TO TOLERATE EVERYTHING IS TO BELIEVE NOTHING:

Putting the fear of God into Holland: The Dutch have rejected liberalism in response to Islamic immigration. Some say they are now too hardline. So what can the rest of Europe learn from their crisis? (Brian Moynahan, 2/27/05, Times of London)

Not long ago, Holland prided itself as being the most tolerant and welcoming country in Europe for immigrants and asylum seekers. It had the credentials to prove it. So many have settled there, ethnic "minorities" are often in a majority. In the great Dutch cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the Hague, the newcomers already outnumber the native Dutch among under-20-year-olds. They will soon be an absolute majority.

Although the slump that followed the 1973 oil shock removed the urgent need to recruit labour, the Dutch accepted that the "guest workers" in the country could remain. The policy was to create a multicultural society in which cultural and ethnic differences were accepted and appreciated.

Some immigrants came from former Dutch colonies. The two largest groups, however, Turkish and Moroccan, had no historic links with the Netherlands. The Dutch nonetheless accepted the reunification of families, and the practice of marrying partners from the country of origin, even though these can have an eight- or tenfold multiplier effect on overall numbers. Asylum seekers then arrived, in numbers that escalated from 3,500 in 1985 to over 43,000 in 2000.

The figures were pro rata among the highest in the EU. Illegals came, too, mainly after 1990, with estimates running from 100,000 to 200,000. The Dutch supplied funding for mosques, religious schools, language courses and housing. They passed special legislation so Moroccans could have dual nationality, as Moroccan nationality is inalienable under Moroccan law. Political correctness, of the sort that produced Harry Enfield's famously relaxed Amsterdam policemen, reigned. Issues felt at street level — immigration, crime, culture, national identity — were seldom discussed by the political elite.

No longer. A sea change has taken place. [...]

The consensus has shifted across the board. In a country that can still seem a parody of itself — a magistrate ruled recently that an armed robber was entitled to a tax rebate on the cost of his gun as a tool of his trade — even the leader of the Green party has called for it to be illegal for Muslims to import spouses through arranged marriages. Integrated teams, drawn from the police, social welfare and housing offices, are used to locate and arrest illegals. Social welfare knows who is drawing benefit, housing offices have addresses, and police check for criminal records. The number of asylum seekers has been slashed from 43,000 to 10,000 a year, nine-tenths of whom have their applications rejected.

Multiculturalism is damned. A recent poll found 80% in favour of stronger measures to get immigrants to integrate — and 40% said they "hoped" Muslims "no longer feel at home here".

How did this happen? The first open shift came in 2001, with 9/11. Frits Bolkestein, the leader of the VVD Conservative Liberals, had struck a chord in the 1990s with his insistence that immigrants conform to western culture, but immigration issues were largely the preserve of "racists" and "crypto-Nazis" on the political margins. Then came reports that the atrocities in New York and Washington had been greeted with cheers in parts of Rotterdam. Forum, the Dutch institute for multicultural development, commissioned an opinion poll of Dutch Muslims. It showed that 48% had "complete understanding" and 27% "some understanding" of the attacks. Overall, only 62% disapproved. Wim Kok, the then prime minister, expressed his shock. The poll was said to be "unbalanced".

Another was held. This found that, although only a small number of Turkish and Surinamese Muslims supported the attacks, 26% of ethnic Moroccans approved of them.

This startling fact helped make the brief political career of Pim Fortuyn, an openly gay, flamboyant former Marxist professor turned magazine columnist. He founded his Leefbaar Rotterdam party — "Liveable Rotterdam" — on an anti-multicultural, law-and-order, stop-immigration platform. [...]

There is criticism that the Dutch remain liberal where it suits them — society permits euthanasia, same-sex marriage, the use of recreational drugs, prostitution, adoption by homosexual couples — and that it is post-PC only on immigration. Draconian solutions — preventive arrest, deportation where possible — are bandied about for radical Islamists.

"We have been tolerant to the nontolerant, and we got intolerance back," Wilders says. If the law, EU or Dutch, inhibits security, the law must be changed. "I'm a law-maker as an MP," he says. "I accept nothing that stands against us winning. If necessary, we should change the constitution and European treaties." [...]

Attitudes have hardened elsewhere in Europe. In Germany, Edmund Stoiber, the Bavarian prime minister, has said that there was no place for "preachers of hate" and oppressors of women. Immigrants must accept German values. "To those who don't accept this," he added, "all we can say is, 'You picked the wrong country.'" Traditional small "l" liberals have changed. Helmut Schmidt, the highly regarded former chancellor, has even said that the decision to invite guest workers to Germany in the 1960s was a mistake. German TV has broadcast a secret recording of an imam in a German mosque telling his worshippers that Germans would "burn in hell" because they are unbelievers.

In France, which has 5m Muslims, the highest number in Europe, the government has changed laws that inhibit its policy of zero tolerance to radical Islam. When the courts overturned a decision to expel an Algerian cleric who had preached the stoning of women, the law was amended and he was on the next aircraft out.

Denmark introduced new citizenship rules last year. These delay refugees' eligibility for permanent residence permits from three years to seven years. Spouses who come from abroad are deported if they divorce within seven years. The pair must also be judged to have ties with Denmark exceeding those to any other country.

These changes can have a direct effect on other countries, Britain included. When the Danes cut back hard on immigrants and asylum seekers — the number of asylum seekers fell from 14,347 in 1993 to 3,500 in 2003 — "pass the parcel" complaints came from Sweden and Norway. Somalis, for example, who say they feel bullied by the Dutch "forced assimilation" policy, have been leaving Rotterdam and Tilburg in numbers and resettling in Leicester and Birmingham.

Europe doomed itself when it donned the wrong face of liberalism.

MORE:
Rescuing Tolerance ( A. J. Conyers, August/September 2001, First Things)

The emergence of the modern world was characterized by the growth of regional political authorities that gradually eclipsed the local, familial, ecclesiastic, and sometimes informal authorities that governed (and to some extent still govern) public life. From the beginning, the greatest obstacle to this homogenizing central authority was the authority of religion. And by the sixteenth century religion had so intertwined itself with the emerging political powers that it had lost much of its moral authority in the social make-up of Europe. After the massive loss of life in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and the English Civil War (1642-1648) — wars driven largely by religious controversies — it was not difficult to convince Europeans that religious authority was more a force for social unrest than it was one necessary to peace. The Church, the ecumenical bearer of culture, law, and learning, had now been rent from top to bottom. What once provided the framework of an ecumenical accord could no longer perform the function.

Thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes insisted that the goal of social life was to provide peace and security from the life that is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." No one could do that better, said Hobbes, than one to whom we entrust the sword of government; his is the true kingdom of God, since it is the only route to a kingdom of peace. Theologians could only complicate this arrangement, since they sought a kingdom that might work against conditions required by a world of constant conflict — a world that, in its natural state, could only be one of war of "each against all." Religion instead threatens the equilibrium of a well-organized state.

Under the guidance of John Locke, Pierre Bayle, and others, a way of sheltering the secular powers of the state from the disrupting influence of religion was hit upon. It consisted primarily in assigning religion to the realm of private convictions, thus preserving for the state the management of public affairs. This arrangement took upon itself the cast of a new virtue. The appropriate response of the state to the competing demands of religious communities is "toleration." The state could be tolerant because it had ceded religion to the realm of private convictions, and later (especially under the influence of John Stuart Mill) the task of moral philosophy. To state the matter fairly, this privatization of religion was seen not only as a safeguard for the state, but for the religious life as well. But what is not often recognized is that it was quickly being assumed that public life inevitably belonged to the state.

In ceding the private realm to religion, the state was giving up authority over matters it never really governed anyway. Religion, on the other hand, was ceding to the state a domain of social life over which it had always claimed to have some ultimate authority, for it had always claimed insight into the nature of a just society.

It was apparent to many in the early modern period that this was not the only possible arrangement of public and private authorities. The Reformed theologian Johannes Althusius, for one, had seen that society naturally was divided among a number of overlapping and largely informal authorities. These "associations," as he called them — the family, the Church, the collegium (those who work on common public tasks), the region — each impose certain disciplines upon the individual and demand a certain loyalty. These associations likewise mediate between the person and the vastness of the world outside; they make possible a course of action, and they interpose an authority in a way not possible for the individual. Each association has its own proper sphere of action and authority, its own status, and its own vocation or divine calling. The civil government is one of these. But it is only one of the authorities among a number of different and sometimes competing voices.

What was happening in the early modern period was the rise of a more comprehensive authority. Less and less did other associations interpose between the state and the individual, leaving the individual (or the family, for that matter) defenseless against what Hobbes had frankly described as the Leviathan. One can see the effects of this in the growth of the state's ability to marshal more and more of a society's resources in waging wars against other governments. Moving from Louis XIV's decision to keep a standing army, not heretofore within a monarch's power, we can fast-forward to the twentieth century where giant states were able to raise and maintain enormous armies, wage wars continually, and mobilize civilian resources on demand. Wars came to require almost unlimited provision from the civilian sector of society.

Why were such wars not waged in the past? Technology is only part of the answer; the more important part is that heretofore the government simply did not have that kind of authority. Now nothing stood between the individual and the state. The individual was, more than anything else, a citizen of the state. Other associations were being eclipsed by the overshadowing association established so remotely and so abstractly between the citizen and the state. With the results of the French Revolution in mind, Benjamin Constant said that "the interests and memories which spring from local customs contain a germ of resistance which is so distasteful to authority that it hastens to uproot it. Authority finds private individuals easier game; its enormous weight can flatten them out effortlessly as if they were so much sand."

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 10, 2005 7:08 AM