THE ECONOMIST: REMEMBER the shock of May 29th 2005, when the French rejected the draft European Union constitution by 55% to 45%? Yet this was largely a vote against an unpopular president, Jacques Chirac, and against the forces of globalisation. Far more worrying for Brussels was the even bigger majority, 61% to 39%, by which voters in the Netherlands rejected the EU constitution three days later. A resentful bolshiness from the French seems unsurprising, almost routine. But the Dutch are placid, stolid—and, surely, reliably pro-European, whatever the issue.
Clearly not then. And it is not hard to detect tensions in Dutch society now. Just stop a few passers-by of an April morning on Dam square in Amsterdam. Within ten minutes one finds somebody like Pieter, a graphic designer who confirms that he voted no, and adds that his big fear was the loss of Dutch identity. A banner hangs helpfully from the nearby Nieuwe Kerk, which is staging an exhibition on Afghanistan, proclaiming (in English) that “A nation stays alive when its culture stays alive”.
Over the past 60 years the Netherlands has been one of Europe's biggest success stories. The Dutch are among the richest (and tallest) people on earth. Their social tolerance is widely admired. Yet immigration and the rise of Islam have triggered a backlash. Rotterdam may soon become the EU's first big Muslim-majority city. The meteoric political career of Pim Fortuyn, a populist who was assassinated in 2002, followed two years later by the murder of Theo van Gogh, a film-maker, by a (Dutch-born) Islamist radical has left scars on a society that once took pride in its embrace of multiculturalism. The Netherlands is a place that is now palpably fretful about its future. Going Dutch >>> | May 1, 2008
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback - UK)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardback - UK)
