ABSTRACT
Culturalism has been a powerful force in the Netherlands since 1991, but it did not emerge out of thin air. To understand integration politics after 1991, we need to reconstruct the evolution of the Dutch civil sphere and the genesis of a policy field through which minorities were to be governed. How did power relations form in the civil sphere and how were these refracted in the policy field? This chapter answers this question through an examination of the proliferation and resolution of three formative conflicts in the Dutch civil sphere: the emergence and incorporation of Catholic and Socialist challengers in the early 20th century, the emergence and incorporation of new social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Moluccan revolt of the 1970s and the subsequent inception of the minorities policy. Although these conflicts were very different, each was resolved through the accommodation of different interests and groups. The chapter concludes that the failure of the minorities policy to successfully accommodate immigrants in the 1980s prefigured the emergence of Culturalism in the 1990s.
