Turning Point Pim Fortuyn series – Pim Fortuyn and the racialization of Dutch Muslims: Introduction
It’s about six thirty. I’m sitting in the station restaurant drinking a cup of coffee. Just a moment ago, while I was at the cash register, T. called me: ‘Hey buddy, I think Fortuyn is dead. They killed him. He was on the radio and then they killed him. I just hope it’s not an “allochtoon” man, because then all hell breaks loose.’ I flip through the newspaper and drink my coffee, because otherwise I don’t know what to do now. I see others, including some older Moroccan-Dutch men, startled when they get the same news. Some are busy arguing with each other and others stare blankly in front of them.
Logbook Gouda, 6 May 2002
The above excerpt comes from my logbook that I kept for my research (2000-2005) into the religious identity and religious experience of Moroccan-Dutch Muslim boys and girls in Gouda. The assassination of the Dutch populist leader Pim Fortuyn on 6 May 2002 was the nadir of a turbulent election period, and the comment of one of my closest friends perfectly reflected the fears of many. If the murder were committed by an ‘immigrant’, it would be more disruptive to society than if the perpetrator could be identified as a native. The next day, many Moroccan-Dutch parents told me that they had been keeping their children at home in the evening, because they were afraid that something would happen to them. Although nothing happened, the fear was not entirely incomprehensible. Many parents already had the idea their presence in the NEtherlands was conditional; if a Moroccan Dutchman did ‘something bad’, they could be deported. This fear was reinforced after several incidents that took place after 9/11, in which mosques were attacked, windows from the houses of Turkish Dutch people were smashed and there were reports of young boys and girls being physically attacked. Many boys in Gouda told me the day after the murder that they had indeed stayed at home. However, a few had just taken to the streets to ‘bully’ people and ‘challenge them a bit’, for example by shouting ‘Fortuyn, Fortuyn’ loudly.
In my research on Muslim interventions in the public domain, I pay attention to the historical shift in debates and policies towards Muslims. I look at, among other things, how the idea that Muslims have become the ultimate Other has emerged and how important divisions in society are constructed, legitimized and reproduced. Now 20 years after the killing of Fortuyn, I reflect on Fortuyns place in the Othering of Muslims. In a series of posts based upon my Dutch essay of five years ago, I look at how Fortuyn reproduced the idea of Muslims as the ultimate Other and how his ideas were both a break with and a continuation from earlier periods. I do this on the basis of an analysis of his book (Against) The Islamization of our culture, my previous research in Gouda and my current research into interventions by Muslims in the public domain.
Introducing Fortuyn
Fortuyn was born on 19 February 1948 in 1948 in Velsen, a town in north Holland. With his many siblings he came from a middle class, according to others conservative, middle-class, Roman Catholic family. In 1967 he went to the Free University in Amsterdam to study sociology and became active in leftwing politics. In 1980 he defended his PhD at Groningen University on socio-economic development in the Netherlands from 1945 to 1949. He was very much into Marxist sociology and joined the Dutch Labour party.
After several research positions, he worked at the social sciences department at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. He became somewhat notorious because of “Fortuyn’s Law”; wherever he worked, he left in controversy, bitterness and animosity. He left Erasmus University in 1995. At the time he was already a columnist for the Elsevier magazine and had slowly but gradually shifted towards the neoliberal right. In 1997 he published a little book Against The Islamization Of Our Culture; re-issued in 2002 as The Islamization Of Our Culture.
Fortuyn was known for his flamboyant style: he was always accompanied by his King Charles spaniels, Kenneth and Carla, had a butler and a Daimler car with a chauffeur. In 2001, shortly before 9/11 Fortuyn called for a cold war against Islam. Shortly after 9/11 he announced his plans to run for the elections and his ambitions to become the new Prime Minister. Until then, the idea was, with PM Kok stepping down, social democrats, Christian democrats or conservative liberals would head the new coalition after the elections in 2002. But already the local elections early 2002, were a major victory for Fortuyn who openly and proudly celebrated being gay. His party Livable Netherlands ousted Fortuyn after he had denounced Islam as a ‘backward culture’ and pleaded for abolishing the anti-discrimination segment of the Dutch constitution. But Fortuyn came back with a vengeance: his own party List Pim Fortuyn (LPF) polled second place a week prior to the national elections. Fortuyn was ready to take Dutch politics by storm on 15 May 2002, but was assassinated on 6 May 2002 by an animal rights activist. The political campaigns stopped, there were small scale riots but the election went on. His party got 17% of the votes: 26 seats out of 150 in Parliament and was part of the new, very short-lived coalition. In 2004, a few weeks after the killing of writer and TV director Theo van Gogh, Fortuyn was voted the Most valuable Dutchman ever in a TV program.
‘(Against) the racialization of our culture’
In this series of posts I will revisit Fortuyn’s work on Islam and migration in order to assess the position Fortuyn has had in Dutch politics and his continuing relevance today. In his book, originally published in 1997, Against the islamization of our culture, Fortuyn argued against multiculturalism as an ideology of cultural relativism: a dangerous ideology because it ignores the threat coming from other cultures (the Islamic one) for the traditional, original Dutch culture. According to Fortuyn the difference between us and them (the Dutch culture, the Jewish-Christian humanist culture versus the Islamic culture) rests on three pillars:
• Separation of church and state
• relation between sexes
• relation between parents and children
Fortuyn concluded his book with a call for a political and social debate on norms and values on which the Dutch multicultural society is ought to be based on. “It is time to enter into a debate about our norms and values. At least, if we really wish to live together”. In the 2002 election campaign, in the aftermath of 9/11, this becomes part of his political program.
As I will argue throughout this series of posts, Fortuyn’s politics constituted an important pivotal point in thinking about politics and in debates about Islam, integration and security. He based himself on much older ideas, but turned this into a contemporary confrontational policy, in which he portrayed migrants from Muslim-majority countries, Turkish and Moroccan Dutch and Moslims as the unacceptable Other. How he did this and thus shaped the continuity and the change in relation to developments in his time, we can analyze on the basis of the concept of ‘racialization’ that I will discuss in relation to the question of how debate and policy engaged with migrants and with Islam in the eighties, nineties and 2000s. After all, this forms the context in which the first and second editions of Fortuyn’s book (Against) The Islamization of Our Culture were published. I will pay particular attention to the idea of the danger of migrant cultures, to the contrast between immigrant and native, and to the process of secularization.
In the upcoming posts, after introducing the idea of racialization of islam (post 2) I will discuss three closely intertwined elements of Fortuyn’s cultural legacy (post 3) among which the doomsday image of Islamization (post 4 and 5), the ideal image of Dutch identity (post 6 and 7) and his very personal, flamboyant style of moral leadership on which people could project and express their own meanings and experiences. (post 8 and 9). Conspicuously absent from many analyses about Fortuyn are the reactions of Moroccan Dutc people at the time; I will discuss this in posts 10 and 11 on the basis of my research in Gouda. In the final post (no. 12) I will turn to contemporary politics and policies and discuss Fortuyn’s continuing relevance.