International Herald Tribune – Politicus: Nudging to consensus over Dutch Muslims
Politicus: Nudging to consensus over Dutch Muslims – Europe – International Herald Tribune
John Vinocur / International Herald Tribune
AMSTERDAM: The Dutch don’t talk about a victory because the word doesn’t really fit. But theirs is an accomplishment of some significance, because after years of rage and murder, they have reached what is pretty much a consensus about the integration of the Muslim immigrants in their midst.
It is a strange mark of an obviously fragile success, but the issues of integration and immigration just won’t play a big role when the country votes in national elections on Wednesday. Call it an achievement, all the same.
This is because, before the voting, the Dutch already have a measure of real results in two areas where much of Europe remains tortured: clarity in dealing with its Muslim population, and achieving economic growth through difficult reforms.
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Could the Dutch have “polderized,” or nudged, the immigration and integration issue to a consensual middle- ground? Yes, says Victor Halberstadt, a Leiden University professor of economics, who served for 16 terms as the ranking member of the Social and Economic Council advising the Polder Model’s consultation process.
International Herald Tribune
Politicus: Nudging to consensus over Dutch Muslims
by John Vinocur
The Dutch don’t talk about a victory because the word doesn’t really fit. But theirs is an accomplishment of some significance, because after years of rage and murder, they have reached what is pretty much a consensus about the integration of the Muslim immigrants in their midst.
It is a strange mark of an obviously fragile success, but the issues of integration and immigration just won’t play a big role when the country votes in national elections on Wednesday. Call it an achievement, all the same.
This is because, before the voting, the Dutch already have a measure of real results in two areas where much of Europe remains tortured: clarity in dealing with its Muslim population, and achieving economic growth through difficult reforms.
In France, five months from presidential elections, an affirmative action program for immigrants remains a conflictual issue, while masses of young demonstrators this past spring forced the government to back off a major job-market modernization. Last week, Britain’s internal intelligence chief described the homegrown Islamic fundamentalist scene as counting 200 cells and 1,600 militants involved in about 30 potential terrorist plots.
But here, NIPO, the biggest Dutch public opinion researcher, reports that Muslim integration is a more or less important issue for just 24 percent of the voters; only 4 percent consider it the main election theme.
For those who argue that the Islam issue has been swept under the carpet in a national flight from reality, the Dutch government agreed without vast controversy Friday on legislation that would ban the wearing in public places of “face-covering clothing,” including the head-to-toe burka worn by some Muslim women. The news was not at all uniform Page 1 stuff in the weekend press.
And this in a country whose sense of tolerance is a historical fact rather than a cliché, but whose sense of self- identity clashed with the hardest edge of its Muslim population earlier, and in a more articulated manner, than that of any other country in Europe.
In the period since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, the Netherlands has lived through a populist revolt against the problems of Islamic immigration led by Pim Fortuyn, later murdered by an animal rights activist; the murder of the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, accused of blasphemy by a homegrown Muslim fundamentalist killer; and the bitter departure from the Netherlands of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali woman who became a member of Parliament before being marked for death for her criticism of radical Islam.
Over the same period, the Dutch paradigm on the integration of its Arab and Turkish immigrant population (about 6 percent of a total of 16 million) has gone from one of accommodation to an emphasis on requiring compatibility from resident Muslims.
The swing has been away from multicultural concessions to obligations that reject seemingly parallel societies. The basis for living here has been defined as accepting the primacy of the Constitution, practical standards of engagement in society such as Dutch language competence, European notions relating to women’s rights or homosexuality, and the plain old cohesive value of work.
The changes include speaking openly about Muslims in the Netherlands who neither condemn nor challenge the harsh and violent ways of Islamic fundamentalists and fundamentalist regimes.
Clearly these days, the what-to-do- about-the-Muslims question here has lost some of its old heat. The issue is less a voter preoccupation now because it has been redefined to reflect the concerns of the majority.
The explanation for how this happened may be exclusively Dutch. Because most of the major political parties realized the legitimate grip on voters of Fortuyn’s success in talking about how the Dutch would not accept a loss of their identity and ethos – an issue with a sequel in the Dutch rejection last year of a European Union constitution – the parties turned their approach to insisting on demands for Muslims’ compatibility and tighter immigration controls.
Remco Frerichs, who researches voter attitudes for NIPO, said both the incumbent Christian Democrats, who polls say will have the most seats in the new Parliament, and the opposition Labor Party, traditionally the leader of the left, “have successfully incorporated these themes and removed them as taboos.”
“Labor has come to say things about Islam’s place in the Netherlands that you absolutely could not have imagined four years ago,” Frerichs said.
This means a kind of consensus that includes acknowledgment that much more democracy is needed in the hiring and the education of Muslims.
The uniquely Dutch aspect is that the process has been in the tradition of a system of institutionalized consensus formation called the Netherlands’ Polder Model, which has stood as a distant goal in more ideologically divided countries like Germany, France and Italy.
The calm of the moment has also been bolstered by the fact that a set of tough, parallel reforms in the Dutch economy (of a kind Germany and France still shy from) are resulting in a growth rate of 2.8 percent and unemployment around 5 percent – strong numbers in European terms.
Could the Dutch have “polderized,” or nudged, the immigration and integration issue to a consensual middle- ground? Yes, says Victor Halberstadt, a Leiden University professor of economics, who served for 16 terms as the ranking member of the Social and Economic Council advising the Polder Model’s consultation process.
Here’s where the cautions come in about the Dutch experience serving as a model for anyone else.
Both Frits Bolkestein, the former European Commission member who began writing in the early 1990s about Islam as a challenge for Europe, and Halberstadt emphasize that the Dutch are weary of confrontation. Halberstadt says that the present consensus reflects a current Dutch “satisfaction with perceptions, and not wanting to spend passion on issues.”
For Bolkestein, integrating Islam “remains Europe’s most serious problem.” He believes the Dutch are not really going to come to final terms with it until there is a constitutional amendment ending religious schooling. “Divided schooling leads to a divided country,” he says.
Still, in ranking buying power, affordable health care, and better education as the central issues in the election Wednesday, voters in the Netherlands seem to be saying that something has been accomplished here in relation to the integration of Muslim immigrants. If it’s an illusory respite, the Dutch will be the first to know.
E-mail: pagetwo@iht.com
Tomorrow: Roger Cohen on the end of the unipolar world.
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