Transformations of the secular and the ‘Muslim Question’. Revisiting the historical coincidence of depillarization and the institutionalization of Islam in the Netherlands (2013)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/22117954-12341264

Journal of Muslims in Europe 2 (2013) 208-226 brill.com/jome

Transformations of the Secular and the ‘Muslim Question’. Revisiting the Historical Coincidence

of Depillarisation and the Institutionalisation of Islam in The Netherlands

Sarah BrackeAssistant Professor Sociology of Religion and Culture,

KU Leuven, Parkstraat 45, 3000 Leuven, Belgium [email protected]

AbstractThis article revisits the ‘historical coincidence’ of the process of ‘depillarisation’ and the institutionalisation of Islam in the Netherlands. It critically considers the established Dutch narrative of pillarisation, i.e. the organisation of the social body along confessional or sectarian lines, and the way in which this historical formation of Dutch secularism is mobilised within contemporary discussions about multiculturalism. This article further explores how depillarisation accounts figure within ‘the Muslim question’ in the Netherlands. While acknowledging that depillarisation is a multidimensional concept, it engages the argument that, on a structural level, Muslim claims of recognition and institutionalisation vis-à-vis the Dutch state were crucial for the process of depillarisation. The article thus reverses the suggestion that Muslims arrived ‘too late’ in an already depillarized society, and draws attention to the constitutive role of Muslims in the ongoing process of nation-building and secularism in the Netherlands.

Keywordssecular governmentality; Islam; The Netherlands; pillarisation; depillarisation

Introduction

The so-called ‘multicultural debates’ in Europe are often presented as debates about the ‘other’: about migrants and their descendents, about different cul-tural and religious backgrounds, about integration and the failure to integrate. Such debates, moreover, often rely on ‘multiculturalism’ as a descriptive term, supposedly characterising a certain kind of society, or pointing at an increased degree of diversity within existing societies. These multicultural debates have been framed through a focus on ‘the other’—and both Islam as a religious

S. Bracke / Journal of Muslims in Europe 2 (2013) 208-226 209

tradition and Muslims as a minority population, are the other par excellence in contemporary Western Europe—thereby obscuring what happens to ‘the self ’. More critical approaches, however, have taken the historical context and geo-political location of the ‘multicultural debates’ into account. They hence con-sider contemporary discussions of multiculturalism in Western Europe, as they occur in the context of a post-colonial world shaped simultaneously by neo-colonial dynamics and the de-centering of the West, increasing globalisation and its effects on the nation-state, and new flows of post-colonial migration, as debates about the transformations of national identity in Europe and of Euro-pean identity itself. In other words, critical approaches consider ‘multicultural-ism’ as a correlate of nationalism, and relate discussions about ‘cultural differences’ and ‘the other’ to debates about ‘the national self ’.1 As several authors have argued, the discourse of multiculturalism reveals how the cul-tural majority thinks about itself, the stories it tells itself, and the stories it seeks to forget.2 In other words, multicultural debates are useful sites of investigation of narratives of inclusion and exclusion, which constitutes the point of depar-ture of this article.

Relying on a critical perspective that takes ‘the multicultural debates’ as a site of critical inquiry about the national self, this article zooms in on one par-ticular transformation of national identity that can be traced through these debates, i.e. what happens with the ‘secular regimes’ of Western European nation-states. More specifically, I want to argue firstly that the secular arrange-ments of Western European nation-states are currently in transformation, and secondly that these transformations occur through ‘the Muslim question’, or concerns and anxieties about ‘the Muslim other’ in Western Europe. This argu-ment is couched in an understanding of the formation of the secular as well as nation-building as ongoing processes. Furthermore, it is affiliated with the recent problematisation of ‘the secular’, as prior to the doctrine of secularism,

1 Goldberg, David Theo, Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (John Wiley & Sons, 1995); Hage, Ghassan, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (London: Routledge, 2000); Fortier, Anne-Marie, Multicultural Horizons. Diversity and the Limits of the Civil Nation. (London: Routledge, 2008); Arnaut, Karel, Sarah Bracke, Bambi Ceuppens, Sarah De Mul, Nadia Fadil & Meryem Kanmaz, Een leeuw in een kooi. De grenzen van het multiculturele Vlaanderen. (Amsterdam: Meulenhof, Manteau, 2009); Lentin, Alana & Gavan Titley, The Crises of Multiculturalism. Racism in a Neoliberal Age (London: Zed, 2011); Bracke, Sarah & Nadia Fadil, “Is the headscarf oppressive or emancipatory?” Field notes from the “multicultural debates”, Religion and Gender, 2(1), (2012), 36-56.

2 Arnaut et al., Een leeuw in een kooi.

210 S. Bracke / Journal of Muslims in Europe 2 (2013) 208-226

in the wake of the path-breaking scholarship of Talal Asad.3 Asad’s approach to religion and the secular enables us to think of secularism in terms of the regula-tion of religious practices and doctrines in the name of a particular under-standing of the ‘truly human’.4 Asad’s understanding of the secular, in other words, opens up and legitimises a space for religion. Hence, the secular is understood not in opposition to the religious, but rather as a set of institutions, ideas, and affective orientations that are part of the formations of modernity and through which religion is regulated. Here the secular emerges as a form of governmentality, or a set of regulatory practices that organise the public space as secular space, and that reflect distinct conceptions of life and the body, and death and human agency.

Bringing critical approaches to ‘the multicultural debate’ and the secular to bear upon each other provides the theoretical ground of the argument I seek to unfold in this article. While in a speculative way I would submit that the trans-formation which this article investigates can be traced in various Western European countries, and hence effectively points to a transformation on a Western European level, this article focuses on one particular case-study, and that is the Netherlands. In the first section I will briefly discuss ‘the Dutch mul-ticultural model’ and its crisis, as this provides the context for the reflection I seek to develop. The second section of the article discusses the conditions of Dutch secularism, which has been accounted for in terms of pillarisation, or the organisation of the social body along confessional or sectarian lines, as well as de-pillarisation. In the third section I propose an alternative reading of de-pillarisation that draws attention to the structural significance of ‘the Mus-lim question’ in relation to the transformations of the Dutch secular arrange-ment. By way of conclusion I situate my argument in a broader European context, and reflect on its implications.

The Dutch Multicultural Model and the Politics of Crisis

As in many other Western European countries, the ‘multicultural debates’ in the Netherlands emerged in full force at the end of the 1980s. In this vein, 1989 can be considered a turning point in ‘the short 20th century’, with the Rushdie affair and the first French headscarf debates (affaires du foulard) as indications

3 Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

4 Asad, Secular Formations, p. 17.


that understandings of national identity were changing all over Western Europe in relation to the presence of Muslims and the affirmation of Islam as a religious tradition. The date of 1989 is of course most salient as a symbol for the fall of the communist bloc and the subsequent emergence of a new hegem-onic geopolitical frame, i.e. the ‘clash of civilisations’. The national multicul-tural debates in Western Europe effectively coincide with the global rise of civilisational discourse in a geo-political realm, and the increasing importance of the language of culture and ethnicity in framings of political conflicts and fault-lines.5

The ‘Dutch example’6 has figured prominently in discussions about multi-culturalism in Western Europe. As Maarten Vink argues, until not so long ago the Netherlands was considered as one of the few Western European countries with an integration model that comes close to the multicultural ideal-type understood as a government endorsing the principle of cultural diversity and supporting the right of different cultural and ethnic groups to retain their distinctive cultural identities.7 The often-quoted citation from Entzinger exem-plifies this point:

Wake up any expert on immigrant integration in the middle of the night and ask that person to name a country known for its multiculturalism. Ten to one that the answer will be Canada, Australia or the Netherlands.8

This exemplary status has rendered the Dutch case particularly prone to dis-cussions about ‘the end of multiculturalism’, which emerged all over Western Europe. In the Netherlands, such discussions were particularly intense and salient, and throughout them, a strong consensus about the Netherlands as a fore-runner of multiculturalism was replaced by an equally strong consensus about the Netherlands as multiculturalism’s ‘prodigal son’, as Vink puts it. The notion of crisis, and the work it does, has been analysed in great detail by Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley, who argue that an understanding of crisis is in fact crucial to the narrative of multiculturalism, which they qualify as ‘the toxic gift

5 Arnaut et al. Een leeuw in een kooi. 6 See e.g. Braidotti Rosi, Charles Esche & Maria Hlavajova (eds.), Citizens and Subjects: The

Netherlands, for example (Zurich: JRP Ringier Kunstverlag AG, 2007).7 Vink, Maarten, “Dutch ‘Multiculturalism’ Beyond the Pillarisation Myth”, Political Studies

Review, vol. 5, (2007), p. 337.8 Entzinger, H. “The Rise and Fall of Multiculturalism: The Case of the Netherlands”, in

C. Joppke and E. Morawska (eds.), Toward Assimilation and Citizenship (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 56-88.


that keeps on giving’.9 The rhetoric of multiculturalism’s failure has indeed resonated very prominently in the current Western European political and public sphere, and has been linked to a litany of transformative events, in which the WTC attacks of 11 September 2001 play a pivotal role. This litany weaves the global event of 9/11 together with local events—such as the murder of the politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and the murder of film-maker and columnist Theo van Gogh in 2004—hence producing a ‘common sense’ of Western European history.

Framing the Dutch case as an exemplary ‘multiculturalist model’ running havoc might, however, not be the most accurate nor productive perspective on the transformations within Dutch society, as a number of Dutch sociologists and political theorists have argued more recently.10 According to Jan Willem Duyvendak and Peter Scholten the problem begins with the representation of a Dutch multicultural model that would consist of a coherent set of immigrant integration policies. This never was the case. The purported Dutch multicul-tural model usually refers to the institutionalisation of cultural pluralism and is linked to the history of pillarisation, yet a reconstruction of immigrant integra-tion policies, as Duyvendak and Scholten show, reveals a strong discontinuity in Dutch immigration policy over the last four decades. Nearly every decade is marked by a different policy paradigm; shifts that effectively undermine the idea of one multicultural model. In a first period, which extended well into the 1970s, the Dutch government remained reluctant to develop a policy at all, and measures and regulations were taken in an ad hoc-way. This ‘no policy’ can be explained by the fact that the presence of migrants was considered to be tem-porary, which in turn rested on the representation, as well as normative belief, that the Netherlands was not a country of immigration. As the ‘no-policy’ came under increasing pressure in the late 1970s, the Dutch government developed an Ethnic Minorities Policy (Etnisch minderhedenbeleid) that framed the ques-tion of migrants and their descendents in the Netherlands in terms of partici-pation and social-cultural emancipation of ethnic or cultural minorities. This policy effectively resonates with practices of accommodation of pluralism, and the ‘sovereignty within the own sphere’ principle characteristic of the process

9 Lentin & Titley, The Crises of Multiculturalism.10 See notably: Vink, “Beyond the Pillarisation Myth”; Duyvendak, J.W. & P. Scholten,

“Questioning the Dutch multicultural model of immigrant integration”, Migrations Société (special issue ‘Beyond models of integration: France, the Netherlands and the Crisis of National Models’, ed. C. Bertossi & J.W. Duyvendak) (2009); Maussen, Marcel, “Pillarization and Islam: Church-state traditions and Muslim claims for recognition in the Netherlands”, Comparative European Politics, vol. 10, 3 (2012), pp. 337-353.


of pillarisation, which is a crucial element of the Dutch ‘multiculturalist’ imag-inary. Yet this policy was first questioned and subsequently reformed by the end of the 1980s, when the Ethnic Minorities Policy was reframed into the Integration Policy (Integratiebeleid) stressing the socio-economic participa-tion of immigrants as citizens. In this shift the multiculturalist perspective, Duyvendak and Scholten emphasise, was exchanged for a more liberal- egalitarian perspective, in which the notion of ‘minorities’ was left behind in favour of the supposedly less minoritising concept of ‘allochthonous’.11 And by the beginning of the new millennium, i.e. the 9/11 ‘turning point’ in the narra-tive of multiculturalism all over Western Europe, the Integration Policy took a strong assimilationist turn.12

Duyvendak and Scholten’s reconstruction of these policy paradigms reveals a number of things. As already mentioned, what most closely resembled a ‘multicultural model’ in the realm of policy was only in place for more or less a decade. Significantly, by the time ‘the multicultural debates’ broke loose at the end of the 1980s, this model was in fact already replaced by a policy focused on integration. This leads Duyvendak and Scholten to conclude that “[t]he multi-cultural model seems to have been coined retrospectively, in an attempt by politicians to disqualify policies with which they disagreed”.13 Such an observa-tion is arresting in many ways. It underscores the constitutive role of the ‘crisis’ for the narrative of multiculturalism. More precisely, it suggests that the narra-tive of multiculturalism in the Netherlands was elaborated under the sign of its ending. It also urges us to consider carefully how much of the political dis-course on Dutch multiculturalism might in fact have served the purpose of dismissing or undoing the material and symbolic realities ‘multiculturalism’ referred to. In sum, Duyvendak and Scholten’s witty remark does not merely unpack the myth of a ‘golden era’ of multiculturalism subsequently tragically lost, but in fact suggests that the discourse on multiculturalism itself was a way of constructing a new consensus about the integration of ethnic and religious minorities in Dutch society.

For the further development of my argument, I am interested precisely in this moment of purported crisis, and the discursive shift from ‘multiculturalism’

11 For a critique of the allochthonous-autochthonous binary, see Botman, Maayke, Nancy Jouwe & Gloria Wekker (eds.), Caleidoscopische visies. De zwarte, migranten- en vluchtelingen-vrouwenbewegingen in Nederland (Amsterdam: KIT, 2001).

12 Duyvendak & Scholten, “Questioning the Dutch multicultural model”. 13 Duyvendak, Jan Willem & Peter Scholten, “The invention of the Dutch Multicultural Model

and its Effects on Integration Discourses in the Netherlands”, Perspectives on Europe, 40:2 (2010), p. 39.


to ‘integration’ that takes place under its auspices. I would like to ask what this shift reveals about the formation of the secular. A landmark in this cultural shift is the speech delivered by the Dutch politician Frits Bolkestein at the Liberal International in Luzern in 1991.14 The speech is a commentary on the geo-political transformation inaugurated by the fall of the Soviet Union, wherein Bolkestein effectively establishes a link between the new post-1989 geo-political moment and the national debate on the ‘multicultural society’.15 At the heart of Bolkestein’s speech lies the denunciation of ‘the failure of inte-gration’ of the post-colonial labour migrants to the Netherlands. To take stock of this failure, he points in two directions. Firstly, he identifies Islam as a fun-damental problem. The central argument here is the incompatibility between the new geo-political (f )actor of Islam on the one hand, and Western liberal values on the other. Such values notably include the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, toleration and non-discrimination. European civilisation, Bolkestein contends, and in particular the political tradition of liberalism, has generated a number of fundamental political principles with universal validity and value, and Islam stands in tension with these principles. Such an argument sets up an interesting tension between the universal and the particular: surely, if the values Bolkestein refers to are universal, it would fol-low that they can potentially be found in any kind of value-system or societal context. Yet Bolkestein in fact suggests that Islam is excluded from the univer-sality he affirms—a way of framing which has become more popular in the last two decades. That such a structural exclusion potentially undermines the argu-ment about universality, which apparently cannot be extended to Islam or the Muslim world, seems to be reduced to a small matter of fine irony that mostly escapes the proponents of this discourse.

Secondly, Bolkestein denounces the ‘cultural relativism’ of the 1980s minor-ity policies grounded in the principle of ‘integration with the conservation of one’s own identity’. Time has come, he concludes, to draw limits to Dutch tol-erance and multicultural society. His speech, which was subsequently elabo-rated and published as an op-ed in one of the leading newspapers, De Volkskrant, effectively marked the beginning of the political use of civilisational discourse within Dutch public debate by voices other than the extreme right. Moreover, the speech illustrates the point that the introduction of multiculturalism as a

14 Vink, “Beyond the Pillarisation Myth”, p. 338.15 Bolkestein, Frits, On the collapse of the Soviet Union, Address to the Liberal International

Conference at Luzern, Friday 6 September 1991, http://www.liberal-international.org/content Files/files/Bolkestein%201991.pdf, accessed 15 May 2013.


topic of discussion into the mainstream debate occurred under the sign of cri-sis and dismissal.

In many respects, Bolkestein’s speech laid out the parameters for debates on culture, religion and identity in the Netherlands in the decades to come. He mainstreamed a civilisational scheme that opposed Dutch society to Islam. This is of course not to say that the new ‘civilisational era’ and its intense re-articulation of Dutch identity is a homogenous epoch; several important dis-tinctions can be traced since then. Bolkestein’s refrain was soon joined by political figures such as Pim Fortuyn and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who in various ways highlighted and further elaborated the gender and sexual politics of the ‘new civilisational era’, which were present from its very inception.16 The murder of film-maker and columnist Theo van Gogh in 2004 inaugurated yet another political moment, marked by political figures such as the Minister for Inte-gration and Immigration Rita Verdonk and the Party for Freedom’s leader Geert Wilders, with a strong emphasis on a securitarian logic and its key terms of terrorism and violence.17 Yet these different phases—which in any case should not be understood in a discrete, linear and chronological way, but rather as different emphases in the process of re-drawing the symbolic and material boundaries of Dutch identity and ‘the Muslim other’—are all under-girded by the assertion of an incompatibility between Islam and Western liberal values, which Bolkestein introduced in a respected manner in main-stream discourse.

The discourse that was elaborated in the process performed a break with previous understandings of Dutch identity and society—a break coded as ‘the end of tolerance’ which signals a transformation of Dutch society, i.e. of the hegemonic understanding of the national self. To understand better what this transformation consists of, and to bring the discussion to the realm of the secular, I now turn to the narrative of pillarisation that captures the par-ticular secular regime of the Netherlands.

16 See e.g. Marc de Leeuw and Sonja Van Wichelen, “Please, Go Wake Up!’ Submission, Hirsi Ali, and the ‘War on Terror’ in the Netherlands,” Feminist Media Studies, 5: 3 (2005), pp. 325-340; Anna C. Korteweg, “The Murder of Theo Van Gogh: Gender, Religion and the Struggle over Immigrant Integration in the Netherlands”, in Bodemann, Y. Michal, and Gökçe Yurdakul (eds.) Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos, (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005); Bracke, Sarah, “Subjects of debate: secular and sexual exceptionalism, and Muslim women in the Netherlands”, Feminist Review, 98 (2011), pp. 28-46.

17 See e.g. Vossen, Koen, “Populism in the Netherlands after Fortuyn: Rita Verdonck and Geert Wilders Compared,’ Perspectives on European Politics and Society, 11: 1 (2010), pp. 22-38; Landtsheer, Christ’l De, L. Kalkhoven, and L. Broen, “De beeldspraak van Geert Wilders, een tsunami over Nederland?”, Tijdschrift voor communitatiewetenschap, 39:4 (2011).


Accounting for De/Pillarisation

Accounts of Dutch multiculturalism as well as the institutionalisation of Islam habitually grant a prominent place to the heritage of pillarisation. Such a gene-alogy, however, is increasingly questioned. Thijl Sunier has for instance argued that other factors, such as the principle of equality, ethnic minority policies and the rise of the welfare state, have been of more significance in understand-ing the position of Islam in the Netherlands, than pillarisation as such.18 Accounts of Dutch multiculturalism suffers from a ‘pillarisation reflex’, Vink suggests, and he argues for the need to go beyond ‘the fashionable myth’ that Dutch accommodating policies are an extension of the historical tradition of pillarisation.19 Also Duyvendak and Scholten argue that overstressing the point that pillarisation would have generated full-blown multiculturalism is quite misleading and fails to deliver an accurate reading of the past. They also remind us that purported affinities between pillarisation and multiculturalism are usually stressed as a way to dismiss multiculturalism.20 This dismissal is rooted in the understanding that, since the 1960s, Dutch society has moved beyond pillarisation. In this section, I further explore this argument and propose an alternative reading of the de-pillarisation of Dutch society, which highlights the role that Islam, or rather the Dutch reckoning with Islam, plays in this transformation of secular governmentality.

The Dutch secular regime has been characterised in terms of pillarisation (verzuiling), which implies that the social body is organised along confessional or sectarian lines in a segmented polity. This social and political formation dates from the beginning of the 20th century, and more particular from the 1920s. A pillar is an integrated complex of societal organisations and/or institu-tions (such as schools, political parties, trade unions, newspapers, etc.) resting upon a confessional basis. Hence the cohesion internal to a pillar is mirrored in the separation from the rest of society, and a pillar can be recognised as a paral-lel network or social body. The prominent theorist of Dutch pillarisation, Arend Lijphart, characterised pillarisation in a classical account (in 1968) as ‘a politics of accommodation and pacification’, in which different faiths and ideologies are organised in a structurally similar way: Dutch nation formation began with a Protestant, a Catholic and a ‘general’ (Humanist) pillar; a Socialist pillar

18 Sunier, Thijl, “Verzuilen of niet? Dat is de vraag,” Tijdschrift voor Migratie- en Etnische Studies, 16:1 (2000), pp. 54-58.

19 Vink, “Beyond the Pillarisation Myth”, p. 339.20 Duyvendak & Scholten, “Questioning the Dutch multicultural model”.


followed in the nineteenth century.21 Dutch pillarisation has been praised and ridiculed, defended and criticised, and analysed in terms of its functions which are laid out by Marcel Hoogenboom in the following way: first, an emancipa-tion strategy of structurally disadvantaged groups; second, the conservation and protection of identity; third, social control, or an instrument allowing elites to counter and channel claims for emancipation; and finally, the continuity of a tradition of pluralism and politics aimed at compromise.22

Since the 1960s the ‘de-pillarisation’ (ontzuiling) of Dutch society has been announced over and over again, as a way of accounting for transformations of Dutch society and notably the decline of the binding force of confessions and ideologies in relation to societal institutions. If pillarisation provided a mode of modernisation in and of the Netherlands, in a postmodern era the religious and ideological differences that undergird the pillarised model yielded to a more diffuse and playful understanding of pluralism and tolerance, or so the suggestion goes.23 Accounts of de-pillarisation typically locate this process in the 1960s, and connect it to cultural transformations that profoundly changed Dutch society, and most notably the decline of religion, or more precisely the drastic fall in church membership and attendance. Yet such declarations of the end of pillarisation were subsequently questioned in each instance in which the resilience of the pillarised architecture of Dutch society revealed itself—after elections for instance, or in the modalities of redistributing resources according to different religious and political lines.24 Hence the Dutch pacifica-tion model continued to be salient after the 1960s, or as Lijphart put it in 1989: “The politics of accommodation did not undergo a complete metamorphosis into its very opposite. No revolution ever happened.”25

Two decades later, however, not many would defend this claim, including Lijphart himself who in the preface of the 2008 edition of his classic work on pillarisation suggests that the Dutch pacification politics of the pillarised sys-tem had in fact profoundly changed by 1967. What to make of the current

21 Lijphart, Arend, Verzuiling, pacificatie en kentering in de Nederlandse politiek (Amsterdam: De Bussy, 1968).

22 Hoogenboom, Marcel, Een miskende democratie. Een andere visie op verzuiling en politieke samenwerking in Nederland (Politiek Bestuurlijke Studiën 18) (Leiden: DSWO Press, 1996).

23 Dekker, Paul & Peter Ester, “Depillarization, Deconfessionalization and De-ideologization: Empirical Trends in Dutch Society 1958-1992”, Review of Religious Research, 37:4, (1996), pp. 325-341.

24 Hoogenboom, Een miskende democratie.25 Lijphart, Arend, “From the Politics of Accommodation to Adversarial Politics in the

Netherlands—A Reassessment”, West European Politics, 12:1 (1989).


insistence that pillarisation ended in the 1960s? In order to explore this ques-tion, let us consider in more detail a recent account of de-pillarisation specifi-cally elaborated in relation to Islam in the Netherlands. In an article entitled “Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and The Politics of Tolerance in the Nether-lands” the anthropologist Peter van de Veer agrees with many others that the dramatic events in Dutch political life at the turn of the century must be brought to bear on transformations of Dutch culture rather than merely on Islam, yet argues that a different genealogy of Dutch culture is needed to account for current predicaments.26 The genealogy van de Veer lays out revolves around Dutch cultural politics after the decline of religion, and the ways in which these cultural politics feed on desires and anxieties that make the Dutch incapable of dealing with globalisation and immigration. During the 1960s, and in a relatively short period of time, the Netherlands was trans-formed from a highly religious to a highly secular society, van der Veer argues. The silent revolution of the 1960s is celebrated in the Netherlands as a move-ment of liberation, especially from what he calls ‘obstacles to enjoyment’. Among the many ways in which Dutch society has changed, the most impor-tant change, van der Veer suggests, concerns a growing emphasis on enjoy-ment, and in particular sexual enjoyment as well as a general shedding of Protestant asceticism. Enjoyment became the hallmark of consumer societies everywhere in the West, yet in the Netherlands the transition from ‘deeply ingrained frugality’ to consumption and sexual liberation was particularly intense.27 It was the pressure of the sexual revolution, which was to a large extent understood as the ‘liberation from religion’, that made the pillarised sys-tem collapse, van der Veer contends. In this new cultural configuration Mus-lims came to be understood as a rejection of this ‘Dutch way of life’ and Islam came to be stand-in for the theft of enjoyment.28

While van der Veer’s account makes a particular case about the relationship between Dutch society and Islam, it replays a conventional argument about the importance of the decline of religion from the 1960s onwards. This argu-ment, however, raises a number of questions, notably about the relationship between the decline of religion and a more analytical understanding of secu-larisation (see Dobbelaere below) as well as the relationship between a cul-tural and more structural account of pillarisation (exemplified in Lijphart’s

26 van der Veer, Peter, “Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and the Politics of Tolerance in the Netherlands”, Public Culture, 18, 1 (2006), pp. 111-124.

27 van der Veer, ‘The Politics of Tolerance’, p. 119.28 van der Veer, ‘The Politics of Tolerance’, p. 120.


seminal account of pillarisation and his 1989 claim that the pillarised system remained pretty much intact). Van der Veer’s account hinges on a cultural analysis, which in fact reflects a broader tendency in current understandings of de-pillarisation. Yet de-pillarisation is a complex and multilayered process that cannot, I believe, be equated with its cultural dimension. To substantiate this claim I turn to the work of sociologist of religion Frank Lechner, and more specifically an argument he develops in response to Starck and Iannoc-cone’s thesis about the increase of religious mobilisation in pluralist societies.29 Lechner’s point of departure is what he calls “the single most significant fact” about organised religion in the Netherlands, i.e. its marked decline from the 1950s onwards. There is indeed little doubt about the fact that religious belief and practice has changed drastically since the 1960s, and that massive un-churching (ontkerkelijking) occurred. Yet as the sociologist of religion Karel Dobbelaere convincingly argues, church attendance remains analytically dis-tinct from secularisation.30 Lechner for his part stresses that throughout the time of un-churching, the regulation of religion in the Netherlands has remained mostly stable. He concludes (in 1996):

And that makes my point: in all relevant respects, the system today is the same as it was when the Netherlands was more churched. The other aspects of state regulation mentioned above, far less significant in any case, have not changed greatly either. The declines in membership and faith thus occurred in a relatively stable ‘regulatory’ context.31

Lechner thus suggests that the state-regulated features of the pillarised system remained in place after the 1960s. Or as I would put it, there was no profound shift or break in the secular governmentality that gave rise to and sustained the pillarised system, on the one hand, and the de-pillarisation of the 1960s on the other.

State-regulated features remained in place, Lechner adds, “as a kind of polit-ical lag”, while the real changes that did occur are to be situated on other levels: the declining influence of the church over other institutions, the blurring of the lines between pillars, and the decline of public support for pillarisation. These changes, Lechner contends, reflect larger cultural changes—changes

29 Lechner, Frank J., “Secularization in the Netherlands?”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 35, no. 3 (1996), pp. 252-264.

30 Dobbelaere, Karel, “Towards an Integrated perspective of the Processes Related to the Descriptive Concept of Secularization”, Sociology of Religion, 60:3, (1999), pp. 229-247.

31 Lechner, “Secularization in the Netherlands?”, p. 258.


in dominant values, which to a great extent revolve around an increase in individualism. Here Lechner’s argument resonates with Paul Dekker and Peter Ester’s discussion of de-pillarisation. While Dekker and Ester consider de-pillarisation in terms of a combination of both cultural and structural dimensions,32 they stress that there is no inevitable correspondence between what they call subjective de-pillarisation and organisational developments. Subjective de-pillarisation refers to “the erosion of traditionally pillarised per-ceptions and attitudes at the micro- or individual level”, and occurs while ‘organisational’ dimensions of pillarisation (such as the organisation of Catho-lic and Protestant schools and policy bodies) remain in place.33 In other words, we might agree that a certain cultural underpinning of the pillarised structure disappeared. Yet the state-regulatory practices and structures did not change accordingly, at least not at the time of this first cultural shift. At the turn of the 21st century, the pillarised system is, as Jan Rath et al. put it, far from dismantled, with many of its social, political and legal practices still in place.34 This, I believe, is what Lijphart meant when he argued, at the end of the 1980s, that no revolution ever happened, and this point is crucial for my argu-ment that subsequently the pillarised system was challenged in a more struc-tural way by ‘the Muslim question’.

Transformations of the Secular

To further elaborate this argument, it makes sense to reconsider Bolkestein’s speech mentioned in the first section of this article. Bolkestein’s critique focused on the Dutch policy of ‘integration with conservation of one’s own identity’, which he believed should be brought to an end. He highlighted the continuity between the ‘integration with the conservation of one’s own iden-tity’ policy and the Dutch model of pillarisation, in order to dismiss existing

32 “These include institutional erosion and merging of pillars, decreasing membership of pillarised organisations, decreasing mass support for pillarised organizations, diminishing identification with religious and secular ideologies organised in pillars, decreasing ideological cohesion within the pillars, and weakening of links between membership of churches and pillarised social organisations on the side and political preferences and behaviour (i.e. voting) on the other.” Dekker & Ester, “Depillarization, Deconfessionalization and De-ideologization”, p. 331.

33 Dekker & Ester, “Depillarization, Deconfessionalization and De-ideologization”, p. 331. 34 Rath, Jan, Rinus Penninx, Kees Groenendijk and Astrid Meyer, “The Politics of Recognizing

Religious Diversity in Europe. Social Reactions to the Institutionalization of Islam in the Netherlands, Belgium and Great Britain”, Netherlands Journal of Social Sciences, 35:1 (1999), p. 58.


minority policies (thus illustrating Duyvendak and Scholten’s abovementioned argument), relying on the claim that Dutch society has moved beyond pillari-sation. Bolkestein does not further qualify this claim, as he does not need to: he can rely on the ‘common sense’ knowledge and national self-understanding that the Netherlands is beyond pillarisation. While at the time both his critique of existing minority policies and his adoption of a civilisational discourse were met with counterarguments, his claim with respect to the end of pillarisation remained unchallenged. While this observation might simply be part of the ‘subjective de-pillarisation’ Dekker and Ester refer to, I would like to suggest that Bolkestein’s declaration and subsequent debate signals a moment of sig-nificant change in the history of Dutch de-pillarisation, in light of Europe’s ‘Muslim question’. 35

Pillarisation and Islam in the Netherlands have been brought to bear upon each other in various ways. I am particularly interested in the suggestion, artic-ulated notably by Rath et al., that ‘the Muslim timing’ was unfortunate, and somehow Muslims came ‘too late’ to take advantage of the pillarised structure.36 How can ‘coming late’ be understood in this context? As Thijl Sunier points out, such a verdict frames nation-building as a process which, at some point, is simply achieved: Muslims migrated to an accomplished nation-state, which had reckoned with religion ‘for once and for all’ in the 1960s.37 Yet surely nation-building is a ongoing process, Sunier argues, in which the 1920-1960 ‘high days’ of pillarisation can be seen as a moment of relative consolidation in the continuing processes of nation-building—and secular governmentality we might add. Moreover, it strikes me that Rath et al.’s account positions the trans-formations of the pillarised arrangement on the one hand, and the growing presence of Islam in the Netherlands on the other, as two discrete and coinci-dental dynamics. Would it not be more plausible to consider these dynamics to be related?

To address this question, let us consider the subject of an Islamic pillar and its relation to other instances of integration of religious ‘outsiders’ into the secular arrangement of a nation-state with its privileged ties to the Protestant tradition. Sunier reminds us that the question of the integration of religious

35 On ‘the Muslim question’ see notably Parekh, Bhikhu, European Liberalism and ‘the Muslim Question’, ISIM paper, (Amsterda: Amsterdam University Press, 2008); Sayyid, Salman, “Racism and Islamophobia”, Darkmatter (2008); and Norton, Anne, On the Muslim Question (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

36 Rath et al., “The Politics of Recognizing Religious Diversity in Europe”, p. 58.37 Sunier, Thijl, “Naar een nieuwe schoolstrijd?”, BMGN (Low Countries Historical Review) 4

(2004), p. 553.


minorities has been crucial in shaping the Dutch secular regime. The history of religious emancipation struggles in the Netherlands unfolded in close interac-tion with debates about the character of the Dutch nation-state.38 A crucial ‘religious other’ within Dutch nation-building, and indeed with respect to shaping the pillarised system, was of course Catholicism. At the turn of the 20th century the Catholic Church found itself in a position of relative separa-tion or withdrawal vis-à-vis the Dutch polity, and was mostly engaged in organ-ising its own community while also involved in various conflicts with the state, which could be seen as ongoing discussions about the interpretation of the constitutional freedom of religion.39 Clashes between the Catholic elite and the state were particularly intense at the time, and notably in relation to the school system. Around the 1920s onwards a certain pacification occurred and the Catholic Church was increasingly integrated into Dutch society and poli-tics, through the pillarised structure. As Erik Sengers writes,

The main result of this mobilization of Catholics (and other religious minorities) was that the definition of the liberal, pluralistic, national state was expanded so that these groups, through the organization of a pillarized society, could find their place in it.40

Integration occurred, in other words, as the state responded to, through accept-ing and regulating, increased Catholic mobilisation and demands for the free-dom to organise the ‘internal life’ of their communities.41

Another religious minority or ‘outsider’, which often remains absent in the literature on pillarisation in the Netherlands, is Judaism. The story of the Jew-ish emancipation struggle and incorporation in the Dutch nation, and the posi-tion of the Jews in relation to pillarisation, is a complicated matter. Before the Shoah, the Dutch Jewish community was characterised by a number of central characteristics of pillarisation, such as the development of its own charities, health-care institutions, and youth organisations; the fact that its unifying structure was of a confessional (and e.g. not ethnic) nature; and that its leaders were addressed as representatives of the community, thus effectively organising

38 Sunier, “Naar een nieuwe schoolstrijd?”, p. 552.39 Sengers, Erik, “Dutch and Catholic. The Catholic Church and Dutch Catholics in the Dutch

nation state since 1795”, Religious Newcomers and the Nation State: Political Culture and Organized Religion in France and the Netherlands, Eric Sengers & Thijl Sunier (eds.) (Delft: Eburon, 2010). p. 80.

40 Sengers, “Dutch and Catholic”, p. 92.41 Sengers, “Dutch and Catholic”, p. 92.


the state’s relations with the Jewish elite.42 Yet at the same time, a full-blown Jewish pillar never developed.43 There was no Jewish political party for instance, which implied that many Dutch Jews were involved in Liberal and particularly Social Democrat organisations. There also was no encompassing Jewish school system, nor a labour union. While the reluctance to form a full-blown Jewish pillar can be related to a number of reasons, Judith Frishman and Hetty Berg argue that many Jews, intent on proving their belonging instead of emphasising their difference, preferred to identify with the non-confessional liberal and social democratic pillars. Instead of framing this in terms of assimi-lation, Frishman and Berg argue that many Jews were in fact not trying to gain entrance in a pre-existing culture—which paradoxically would have effectively meant to strive for the establishment of a Jewish pillar—but sought to con-struct a new Dutch culture jointly with non-Jews, thus adopting Aschheim’s notion of ‘co-constitutionality’ to the Dutch context.44

At this point it is clear that contemporary discussions about the integration of Islam as a religious tradition, including various considerations about an Islamic pillar, are all but unprecedented in the history of Dutch nation- building. In this vein, it is difficult to miss the point that the pillarised structure of Dutch society suggests a rather evident mode of incorporation of Muslims, i.e. through the development of an Islamic pillar. Drawing upon political opportunity structure theory, one might argue that the inherited political structures and institutions strongly tend to push Muslims to demand space and resources for their own organisations, and that the Dutch state would rec-ognise and grant such demands within its own understanding of secularism.45 Discussing different ways of organising multicultural society in Western Europe, Yunas Samad offers the following observation (in 1997):

‘Pillarisation’ has incorporated religious minorities and retarded xenophobic and defensive developments among them. The Islam versus secularism debates, graphi-cally represented by the vitriolic controversy around The Satanic Verses in Britain and the headscarf affair in France, are non-issues in the Netherlands, as Muslims there are

42 Reynolds, David, ‘They can’t be considered as one’. Verzuiling, Group Identity and the Social Dislocation of Dutch Jews, 1945-1946’ (unpublished paper 2006).

43 Knippenberg, Hans, “Assimilating Jews in Dutch nation-building: the missing pillar”, Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 93: 2 (2002), pp. 191–207; Frishman, Judith & Hetty Berg (eds.), Dutch Jewry in a Cultural Maelstrom 1880-1940 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008).

44 Frishman & Berg, Dutch Jewry in a Cultural Maelstrom, pp. 9-10. 45 Fetzer, Joel & Christopher Soker, Muslims and the State in Britain, France and Germany.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).


already covered by blasphemy laws, allowed to have state-funded Muslim schools, and have access to the media in the form of an Islamic television channel. Clearly, then, the issues are not just about secularism and religion, but about forms of political activity that are deemed by national society to be legitimate in the light of existing structures.46

Yet the Dutch ‘multicultural debate did not turn out any less vitriolic, and an Islamic pillar never developed.47 The latter can, as in the case of the ‘missing’ Jewish pillar, be explained by various factors, but one strikingly new element has entered the debate: the delegitimisation of the pillarised structure itself. So did Muslims really come too late? Or did perhaps the possibilities and opportunities of the ‘existing structures’ fuel the need for a fundamental break or discontinuity within Dutch society and its existing structures and identity, including its understanding of secularism, when according to a hegemonic civilisational logic Islam could not be integrated into Dutch society? In any case, the post-1989 declarations that pillarisation is over and done with, such as Bolkestein’s, seem to be the most consistent ‘declarations of death’ of the Dutch pillarised system thus far. In this context, I would like to suggest that de-pillar-isation in structural terms is not merely, and perhaps even not primarily, related to the post-1960s decline of religious institutional affiliations, but rather to yet another cultural shift, i.e. the post-1989 civilisational logic in which Islam and Dutch society are construed and imagined as incompatible opposites.

Conclusion

In this article I have argued that a particular positioning of, and relation to, Islam has been crucial in the structural transformation of the Dutch secular regime, and that ‘the multicultural debates’ are central in accounting for the process of de-pillarisation in the Netherlands, in ways that match or perhaps even exceed other cultural transformations. This is not to deny the importance of other cultural shifts, and notably the cultural revolution of the 1960s, for the transformations of the Dutch secular regime. Clearly the revolution of the 1960s impacted contemporary formations of ‘the secular’, which also com-prises, following Asad, attitudes to the human body and the structure of the senses that these attitudes depend on.48 Yet in terms of state-regulatory

46 Samad, Yunas, “The Plural Guises of Multiculturalism: Conceptualising a Fragmented Paradigm”, in Tariq Modood & Pnina Werbner (eds.), The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe. Racism, Identity and Community (London: Zed, 1997).

47 Rath et al., “The Politics of Recognizing Religious Diversity in Europe”, p. 59.48 Asad, Formations of the Secular.


features, and more precisely particular ways of approaching, framing and gov-erning (religious) difference, a more significant transformation of the Dutch secular arrangement occurred in relation to ‘the multicultural debate’ and the question of Islam in the Netherlands. It is only within that constellation, I argue, that pillarisation as a mode of secular governmentality has been dele-gitimised and dismantled (e.g. through doing away with particular models of redistribution of resources), to an unprecedented extent.

This argument highlights questions of inclusion and exclusion of Islam in the history of Dutch nation-building and more specifically in its history of secular governmentality. More precisely, it centres analyses of more recent cultural and structural shifts in the Dutch secular regime on the presence and institutionalisation of Islam in the Netherlands, instead of considering ‘the Muslim question’ to be ‘coincidental’ to transformations of the secular regime. The history of pillarisation as a mode of secular governmentality can-not be understood without considering the role of religious ‘outsiders’ within Dutch nation-building, as Sunier convincingly showed, and in a similar manner I would like to insist that accounts of de-pillarisation need to consider the role of ‘the Muslim question’ in the reform of the pillarised structure.

By way of conclusion, I would like to briefly zoom out from the Dutch case to the larger context of Western Europe, and suggest that similar dynamics occur in other national contexts (with each their particular secular arrange-ments). In her study of the debate about the headscarf in France, Joan Scott argues that while the report of the Stasi commission, which paved the way for the law prohibiting ‘conspicuous religious symbols’ in schools, at the very out-set explicitly establishes its historical filiations with the 1905 law affirming laicité, the report’s conclusion about the headscarf in public schools is in fact a significant break with that law.49 Nadia Fadil and I have argued something similar in the Belgian context, as we examined common arguments about sec-ularism—and more specifically arguments revolving around the constitutional principles of neutrality, freedom of religion, and the separation of church and state—within the public debate about Islam. We observed how recurrent ref-erences to laicité in these public debates seem to suggest that Belgium’s history of secularisation is close to the French model of laicité.50 This is emphatically not the case: the Belgian secular regime is characterised by the principle of the freedom of religion as well as its own historical-sociological reality of pillarisa-tion. Such public debates have a performative character: in the autumn of 2012,

49 Scott, Joan Wallach, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).50 Bracke, Sarah & Nadia Fadil, “Tussen Dogma en Realiteit. Secularisme, multiculturalisme

en nationalisme in Vlaanderen” in Arnout et al. (eds), Een leeuw in een kooi, pp. 93-110.


a Belgian politician proposed the idea of introducing a legal reform to effec-tively inscribe the principle of laicité in the Belgian constitution.51 In his justi-fication of the need for such a constitutional reform, he refers to the danger presented by ‘certain extremist religious currents’ which he explicitly situates within the Islamic tradition.

These cases point to a transnational dynamic in which the state-regulation of religion and in particular sedimented secular arrangements are currently revised and re-articulated. This re-articulation occurs within a conjuncture marked by the increasing presence and claims of Muslims within, and of, the Western European nation-state. In other words, contemporary practices of secular gov-ernmentality in Western Europe seem to be geared on the one hand towards the governmentalisation of Islam,52 which necessarily involves a form of inclu-sion of Islam, notably as the object of governmentality. Yet at the same time these practices of secular governmentality are driven by the exclusion of Islam from the symbolic order; processes through which new secular formations come into being.

Moreover, these contemporary transformations in the regulation of religion and the constitution of the secular seem to occur in a disavowed manner: oftentimes new forms of state-regulatory practices in relation to religion come about in the name of merely extending or defending already existing arrange-ments. As a result, the re-articulation of secular arrangements goes unmarked. De-pillarisation is for instance firmly located in the past, and the contempo-rary structural transformation, or rather dismantlement, of the pillarised sys-tem recedes from view. Or contemporary measures in the name of a legally inscribed laicité gloss over the fact that such a principle has a vast array of pos-sible concrete, embodied and embedded, materialisations, and thus that affirming the continuity of laicité might in fact obscure important shifts within this secular arrangement. This disavowed mode in which contemporary trans-formations of the secular take shape, we might add, has important political consequences, as it implies that these transformations itself are hardly made subject of a more transparent and inclusive debate.

51 Olivier Maingain, president of the French-speaking right-wing liberal party FDF, see www .lalibre.be/debats/ripostes/article/776908/inscrire-la-laicite-de-l-etat-dans-la-constitution.html (last accessed on 2 December 2012).

52 See e.g. Amir-Moazami, Schirin, “Dialogue as a governmental technique: managing gendered Islam in Germany”, Feminist Review, 98 (2011), pp. 9-27.

Documents

Transformations of the secular and the ‘Muslim Question’. Revisiting the historical coincidence of depillarization and the institutionalization of Islam in the Netherlands (2013)