The Islamic Republic of Holland: how one nation deals with a revolutionary problem.

JUST days before the Dutch referendum on the proposed European constitution, a local political sociologist forecast a victory for the Noes. People were likely to reject Euro-initiatives, he argued, when they were angry about immigration, pessimistic about the economy, and hostile to the current government. All three factors were present in Holland. So ...

As it happened, the Noes did more than prevail; they won in a two-to-one landslide. It was a result that shocked the Dutch establishment, which had almost unanimously backed the constitution. The Euro-establishment across the continent, equally thunderstruck, has argued in mitigation that the Dutch voters did not really know what they were doing: They were not rejecting Europe but reacting to local political discontents.

At first glance the sociologist's prediction might seem to support this defense. A closer look, however, suggests that the Dutch were following a deep social instinct: They sensed that "Europe" was somehow connected to their other discontents, and were striking the only blow available to them. What links the EU constitution to anti-government sentiment, immigration, and economic pessimism is voter anger with elite-driven politics. European integration is generally admitted to be an elite project--the current cant phrase that it needs to be better "explained" to the masses makes that embarrassingly clear. High levels of (mainly Muslim) immigration and accompanying policies of multiculturalism are similarly regarded by elites as necessary steps towards a more diverse society.

Most ordinary Dutch people were either opposed to or apathetic towards these social experiments. But the major parties favored them and the media preached them. That left voters with no obvious avenues of protest. And the issues did not intrude on their lives to the extent of rousing them to rebellion--until two atrocities occurred. Pim Fortuyn, the gay libertarian leader of a quirky anti-immigration party, was murdered by an assailant who cited Fortuyn's opposition to large-scale Muslim immigration as his justification. Next, filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim extremist who objected to a film he had made attacking Islam for its hostility to women's rights. These two murders sharpened the sense of many Dutch people that their country was being transformed in ways they disliked--and also made them unsafe.

FINGERS IN THE DIKE

Not only conservatives and traditionalists felt these fears. Liberals, feminists, and libertarians like Fortuyn who prized the tolerance, sexual equality, and libertinism of Dutch society were also made nervous. Unpolitical Dutch people voted with their feet. There had long been a "white flight" from schools and urban neighborhoods with large numbers of immigrants; now the Dutch began to emigrate in large numbers abroad.

The political effects of this pessimism were dramatic. The Fortuyn party made major gains in successive elections; the establishment conservative and liberal parties adopted many of its policies; and when the Euro-referendum came along, the Dutch voted no. They were rejecting two things--a constitution that transferred many more powers, including immigration control, from the Dutch parliament to the impenetrable committees of the EU, and a style of bureaucratic politics that was haughtily undemocratic and deaf to their concerns. Those concerns can be very simply summarized: How do we deal with a large and growing Muslim minority that contains Islamists who hate Dutch society and are prepared to use violence against it--and therefore us? Dutch Muslims, for their part, have concerns rooted in the same situation: How do we deal with the fact that we are distrusted and discriminated against by our neighbors because of the actions of a minority of radical hotheads?

The facts underlying these questions are relatively straightforward. Holland's Muslims account for about 15 percent of its population. In cities such as Rotterdam, where immigrants have tended to congregate, the Muslim proportion is about one-third of the local population. And these percentages are rising. Estimates of the number of (generally young male) Muslims who are actively sympathetic to Islamism are inevitably more speculative. The usual guess is that 15 percent of the Muslim population is sympathetic to Islamism and a much smaller percentage, say 4 percent, actively so. In a growing immigrant population, however, these low percentages translate into quite large numbers of potential terrorists.

What makes these possibilities so unsettling to the law-abiding Dutch is that the law is ill-equipped to deal with the threat. In 2003, Dutch intelligence discovered ties between a group of 40 to 50 North African radicals in Holland and a terrorist network that had carried out the Casablanca bombings of that year. (Some were arrested, but because intelligence evidence is not permitted in Dutch courts, they had to be released.) One of the group was Mohammed Bouyeri, who subsequently murdered van Gogh.

The Dutch public was particularly alarmed by this case because, outwardly, Bouyeri seemed a model of assimilation and acceptance. If he was a jihadist, anyone might be. A subsequent poll showed that 40 percent of Dutch respondents "hoped" that Muslims would no longer feel at home in Holland. There have accordingly been a few attacks by Dutch hooligans on mosques. With each such incident Muslims feel anxieties not dissimilar to those of their Protestant neighbors. Before long, nobody feels safe.

Dutch governing authorities, being Dutch, have reacted to these various threats with a mixture of moderation and social engineering slightly tilted in favor of the Muslims. Thus, when an imam complained about the graffito Thou Shalt Not Kill painted near a mosque not long after van Gogh's murder, Dutch police sent in city workers to sandblast the graffito off. The police subsequently apologized. Still, it had been the instinctive reaction of a politically correct police force to prefer artistic censorship to offending a minority.

I saw some of this recently when I visited Rotterdam as part of a conference examining Muslim immigration into Europe, jointly organized by the New Atlantic Initiative and the Edmund Burke Foundation. Rotterdam authorities have sought to overcome the "us and them" mentality that divides their city ethnically and religiously by fostering mixed neighborhoods, supporting responsible mosques, and holding open public debates with ordinary citizens from both communities on how the city can improve community relations. The proposals that emerged were all highly reasonable. But it is noticeable that actions to soothe Muslim concerns--such actions as the promotion of cultural diversity and the enactment of anti-discrimination rules--were higher priorities than those aimed at mollifying the native-born, such as making Dutch the language used by all in public.

A MUSLIM DUTCHMAN

In Rotterdam, officials denied that "assimilation" was their aim; what they sought was "cultural integration." But this distinction turns on a misunderstanding of "assimilation" as it is understood in the U.S. They seemed to suggest that asking Muslims to assimilate would be almost like asking them to convert to Protestant Christianity. That would indeed be unreasonable--and futile. But is Protestantism an essential part of Dutchness? Many Dutch natives manage to be loyal citizens without being observant Protestants. Dutch identity is now primarily cultural, historical, and political rather than religious, so there should be no explicitly religious barrier to the concept of a Muslim Dutchman. In these circumstances, assimilation and cultural integration amount to much the same thing.

That does not mean to say, however, that there are no genuine obstacles to Muslim adoption of a Dutch identity. The first is the nature of the Muslim identity itself--which is cohesive, strong, and resistant to assimilation. Not just in Holland but throughout Europe, Muslims form strong communities built around mosques with their own "self-help" social institutions. These bodies are highly effective and guide new arrivals to find work, accommodation, financial assistance, and other services. Their efforts help explain why poor Muslim laborers often own their homes outright; they also ensure, however, that new immigrants remain in a Muslim environment and participate only marginally in the rest of society.

If the values inculcated and reinforced by that Muslim environment are the same as those of the host society, then assimilation will probably occur in time, albeit slowly. But if they differ sharply, then the Muslim communities will reject an assimilated national identity more or less indefinitely. Islamism is the extreme version of such a rejection. In Holland, this problem centers on the rights of women and homosexuals. Does Islam accord women and gays those equal rights that are among the values of the Dutch state? There are currently disputes within Islam on this point, at least in Western countries. Dutch officials are nudging Islamic representatives to reach the right liberal conclusion. Rotterdam, for instance, is quietly pressing self-help organizations to put women on their boards. But it is far from certain that this obstacle to assimilation will soon be removed.

The second obstacle is the weakness of Dutch identity. Several Dutch speakers at the aforementioned conference blamed their problems on an earlier failure to treat immigrants well; they contrasted this regretfully with America's traditional policy of welcoming new arrivals. But that is not quite correct: Immigrants to the U.S. were welcomed at some times and given a hostile reception at others. What was more important in ensuring their assimilation was the strong appeal of the American identity. Immigrants wanted to be American and overcame many obstacles to become so. To use today's jargon, America was a strong brand image.

Even if Holland cannot quite match that, it is a beautiful country; the Dutch are a fine, decent, and democratic people; and they have great historical achievements to their credit, from pioneering capitalism to resisting the Nazis. Their present national identity is weak, in both their own eyes and those of immigrants, only because it has been artificially undermined by government in order to advance multiculturalism and European integration. National pride in Holland has been disparaged in order to ease the path of immigrants into society--but that has had the paradoxical effect of making those immigrants less likely to identify with a society that lacks confidence in itself. If the Dutch want to assimilate Muslims more effectively, they would make a good start by recovering their own identity from Brussels and boasting about how they drove the Kings of Spain from their homeland.

A final obstacle to assimilation is continuing high levels of immigration. As is now generally accepted, these tend to reinforce ghettoization, alarm the native-born, and thus obstruct assimilation from both ends. Restrictionist measures have been proposed since van Gogh's murder, but they are vulnerable to legal and political pressures. And these pressures in turn are fueled by the belief of European elites that their declining populations need large infusions of immigration to avert the collapse of their economies and welfare states.

Europe does indeed have a demographic problem. But the distinguished demographers at the conference--including Joseph Chamie, the former chief demographer of the U.N.--pointed to a number of facts arguing against the elites' alarmism. Europe's projected decline in population is actually rather moderate; it would, for instance, not reduce Spain even to its 1950s population level (not then seen as too low). Living in a country with a stable or declining population would be a quieter life but not necessarily unpleasant. Problems of overcrowding, congestion, and environmental overload would be ameliorated. There is no evidence that larger countries tend to be wealthier--if anything, the reverse. We would need to make major transfers of resources from some purposes--e.g., schools and infrastructure--to others, such as hospitals and social benefits. But such adaptation would make more sense than seeking to maintain the existing ratio of workers to dependents through immigration. Not only would that mean wholly unsustainable levels of immigration--the EU would need to increase its population level to that of India and China combined by 2050 to maintain the "support ratio"--but it would merely postpone the problem to the next generation.

In other words, immigration is not economically necessary in Europe. Hence it can be prudently reduced in order to promote other objects such as Muslim assimilation. That is plainly what the Dutch would like. To get it, however, they may need to seize power back from the multicultural elites of The Hague and Brussels.

JOHN O'SULLIVAN

Rotterdam