Neoliberal Xenophobia: The Dutch case

Alternatives

Volumn 35, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 53-70

  Demmers, Jolle ^a   Mehendale, Sameer S ^b  

^a UTRECHT UNIVERSITY   (Netherlands)

^b NONE

Author keywords

Collectiveness; Neoliberalism; Netherlands; Uncertainty; Xenophobia

Indexed keywords

EID: 77951837766     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437541003500103     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. In recent months, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the European Commission have criticized various aspects of Dutch immigration policies as inhumane and discriminatory toward "non-Westerners." These punitive, criminalizing practices include the open-ended (some lasting more than a year) detention of migrant minors, families with children, and torture victims, in cramped conditions of up to six persons in a cell, with little communication with the outside world, and an "integration" process with costly compulsory exams and a hierarchy of countries of origin, effectively blocking family reunification of people of Moroccan and Turkish origin. See "Discrimination in the Name of Integration: Migrants' Rights Under the Integration Abroad Act," Human Rights Watch (May 2008);
2. "The Netherlands: The Detention of Irregular Migrants and Asylum Seekers," Amnesty International (June 2008)
3. EUR 35/02/2008; "Evaluation of the Family Reunification Directive," EU Commission (October 2008), 610/3.
4. "Hij was een klootzak, maar hij was mijn klootzak." Leon de Winter, "Bliksemstraal," Elsevier 6 (November 2004): 21. Translated literally, the word would be scrotum.
5. This is how the Dutch institutionalization of difference works: You are either an autochtoon or an allochtoon. An allochtoon is a person living in the Netherlands who has at least one foreign-born parent. The Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) makes a distinction between a Western (one might substitute "civilized") allochtoon (a parent from Europe, North America, Oceania, but also Indonesia and Japan) and a non-Western allochtoon (Turkey, Latin America, Asia, and Africa). The terms are common and widely used, although in everyday parlance only those from the non-Western group are labeled as allochtonen, and the theoretically nonexistent third generation of allochtonen is still generally covered by the term (e.g., the City of Rotterdam officially speaks of third-generation allochtonen, who are individuals who have at least one foreign-born grandparent). In 2008, the CBS counted 1.8 million non-Western allochtonen in a population of 16 million. According to the CBS, Holland has a total of 850,000 Muslims.
6. Amsterdam itself was something of an exception, where authorities successfully made use of an inclusionist discourse by strongly playing on a shared identification with the city of Amsterdam.
7. The translations here and below stay as close as possible to the text as actually voiced, with errors syntactical or otherwise left uncorrected.
8. Probably referring to an Egyptian human rights activist assassinated by Islamic fundamentalists and to the leader of the Islamist group Takfir wal- Hijra executed by Anwar Sadat in 1978.
9. In contrast to the US/UK context, "liberal" in the Dutch sense is not the opposite of "conservative." Rather, it means pro-free market and anti-Socialist, though progressive on "moral" issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and euthanasia. In the Dutch political landscape, the VVD is placed on the right, the Labour Party (PvdA) on the left, and the Christian Democrats (CDA) in the center.
10. Television-watching by the Dutch doubled between 1965 and 2005, to an average of three hours, twenty-two minutes a day.
11. Pierre Bourdieu, Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market (London: Verso, 2004).
12. See, e.g., A. Lijphart, The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).
13. As a member of, for instance, the Socialist pillar, you would vote for the Social Democratic Labour Party, watch the programs of the VARA, read the Vrije Volk, and send your children to a state university.
14. This shift from pillar to welfarist state was both symbolized and significantly reinforced by the establishment of the NOS (Dutch Broadcasting Institute), a national coordinating and facilitating institute that also broadcast the daily news, sports, and reporting on other events of "national" importance.
15. Minister of Finance Wouter Bos, during a seminar at the Holland Financial Center, Amsterdam, on September 6, 2007.
16. After being ousted from the VVD party, Rita Verdonk established her own political "movement," TON (Proud of Holland), which will take part in the 2010 elections.
17. It is important to point out differences between the high level of such symbolism in national politics and the practical, depolarizing approaches of local authorities. A case in point is the latest controversy between the national leader of the Labour Party and the Labour mayor of Amsterdam, the latter allowing his "street coaches" to not shake hands with members of the opposite sex because of (Islamic) religious mores. The national leader loudly protested stating that "in this country, the handshake is the norm," conveniently forgetting that the country's chief rabbi had refused to shake hands with women from time immemorial (a fact nobody ever politicized).
18. Judith Butler, "Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time," British Journal of Sociology 59, no. 1 (2008): 4.
19. The Netherlands has a parliamentary system of proportional representation, in which the main parties strategically opt for the national majority vote. In the current setting of polarization, reaching out to the allochtoon minority could prove counterproductive.
20. Paul Scheffer, "Het Multiculturele Drama," NRC Handelsblad, January 29, 2000.
21. NRC Handelsblad, May 20, 2000.
22. Emergency debate, Dutch parliament, September 25, 2008, about youth misbehavior in Gouda.