rich and richest poor" in the world. Bos told me a divide arose between the educated class and the common man. "Because intellectuals thought positively about Europe and the common man didn't like that. Because intellectuals said migration enriched society, and the common man was faced with the downsides of it."
Fortuyn's murder was a bigger shock than it would have been in Germany, Britain, Italy or even Sweden, countries that are used to political murders. No Dutch politician had been killed since a mob lynched the De Witt brothers in 1672. (A thumb and tongue remain on display in the Hague Historical Museum.)
For centuries the Netherlands had little experience of extremism and violence. After Fortuyn's death it still had little experience, but it now lived in fear. Then, in November 2004, Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death by the Islamic fundamentalist Mohammed Bouyeri for having made his anti-Islamic film. Panic erupted nationwide. The murder was described as a "Dutch September 11", even though it wasn't exactly comparable in scale, and hadn't been committed by a wealthy international terrorist organisation.
Dutch thugs mourned Van Gogh by burning mosques and Islamic schools. A cabinet minister said the Netherlands was "at war". Many Dutch people felt that their holiday from history had ended.
Old Fortuyn quotes, once shocking, became mainstream. Gerrit Zalm, deputy prime minister, said "the Netherlands is full", while Geert Wilders, an MP who founded an anti-immigrant party, said Islam was backward. But the chief heir to Fortuyn's revolution became Rita Verdonk. She is that rare thing in the Netherlands, a nationalist politician, who said that for immigrants becoming Dutch was "first prize".
Verdonk decided that the problem with the Netherlands was that the local Muslims were not Dutch enough. She wanted to make them pass integration courses, or to send them "home" if they committed crimes. People who passed the courses and became citizens would then have to sing the first stanza of the Dutch national anthem. This features the surprisingly unpatriotic lines "I am / of German blood" and "The King of Spain I have always honoured", but Verdonk prefers to emphasise the phrase "loyal to the fatherland".
She once suggested immigrants be given "vignettes" to gauge how well they had integrated. It was unclear what she meant by this - whether there should be a physical mark, such as a tag or passport stamp, or some invisible grading system. She dropped the idea after Hans Dijkstal, former leader of her "liberal" rightwing VVD party, said he was reminded of the Nazis' yellow star for Jews.
Verdonk then focused on developing her integration courses for those born outside the Netherlands. One retired professor of foreign origin, receiving a letter instructing him to take such a course, corrected the spelling mistakes and posted it back. Nor would the courses have helped Bouyeri, who was arrested carrying a poem of his own composition in rhyming Dutch.
Like the original "Iron Lady", Margaret Thatcher, "Iron Rita" prided herself on knowing her own mind. In the Dutch phrase, she was "straight through the sea". No multiculturalist, she scolded an imam who refused to shake her hand because she was a woman. But despite her mantra that "rules are rules", many of her proposals turned out to be illegal: Dutch law does not allow special treatment for members of certain ethnic groups. It is therefore illegal, for instance, to send Dutch citizens who happen to be of Moroccan origin on integration courses, or to Morocco if they commit a crime. The collapse of most of Verdonk's plans left her relying chiefly on words. When a Muslim teenager was knocked over and killed by a car after stealing its driver's handbag, Verdonk said: "If that boy hadn't stolen that bag, he'd still be riding around on his scooter."
Technocratic MPs didn't like Verdonk's habit of appearing on television to reveal personal details from some deported asylum- seeker's file. They were angry when Syria and Congo got information about asylum-seekers whom Verdonk was returning to these dictatorships. They didn't like Verdonk's intention to send gay and Christian asylum-seekers back to Iran. (If her definition of modern "Dutchness" didn't include protecting gays and Christians from an Islamic theocracy, it was unclear what it meant.) Dijkstal compared Verdonk to the extremists Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Belgium's Filip Dewinter.
One day this spring Verdonk saw a television programme about Hirsi Ali. The programme made the familiar point that the country's most celebrated immigrant had given a false name when applying to stay in the Netherlands. This was apparently news to Verdonk. She immediately announced that Hirsi Ali should lose her passport.
Parliament's anger with Verdonk boiled over, as MPs rallied behind their favourite asylum-seeker. Hirsi Ali wrote an open letter apologising for her sins. It said of Verdonk: "I completely understand that she acted as she did." Verdonk then said Hirsi Ali could keep her passport.
The government might have survived, had the weary Christian Democratic prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende not let slip in parliament during a late-night debate that Hirsi Ali's apology to Verdonk was necessary. This confirmed a rumour being fed by Hirsi Ali herself, that she had done a deal with Verdonk: an apology for a passport. The technocrats were outraged. The little D66 liberal party left the coalition government in protest at Verdonk. The government fell. Today Iron Rita remains in the minority centre- right "rump cabinet" as it heads for the elections. So far she has survived three parliamentary motions of no confidence.
Verdonk is partly responsible for a new Dutch despair over the country's image abroad. The country used to see itself as a light unto nations, the ideal democracy. In Dutch debates on foreign policy, it was common to use the phrase "Netherlands guide-land". For decades, few foreigners paid much attention. But in the past five years, Dutch politics suddenly became international news. Fortuyn, Van Gogh and Hirsi Ali were ideal characters for foreign media, because each could be captured in a sentence: Fortuyn was gay, Van Gogh possessed a legendary name, and both were slain horribly. The "banishment" of the beautiful Hirsi Ali got into papers everywhere.
The Dutch are big consumers of foreign media, and ravenous for their own rare appearances in them. The past five years have brought much embarrassment. When George W. Bush made a speech last year in Brussels, for instance, he mentioned the domestic situation of only one European country: the Netherlands, which he said was suffering from violence.
The Hirsi Ali affair particularly embarrassed the Dutch. Some American media suggested that she was being banished because her attacks on Islam frightened the weak-kneed Dutch. This was quite wrong. Her attacks on Islam were popular in the Fortuynist Netherlands. And the minister who threatened to take away her passport ("shamefully", wrote The New Yorker) not only seemed to share her views of Islam, but was also the political representative on earth of Fortuyn, first prophet of these views.
Nonetheless, the Verdonk-Hirsi Ali affair made the Dutch look both cowardly and anti-immigrant. Balkenende ordered Dutch ambassadors to write to foreign newspapers explaining the true facts of the case. It's questionable whether this restored the Dutch image abroad, because almost immediately afterwards the next Dutch story broke in the foreign media: a new "paedo-party" called for the legalisation of sex with 12-year-olds.
When I asked the Labour leader Bos whether the Dutch image had worsened, he said: "I notice it, and I think it's a shame, because in the end you have less influence. It's not at all 'the Netherlands guide-land' that we always thought we were."
At least the Dutch establishment avoided the ultimate embarrassment: in May Verdonk narrowly failed to become leader of the hitherto respectable VVD party. She lost the internal election to Mark Rutte, despite getting 45 per cent of the vote. Now the VVD is again so respectable that Ben Verwaayen, the Dutch chief executive of British Telecom, is in charge of writing its election manifesto.
Amid the political mess, the Netherlands has regained much of the placid happiness that prevailed before 2001. The economy is growing again after an unusual period of stagnation and recession. Everywhere normality is returning. The site of Van Gogh's murder on a busy Amsterdam shopping street was once a shrine of flowers and letters, but this spring I searched in vain for the spot.
Perhaps best of all, the Netherlands is already becoming less full. The solution turned out to be getting rid of the farmers instead of the immigrants. Dutch farmland is fast being returned to nature, or to the real-estate developers. Agriculture now takes up just 54 per cent of Dutch territory, and its share keeps falling. New homes and parks are going up where cows recently grazed. Sietse van der Hoek, author of a book on "the last Dutch farmers", writes that "the Netherlands will shortly be a de-farmed nation, and a whole new history for the Low Countries will commence." The population explosion is over; the transformation of the national landscape has begun. By mid-century the Dutch may hardly feel claustrophobic at all.
European Commission Eurobarometer polls of public opinion this summer showed levels of Dutch contentment consistent with a whole nation being on Prozac. Ninety-five per cent of those polled said they were happy with their lives. They were more confident than most Europeans about their economic future, showed above-average faith in their politicians, and only 19 per cent named terrorism as a key issue facing the country. A year after the Netherlands voted "no" in a referendum on the European constitution, 74 per cent of Dutch people said membership of the EU was a good thing. Only the Irish were more positive among EU member-states.
In this climate, the Netherlands' most obsessive anti-immigration politicians are vanishing. Their messianism and untechnocratic "can-do" spirit had failed to get rid of traffic jams or immigrants. The Armageddon they predicted has yet to materialise: old ladies still cycle down Dutch high streets. Fortuyn's LPF party has imploded and will probably disappear from parliament at the November elections, though Fortuyn's own name remains such a valuable brand that the LPF is disputing its use with a rival party.
Politicians who bang on about immigrants a la Verdonk - appealing to "abdominal feelings", as the Dutch call it - are now considered slightly tasteless. The coming election, like most previous Dutch elections, will be fought chiefly over minor adjustments to the elaborate welfare safety net. The election's main peculiarity is that it might result in the ousting of the sitting prime minister, Balkenende. So great is Dutch contentment that no premier has been voted out of office since 1973. There have been communist dictatorships that offered less job security. In November, however, Labour is predicted to triumph. Balkenende, a devout Protestant throwback to the Dutch 1950s with a Harry Potter hairstyle, is not helped by his total lack of charisma.
Whoever wins the election, the Netherlands will never again be quite the same place it was on September 10 2001. I realised this when I interviewed Bos last year at an international retreat for Social Democrats in Surrey. The fresh-faced, informal yet earnest 43-year-old is strangely reminiscent of the fresh-faced, informal yet earnest 43-year-old Tony Blair who moved into Downing Street in 1997. Like Blair, Bos is well-educated: he completed two degrees with distinctions, quotes the latest sociological studies, and spent nine years working for Shell. It's a typical Dutch technocrat's CV, with the requisite modern twists: Bos tries to keep Fridays free of work so that he can be a stay-at-home father to his two children. He doesn't wear a tie, and immediately suggests to me that we address each other with the familiar "jij", the Dutch equivalent of the French "tu".
But in bigger ways too, Bos is a new Dutch politician: like Blair, he has got his party listening to voters. In another country this would be a platitude. But in the Netherlands it is a new idea. Here technocrats used to lead, and voters trusted them. Populism didn't exist. Bos - like most successful Dutch politicians today - learned it from Fortuyn. Dutch populism chiefly means being tough on immigrants. As Bos phrases it: "You have to ask whether it's solidarity to let people in who have no real chance of succeeding in your country because they are so far behind."
Bos says nice things about immigrants too, but no previous Dutch Labour leader ever said anything so sharp. He had come to Surrey to persuade Social Democrats from around Europe that the left must take traditional rightwing issues like immigration and Euroscepticism seriously. Bos explained to me that one big divide in Europe was between countries that had experienced a rightwing populist movement and those that hadn't. In countries with populism - notably Denmark, Austria and the Netherlands - the left had learned how easily it could lose voters to people like Fortuyn. Bos said it "worries me a bit" that the left in Britain and Germany hadn't realised this yet. Dutch anti-immigration extremists have been marginalised precisely because mainstream types like Bos have adopted much of their message.
The new Dutch populism will be more rule-bound, more respectable, less hysterical than Verdonk's version. It will probably make the Netherlands more democratic. But it will also bury Dutch exceptionalism. The Dutch used to see their polity as uniquely liberal and tolerant. Now, after Fortuyn, it is a grubbier, sadder, less hopeful place, no longer a guide-land.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Great...
But to call Ayaan Hirsi, a somali beauty is abnormal unless you want us somalis to believe "beauty lies in the eyes of beholder"...
Then, you know very little of Ayaan Hirsi...She herself got dutch citizenship through "mercy" lying that she was forced to marry someone...but read my blog...I am one person who comes from the same place as her..and I know she meant to decieve you..
Posted by: Ibraheem | August 29, 2006 at 02:06 AM