Out of character: Dutchness as a public problem

Abstract

Public debate became a crucial, political terrain for the culturalisation of citizenship in the Netherlands. This chapter reconstructs the emergence of debates and discourses that have shaped this terrain since the 1970s. In contrast to historical narratives in which culturalisation of citizenship is understood to be a reaction to weak nationalism and an imposed multicultural policy regime, this chapter argues that emerging narratives about the Dutchness of citizenship did not critique but reiterated well-established images of Dutch exceptionalism: post-racism, outspokenness moral autonomy and liberality. Public disagreements formed not about the substance of national identity, but about its public enactment. As debates about Dutchness shifted from struggles over character and began to focus on questions of identity, such debates became performative of Dutchness and its supposed deficiencies. The formation of national identity debates in the late 1980s and early 1990s thereby enacted both exceptionalised aspects of Dutchness as well as an ongoing crisis of Dutch identity. Thus, public debates on Dutchness and citizenship helped to sustain the notion that national culture ought to be protected and reinvigorated. Out of this problematisation of ethnic and religious diversity eventually came political proposals for using ‘Dutch culture’ as an instrument for assimilation into national community and a tool for excluding those that purportedly ought not belong in a country of exceptional freedoms. Debates over the post-2001 instrumentalisations of Dutchness, in the form of a revamped enculturation policy and the creation of a national history canon, enacted a logic of fame in which inclusions and exclusions are justified in relation to a native public. The chapter ends by suggesting that, recently, the struggle over Dutch citizenship might have shifted once more: away from a focus on ‘identity crisis’ and towards renewed questions of race and injustice.