The Netherlands: Dutch Culture Wars

Geert Wilders, the Netherlands’ notorious right-wing extremist who is currently standing trial in an Amsterdam court accused of inciting racial hatred, is also is the subject of a best-selling new book by the Dutch academic Meindert Fennema, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

As Fennema puts it, the Netherlands will very soon have two foreign ministers: an official one, sitting in the cabinet and following the establishment line of Euro-Atlantic moderation; and an unofficial one, Wilders, who says that there can be no moderate Islam and that any belief to the contrary will likely imperil Western civilization.

But Wilders is not solely a Dutch phenomenon. His words chime with a wider set of concerns that pervade contemporary European politics: the problem of integrating Europe’s large minority of Muslim citizens, the fears of workers who see their wages undercut by inflows of cheap labor, and concern that Western values are giving way to self-loathing and ethical relativism.


In attempting to silence Wilders, first politically and now through the courts, the Dutch liberal elite has evaded the thorny question of how to respond to these concerns. Fennema portrays Wilders as really no more than a republican with a bee in his bonnet about Islam. He thinks liberal leftists are terrified of him because, in the name of multiculturalism, they have repudiated their own sense of national identity.


In Fennema’s analysis, the answer to the Wilders riddle lies in the collapse of the corporatist bargain. The old business establishment no longer holds the reins of a de-industrialized neoliberal economy. Power now lies in services and in finance rather than in old-fashioned manufacturing.

Those now in control of the economy, a younger generation of newly rich entrepreneurs and financiers, no longer respect the social pact of past decades and chafe at the values so cherished by the 1968 New Left As in other countries, from France to the United States, the political legacy of the ’68-ers is under attack.


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