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  “When the illusion disappears, it goes completely in the other direction,” argues Heijne. “There is a sense that ‘we are welcoming and then they do this,’” he adds. The Dutch “have been terribly let down in their good intentions.”24

  Part of Holland’s integration dilemma is that it was preoccupied with other things when immigrants first began arriving in the 1960s and 1970s. “Dutch society was not prepared because they were changing themselves,” says Marcouch, the former Labour MP. Welcoming culturally distant foreigners in the midst of a national upheaval over feminism, gay rights, environmentalism, and religion wasn’t a priority. The new immigrants were invisible guest workers, and no one gave them much thought. Meanwhile, Moroccan men found themselves in a society where sexual liberation, drugs and prostitution were overt. Their reaction was “We don’t want our wives and daughters to become like that,” which often resulted in girls being kept out of school.25

  As the debate became more polarized after 9/11, religious observance suddenly became politically loaded. Teenage girls were telling teachers they couldn’t shake hands and that they had to fast and pray while other Dutch kids were out drinking and having sex. Orthodox religious observance runs against everything that Dutch youth culture promotes.

  The Dutch government assumed that the model it had used to successfully assimilate its own religious minorities throughout history would solve the problem. Separate schools and sports clubs are something the Dutch had tried; they called it pillarization, a system of viewing different religious groups as separate entities or pillars within the society, each with its own community leadership.

  Pillarization (verzuiling in Dutch) was, after all, regarded as a success in integrating a large Catholic population that had long been marginalized as second-class citizens.

  Pillarization classified society according to its groups. As Ian Buruma describes it, “From the cabinet minister down to the lowest manual worker, everyone was part of one of the pillars that held up the edifice of Dutch society, and all the real or potential conflicts between the pillars were negotiated by the gentlemen who stood at their pinnacles.” To many people, especially Christian Democrats, this seemed the obvious way to integrate Muslims.26

  It was multiculturalism by another name and a strategy rooted in Dutch history. But, as the historian Han Entzinger has written, the model that had functioned so well before failed in integrating the country’s new ethnic minorities.27 They did not have their own established and recognized leaders, like the Dutch Jews or Catholics–and any attempt to graft past social engineering projects onto new phenomena is generally laden with pitfalls. For Paul Scheffer, the analogy simply didn’t work. Muslims from abroad were fundamentally different from Dutch Catholics, he argued. “There was no prospect of a Muslim community as an organized or unified presence for the simple reason that the history of the guest workers that produces this migration was a community without elites.”28

  The one group that seemed to have a somewhat easier time was the Surinamese, who came from Holland’s Latin American colony. They had a “colonial bonus,” argues the University of Amsterdam historian Leo Lucassen. They already had been socialized in the culture of a country they had never seen. Equally important, he argues, was “the front-stage message” framed by the government that these people “are like us and that they belong.” For Turks and Moroccans, neither of these factors applied. They didn’t speak the language or have a cultural affinity with the Netherlands.29

  Willem Schinkel, a sociologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, doesn’t believe Holland has ever had any true interest in admitting foreigners to the national club. His office on the upper floors overlooks the once bombed-out and rebuilt city that is home to Europe’s largest port. Rotterdam is Holland’s largest and most diverse city, and the only one governed by an ethnic minority mayor, Ahmed Aboutaleb, who moved to the Netherlands from Morocco when he was fifteen. It is also the place that produced Pim Fortuyn and the brand of politics that still dominates Dutch debates.

  Schinkel insists that the multiculturalism debate in Holland is based on fiction: the country has never had genuine multiculturalism. Instead, he argues, integration in Holland is about policing the borders of Dutchness to avoid welcoming outsiders into Dutch society. Integration places a huge burden on the individual to assimilate and become part of society while asking little of the larger society. When integration of immigrants fails, however, the responsibility is placed on the religious or ethnic community they come from. “It’s two things at the same time. A person may not be well-integrated and we also know that the responsibility or the cause of this lies in his or her culture, which gets to be identified with a particular group or community assumed to exist as some sort of cohesive whole.”30 The larger community then suffers a sort of collective punishment from society, ostracized for producing terrorists like Mohammed Bouyeri or for not criticizing them sufficiently.

  Schinkel is highly critical of Scheffer for taking integration and turning it into a bogeyman for the country’s ills. It was a red herring, he insists. The architects of the early integration policies believed that people would need their cultural identity to give them strength while they assimilate and would eventually shed it.

  Integration became such a central issue in political debates after 2001 that all nuances were forgotten. “We’ve had difficulty defining Dutchness in ethnic terms partly because there was never any need to do so. The Dutch colonial effort was an effort to keep the other outside,” he says. When foreigners and ex-colonial subjects started to show up inside the country, there was a need to define and police the boundaries. The only way to define what Dutch society is, is to “constantly monitor and identify what does not belong to it,” argues Schinkel. And this, he insists, is the “social function of the concept of integration, … to keep alive a reservoir of people identifiable as not part of society.”31

  After the murder of Theo van Gogh, there was a debate over how people had failed to stop his killer, Bouyeri. Many thought he appeared to be “well-integrated.” As a matter of public opinion, it quickly became a consensus “that as soon as he murdered a person, he wasn’t well-integrated after all,” says Schinkel. But the same standard wouldn’t have been applied to an ethnic Dutch murderer; indeed, integration, or lack thereof, was never discussed after Fortuyn was shot by a white Dutchman who professed extremist views about animal rights.

  Once upon a time, getting a Dutch passport was considered the final stop on the road to successful integration. Now, Schinkel says, there has been a shift “from a focus on formal citizenship to what I call moral citizenship.” No longer is a passport the end of the road; it’s just the beginning. “Then begins the real moral work, the cultural work of integration.” This shift, he insists, is evidence that newly naturalized Dutch are still being “monitored in terms of their not belonging to society” on the grounds that “you don’t have the correct cultural outlook to be a true Dutch citizen.”32

  The Dutch values and habits that immigrants are expected to adopt are no longer merely wearing wood clogs, eating Gouda cheese, and having windows without curtains. A DVD used as part of a state integration effort with pictures of topless women on Dutch beaches and kissing gay couples sends the message that “‘This is Holland,’ a country of progressive people, and who takes issue with this should stay away.”33

  The problem, of course, is that for a liberal democracy to attempt to enforce liberal beliefs is a violation of its liberalism. A state can forbid and punish certain behaviour it deems aberrant, but it cannot tell people what to think. Just as a liberal state tolerates those who hold fascist and anarchist views, it must tolerate those with Orthodox religious convictions. They are free to believe in white supremacy, the evils of government, or the sin of abortion so long as they don’t violate any laws by acting on those beliefs.

  Schinkel points out that if the metric for integration is the frequency of contacts with people of other ethnic groups, then “the ethnic
Dutch are the least well-integrated.” Data is collected with the goal of feeding policy makers, and policy makers don’t worry about how often a member of the Dutch Reformed Church meets Surinamese or Turks. “They’re not measured!” exclaims Schinkel. They are just seen as the baseline, a control group. “The surveys only target those people who are a priori considered to be not a part of society, and then, the only question is the degree to which they are not.” It is not just a matter of interaction with other races and religions, he argues. “If you were to actually measure the religiosity of the ethnic Dutch, if you were to incorporate their views on gender equality and homosexuality … and speak of the entire population in terms of integration, you would have a very small society really.”34 Many of them are also outside the assumed norms of gay-loving, feminist, tolerant Holland’s self-image.

  There has been another major obstacle to genuine integration, one that can be encapsulated in a single word. The Dutch use the word allochtoon to refer to those who are foreign or look it.35 It is a ubiquitous term applied to anyone who does not look to be “native Dutch” and is deeply resented by almost every nonwhite Dutch person I’ve met. The official definition is someone with one or more parents born abroad, but it is never applied to someone with a German or Australian parent. Its use is interchangeable with black or brown. It is a term, the Dutch-Turkish writer Zihni Özdil argues, that creates a second class of citizens, stripping them of their Dutchness. Özdil once asked a national television audience why, if allochtoon is neutral and nonracial, it is never applied to the former queen Beatrix, whose father was from Germany. Within minutes, he received death threats.

  Özdil recently wrote a book called Netherlands, My Fatherland, intentionally borrowing one of the far right’s slogans for his title. Holland is often praised for its tolerance and seen as an exemplar for other nations, but Özdil sees things differently. He believes that Holland’s vaunted tolerance is really a form of condescension, an attitude that says, “You’re not equal to me, I really don’t like you, but I’m going to tolerate you.” Protestants treated Catholics and Jews as second-class citizens for centuries, he points out. “They were tolerated, they were allowed to practise their religion as long as it’s behind closed doors.”36

  Paul Schnabel, a senator for the centrist D66 party and the government’s former social policy guru, has some experience with being a Dutch religious minority. He grew up Catholic with a mother who was half-Indonesian. Looking back, he says, “You could say nasty things about Catholics you could never say about Jews in this country.” Even the royal family, he says, didn’t fully accept them as equals rather than outsiders loyal to the pope. It took the Second World War and their role in the resistance before the queen “would accept that they were also real Dutch citizens. It took a long time.” Ironically, he adds, “Now we have a queen who is a Catholic and nobody is bothering anymore.”37

  It’s harder for Muslims who aren’t royalty. “I don’t want to be tolerated in my own country, I want equality!” Özdil exclaims. “If you really hate me, but you have the respect to say it to my face, that’s equality,” he insists. “Diversity doesn’t necessarily mean nice things. That’s part of citizenship.” But these debates have to take place without one group of citizens telling another, “You should get the fuck out.”

  Özdil has some experience in this regard. He writes columns about health care for the NRC Handelsblad. “Literally 80 percent of the responses I get from readers are, ‘Oh, as if health care is better in Turkey. Go back if you don’t like it,’” he tells me. Despite his Dutch passport and elite platform, readers still refuse to see him as Dutch. “The idea that someone with my looks and my name is writing about Dutch health care,” he says, is unimaginable to some of his readers.38

  Özdil reserves a special ire for a gentle white-bearded man named Rinus Penninx. Penninx is a leading scholar of immigration history in Holland; he also helped shape early Dutch integration policies in the 1980s. Özdil begins one of the chapters in his book with the following quotation: “Our policy is a policy that accepts that there are differences between people and you have to recognize these differences. Differences should be celebrated.”

  It is a line from Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the architects of apartheid in South Africa and the chief proponent of the policy of separate development—the idea that groups should live apart from one another, which, in practice, meant separate and unequal facilities, education, and citizenship rights. Özdil juxtaposes the quote with one from Penninx. “Every society consists of many groups that are different. Integration should concern itself with the way groups are situated in the society, so that it functions properly.”39

  To Özdil, this is an echo of apartheid, an idea that had its roots in Dutch Calvinist thought. He believes that Penninx’s vision, well-meaning as it was, was to essentially adopt Verwoerd’s logic: “Don’t impose yourself on the other if the other doesn’t want this. It’s wrong.” The idea of separate enclaves, living equally, is a fallacy. The legal doctrine of “separate but equal” that reigned for decades in the United States was rarely equal. Nor were South Africa’s nominally independent homelands, built in the name of separate development.

  “This is what Dutch liberals still do not want to face: the dynamics of power,” he writes. Claiming that it’s fine for Turks to live in their own enclave because rural Dutch whites do, too, “completely ignores the reality that white groups are not seen by society as ‘the other’ or ‘un-Dutch.’”40 By allowing minority enclaves and Turkish or Moroccan schools, he argues, Penninx is “pleading for Apartheid without realizing it.”

  Özdil’s nemesis, Penninx, hardly seems like an advocate of apartheid. He is friendly and soft-spoken, and his foot-long beard makes him look more like Santa Claus.

  For the past four decades, Penninx has studied Turkish migration patterns and the regions the guest workers originally came from. Back in 1983, when Holland’s national unemployment rate was 13 percent, the rate for Turkish workers was more than 40 percent. “They were there, and their jobs had gone,” he told me over coffee in the small town of Gouda, famous for its cheese. “All these factories were closed down.… There was no alternative for them.”41

  It was at this point that the government realized that many would stay and they would somehow have to be integrated. The goal was to give them “a proper place in Dutch society,” which meant education, housing, and health care. “That went together with accepting their religion and worldview and culture, as far as we did not contradict Dutch values,” he adds. Penninx was intimately involved in formulating these policies, and he still maintains that many of them were successful.

  He points to data between the 1980s and the 1990s and comparisons of parents and their children. He cites companies like Corendon Airlines, a low-cost carrier founded by Turkish immigrants. Politically, however, integration proved a failure. Figures like Scheffer cemented that consensus view. They argued that Holland had created parallel societies and had not done enough to “protect our own national culture.” The discussion of integration also shifted away from groups to individual immigrants.

  The view that immigrants needed to be better integrated into the social fabric, as Penninx describes it, “led to a redefinition of these policies in which the target groups were not groups anymore, but were individuals. It also meant that organizations of these groups were not important anymore.” Policy was now at the personal level—something that liberals see as essential but multiculturalists focused on group rights deplore.

  Penninx has thought deeply about what integration means. He divides the process into three stages: language, aesthetic sense, and normative values. Most migrants are very quick with the first stage because they need the language to succeed. The second involves tastes in food, art, and music, which is more difficult. “These things do not change very much in an adult’s life. They eat the same kind of things because they like it,” says Penninx. The same goes for music and art. Finally, there is the norm
ative dimension: “You have to learn the distinction between good and evil. Which is different in different societies.” Such views do not change easily. “Not with natives and not with migrants,” he insists.

  Penninx does not defend certain brutal practices in immigrant communities, but he does see trying to stop them with policy as futile. Public debate has branded all Muslim immigrants as guilty of being patriarchal, vengeful, and practitioners of genital cutting. “And of course, they hate homos,” he adds. Immigrants are depicted as violating norms that many natives never adhered to in the first place. After all, there are a lot of white Dutch natives who do not accept homosexuality and some who even attack gays. They should be treated the same as migrants who commit similar crimes. If not, it amounts to discrimination, he argues. It is the distinction between those deemed to have an integration problem and those for whom that thought would never arise.

  The exception, and the blind spot, of course, is that while many native Dutch might be vicious homophobes and have antiquated views on gender relations, there is not widespread genital cutting in rural Friesland, and there is among certain Somali immigrants. So should the government enforce any norms? I ask. The government must regulate society according to several basic norms, Penninx replies, “but don’t have the illusion,” he argues, that there’s one specific group—immigrants—that you can resocialize.

  To him, that smacks of old policies toward the poor. “They had the wrong ideas about how to raise children. They had the wrong ideas about alcoholism.… We had governmental programs where we put these people in resocialization camps.” Penninx worries that such social engineering leads to dangerous places. What next? he asks. “You forbid these people to have children?” The government needs to ensure norms aren’t violated, but he insists it cannot take preemptive action. Just as with fighting alcohol abuse, the government runs campaigns, but compliance is up to the individual.