Go Back to Where You Came From Read online

  It is similar to the refrain heard in old working-class areas of London. Michael Collins was a child growing up in Walworth, a gritty part of South London, when the Conservative politician Enoch Powell gave his infamous speech in 1968. “Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population,” warned Powell. Britain was, he argued, “a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.”

  He compared complaints of discrimination from the left to those who tried to blind the country from the peril of Nazi Germany. For Powell, it was not immigrants who were suffering but white Englishmen. “The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming,” he declared. “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”35

  Collins recalls the murmurs of “Enoch was right” whispered throughout his neighborhood in the late 1960s. “We knew he looked like the kind of stranger we shouldn’t take sweets from,” but his message appealed to the working classes of South London. Even if the capital’s population was only 3 percent nonwhite at the time (and 2 percent nationally), Powell managed to build a following. There was fear of foreigners taking their jobs. “Somewhere between the bombs stopping, the bulldozers starting, and kids being warned about strangers, ‘the coloureds’ had become a talking point,” Collins recalled.36 The extent of Powell’s support became clear when Tory leader Edward Heath fired him. Dockworkers, porters, factory hands, and members of the transport unions protested on his behalf. It wasn’t necessarily an endorsement of his vitriolic speeches or even agreement with his views but a defence of his right to speak his mind.

  The public debate became so polarized, Collins argues, that all fears about immigration and diversity were summarily waved off as illegitimate racism or worse. Something deeper was happening, too, according to Collins, that was reshaping the identity of people like his own family. “Many of the urban white working class saw themselves more as part of an ethnic group united by colour and culture, than as a class united by their work.”37

  By the 1980s, just as in Marcouch’s corner of Amsterdam, a mass exodus had begun. Some were called “Thatcher’s Children”; “Essex Man” became shorthand for a new breed of Tory voter who was nouveau riche rather than middle class. And like the East Enders who moved to Essex, Collins’s neighbours fled London for places like Bexley and Eltham. But they did not entirely leave their old lives or identities behind, living “like ex-pats, attempting to recreate aspects of the old neighbourhood within their new environment.”38 Their nouveau riche tastes in interior decoration and loud clothing became the object of mockery from those higher up the class ladder. But one day, they would exact their political revenge.

  2

  WHEN INTEGRATION FAILS

  In 1992, soon after Ayaan Hirsi Ali arrived in Holland and requested asylum, she bought a huge pink-and-purple carpet. Hirsi Ali, who is today better known as a crusading anti-Islamic feminist who for years lived under police protection, was then a Somali refugee who had fled an arranged marriage by disappearing during an airport stopover in Germany and crossing the border to Holland. When she received a large check from the Dutch government to cover expenses after being granted asylum, she and a fellow Somali who shared a flat immediately went to a local shop and spent it all on an exorbitantly priced garish carpet to cover every inch of floor in their new state-subsidized home. Her Dutch friends were appalled; for Hirsi Ali, at the time not accustomed to saving money or budgeting for essential expenses, it seemed an entirely reasonable thing to do.1

  Eight years later, as Hirsi Ali was laying the groundwork for her own political career, the issues of immigration and integration—and how to deal with people unfamiliar with Dutch norms and behaviors on matters ranging from floor coverings to feminism—were thrust to the forefront of the country’s political debate.

  In early 2000, Paul Scheffer, a curly-haired Dutch intellectual seen as part of the left-leaning intelligentsia, published an article that rocked the country’s political establishment. His article “The Multicultural Drama,”2 published in the prestigious NRC Handelsblad, lashed out at those who assumed that everything would work out fine. “Many live with the misconception that the integration of ethnic minorities will have approximately the same course as the peaceful conciliation of religious groups in the Netherlands,” he wrote. This, he argued, “reveals a boundless faith in elites.” He likened this blind faith to those misguided Dutch who had favored neutrality on the eve of World War II and his article brought the immigration debate firmly onto the turf of the Dutch Labour Party.3

  Whole generations, he insisted, had “been written off under the guise of tolerance,” and the current policy of “limited integration increases inequality and contributes to a sense of alienation in society.” What was needed instead was “a departure from the cosmopolitan illusion in which many wallow.”4

  What made the article so powerful was that its author wasn’t regarded as a right-winger like the few politicians who had made noises about immigration and were quickly dismissed as racists or worse. Scheffer was a card-carrying member of the Labour Party, something that both outraged the left and forced them to listen.5 His article was the first salvo in a debate that has dominated Dutch politics ever since.

  For Scheffer, ostensibly progressive social policy was constraining the potential of refugees by taking people who are by nature and necessity innovative and transforming them into passive members of society. “The subsidized isolation of all those migrant families has turned out to be an obstacle to them, to their children and to society as a whole,” he argued elsewhere. “The entrepreneurial instincts of those who left their home countries to earn money abroad is stifled by a society that attempts to protect people against every conceivable risk.” They weren’t, in his view, coming to Europe for benefit tourism, as some right-wingers like to argue. Instead, they were getting caught in the safety net after they arrived.6

  Before Scheffer’s article, and even after it was released, it was frowned upon to voice such critical views. But the establishment’s failure to talk about it openly infuriated those who lived in the neighborhoods suddenly dominated by immigrants. They resented their politicians and felt they had never been consulted. Many of them came from the very neighborhoods that families like that of Dutch Labour Party politician Ahmed Marcouch’s moved into in the 1980s as white flight began. The poor Dutch families who couldn’t afford to go stayed behind. Their message to the Labour Party was “You ignored us. You let it happen,” says Marcouch.7

  Labour’s stance left a political vacuum, and those who felt no one spoke for them would soon find their political messiah in the unlikeliest of characters—a flamboyant gay Catholic professor who had no patience for political correctness.8

  Pim Fortuyn’s time in the limelight was short, but it was transformative. A former Communist and openly gay man who boasted of sleeping with Muslim immigrants in Holland while calling for a ban on Muslim immigration, he was an electrifying figure in a country known for its staid politics.

  Before founding his own party, Fortuyn had tried to join an establishment centre-right party, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). The party’s leader at the time, Frits Bolkestein, had been one of the first figures to speak critically about immigration in the early 1990s. He remembers Fortuyn as a talented but inflammatory politician. “He had a thoroughly theatrical personality, and that played in his favor,” Bolkestein, now in his eighties, told me in his book-lined office overlooking the canals of Amsterdam. “I didn’t want him to be in my parliamentary group, so I cold-shouldered him.… He would have acted as a fragmentation bomb.”9

  Fortuyn took his explosive rhetoric elsewhere and formed his own party. By fashioning a new type of far-right politics in progressive garb, he redirected the entire na
tional debate in a way that has endured.

  Fortuyn pushed the right toward a form of conservatism that could work in a country with progressive views toward homosexuality, prostitution, premarital sex, and other issues that are anathema to family-values conservatives in the United States. Fortuyn proved that the winning argument for the European far right was not an American-style appeal to conservative religious values but the claim that it was protecting women, gays, and secularism from backward Muslims.10 The Netherlands was a perfect laboratory for this new strategy because, unlike France, it lacked a strong contingent of religious traditionalists opposed to women’s liberation and gay rights. The new right had to hone its message for this audience. Right-wing intellectuals realized their mistake and followed Fortuyn’s example. Almost overnight, they seemed to switch from being opposed to gay rights to favoring them.

  It was Fortuyn who blazed the trail for the new generation of far-right leaders across Europe. He may not have intended to be a pioneer, but his brand of plainspoken political incorrectness and his depiction of Islamic culture as a backward and reactionary threat to the hard-won progressive values of Western Europe would provide a potent template for a modernized far right. His ideological inheritors in Dutch politics, as well as the revamped Front National in France, the Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party, or DPP), and Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) have all emulated Fortuyn in their own ways.

  Fortuyn had begun his political life on the far left. He was active in Communist groups and later tried to join the Labour Party. But it was his homosexuality, which he wore on his sleeve, that pushed him to the right. Fortuyn was a regular customer at Rotterdam’s edgy gay clubs, where anonymous sex was common. He had always felt safe in Holland, but that was to change.

  One of the clubs, called Boundless, was attacked by immigrant youths, who smashed its windows. When a journalist asked him about his views on Islam in February 2002, he replied, “I have no desire … to have to go through the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again.” Moreover, there were not many countries where someone as openly gay as he was could succeed in politics. “I take pride in that,” he said. “And I’d like to keep it that way.”11

  On May 6, 2002, one day after revelers filled the streets of Paris to celebrate Jacques Chirac’s victory over Jean-Marie Le Pen, Fortuyn was gunned down by a radical animal rights activist as he emerged from a radio interview. His assassin later claimed that he had killed Fortuyn to stop him from using Muslims as “scapegoats.”12 In national elections nine days later, Fortuyn’s eponymous party, the Pim Fortuyn List, became the second largest in the Netherlands with 17 percent of the vote. Bolkestein believes that Fortuyn’s premature death may have made his ideas and his influence eternal in the way that a long, bruising political career never could have.13

  After the assassination, an up-and-coming politician named Geert Wilders attempted to fill Fortuyn’s shoes. Wilders started out working as a young staffer for Bolkestein in the VVD’s party offices focused on social affairs. “I had very little to do with him,” says Bolkestein, but, he adds, “We were all happy with him.” Wilders then served as a member of parliament for the VVD for several years until he began to clash with its leaders over a platform advocating Turkish accession to the EU. By then, Bolkestein had stepped down as leader to become an EU commissioner in Brussels. Wilders soon left the party and started his own.

  Speaking of his old understudy, Bolkestein is disdainful but not dismissive. “He has two arrows” in his quiver, says the former party leader. “The first arrow is indeed xenophobic,” but the second is the same thing as the left: “To protect the workingman, which really should have been done by the Labour Party.”

  But as Labour moved away from its old base toward a more culturally liberal constituency, many of its voters started to look elsewhere. “They made a fatal mistake and really continue to make that mistake,” Bolkestein says of his old political rivals, with a tinge of satisfaction. Faced with “the choice between the foreign-born … and the labour classes, they chose the foreign-born and they’ve paid for it dearly.”14 In March 2017, in a calamitous election result, 80 percent of Labour’s MPs, including Marcouch, lost their seats, leaving a party that had once been the country’s largest with just nine of parliament’s 150 seats.

  Bolkestein himself has undergone a strange evolution in the eyes of the Dutch public, one that mirrors the shift experienced by the society as a whole. The left used to hate him and see him as “a fearmonger, even a racist.”15 Indeed, Bolkestein himself admits that he was appealing to voters who felt no one would say out loud what they were saying behind closed doors. “I said then, in the pub and the church, this is what people think. I gave voice to that,” he told me.16 Or, as he once put it more bluntly, “One must never underestimate the degree of hatred that Dutch people feel for Moroccan and Turkish immigrants. My political success is based on the fact that I was willing to listen to such people.”17

  And as in France, where many of the 1968 generation’s brightest intellectual lights have veered right, Dutch leftists began to swing right out of antireligious fervor and defence of what they saw as liberal values under attack from Muslims. Though Bolkestein has long since left the political arena, his ideas have become a rallying cry for people who once hated him.18 This is largely explained by another gruesome killing.

  The filmmaker Theo van Gogh was cycling along one of Amsterdam’s perfectly maintained bike lanes on a grey morning wearing his customary uniform of suspenders and a T-shirt. It was a typical Dutch scene. Then Mohammed Bouyeri, a twenty-six-year-old Dutch-Moroccan man, approached Van Gogh and shot him. As the filmmaker tried to escape, Bouyeri fired again and again. He then produced a machete and cut the dead man’s throat before stabbing a letter into Van Gogh’s chest with a knife.

  Witnesses later told journalists the greatest shock was that “the killer was so calm”—he kicked the corpse before casually walking away from the crime scene.19 A shoot-out with police soon ensued, and Bouyeri took a bullet in the leg and was arrested. His goal was martyrdom as the letter left on Van Gogh’s body attested, in verse: “Drenched in blood these are my final words / Pierced by bullets / As I had hoped.”20

  But the core message left on the dead man’s body was not directed at the victim; it was addressed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who had, since her arrival in the Netherlands, publicly renounced Islam, become a member of parliament for Bolkestein’s VVD party, and collaborated with Van Gogh on his film Submission, which featured Koranic verses etched on the bare bodies of women. “With your attacks you have not only turned your back on the Truth, but you are also marching along the ranks of the soldiers of evil,” the blood-soaked letter accused Hirsi Ali. “This letter is God willing an attempt to stop your evil and silence you forever,” he continued in a mix of Dutch and Arabic. “Islam has withstood many enemies and persecutions throughout History.” Pressure would only fan “the flames of belief,” he continued. “Your intellectual terrorism will not prevent this, on the contrary, it will hasten this. Islam will be victorious through the blood of the martyrs. They will spread its light in every dark corner of this earth and it will drive evil with the sword if necessary back into its dark hole.”21

  Hirsi Ali was immediately placed in hiding and whisked away to a Dutch military air base, where she slept in the barracks.22 She was soon given bodyguards by the Dutch government, who continued to accompany her years later after she had moved to the United States.

  Holland had long been mocked by German intellectuals as a boring place where everything of consequence happened fifty years later. That has changed. Since the 1960s, it has become a country where great cultural shifts happened first, from assisted suicide to permissive prostitution laws. Being known as a progressive trailblazer among everyone from gay couples to pot-smoking students had its consequences, though.

  The 9/11 attacks, the murders of Fortuyn and Van Gogh, the threats to Hirsi Ali, and the rise of extremist Islam among
Dutch-born children called everything into question and changed the way the left viewed Islam.23 It was a Salman Rushdie moment—a moment of realization—for many in Holland. And the anger of the Dutch people erupted in the form of a powerful and profound sense of disappointment.

  Now, it wasn’t only new right activists who were contesting the consensus on immigration; there were also many disappointed progressives—the people who saw the victories of the 1960s and 1970s as major battles that had been won, making sexual freedom, women’s liberation, and gay rights an unquestioned part of Dutch society. For a generation that believed its wars against the church were won, suddenly there was a regression; those old victories seem tenuous.

  At the same time, political views that were once radical, even revolutionary, had become quotidian. Feminism, gay rights, antiracism, and environmentalism were once the animating forces of left-wing activism; now they are in many cases state policy. “Idealism has been bureaucratized,” argues the journalist Bas Heijne. “And when the establishment enforces universalism, you react against it.” Heijne is a columnist for the NRC Handelsblad, the highbrow paper where Scheffer’s bombshell article appeared. He splits his time between Holland and Paris, where I met him in a busy café. In his view, the Dutch left’s abandonment of its core ideas helped speed the rise of the populist right. The Labour Party relinquished its message of solidarity, and a new ethic of being only responsible for oneself took over. With more and more immigrants, that quickly developed into a “why should I pay for you?” mentality. Terrorist attacks perpetrated by Muslims have only made matters worse.