Recently, Paul Mepschen and Rogier van Reekum, both academics at the University of Amsterdam, argued on Facebook, in response to a status update of Zihni Ozdil, that the Netherlands had never been multicultural. You can check out the thread here.
Zihni Ozdil’s status update on the state of Dutch multiculturalist policies
Paul Mepschen’s comment
Rogier van Reekum’s comments
Mepschen states that “the idea that Dutch society was once ‘multicultural’ is at least for a large part a culturalist myth, a rhetorical figure put into circulation by anti-immigration/anti-multiculturalist radicals that needed it to construe liberals and the left as multiculturalist.”
I’d like to take his comment as a point of departure to critique the larger discourse on multiculturalism and the research on “culturalization of citizenship,” which took form in the Culturalization of Citizenship conference in December 2012. According to the conference website, culturalization “refers to the growing importance that is attached to cultural heritage, the ‘canon’, and to emotions linked to culture and the nation such as loyalty, feeling at home, and belonging.”
Now, it may well be that the Dutch government did not formally term its policies “multiculturalist,” as Han Entzinger suggests in Changing the rules while the game is on. However, multiculturalism has served, for better or worse, as a backdrop to government programmes since the 1980s. To put it differently, the government pursued pluralist policies in a pragmatic fashion. For all intents and purposes, these policies can, as Entzinger notes, “be labelled as multiculturalist.” Whether or not the Dutch government pursued some predefined multiculturalism is a moot point, since both “multiculturalism” and its concomitant “integration” are ambiguous terms.
In his comment Mepschen also posited that “the notion of culturalization is useful, NOT as a term describing a new post-racial form of differentiation and classification, as some indeed seem to think, but as a concept describing precisely the process in which racism and racialization come to hide as ‘merely’ cultural critique, in Islamophobic discourses for instance.”
What troubles me is the periodization of the culturalization process, which lets the inception of culturalization coincide with the rise of Islamophobia. This move simply helps sustain the illusion that culture was relatively of no importance “before culturalization”—an implication that indirectly dismisses the salience of culture in Dutch colonial practice, for instance.
What the concept of culturalization does, apart from describing common processes, is refix the gaze on culture. And, by so doing, it keeps the discussion firmly confined in the language of multiculturalism, which has, following Sunera Thobani, “allowed for certain communities—people of colour—to be constructed as cultural communities.” What’s more, the current emphasis on culturalization further obscures the instances in which race and culture not only overlap, but, in fact, constitute each other. This artificial theoretical demarcation between race and culture in theories of multiculturalism can be misleading—a point that Juliet Hooker makes in Race and the Politics of Solidarity when she states that,
“[T]his dichotomy between race and culture in theories of multiculturalism has had important consequences. Not only has it impeded the adequate conceptualization of racial justice, but it has also made it easier for the aims of the branch of the literature concerned with the fair accommodation of cultural difference to be misunderstood.”
One such important consequence has been pointed out by Sunera Thobani. She details in a lecture how we ended up with “no language to talk about racism.”
Thobani insightfully notes that “culture has [now] become the only space from which people of colour can actually have participation in national political life.” A process that has severely limited the possibilities of an anti-racist discourse. The most unsettling consequence is that racist notions are now expressed “through the language of multiculturalism and anti-racism.” Thus, making it even harder to dismantle racism.
Not only does culturalization further entrench the assumption that there exists a strict division between “racial” and “cultural” groups, but it also suggests that citizenship has been hitherto non-cultural, if not abstract. Historically, racist, as well as gendered, classed and ableist, practices have circumscribed citizenship, and its possible owners: Dutch citizenship has never been raceless, genderless, classless, nor non-cultural.
Nationality, and citizenship have been, from the outset, gendered and raced—a fact that many feminist historians have argued. Until 1985, for instance, Dutch law stated that nationality, and consequently automatic citizenship, was granted through patrilineal jus sanguinis. Only men could pass on nationality, and automatic citizenship, to their offspring. Susan Sage Heinzelman noted that legal texts are “products of culture, of a certain historical moment,” and “have a powerful effect on the construction of certain kinds of cultural identities.” Contrary to popular belief, Heinzelman explains, legal texts are not “permanent and sacred repositories of human law and emotion.” After 1985 bilineal jus sanguinis, grounded citizenship firmly in hegemonic heterosexuality. Citizenship and nationality, then, have been conceptualized as lived within and through the body at an intimate and sexual level. In Cloning Cultures, and the Social Injustices of Homogeneities Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg gesture towards this close relationship between “normative models for bodies [in the name of civilization],” cultural homogeneity, and the biological.
In addition, the affective dimensions of nationality embedded in the “No Double Passport” debate inextricably tie notions of loyalty and national identity, which are ephemeral and relational, to concepts of citizenship, which are legal and as such appear fixed. However, as Heinzelman argues legal texts are simply temporally contingent fictions. The debates on immigration and citizenship have revitalized the importance of gender, class, and race and made their importance even more explicit. All three categories are historically contextual and culturally contingent.
In Queer Phenomenology Sara Ahmed theorizes that heterosexuality and Whiteness are both mechanisms for the reproduction of culture. She posits that Whiteness “functions as a habit, even a bad habit, which becomes a background to social action.” Whiteness, as a mechanism for the reproduction of culture, is noticeably absent in the culturalization debates—as are the cultural dimensions of colonialism—even though colonialism has rendered the world White, and, as Ahmed asserts, “‘ready’ for certain kinds of bodies.” White Autochtoon Dutch normativity is taken for granted, and colonialism is simply behind us—consigned to oblivion rather than integrated into our national histories. “Bodies,” however, as Ahmed concludes, “remember such histories, even when we forget them.”
What happens to bodies that act as reminders of such histories when such histories are actively obscured, if not erased?
Racial political discourse violently inscribes difference onto Allochtoon bodies while reasserting White Autochtoon Dutchness through an idealized notion of “Dutch culture” and “Dutch identity,” which rests on liberal ideals such as, tolerance, secularism, freedom of speech, gender equity, and acceptance of the LGBT community. Liberal ideals notwithstanding, contemporary Dutch society is, due to the Autochtoon/Allochtoon division, “characterized by asymmetry and, in this regard, white majorities, who declare ‘race’ as unspeakable, avoid the deconstruction and problematization of whiteness.”
The unspeakability of race and the normalized nature of Whiteness—along with the folk belief in Dutch tolerance—have made it more difficult, if not near impossible, to challenge racist discourse. Tolerance is positioned as the founding ethical property of the Dutch nation. And it is through the language of tolerance in conjunction with the rhetoric of “benoemen” (i.e. rhetoric of “naming”) that it becomes possible to protect oneself against the charge of racism. “Real racism” is projected onto “real racists,” like Geert Wilders—who incidentally plays a particularly important role in the liberal Left’s discourse. Dutch multiculturalism is positioned in opposition to Dutch (neo-)nationalism.
The juxtaposition of multiculturalism and nationalism may suggest a well-defined relationship between ethnicity and national identity, however, the relationship between them is not so straightforward. What’s more, multiculturalism itself, ironically, has become a basis for national identity: it is a fact “we” should embrace, even though multiculturalism is, as Sara Ahmed writes, “increasingly evoked as an unhappy object, as a sign of the failure of communities to ‘happily integrate’.” The tension of navigating the gulf between the “multicultural drama” and the multicultural realities of the Netherlands has led to a “Multicultural Nationalism,” which, as David Brown writes, “depicts the nation as a community made up of diverse ethnic segments, all united by their common commitment to the public institutions of the state that guarantee their equal status.” Herein the Left do not differ much from the Right.
Lodewijk Asscher recently proposed a “warm and caring” integration policy that is at once “clear and tough.” Asscher argued that, “[S]igning a contract would make sure immigrants are better aware of the norms and values in the country in which they live.”
“If we don’t take steps,” Asscher continued, “we will pay an enormous price.” Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Wilders expressed similar sentiments in a recent interview on Australian TV.
Good feeling, and integration, require “‘points’ of alignment,” which White Autochtoon Dutchness happily provides, and a closing off. Speaking about the UK Sara Ahmed writes, “[A]lthough integration is not defined as ‘leaving your culture behind’ (at least not officially), it is unevenly distributed, as a demand that new or would be citizens ‘embrace’ a common culture that is already given.”
It is through a commitment to “Dutch values,” the constitution, and Dutch laws, i.e. White Autochtoon Dutchness, that we can enter the national fold—it is by embodying White Autochtoon Dutchness that we can integrate, and become “happy” and “productive” citizens. Happiness, Ahmed notes, “is promised as a return for loyalty to the nation, where loyalty is expressed as ‘giving’ diversity to the nation through playing its game.” The failure of immigrants to integrate, to play the nation’s game, has invariably cast society into unhappiness.
However, it is not just state-created integration programmes that (re)produce (dominant) understandings of belonging or difference, but also the everyday discursive practices of White Autochtoon Dutch who, at times inadvertently, reproduce exclusionary notions of national identity and belonging; these notions encompass characteristics such as, speaking Dutch “without an accent,” being secular, and culturally literate.
(for a breakdown of this commercial check out Generic’s post “Orange is White”)
The discourse on culturalization not only obscures the fact that race is culturally contingent, but also what Nadine Naber has referred to as an interplay between “cultural racism,” that is “a process of othering that constructs perceived cultural (e.g., Arab), religious (e.g., Muslim), or civilizational (e.g., Arab and/or Muslim) differences as natural and insurmountable,” and “nation-based racism.” Naber defines nation-based racism as “the construction of particular immigrants as different than and inferior to whites based on the conception that “they” are foreign and therefore embody a potentiality for criminality and/or immorality and must be “evicted, eliminated, or controlled.”” State policies concerning immigrants are primarily centred on technologies of control, such as surveillance and social sorting, due to the “threat of illegal immigration,” and crime.
The discourse on “illegal” immigration and “failed” refugees not only consolidates the idea of a recognizable nation by creating undesirable bodies, it also enacts the border on the body (or turns the body into a border) within a “borderless” EU—thus making the border embodied, performative, and mobile. Meghan G. McDowell and Nancy A. Wonders have detailed this shift in Keeping Migrants in Their Place: Technologies of Control and Racialized Public Space in Arizona. They write,
“Under pressure to curb “illegal” immigration, states have moved toward internal, mobile border-control policies that rely heavily on various forms of surveillance and exclusion by law enforcement officials and government workers.”
Back in 2011 The Canadian Press reported that the Dutch government planned “to equip 125 police officers with mobile devices that can scan detainees’ fingerprints to check whether they are illegal immigrants.” Biometrics are not the only technique of control the state employs. The state also uses sexuality to regulate immigration and to (re)produce sexual categories. In ‘Gays who cannot properly be gay’: Queer Muslims in the neoliberal European city, for instance, Fatima El-Tayeb writes about how sexuality is used to construct an implicitly straight Muslim community in the Netherlands that is pitted against an equally implicit White Autochtoon Dutch gay community. Both cultural racism and nation-based racism play significant roles in these processes.
“The Netherlands has never been multicultural.” — Jan Willem Duyvendak
The temporal politics embedded in the culturalization discourse unquestionably regulate the cultural manufacture of noteworthy time frames—which opens the door to academic myopia and suppression. It is, to say the least, odd that professor Jan Willem Duyvendak, the leading scholar on culturalization in the Netherlands, does not mention, nor engage, (the legacy of) colonialism in his work on the politics of belonging, and home. Historical amnesia is, as Noam Chomsky attests, “a dangerous phenomenon, not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity, but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that lie ahead.” The question is, what groundwork is being laid with this vehement denial of “the multicultural society”?