Netherlands: working together to fight radicalization

Europe lags behind the United States in its ability to craft a multiethnic society, to turn newcomers into citizens. European countries, by this reckoning, are prisoners of their old racial or nationalistic identities. And the Netherlands has of late been a particular example of this; its right-wing, anti-immigrant standard-bearer, the golden-maned Geert Wilders, has steadily gained support since he formed his Freedom Party for the 2006 parliamentary elections. Earlier this year, Wilders’s party was leading in the polls. In municipal elections in early March, his party, riding on his virulent anti-Muslim rhetoric, won the city of Almere and came in second in The Hague itself — the seat of the Dutch government and home of the International Criminal Court. On a protest-filled visit to London afterward, Wilders — who is facing trial in a Dutch court for inciting hatred — boasted of becoming the next prime minister.

When, in 2007, Wilders called for the Koran to be banned in the country, it caused outrage, but at the same time his underlying message — that, as he has declared, “we are heading for the end of European and Dutch civilization as we know it” — reflected a widespread feeling that the country’s way of handling immigration was a disaster.

That way, in a word, was multiculturalism, the reigning dogma of the Dutch left in the 1980s and 1990s. By its logic, the government, far from insisting that newcomers integrate, actually provided money so that immigrant communities could keep up the traditions and language of their homelands, maintaining little Moroccos and Turkeys within the Dutch borders, largely disconnected from the wider society. If multiculturalism had failed, did Wilders represent the only alternative?