Jeffrey C. Isaac
The “identity politics” of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality have been at the forefront of the politics of “advanced industrial societies” at least since the emergence of new social movements associated with the sixties New Left. Demands for political and social inclusion have shaped the development of public discourse, party politics, and social policy, and they have profoundly impacted the research agendas of political scientists across the discipline. In recent years much attention has turned to the specific challenges of “multiculturalism” presented by the growth of large, visible, and increasingly politicized groups of Muslims within the “advanced industrial societies,” from Britain and France to Canada and the U.S. Perhaps no society has come to exemplify these challenges more than the Netherlands, a country long regarded as a bastion of tolerance and liberal accommodation, which has recently been beset by conflicts that test not simply its political self-understanding, but its deeper identity as a “European” nation. These conflicts—symbolized by the highly publicized controversies associated with the figures Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali—have been widely covered in the media and have been the topic of much recent analysis. Paul M. Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn's When Ways of Life: Multiculturalism and its Discontents in the Netherlands (Princeton University Press, 2007) is an important new book that focuses directly on the recent politics of the Netherlands and its broader significance. The book brings to bear on this topic the most advanced tools of public opinion research, and it builds on Spiderman's earlier pioneering research on the political psychology of prejudice and the politics of race. The book raises questions of fundamental importance to the political identity of liberal democracies. It is also an excellent example of the ways that the methods and concepts developed in the study of American politics are part of a broader scholarly discourse that addresses problems of broader scope and relevance. So it seemed like a perfect book around which to organize a symposium, bringing into conversation a range of political science perspectives. The contributions of Will Kymlicka, a renowned political theorist of multiculturalism; Jonathan Laurence, an expert on Western European politics with a focus on challenges of Muslim incorporation; and Robert Rohrschschneider, an expert on European public opinion research, make clear that political scientists shed light on political problems from a range of angles, and that our overall understanding of the political universe is enhanced when these diverse viewpoints can be brought into productive contact.
Robert Rohrschneider
The Netherlands is famous for its tolerance of diverse lifestyles that frequently clash in other countries. Any tourist walking the canal-lined streets of Amsterdam must be struck by the easy symbiosis among residents, business, and the red-light district. Arend Lijphart provided us with a way to understand the historically grown capacity to tolerate the side-by-side existence of diverse social norms. He ascribed to Dutch elites an ability to create institutions that shared the nation's resources in a way that de-escalated conflicts among social and political groups. Precisely because of this capacity to amicably regulate diverse interests, most observers of European politics were taken aback by the sudden outbursts of hostilities over immigration in the Netherlands. Why did these tensions arise so suddenly and with such intensity? Why do Dutch citizens object to many aspect of the government's multiculturalism program when they accept diversity in other areas? What can elites do to reduce political and social tensions?
These are the core questions addressed by this landmark study by Paul Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn. As is the case with all of the recent work by Sniderman and his colleagues on European attitudes about immigrants, the study examines the political psychology underlying citizens' hostilities toward immigrants. However, although the book focuses on the Netherlands, its significance reaches far beyond the Dutch case: The study informs readers about the character and origins of controversies that liberal immigration policies likely create in other democracies. And it offers ideas about how elites might deal with public opposition to immigration at a time when European societies need the economic contributions of immigrants in order to maintain those levels of affluence to which citizens have become accustomed.
Narrowly interpreted, then, the study is about how Dutch multiculturalism policies—letting immigrants define their identity in ways they see fit—created a backlash against these policies among Dutch citizens. Viewed more broadly, the study is concerned with the structure of the mass-elite dialogue in advanced democracies: It seeks to identify the mechanisms by which elites can trigger or downplay opposition to their policies. To make a profound contribution to either goal alone would have been remarkable. To enlighten us about both makes this book a must-read in the field of comparative politics.
Given the study's twin goals, the first several chapters examine how publics perceive immigrants and the dispositions that influence these evaluations. The analyses provide a fascinating but disturbing portrayal of how Dutch citizens and Muslims view each other. Using data from a new survey conducted before Pym Fortune and filmmaker Theo van Gogh were murdered, these nuanced analyses portray a sobering reality. Yes, about half of the Dutch citizens hold positive views about Muslims as a matter of principle. They see their valuable contributions to Dutch society, and they believe that West Europeans and Muslims can get along just fine. Just the same, the other half holds negative views about Muslims as a matter of principle. This segment of Dutch society simply does not believe that Muslims can make a positive contribution to the Dutch way of life.
This partition of the Dutch public into two roughly equal parts lays the foundation for the analyses in the chapters on mass attitudes: How do Dutch citizens evaluate the various religious and cultural practices of Muslims? Of course, those who dislike Muslims in general can be counted on to dislike their specific practices. These citizens constitute the potential core constituency for extremist appeals. But what about those who do not object to Muslims in general, and who presumably represent the liberal core of Dutch society? Can they be mobilized against Muslims under certain conditions? The answer is, surprisingly, affirmative. The study persuasively shows that these citizens reject specific practices of Muslims, particularly the unequal treatment of women and children that they associate with Muslim culture. One case in point: There is near unanimity among Dutch citizens that “Muslim men dominate their women” (p. 24). And there is a large proportion that believes that “Muslims in the Netherlands raise children in an authoritarian way” (p. 24). Crucially, people who dislike these practices are pushed toward favoring more stringent immigration policies despite their approval of Muslims in principle. Further fueling this antagonism is the fact that Muslims in the Netherlands hold equally uncharitable views about Dutch citizens. For instance, a substantial majority of Muslims agrees with the statement that “Western European women have too many rights and liberties” (p. 28). What these analyses reveal is a wide perceptual gulf between Muslim immigrants and Dutch citizens, and the deep distrust that Dutch citizens harbor toward Muslims.
One note on the study's methodology. It is exemplary in its creativity to push the boundaries of knowledge using experiments embedded in survey research. One example must suffice to illustrate this point. An important question in light of the findings about Muslim practices, clearly, is this: Are liberal critics of Muslims—those who welcome them in principle but reject some of their practices—hypocritical, by using Muslim practices to express their prejudice but denying it when asked about it in principle? A “list experiment” lays this possibility to rest. The idea behind a list experiment is to ask two sets of survey respondents, randomly selected, to indicate the number (not the name) of groups in a list that are objectionable. Baseline respondents evaluate a given set of groups; “treatment” respondents evaluate the same list, except that the group of interest is added to the list. In the current case, Muslims are added to the list presented to “treatment respondents.” This measurement allows respondents who dislike Muslims but would not say so openly to express their preference in a covert way. The crucial lesson from this experiment is that liberal critics of Muslims really mean it when they say that they have nothing against Muslims in principle. This experiment thus provides powerful evidence that Muslim practices constitute an important reason for the opposition to multiculturalism among the liberal segments in Dutch society.
All in all, these analyses show that it is not just the extremist segments of Dutch society—closed-minded, prejudiced, authoritarian individuals—that may be expected to be hostile toward immigrants. Of course, these predispositions matter—but they have always mattered, as Seymour Martin Lipset's analysis of working-class authoritarianism illustrated, or as Sniderman and his Italian colleagues show in their study of immigration attitudes in Italy. What is so important, theoretically and politically in this study, is that the presumably liberal center is susceptible to becoming hostile toward immigrants, either because they reject certain practices or because Western cultural norms are seen to be threatened by immigrants. As the authors write: “Threats to cultural identity, our analyses show, have a far larger impact on hostility to minorities than any other kind of threat” (p. 91), including economic ones. And when cultural issues are made salient, either through events or the media, or by politicians, then all Dutch citizens may oppose the idea of immigration (p. 98). These all-important findings plainly signal that opposition to multiculturalism has moved from the extremes in Dutch society to its political center.
Among the many sobering insights is a glimpse of hope, however. It appears that those traits that generate some of the hostility toward immigrants may actually aid elites to contain them. This sounds like a paradox, but to resolve it illustrates the creative use to which the authors put survey-based experiments. The argument is surprisingly simple. Conformity and, one might add, authoritarianism drive anti-immigrant sentiments. But they also drive obedience to authority. And the authors show that significant numbers of citizens who do not like immigrants nevertheless are willing to support pro-immigration policies if their preferred party supports them. These results clearly “show that those who prize conformity will tend to yield to political and social pressure” (p. 118). Not all, of course, will abandon their opposition to immigration when their party supports it. But the size of the pliable group may be just large enough to be politically relevant. These experiments show, so far as it is possible using survey research, that elites have a clear choice. They can galvanize opposition to multiculturalism, or they can contain anti-immigrant hostilities.
All in all, this book reveals the tensions that are likely to fuel the politics of immigration and multiculturalism in Europe. It illuminates the logic of resentment toward immigrants in a way no other study does. It shows how elites can influence these antagonisms. And it provides guidance to policymakers about how to frame immigration policies that may reduce tensions. To have accomplished these goals in one highly readable study makes this book pathbreaking.
Will Kymlicka
This book operates at two levels. First, it is a study of public attitudes about immigration in the Netherlands, using the methods that Paul Sniderman deployed in his earlier book on prejudice in Italy. As in Italy, the results reveal that a distressingly high percentage of the population, across the political spectrum, can be mobilized to support anti-immigrant positions.
Second, the book is an argument about the effects of public policy, and specifically of multiculturalism policies. According to Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn, the adoption of multiculturalism policies in the Netherlands in 1983 worsened the potential for anti-immigrant politics. While there was prejudice against immigrants before the adoption of multiculturalism policies, these policies created new sources of resistance that “piled on top” of the preexisting prejudice-based opposition (p. 135). Whereas the original prejudice was concentrated among the more peripheral members of society, this new resistance extends into the educated middle-class core of society (p. 132). Multiculturalism was supposed to reduce the hard core of opposition among the prejudiced, but has instead had the opposite effect of creating a new penumbra of opposition among the less prejudiced.
This claim about the effects of multiculturalism is presented as the take-home message of the book—indeed, Sniderman's summation is that multiculturalism in Europe “is as mistaken an enterprise” as the invasion of Iraq.Footnote 1 Yet the precise link between multiculturalism and anti-immigrant attitudes is not clearly laid out in the book. As I understand it, the authors are advancing two hypotheses about this link: a) that adopting multiculturalism does not reduce the original core levels of prejudice, and may indeed increase it, compared to countries without multiculturalism policies; and b) that adopting multiculturalism generates a wider circle of opposition to immigrant rights among those who are not prejudiced, a phenomenon that is not found in countries without multiculturalism policies.
Neither of these hypotheses is stated explicitly, but without them, the book's conclusions dissolve. If adopting multiculturalism helps reduce the original core levels of prejudice, or if a similarly wide circle of mobilizable opposition among the nonprejudiced also exists in countries without multiculturalism policies, then there is no basis for linking the distressing attitudinal results to multiculturalism.
I have doubts about both hypotheses, which I will discuss. But let us assume they are true about the Dutch case. What implications would this have for international debates about multiculturalism? The authors say that “[w]e believe, but are not in a position to prove, that our results travel to other countries” (p. xi). They believe this because they take the Netherlands as an “exemplary” case of multiculturalism, differing from other countries only in the strength of its commitment to the policy (p. 132). However, this is misleading. Dutch multiculturalism is in fact quite unique, the hybrid outgrowth of a “returnist” approach and a “pillarization” approach. The initial Dutch policies for recognizing immigrant identities were not intended to help immigrants integrate and participate as citizens. Rather, they were rooted in a returnist philosophy that encouraged immigrants to return to their countries of origin. When this expectation was gradually abandoned in the 1980s, the government then adapted the preexisting “pillarization” model. Pillarization historically involved creating parallel institutions to deal with the religious and ideological divisions among Catholics, Protestants, and secular liberals. This model worked historically, in part because all of the separate institutions diffused a common national identity and loyalty, rooted in the fact that Catholics, Protestants, and secular liberals shared the same national origin, identity, and language. The historic success of pillarization in accommodating religious/ideological diversity while sustaining a common national identity encouraged Dutch officials to set up new sets of parallel institutions for immigrants. But in retrospect, this was a risky move, since pillarization was not designed for ethnically and linguistically distinct newcomers.
Sniderman and Hagendoorn say that the Dutch decision to adapt pillarization for immigrants was particularly “generous.” In a financial sense, it was. But in another sense, it reflected reluctance on the part of the majority to accept that multiculturalism requires them to change their own institutions (the same reluctance that sustained the returnist approach for so long). Generously funding separate minority schools or media was a convenient way to avoid having to reform their own schools and media, which is the more difficult and demanding struggle that has characterized multiculturalism in most countries.
In short, the Netherlands started with returnism and shifted to pillarization, neither of which was initially designed to integrate immigrants. This trajectory is unique to the Netherlands and explains some of its discontents. It is different from the model of immigrant multiculturalism adopted by Canada and Australia in the 1970s, and from the model endorsed by political theorists, and from the model promoted by international organizations, all of which focus more on promoting the accommodation of immigrant diversity within common institutions, rather than pillarized institutions.
These authors ignore the distinctiveness of the Dutch model and the implications for using it as an example. So even if their hypotheses hold for the Netherlands, we should be hesitant about drawing lessons for other countries.
Are the hypotheses true even in the Netherlands? After all, anti-immigrant attitudes seem just as strong, if not stronger, in European countries that do not have multiculturalism policies, such as France, Denmark, Austria, or Switzerland. It is not obvious that anti-immigrant sentiments in multiculturalist Holland differ in their causes or depth from those in their nonmulticulturalist neighbors.
So what is the evidence for the authors' two hypotheses? The surprising answer is: none. So far as I can tell, there is no evidence in the book for either claim.
Consider the claim that multiculturalism generates opposition among the nonprejudiced. The evidence for this claim is that opposition to immigrant rights increased when Dutch respondents were “primed” by the interviewer to think about national identity. When a question about barriers to immigration was prefaced by the phrase “You belong to the Dutch nationality,” support for barriers substantially increased, even among the nonprejudiced, compared to the results when people were not primed in this way.
This is an interesting result—the mere mention of nationality changes people's answers. But what does this have to do with multiculturalism? It only supports the book's hypothesis if the results of this “priming” test would be different in countries without multiculturalism policies. The authors apparently believe that replicating this question in France or Denmark would not reveal any national priming effect—that French and Danish citizens would not be more opposed to immigration if primed to think of national identity. But they provide no evidence for the claim that national priming works only in the presence of multiculturalism policies, and I find it completely implausible. In fact, I would bet my life savings that it is false. The priming of national identities is a staple of anti-immigrant politics across Europe, equally evident in countries without multiculturalism policies.
Similarly, the authors provide no evidence that multiculturalism policies increase the number of people who feel hostility to minorities (p. 135). They cite a number of test questions in their survey that trigger increased hostility, but as with the “national priming” test, none of these tests is causally or conceptually related to the presence of multiculturalism policies. The same results could, and almost certainly would, be found in countries without such policies.
So the data do not in fact test the impact of multiculturalism policies. There are, however, other sources of evidence we can use to test the authors' hypotheses. Questions about prejudice, tolerance, and support for immigrants' rights have been included in several cross-national surveys, including the World Values Survey, Eurobarometer, and the European Social Survey. And their results provide no basis whatsoever for the claim that countries with multiculturalism policies exhibit greater prejudice, hostility, or resistance to immigrant rights. If anything, they suggest the opposite: Countries with multiculturalism policies tend to have more positive attitudes toward minorities.Footnote 2
I am not sure why Sniderman and Hagendoorn ignore this body of evidence. Perhaps they prefer to discuss only their own cases. But the puzzle arises even in Sniderman's own data. He lists three countries where he has done comparable studies: Italy, the Netherlands, and Canada (p. 114 n. 21). Canada adopted an official multiculturalism policy in 1971, the Netherlands followed over a decade later in 1983, and Italy has never adopted multiculturalism. So if they are right, we should find (all things being equal) that prejudice and opposition are highest in Canada, where the pernicious effects of multiculturalism have had the longest time to operate; second highest in the Netherlands, with a shorter experience of multiculturalism; and lowest in Italy, with no experience of multiculturalism. In fact, the data show the opposite—prejudice and hostility are lowest in Canada, second lowest in the Netherlands, and highest in Italy.
It would have been helpful if Sniderman had explained this incongruity. In this book, he simply ignores the Canadian experience, although he knows it well, having coauthored a book on attitudes to diversity in Canada. He knows that Canada was the first Western country to adopt multiculturalism, and that it is the only Western country where multiculturalism is constitutionalized. It is therefore an obvious point of comparison for anyone genuinely interested in the effects of multiculturalism. Yet he never once discusses it in this book, perhaps because Canada's enduringly high support for immigration contradicts every one of his claims about the corrosive impact of multiculturalism.
The authors do refer briefly to the Italian data—noting that levels of tolerance are twice as high in Holland as in Italy (p. 55)—but they promptly ignore the challenge this poses for their analysis. If, as Sniderman said in his earlier book, Italy provides a good test case for the general European dynamic of anti-immigrant sentiments, and if the presence of multiculturalism policies creates additional hostility and opposition that piles on top of this general dynamic, then presumably the Netherlands should have higher levels of anti-immigrant sentiments than Italy. In fact, on his own data, it is the reverse.
Perhaps Sniderman would say that the Netherlands historically had much higher levels of tolerance, prior to the multiculturalism policy, and that multiculturalism has reduced it over time. This too can be tested. In three of its waves, the World Values Survey asked people in both Italy and the Netherlands whether they feel comfortable having an immigrant as a neighbor. From 1981 to 1999, precisely the period when these authors say that Dutch multiculturalism was “piling on” new hostility to immigrants, the number of people in the Netherlands who expressed discomfort with immigrants went down from 16.5% to 5.0%. In Italy, by contrast, where there was no multiculturalism policy to pile up hostility, the number of people who said they did not want immigrants as neighbors went up from 3.5% in 1981 to 16.5% in 1999. These are massive changes, and they go precisely in the opposite direction to the claims of Sniderman and Hagendoorn.
I could go on listing studies that contradict these authors' hypotheses, but the more interesting question is why they are so confident about their hypotheses, given the absence of evidence. The answer, I suspect, is that they think they have identified the causal mechanisms that underlie anti-immigrant attitudes. We know from social psychology that certain kinds of intergroup interactions reliably generate hostility against immigrants. For example, if members of the dominant group are asked to think about immigrants in contexts that trigger perceptions of both cultural threat and political disloyalty, the predictable outcome is increased hostility. If we can then show that multiculturalism policies increase the number of contexts that trigger perceptions of both cultural threat and political disloyalty, we can reliably predict a piling-on effect.
At times, the authors imply that they have good evidence of such causal chains, and that this underpins their belief in the corrosive effects of multiculturalism. Unfortunately, the causal linkages are not in fact spelled out in the book. They point to compelling evidence that perceptions of cultural threat and political disloyalty negatively affect attitudes to immigrants. What is entirely missing, however, is any evidence about how the presence of multiculturalism policies triggers those perceptions.
For example, they repeatedly assert that multiculturalism discourages immigrants from feeling or expressing loyalty to the Netherlands, and this makes negative intergroup interactions more likely. But how exactly does multiculturalism policy discourage loyalty? What is the causal story here?
I see hints of three different stories in the book, although none is clearly distinguished or defended. At times, the authors imply that discouraging loyalty was the explicit goal of the policy—that is, that government policy guidelines explicitly discouraged immigrants from identifying with the Netherlands (pp. 11, 42). If true, the causal link would be clear.
As a description of the actual policy, however, it is simply false. In this case, as in several others, their description of the policy is a caricature—for example, that the policy tells people to ignore commonalities across ethnic lines, or to ignore human rights violations in other groups. They do not provide a single quotation from any policy document to support these (mis)characterizations.
Perhaps the authors would say that they were not attempting to describe the official wording of the government policy. Rather, their causal story focuses on the way it has been implemented on the ground. Even if the official policy statement encourages immigrants to integrate, perhaps it has been implemented in a way that empowers factions within minority groups that discourage loyalty. Sniderman and Hagendoorn suggest, for example, that the policy of funding minority institutions has given power to foreign imams who have no interest in the integrationist goals of the policy (pp. 29, 130).
This is certainly possible—all public policies are vulnerable to being captured by actors who do not share their goals. But notice that this causal story does not support the claim that multiculturalism has a general tendency to produce negative effects. Everything depends on how it is implemented. In the Canadian case, for example, a similar policy of financially supporting minority self-organizations has been implemented in a different way, resulting in the creation of a new cadre of elites within minority communities who promote integration and participation. Indeed, this policy helps to explain why political integration and loyalty are higher among ethnic groups in Canada than among comparable ethnic groups in the United States who do not benefit from multicultural funding.Footnote 3
So a similar policy can have different effects on loyalty, depending on how the design of funding and consultation mechanisms affects elite recruitment patterns within minority groups; how these elites are then connected to other institutions, such as political parties, the media, and the courts; and how multiculturalism fits into larger policy frameworks of citizenship and social services. There is a substantial literature, entirely ignored by the authors, that explores how variations in policy design help explain the divergent effects of multiculturalism over time and space. This literature suggests that there are cases where multiculturalism is implemented in a way that exacerbates hostility, as the authors fear, but there are other cases where it encourages participation and solidarity, as defenders of multiculturalism hope. And, as we have seen, the comparative data suggest that, on balance, the latter outnumber the former.
It may be that Dutch policymakers made poor choices about implementation. It is impossible to tell from this book, since it does not describe the actual policy mechanisms. But even if so, the appropriate response might not be to abandon the policy but to improve its implementation. A causal story that rests on problems in implementation is both more contingent and more remediable than Sniderman and Hagendoorn acknowledge.
But the authors also hint at yet another causal story. On this third story, the problem is not with the explicit wording of the policy, nor with the way it has been implemented. Rather, the problem lies in the fact that multiculturalism policy, like all identity politics, “calls attention to difference.” In several places, they imply that this fact alone is sufficient to create added hostility or opposition. Simply calling attention to the fact that minorities have an identity that differs from the majority, by itself, inherently triggers the perceptions of cultural threat and disloyalty that have been shown to increase hostility.
I hesitate to attribute this claim to Sniderman and Hagendoorn, since it is so implausible. Taken seriously, it would rule out not only multiculturalism policies for immigrants but also land rights for indigenous peoples, or minority language rights for Swedes in Finland, or territorial autonomy for Catalans in Spain, or the pillarization model that helped preserve the Netherlands from religious conflict. There are hundreds of examples around the world where policies that call attention to difference have been successful in reducing conflict, preserving peace, and fostering democracy. There is a mountain of evidence refuting the hypothesis that such policies inherently increase, rather than reduce, hostility.
I suspect that Sniderman and Hagendoorn do not intend to make this bald claim. Presumably they meant only to imply that certain ways of calling attention to certain kinds of difference in certain contexts trigger the causes of increased hostility. Perhaps, indeed, they viewed this book as an attempt to specify these conditions. But if so, the book falls short. In order to determine which ways of attending to difference are problematic, we need to distinguish different types of group identity, different rationales for recognizing them, different institutional mechanisms of recognition, and the different historic and demographic circumstances in which these issues arise—that is, we need to examine all the contingencies and variations that the authors ignore in their rush to condemn multiculturalism as such.
Jonathan Laurence
I
When Ways of Life Collide is a valuable contribution to the political psychology of diversity. Paul Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn's book sounds a general admonishment against the dangers of multiculturalism in the West, which, they argue, has permitted the establishment of a hard-to-integrate Muslim bloc. This transatlantic collaboration, by a leading American political scientist and a top Dutch sociologist, centers on the following irony: that the serious commitment to institute religious tolerance and cultural pluralism in the Netherlands has in fact worked “to legitimize and subsidize one particular expression of Muslim culture that is most at odds with the pluralistic spirit of liberal democracy” (p. xi).
There is plenty of blame to go around. They fault the offenders—Muslims in Holland, who, the authors say, have retained conflictual cultural traits and political loyalties—as much as their enablers: successive governments of the 1980s and 1990s who abetted the growing apart of Muslims and the majority society. The government's commitment to “bringing minority identity politics to the fore,” they write, has actually served to “undercut support for the right[s] of ethnic and religious minorities” among majority public opinion (p. 16). In short, the well-intentioned Dutch encouragement of cultural differences has succeeded only in raising the majority's hackles and detracting from the minority's integration.
The authors' central, counterintuitive finding holds genuine surprise: Increasing hostility toward Muslims cannot be ascribed to a rightward swerve in Dutch politics. They show how multiculturalism has engendered concerns over an assault on national culture and identity within majority opinion—as well as awakened feelings of prejudice and nationalism—even among respondents on the political left. So convincing is the book's narrative of the deep incompatibilities between the native Dutch majority and the Muslim minority that one wonders how successive governments could have pursued such an obviously self-defeating set of policies. Similarly, if Sniderman and Hagendoorn are correct, one wonders who could be surprised that the Dutch majority would repudiate these policies and reject a culture that opposes pluralism and mistreats women and children.
II
The authors offer a fascinating look inside the Dutch mind as it grapples with a growing Muslim population. They give a novel account of why the Dutch state dutifully allowed for a Muslim “pillar,” an autonomous institutional space which, while not as extensive as its Protestant or Catholic counterparts, was generous by any measure. If voters were force-fed multiculturalism, state the authors, they swallowed it because they value consensus-based politics (p. 103). Motivated by a consensual feeling of responsibility for the genocide that took place during the German occupation, Social and Christian Democrats alike acceded to certain Muslims' demands for a form of self-segregation. The authors show that it is actually that same “valuing [of] conformity” that leads the Dutch to perceive Muslims as a threat to national culture and identity today (p. 105). In so doing, Sniderman and Hagendoorn upend habitual assumptions regarding the relationship of deference to authority and political affiliation. For their respondents, a commitment to consensual politics and cultural protectionism are inextricably linked.
Using carefully designed survey questions and innovative interview techniques—including opinions collected after the interview has “ended”—the authors decouple prejudice and nationalism from their usual right-wing associations. Social scientists should ponder the relative ease with which their respondents were prodded to adopt illiberal policy positions. In one sequence, the authors get nearly 25% of those asked to agree to the legal segregation of minority children from Dutch children. These respondents hail from the entire political spectrum, and cannot be dismissed as a small band of extreme right supporters. The authors insist that opposition to multiculturalism is not the same as intolerance. “A dislike of some Muslim social practices” that Dutch authorities preserved with multicultural policies, they conclude, “contributes to a politically overwhelming level of support in the society to putting up higher barriers to immigrants” (p. 32). The excesses of multiculturalism can test the patience of even the affable Dutch.
III
The situation that Sniderman and Hagendoorn describe, however, is neither inevitable nor entirely accurate. The book's elegant analysis of Dutch public opinion is undermined by an overly stylized treatment of both multicultural policies and Muslims in Holland. The authors do not do justice to the range of policy options available to a “multicultural” state. To be sure, Dutch authorities proffered generous subsidies and visas to almost any Muslim group well organized enough to ask, and granted citizenship to those who continued to hold Moroccan and Turkish nationality. But the authors' working definition of multiculturalism still has a strawlike consistency: “People cannot flourish … unless they can become who they truly and fully are” (p. 5). This, they explain, requires the use of “public funds to sustain the institutions—communal, religious, cultural—that sustain a minority's way of life” (p. 40). Sniderman and Hagendoorn evoke a parallel Muslim universe made possible by Dutch policies: “Instruction in their own language and culture; separate radio and television programs; government funding to import religious leaders; subsidies for a wide range of social and religious organizations; consultation prerogatives for community leaders; publicly financed housing set aside for and specifically designed to meet Muslim requirements” (p. 15).
At face value, such arrangements suggest exceptionalism and exemption, and multiculturalism might appear to be nothing less than a disavowal of the obligations of national citizenship. Given contemporary fears over ghettoization, terrorism, and the generally tense cultural and religious climate, who could object to scrapping such patently segregationist policies? Yet an examination of degrees of multiculturalism or the complexities of state–church relations in the Netherlands might expose that multiculturalism is not an all-or-nothing, zero-sum game. Much is made of the Dutch willingness to recognize and finance Muslim primary schools. Consider the reality, however, that in the year 2000 only eight thousand (around 8%) of Muslim students actually enrolled in these several dozen schools. Recognizing a minority religion cannot be reduced to “sustaining a minority's way of life.” It is perhaps disingenuous to imply that a carte blanche is the only imaginable form of diversity policy. Dutch “pillarization” may have allowed for a distinctly hands-off form of multiculturalism, but that is still not the same as actively promoting an antipluralist interpretation of the Muslim faith.
The real policy options are more nuanced, since the question is not whether the state will engage minority cultures and religions but how it does so. How does a country differentiate between available regimes of cultural recognition or state–religion relations? Is identity only either “spotlighted” or left to its own devices? Is there no middle ground?
The history of Dutch accommodation of Islam is the slow achievement of (separate) equality in the “pillar” system. Upon examination, it emerges that the Dutch authorities were actually not much engaged with the content of the Muslim pillar. Funding was made available to mosques with few strings attached other than that they be open to all Muslims. Policies toward the Muslim minority were, for all practical purposes, being outsourced to foreign governments. Beginning in early 1980s, for example, Dutch authorities allowed a branch of the Turkish directorate for religious affairs (Diyanet) to appoint around 140 imams for Turkish mosques in the Netherlands. Informal arrangements allowed the Moroccans to do the same for an additional hundred mosques. In other words, the Dutch state was not plugging in spotlights, but nor were they exactly minding the outlets.
Of course, importing imams and allowing foreign governments' involvement in mosque construction was not a uniquely Dutch practice. Every other European government, multiculturalist or not, engaged in similar policies of accepting outside funds and outside authorities—from Morocco and Turkey to Saudi Arabia and Libya and beyond—to influence their local Muslim population. This was pursued in part to avoid a less desirable alternative: that imams representing Islamist opposition in their home countries would promote a revolutionary or violent form of religion. It was understandable that the Dutch preferred the safer bet, that is, the official religious infrastructure of the Turkish or Moroccan state. Like everyone else, the Dutch were ambivalent about the new minority's permanence, and thus kicked the ball down the field, avoiding the hard questions of Islam's status in Dutch society. But is such a policy the same thing as actively promoting and sustaining separate ways of life? The initial period of outsourcing does not define multicultural policy. In a way, it reflects the absence of a policy.
This was before the mid-1990s, when authorities began to encourage the emergence of a “Dutch Islam,” rather than just abiding by an Islam in Holland. It is only natural that organized Muslim representatives would take their place alongside Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish counterparts in Dutch state–religion relations. Like other European governments, the Dutch began using state recognition as an instrument of oversight, including initiatives such as the “Islam and Citizenship” council of 1996.
IV
The book's policy implications are in tune with a growing chorus of liberal critics of Islam in Europe, ranging from the social scientific (Giovanni Sartori, Alain Touraine) to the philippic (Oriana Fallaci, Ayan Hirsi Ali), who denounce multiculturalism for ignoring the incompatibility of Islamic practices with liberal democracy. But whereas these critics often express alarm at the demands of “theocratic Islam,” as Sartori puts it, Sniderman and Hagendoorn seem uninterested in religion per se and focus instead on a cultural analysis of mores and values. “Western Europeans take exception to Muslim treatment of women and children,” they explain, and “many Dutch take strong exception to Muslim practices” (p. 9). For all the evocation of “Muslim culture,” however, the authors never specify what they exactly mean beyond “commonalities in the way of life in countries where the majority are Muslims” (p. 21). To resort to this level of generalization about Muslims reinforces the very confusion that contributes to prejudice in the first place. The authors write that Muslim children are likely to be “kept under strict surveillance and control,” and are often subject to “threat, verbal violence, and corporal punishment” (p. 22). An entire religious and cultural group, in all its diversity, is dealt with as a uniform bloc, without recourse to any polling or statistics of the Muslim population to gauge the extent of the offending behavior.
What do the authors make of the obvious diversity of views and practices among Muslims and non-Muslims? Or of the distinctions between Moroccan, Tunisian, or Saudi Islam from its Indonesian or Turkish variants? They anticipate such criticism—“each culture [is] shot through with tensions and contradictions and variations over time and from place to place even at the same time and place” (p. 29)—and then hastily dispatch it. What it comes down to, they argue, is that “a Dutch observer can see that women in a Muslim community do not enjoy the same status as women in a Dutch community” (p. 29). This shortcut exposes Sniderman and Hagendoorn's view of Muslim populations in Europe as a static, wholesale import from the homeland. As a result, it is sometimes unclear in their survey questions whether they are asking their subjects about “Muslims” or “immigrants.”
Distinctions that may arise between the first, second, or third generations, and the ways that cultural and religious practices change in this process of settlement, are ignored. Nor is there any consideration of how the multicultural state, through its powers of recognition and regulation, has exactly the set of tools that can encourage this generational adaptation and evolution. In fact, Dutch and most other European governments have expanded some aspects of their multicultural policies for the past 10 years or so precisely to encourage the emergence of their own national Islams, with local institutional references and religious authority.
V
This part of the story is missing in large part because the book's data were collected in 1998, a long time ago in terms of Dutch multicultural politics: before the rise of the populist Pim Fortuyn, September 11, the Hofstadt cell, or the murder of Theo Van Gogh. Sniderman and Hagendoorn insist, however, that their data predict what would follow: “The pre-Sept. 11 equilibrium over multiculturalism was inherently unstable” (p. 123). But the Dutch knew this and had begun to correct their course. High unemployment rates and low educational achievement of second and third generation migrant-origin youth had led to changes by the mid-1990s. Attempts were made to increase the presence of minorities in public- and private-sector jobs. The state raised its expectations for integration indicators and stopped outsourcing its Islam policies. Rotterdam and other cities started subsidizing Islamic organizations and theological training for local Muslims out of fear of disproportionate influence from foreign sources. Two interventionist programs aimed at encouraging integration were pioneered in the Netherlands and soon thereafter were emulated across Europe. More than a year before September 11, the Dutch required imams arriving from abroad to take education courses in the Dutch language, social and political institutions, and the Dutch ways of life. This program was among the first such in Europe, as was the law on civic integration for newcomers that mandated a six-hundred-hour language and civic education course. DVDs that included glimpses of topless women on a beach and two men kissing were shipped out to all consular stations to be viewed by aspiring migrants. Even without knowing the success of these efforts in moderating all Muslims' social, religious, or political comportment, this shows that a multicultural state can be affirmative of religious affiliation as an option for individuals and groups who choose it, without retreating behind a wall of nonintervention.
The book omits any good news that might have mitigated the authors' bleak portrait. We read of Moroccans in Holland who rejoiced in the streets when the twin towers collapsed, but nothing of the successes of political integration. Indeed, Dutch voters and political parties have a noteworthy record of electing officials of Muslim descent. The current governing coalition includes two cabinet members of migrant background, the justice secretary (Turkey) and the social affairs and employment secretary (Morocco). Fourteen such members of parliament were elected in the last decade, in addition to one woman of Turkish descent who represents the Netherlands in the European Parliament. This has taken place at the local level, too. There are 30 municipal councillors of Muslim background in 10 cities, from Amsterdam and Rotterdam to Zaanstad and Amersfort. These are not paltry numbers for a recently settled Muslim population of under a million in a country of 16.5 million.
Early in the book, Sniderman and Hagendoorn make a solemn case for the urgency of the situation: “[T]he prognosis is that Muslims will outnumber the Dutch in the three largest cities in the NL within the decade” (p. 13). As this formulation makes clear, the concept of a Dutch Muslim does not come easily. This is, perhaps, the very perception that they wish to highlight: how past multicultural policies have contributed to an apparently unbridgeable gap between cultural blocs. But by ignoring the possibilities presented by better-calibrated policies, they may unwittingly reinforce that distance.
