Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?(International Edition)(Muslims in the Netherlands)(Essay)

Byline: Frans Timmermans; Timmermans is the Dutch Minister of European Affairs.

A dear friend of mine, who has worked her whole life as a nurse and doesn't have a racist bone in her body, recently said to me, "They're taking over the country." And I asked her, "But my dear, who's taking over the country?" "The Muslims, of course. Ten years from now we'll be forced to worship with them, and I'll be forced to wear a headscarf. That's the future of our country." The claim was a startling one. Dutch society has always been known for its tolerance, based on a passion for liberty and a keen sense of pragmatism. For decades no one social group was ever large enough to dominate others, and smaller groups were never so tiny that they could be swallowed up by the majority. So why now would someone who has only good things to say about other people feel that her basic values are under threat from a relatively small minority?

The answer lies in the unusual nature of Dutch tolerance, which ultimately had little to do with interest in the beliefs or values of other communities. Instead, it involved separation of different groups. Since the 1600s, the Netherlands has been a society of minorities, with a "live and let live" attitude. Up to the 1970s, there was remarkably little interaction between groups. Each community took care of training people to become good citizens--strictly within its own realm. In cases that affected society as a whole and that needed to be resolved jointly, the leaders of the different communities would talk to each other and come up with a compromise. But those compromises were less about finding a common solution than coming up with a quid pro quo. When social democrats called for universal suffrage at the beginning of the last century, they could get a majority in Parliament only by granting conservatives public financing of Christian schools, even though they fiercely opposed the idea of giving tax money to religious schools.

With communities living separate lives, there was never any need to learn to deal with diversity. But over time, communities disintegrated or outsourced their issues to the government, leaving behind a society of individuals conditioned to be acutely aware of their own rights and their neighbors' obligations but much less aware of their own obligations, their neighbors' rights or their responsibility for the common good. Meantime, starting in the early 1970s, the Netherlands began to face labor shortages, and industry and the government invited tens of thousands of men, mainly from Turkey and Morocco, to lend a hand. Most stayed and asked their families to join them. They were tolerated in the traditional Dutch way, without any thought given to integrating them. We did not want to be a country of immigrants, so we clung to the fiction that they were "guests," even when the third generation was born.

What happened next is what would happen with guests anywhere. You are too polite to tell them their behavior is not what you would expect of a member of your own family, too polite to write out dinner-table rules for them to read. They are too embarrassed to ask, and they withdraw from the conversation at dinner because they feel awkward and unwelcome, in spite of the polite smiles around them. Everyone is just waiting for an opportunity to leave the table, fed up with the uncomfortable silences.

Against this backdrop came September 11, followed within a year by our first political murder in centuries (by an animal-rights fanatic) and then by a second one (this time by a Muslim fanatic). A conservative mindset took over, ...