ABSTRACT
This book is a study of political ideology. At first glance, it seems counterintuitive to study ideology in a country that is widely believed to have moved beyond ideology. This chapter engages with this problem and alternately serves as an introduction to the Dutch political tradition. The belief in ‘the end of ideology’ and the feasibility of an ‘objective’ politics has long been a powerful sentiment in Dutch politics. Hans Daalder and Arend Lijphart, the founding fathers of Dutch political science, attributed this to a peculiar political culture of consensus and depoliticization among Dutch elites. In a country of political minorities, framing one’s ideas as non-ideological allows one to build coalitions with other parties. Based on an examination of the work of Daalder and Lijphart, this chapter shows how ideology is ever present in the Netherlands, but often disavowed. In times of crisis, the elite consensus culture is actively challenged through renewed ideological contestation. This happened in the 1960s, when Dutch elites became the target of critique of the new social movements. And it happened in the 1990s, when conservative critics such as Bolkestein, Vuijsje and Fortuyn took up the old 1960s critique, this time to challenge the protest generation itself.
