ABSTRACT

Before the murder of Pim Fortuyn shocked the country, it was widely believed that the Dutch cherished no nationalistic sentiments outside politically innocent happenings like football matches, skating championships and Queen’s Day. Only a couple of years and two political murders later, a majority of the population had rejected the European Constitution, intellectuals emphasized the need for a Dutch Leitkultur, while the value of cultural diversity and the loyalty of the Muslim population to Dutch society were widely questioned. On 6 May 2002, ten days before the national elections, with pollsters pre-

dicting that the Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF) could well become the largest party in the country, Fortuyn was shot dead by a radical environmentalist. In the weeks following his death many mourners indicated how ‘Pim’ had ‘said what we were not allowed to say’, i.e. that they feared how foreigners ‘invaded’ the country. On election day, the governing ‘purple’ coalition of Social Democrats, Conservative Liberals and Social Liberals suffered great losses, and the Lijst Pim Fortuyn, suddenly the second largest political party, was to become part of the next cabinet, headed by the Christian Democrat Jan Peter Balkenende. This political landslide, signifying the beginning of a serious backlash

against multiculturalism in the Netherlands, did not appear out of the blue. Fortuyn’s popularity can be understood in terms of the growing appeal of a particular genre of discourse that has become increasingly dominant in Dutch public discourse, the genre of new realism. Fortuyn, we will argue, did not so much break with previous approaches to multicultural society as radicalize a genre of discourse that, at the time of his arrival on the political scene, had already gained considerable respectability. In this chapter we will trace the gradual rise and eventual victory of new

realism through an analysis of a series of public debates, starting with the ‘national minorities debate’ initiated by Frits Bolkestein in 1991 and ending with the controversies raised by the extreme-right politicians Rita Verdonk and Geert Wilders in 2008. These significant moments of public debate will be linked with five stages in which Dutch policies regarding immigrants embraced respectively a model of assimilation (1950s-82), pillarization (1982-94), multiculturalism (1994-2002), new realism (2002-6) and civic integration (since 2007).