Speech by Minister for European Affairs Frans Timmermans at the Carnegie Foundation

Toespraak | 07-04-2009

Gelegenheid: Carnegie Council for Ethics

It’s interesting to approach the issue of integration from that angle, to wonder why someone who generally only has good things to say about other people would feel that her basic values are under threat by a very small minority. What’s happened? How did we come to this stage? And how can we ensure that we deal with this issue as we’ve dealt with other issues in the past? I know that some of you are Dutch, and what I’m going to say next will be familiar, but perhaps it’s useful to go back into Dutch history and talk about the origins of our famously tolerant society. As you’ll see, what can seem from the outside like an ideal model has its flaws.

The reason we have this system of tolerance in the Netherlands is that no one social group was ever large enough to dominate the others, while the smaller groups were never so tiny that they could be assimilated. It was very much like New York, in fact. If no group is big enough to tell the others how to act, you tolerate each other. This is not only a good thing, it’s also a necessary thing. With the establishment of the modern Dutch state in the 19th century, people were looking for ways to incorporate this system into the political structure. This is the origin of what is commonly called ‘pillarisation’, a form of social organisation in which each group in society has its own organisations.

My own background is Roman Catholic, and while growing up, I heard stories from my parents and grandparents about how they lived. You’d never venture out of your particular social stratum, or ‘pillar’. The Catholics constituted a pillar: they went to Catholic schools and Catholic shops. They all read Catholic newspapers and listened to Catholic radio programmes. They had Catholic insurance policies and played in Catholic football clubs. Your social and professional life was entirely determined by your group. I remember that when my grandmother had company and we had to go out buy bread, she would say to avoid the bakery next door, because he was a Protestant. ‘We go to the Catholic baker, who’s a bit further on.’ That was the nature of Dutch society. It was tolerance based on the principle of ‘live and let live’: ‘I’ll let you worship and live the way you want, so I can do the same.’ But this tolerance had no regard for the interests of others, or for their way of life. When I was about nine or ten, I remember my grandmother saying, ‘Look at those people walking down the street. They’re Protestants.’ I had a look at them: two arms, two legs; they were quite like us. ‘They’re even nice people. I spoke to them recently,’ she said. Speaking to a Protestant was a noteworthy event. That’s how partitioned our society was.

There was little interaction between the communities. Of course, certain matters transcended the pillars and required regulation. The heads of the pillars would then talk to each other and come up with a compromise. We’ve always been heralded for our compromises. A Dutch compromise is always a trade-off. It is not about finding the best solution to a given issue. It’s a case of saying, ‘You can get free education for Christian schools if I can get universal voting rights.’ That’s how the trade-offs worked between the pillars. It’s not really a dialogue; it’s just a case of tit-for-tat. And that’s the Dutch model a nutshell.

The reason I bring this up is because in modern Dutch society, things can no longer be tackled that way. Like many countries, we’ve moved on from a top-down society, where the leaders would say, ‘Trust me, I’ll take care of it,’ to a more bottom-up society, where people say to their leaders, ‘First show me, then I’ll give you my vote or my trust.’ But the way we originally organised our society and our political structures is not in sync with that development.

The second important point is that in a pillarised society, ordinary people never learn ways of communicating and negotiating with people from different walks of life. To do that, you need to have some interest in difference, or in other people’s backgrounds. But in the past there was never any need for this. So ordinary people never got used to solving problems at local level.

A third element of importance is the issue of citizenship. Even that was decided upon and taught within the pillar, and since the pillars disappeared, we’ve never developed a concept of active citizenship that could be taught in different systems. Citizenship was always assumed, you were taught it at home or in your church. Or if you didn’t have a church, in one of the liberal or socialist associations. But this no longer happens. So now, this assumption of an educated citizenry is gone, but nothing has replaced it. The educational system in the Netherlands is not geared to teaching people to be good citizens. This is something we urgently need to change. All these elements have come together to bring about the situation we have today, where there is an inherent fear of the Other, in part because we don’t know anything about the Other. I spend a lot of time reflecting on this problem, asking people why they’re afraid. And of course, let’s not forget that fear is the driving force in politics today. Fear will win you elections. If you use fear in your political campaign, you’ll always be a couple of points ahead of your opponents. The sea change we’ve seen in the American elections hasn’t reached Europe yet. Fear is still the driving force here. There’s been some change, but not enough.

Why is fear so powerful? Europeans – not just the Dutch – have lost their inherent belief in progress. Since the Second World War there has been an assumption that kids will be better off than their parents, that they will have a better education, a higher income, etc. Now there is a widespread sentiment that we’ve reached the pinnacle, and it’s all downhill from here. People who hold this attitude become very conservative. They want to maintain what they have. They went to ward off every change. And the most visible agents of change are the foreigners in our society, who then become the target of fear. This is the situation we’re currently facing in Dutch society.

If I say that 50% of the population of inner cities in the major cities in the Netherlands is of foreign origin, you may be shocked. But this statistic is less surprising if you know that we keep labelling people as ‘foreign’ on into the third and fourth generations. It’s a fundamental point, and that’s where New York can be an instructive example for the rest of us. Once you step off the plane here, you’re a New Yorker. You choose to be part of the society, and are accepted. In the Netherlands we still refer to second and third-generation immigrants as allochtonen, which is basically a euphemism for ‘foreigner’. I believe we have an urgent need for hyphenated citizens, as we see in the United States: Turkish-Dutch, Moroccan-Dutch, Surinamese Dutch.

The only problem is what to do with the Dutch-Dutch. It’s an interesting point if you approach it from that angle. What do you do if you can’t define yourself with a hyphen? Traditionally, people would go back to religion or political preference, but now we’re struggling to find that definition. I think it is important because we have traditionally been a society of minorities. It’s only recently that we’ve developed this notion that our society consists of a majority (the Dutch) and a minority (the Muslims). It’s interesting that Dutch society is seen in terms of a dichotomy, even though it’s much more diverse than that. But in the political debate this dichotomy plays a leading role and creates a platform for fear.

I’m in favour of promoting the idea of hyphenated citizenship, creating active citizenship at national level (which can then be applied to the educational system), and giving people tools to use in their private lives, in raising their children. As I said, these rules were always implicit. Now that that’s no longer the case, let’s make them explicit. Let’s write them down, communicate them, talk about them.

Another challenge is to increase the level of interaction between the various communities in the Netherlands. Interestingly enough, if you take a look at the last 40 years, successful integration has always begun with interaction at different levels: first in sports, then in the arts, then in education, then in the economy. After a while, nobody sees the minority as a minority anymore. This happened to people who came to the Netherlands after Indonesia became independent or, more recently, people came who from Suriname. It’s happening right now with the Turkish community, and I’m sure it’s going to happen with other minorities, such as Moroccans. It’s already happening in sports and in the arts.

Last week, with the help of Humanity in Action, we invited ‘pioneers’ from the United States and the Netherlands – 20 people between 20 and 35 – to talk about the issue of active citizenship. How can this be achieved in a modern context? What we discovered is that the older generation has lost touch with their forms of communication. We need to rekindle our ability to interact with the younger generations. This is something I learned from the Obama campaign, which was obviously very successful in that regard. This is a lesson we need to apply in the different context of Europe, which may require completely different instruments.

The main conclusion is that if you talk to people about their fears about Islam, you learn that their anxiety boils down to a lack of control over their own lives. The fear is projected onto other groups, but at the end of the day, people feel they have no influence on the choices that are made on their behalf. The only answer is to empower people to become part of the decision-making process, in a different way than they are today. This is by no means easy.

Here in the Netherlands we have the specific problem of political and institutional structures that are still based on a pillarised society. For instance, in our general elections we still use a system of complete proportional representation, with no threshold. This means that the mood of the day determines the composition of our parliament, which we are then stuck with for four years. The second drawback of this system is that it always results in coalition governments. This leads to public disenchantment with the government. You have an election campaign between Mr X and Mr Y, and whatever the results, you end up with those very same men in power. Those of you don’t know the Netherlands might be inclined to say, ‘Why don’t you just change the system?’ Here again, pillarisation doesn’t help. As result of pillarisation, we made the procedure for amending our Constitution extremely difficult: obtaining a two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament twice – once before and once after an election. This is all but impossible in a post-pillarised society, because you’d have to get almost all the political forces on board. And believe me, the kinds of changes I’m advocating now certainly don’t represent the consensus in Dutch society or politics.

If we are not capable of accepting the consequences of this analysis, we will not be able to solve the root problem, I’m afraid. On the other hand, I’m also a practical politician, not a revolutionary. I want to make progress where I can. I do believe we have an immense opportunity to transform transatlantic relations. You have no idea what things were like in Europe last week during President Obama’s visit. Not at the level of the politicians, at the level of the general public. I haven’t seen anything like this in many years. Europeans have been craving a different attitude. This has nothing to do with security issues or economic issues; it’s far more fundamental than that. It has to do with the willingness of the Obama administration to get back to basics: values-based politics.

My mother likes telling the story of how she was liberated by American soldiers in the southern Netherlands in September 1944. This is something I was brought up with, and it’s very much part of my transatlantic outlook, my pro-Americanism. Last year I was at a rock concert in the Netherlands with my oldest son, who was 19 at the time. It was a band called
Rage Against the Machine. I’m sure many of you will of heard of them. They make a tremendous racket. They came on stage wearing orange jumpsuits, their hands shackled, with hoods over their heads and a siren wailing. My son said to me, ‘Guantánamo Bay.’ And the 40,000 people present at this concert were silent. Just imagine me there, trying to reconcile what my mother has imparted to me and what my son was now telling me. And both elements are part of how we see the United States. I believe that eight out of ten Europeans want to be where my mother is, not where my son was last year. This is probably why you get such a powerful reaction to the Obama election and to his visit to Europe.

My final point on that visit: yesterday, I was at a conference in Washington, where we talked about global warming and the problems of the Arctic. You almost want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over your head because the challenges are so daunting: climate change and energy issues, demographic developments, the financial crisis, the relationship with Russia and China. The only way we can come up with solutions that work is for Americans and Europeans to work together. There is no way that one can be successful without the other. This understanding should be the basis of our actions today. This understanding will help us in the Netherlands come to terms with the challenges of diversity in our society. And these challenges will provide the basis for another 400 years of transatlantic cooperation.

Thank you.