Far-right political leader Geert Wilders was convicted of inciting hatred against Moroccans when he called them “scum” at an election rally in 2016. [GETTY]
Last week, Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom Party (PVV) won the largest number of parliamentary seats in the Dutch national elections. The political figure is known internationally for his Islamophobia, and demands for, among other thing, the closing of all mosques in The Netherlands.
Crucial to his victory is the radicalisation of former supporters of the mainstream conservative-liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) of the incumbent prime minister, Mark Rutte. As Dutch news satire website De Speld explained, VVD’s new leader Dilan Yesilgöz had run an excellent campaign…for Wilders.
Rutte had triggered the fall of his own coalition-government by demanding further restrictions on refugee rights that were unacceptable for part of his coalition. The VVD hoped the elections would be dominated by migration, and not other urgent issues such as the country’s housing crisis and the rising cost of living.
During the campaign, Yesilgöz exaggerated the supposed ease with which refugees enter the Netherlands. The main beneficiary of this tactic ended up being the PVV, the political force that for a decade-and-half built its political profile on hostility towards migrants.
The VVD lost 10 seats, leaving them with 24. Of the new PVV voters, one out of four previously voted for VVD.
Like many of his voters, Wilders is a product of the right-wing establishment. In the early nineties he worked for the VVD and in 1998 he represented the party in parliament. He also wrote speeches for the future European Commissioner, Frits Bolkestein, a pioneer in the ‘clash of civilisations’ rhetoric regarding the West and Muslim societies in Dutch politics.
Wilders eventually left the VVD in 2004, partly because they would not categorically oppose Turkey joining the European Union.
Since founding the PVV in 2006, Wilders gathered a loyal base; almost 80% of those who voted for him in the previous national elections, did so again last month. Whilst the PVV largely rallied support as an opposition to Rutte, it is important to highlight that Wilders is not a political newcomer. Voters showed up for a seasoned politician who for years has remained consistent in his main policies. His popularity therefore shows how mainstream Islamophobia has become in The Netherlands.
Indeed, the PVV’s manifesto presented the racist and authoritarian positions that characterise the party. Pledges ranged from the petty revoking of the government’s apologies for the role played by the Dutch state in slavery, to the deportation of criminals with double nationality, to the deployment of the army against ‘street scum’, and the closing of borders for refugees and preventive arrests of ‘jihadist sympathisers’. Particularly drastic was Wilders’ long-standing insistence on ‘no Islamic schools, Qurans and mosques’.
However, it is not only racist and xenophobic politics that has attracted voters to the PVV. Wilders was originally an explicit supporter of neoliberal economic policies but for the past decade, his party increasingly posed as defenders of the welfare state. The PVV programme contained seemingly progressive positions, such as raising the minimum wage, lowering healthcare costs, and returning the retirement age from 67 to 65.
Though such rhetoric is contradicted by the party’s actions.
In his book Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me (2012), Wilders described the role of the PVV as supporting the austerity plans of Rutte’s first cabinet in return for measures to ‘restrict immigration, roll back crime, counter cultural relativism, and insist on the integration of immigrants’. In parliament, the PVV introduced a proposal to make collective bargaining agreements no longer binding, and supported further restrictions to access to social security.
Not to mention, today the PVV seeks to form a government with the VVD – the party that for the last decade headed the government’s implementation of neoliberal measures that they claim to oppose.
Whilst a substantial number of Wilders’ voters are certainly committed to far-right politics, part of his appeal is that he has been able to pose as an opposition force to an establishment that included the left-wing parties like the Labour Party.
In an attempt to present itself as a legitimate party that could govern, Labour entered a coalition headed by Rutte back in 2012 after they had won close to 25% of votes. They remained despite the deeply unpopular harsh austerity measures that were implemented, and even ran a former minister in the government as the candidate on a joint Labour/Greens ticket.
The result was a modest advance mostly through votes coming from the centre and other left-wing parties, but it hardly attracted new voters. In the elections last month Labour/Greens won 25 seats, and became the second largest party, but finished far behind Wilders.
Another error made by parts of the Dutch left is that anti-racism and migrants rights are considered secondary to social-economic issues. However, as the recent election dramatically showed, these are incredibly decisive issues in Dutch politics.
When Wilders’ electoral victory was announced, hastily organised protests took place in some cities. A coalition of progressive groups called a national demonstration in defence of civil liberties, freedom of religion and human rights. Such protests are of course not only important, but urgent because they make visible the opposition to Wilders’ agenda and show solidarity with groups that are threatened, especially Muslims.
After all, the case of Giorgia Meloni’s Italy shows what can happen when the far-right is in power; it may moderate some of its rhetoric, but it will not abandon its authoritarian and nativist project.
But protests alone are not enough. For years, Wilders pushed the mainstream to the right, pulling voters to his side. The Dutch left can learn something from this; instead of pandering the right, it needs to pressure them. As for rebuilding a left that can effectively pressure the centre and win new supporters, this will need to be a long term project.
What is needed now more than ever is a left that sees itself not as a government-in-waiting but as an opposition force.
Originally published in The New Arab. https://www.newarab.com/opinion/geert-wilders-left-needs-be-real-opposition
Alex de Jong is co-director of the International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE) in Amsterdam, Netherlands and editor of the Dutch socialist website Grenzeloos.org.
Cite as: de Jong, Alex 2023 “Geert Wilders’ election victory: The left must concern itself with being a real opposition” Focaalblog 18 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/12/18/alex-de-jong-geert-wilders-election-victory-the-left-must-concern-itself-with-being-a-real-opposition/
On 1 July 2021, 148 years after slavery ended in the Dutch West Indian colonies, Femke Halsema, the Mayor of Amsterdam, said: ‘For the active involvement of the Amsterdam City Council in the commercial system of colonial slavery and the global trade in enslaved people I, on behalf of the College of Mayors and Aldermen, apologize.’ Halsema was followed by the College of Mayors and Aldermen of Rotterdam (10 November 2021), Mayor Sharon Dijksma (Utrecht, 23 February 2022), Mayor Van Zanen (The Hague, 20 November 2022), and last but not least, Prime Minister Mark Rutte (19 December 2022). It is expected that King Willem Alexander will offer his apologies for the involvement of his family, the Oranje-Nassaus, in the slave trade in the Atlantic and Asia on this year’s (2023) abolition day (Keti Koti). Why, many wondered, should we apologize for slavery? It is so long ago, we are not guilty of it.
Memory politics
Before I get to the ‘why’ question, perhaps let me start with the question: why now? For many, the series of apologies may have come as a surprise. All of a sudden and out of nowhere, they may have thought, we need to apologize for something that has happened long ago and that has never been an issue before. Why should we make a point of it now? Although slavery has never before received as much public attention as it does now, the commemoration of slavery in the Netherlands is not new. In fact, that commemoration has had its own dynamic, and has changed in terms of the political message it carries. Already in the 1950s, African Surinamese students in the Netherlands celebrated Keti Koti, Abolition Day on July 1. In 1963 there was even a public manifestation in Amsterdam. More than ten years before Surinamese independence (1975), students in particular mobilized the commemoration in a framework of Surinamese nation-building. ‘Fri moe de’ (free we must be), in that sense, was not only a reminder of abolition, but also a claim to end colonial rule.
Image 1: Detail of the National Slavery Memorial, Oosterpark Amsterdam, 2009. Photo by the author.
The commemorations continued after independence, but for the main part remained private. That began to change in 1993, when a group of African Surinamese organized a public commemoration of ‘the shared history of the Netherlands and its colonies’ on Surinameplein in Amsterdam. That commemoration was meticulously modeled after the national memorial day on Dam square on May 4, commemorating the fallen in the war. Mirroring the national Committee 4/5 May, the group called itself the Committee 30 June/1 July. Like the Dam ceremony, the Surinameplein event also includes two minutes of silence at 8pm, the singing of the Dutch, Surinamese and Antillean anthems, and a performance by a child. Now, slavery had come to carry a different political message: no longer a plea for independence, but a claim for citizenship. Whereas many Surinamese in the 1970s had come to the Netherlands with the idea of returning to an independent and flourishing nation, political events in the 1980s (a coup d’état, civil war, and economic downturn) shattered these dreams. The 1980s therefore saw a re-orientation towards the Netherlands, stemming from a realization that the Netherlands would have to be a home for the foreseeable future. As a consequence, slavery was now re-framed as a claim to citizenship – hence the emphasis on a ‘shared’ history. Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s dictum: ‘we are here because you were there’ gained popularity. Their manifesto of 2002 also included demands about pensions, education, residency, radio and TV broadcasting licences, and health insurance. These demands, although they had been made throughout the 1990s, reached ever larger audiences after the unveiling of the national slavery memorial in Oosterpark, Amsterdam. This ceremony is usually attended by high-ranking representatives of the state, including the mayor, ministers, the Prime Minister, and the King.
Recent commemorations are increasingly embraced by young people of African-Surinamese descent (and to a lesser extent people of African Antillean descent), born in the Netherlands and exposed to racism in education, the housing sector, or work. They articulate slavery as a historical responsibility of the Dutch state and society at large.
What is changing now, is that slavery is less and less presented as a ‘Surinamese’ or ‘Antillean’ thing, but as something that concerns Dutch society as such. More and more, white Dutch citizens come to the realization that commemorating slavery is not only about someone else’s pain (although clearly that is also important), but that it concerns Dutch society as a whole. Now, one might argue that there are many ways of taking responsibility for that past. Why apologies? Why that particular form?
Apologies
In fact, apologies are notoriously difficult, especially when they concern collectives. As Michel Rolph Trouillot (2000) argued, in order for apologies to work one must establish the identity, or the self-sameness of two fundamentally different entities: a collective in the present and a collective in the past. One must show that the collective perpetrating an act is actually the same as the one apologizing – an impossible task according to Trouillot. Indeed, it is easy to dismiss this, as for instance the populist politician Pim Fortuyn has done: those who suffer from traumas should visit the psychiatrist, instead of sitting at a negotiating table, he wrote in 2002. Apologies may even be the flipside of this kind of right wing populism. Take, for instance, Rita Verdonk, who upon launching her political movement ‘Proud of the Netherlands’ (Trots op Nederland) in 2007, exclaimed that the Netherlands had been a hospitable country for centuries, and that it is not in the Dutch nature to discriminate. Verdonk imagines a nation characterized by unwavering goodness, a kind of völkische idea of an essentialized people characteristic for populist ideology.
In legal terms apologies are less of an issue. The present Dutch government and city councils are the legal successors of historical governments. This is why many apologies have been made by sitting governments on behalf of their predecessors. Think, for instance of Willy Brandt’s famous ‘Warsaw genuflection’, a gesture of both commemoration and apology in the context of the 1943 uprising in the Wasaw Ghetto (which at the time only 41 per cent of West Germans approved of).
Abortive rituals?
Nevertheless, Trouillot argues that apologies should be seen as ‘abortive rituals’: ‘collective apologies are meant not to succeed – not because of the possible hypocrisy of some of the actors but because their very conditions of emergence deny the possibility of a transformation’ (Trouillot 2000, 185). I’m not sure I agree with Trouillot that apologies are necessarily ‘abortive’. I do recognize the danger of essentializing collectives, and indeed, the slavery debate in places like the Netherlands does generate presumably clear cut identities of blackness and whiteness, victim and perpetrator, oppressor and oppressed. Looked at ethnographically, the picture becomes much more complex. Relations between African Surinamese and Ghanaians, for example, can sometimes be as tense, if not more, as those between African Surinamese and white Dutch; African Surinamese in Suriname think and feel differently about slavery compared to African Surinamese in the Netherlands; political outlook can be more important than racial-ethnic identification as black or white, and so on.
However, as an anthropologist I do not want to dismiss the power of rituals so easily. Trouillot argued that collective apologies are rituals that have a demonstrative and a transformative dimension. The goal of a ritual in general is to transform a person or collective from one state to another. Rituals of collective apology, according to Trouillot, fail to achieve such a transformation because these rituals rely not on transformation but on durable identities. My sense is that Trouillot was too quick to dismiss apologies purely based on their structural premises. It remains interesting to ask how such rituals may work in practice.
Collective rituals, to speak with Benedict Anderson, are also a space to imagine oneself. Collectives, one might say, do not exist outside of, or prior to these rituals, but they emerge out of these rituals in the first place. This means that collective rituals also present opportunities to imagine a collective subject in a new way. This is precisely what has been happening around the issue of slavery in places like the Netherlands in the past two decades.
Image 2: Winti priestess Marian Markelo pouring libation to the ancestors at the National Slavery Memorial, 2010. Photo by the author
Two examples may show this. The first is from the year 2006. During the Algemene Beschouwingen, a parliamentary debate about the government’s plans for the coming period, then Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, a Christian Democrat, said in reply to the critique by Femke Halsema, then a member of the oppositionof the GreenLeft: ‘I don’t know why you are being so negative and annoying about this. … Let’s be happy together! Let’s be optimistic! Let us say: Once more, The Netherlands can do it! This VOC-mentality, looking past borders, dynamism! Right?!’ By ‘VOC mentality’ he referred to what he perceived as the Dutch entrepreneurial spirit as embodied in the Verenigde Oost Indische Compagnie (United East India Company), a mindset that supposedly had made The Netherlands a great economic and political power in the world. Like Verdonk, he cherished Dutch colonialism.
Although Mark Rutte, from a liberal party that has similarly been proud of Dutch imperial history, has long argued that you that you cannot hold people in the present responsible for what happened in the past, he now imagines the nation differently. In his apology speech, he said: ‘We, living in the here and now, can only recognize and condemn slavery in the clearest terms as a crime against humanity. … And we in the Netherlands must face our share in that past. … [The national archives are] the place for national examination of conscience.’ It was a rare moment of vision for this Prime Minister – a liberal to the bone – who has notoriously claimed that those who want vision should visit a doctor.
So, have these apologies been transformative? There are many who did not think so, especially because after years of rejection and hesitation, they came very suddenly, without consultation of societal partners, and deliberately on a date without any ritual significance in any of the countries involved. Nevertheless, many agree that it was a moment in which the Prime Minister showed unexpected statesmanship. In spite of considerable societal backlash, he chose to imagine the Netherlands differently, turning away from the classic nationalist narrative of a glorious imperial past to a certain humility, mindfulness, and care. It remains to be seen whether the cabinet will not just talk the talk, but also walk the walk, but it is possible that an important step has been made in the process of re-imagining the Netherlands.
Markus Balkenhol is a social anthropologist at the Meertens Institute, Amsterdam. He specializes on colonialism, race, citizenship, cultural heritage and religion. His 2021 book Tracing Slavery: The Politics of Atlantic Memory in the Netherlands is published by Berghahn Books.
References
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2000. “Abortive Rituals: Historical Apologies in the Global Era.” Interventions 2 (2): 171–86.
Cite as: Balkenhol, Markus 2023 “Apologizing for slavery: notes on a Dutch surprise” Focaalblog 28 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/06/28/markus-balkenhol-apologizing-for-slavery-notes-on-a-dutch-surprise/
The shock among the Dutch chattering classes on 16 March was palpable. The right-populist Farmer–Citizen Movement (BBB) – established in 2019 by a small communications firm, bankrolled by the powerful Dutch agrifood complex and led by a former journalist for the meat industry – had in one go massively increased its vote share in the country’s provincial elections. It is now the largest party in all twelve provinces, and expected to achieve the same status in Senate in April. This would give BBB huge veto power at both national and local levels, potentially bringing an already hesitant green transition programme to a standstill. Faced with this prospect, an irate commentariat has begun to denounce the farmers as enemies of green progress, and speculate that voting restrictions – on the elderly, the lower educated, those in rural constituencies – might be necessary to override their resistance.
The casus belli for the farmers’ revolt was a 2019 ruling by the Dutch Supreme Court that the government had breached its EU obligations to protect 163 natural areas against emissions from nearby agricultural activities. This prompted the centre-right coalition government, led by Mark Rutte, to impose a nationwide speed limit of 100 km/h on highways and cancel a wide array of building projects intended to alleviate supply shortages on the Dutch housing market. Yet it soon became apparent that such measures could only be a short-term stopgap, since transport and construction contributed a pittance to national nitrogen emissions while agriculture made up a whopping 46%. A structural solution would therefore have to involve a substantial reduction of livestock. The suggestion long put forward by the peripheral ‘Party for the Animals’, to slash half of the aggregate Dutch livestock by expropriating 500 to 600 major emitters, was suddenly on the table. The unthinkable had become thinkable.
Image 1: Dutch farmers protesting in The Hague in October 2019, photo by Steven Lek
The number of Dutch workers employed in agricultural activities has declined precipitously since 1945, from around 40% during the Great War to only 2% today. Yet, over the same period, the Netherlands has become the second biggest food exporter in the world after the US. Its highly capitalized meat and dairy industry plays a pivotal role in global supply chains, which makes its ecological footprint unsustainably large. Hence the gradual realization among the Dutch political class – accelerated by the Supreme Court ruling – that meeting climate goals meant reorienting the national economy. For the rural and small-town oriented Christian Democrats in the coalition that was hard to swallow; for the eco-modernist, meritocratic social liberals in the coalition (D66) this came naturally; while for Mark Rutte’s own People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, even though naturally in favor of ‘growth’, it was simply the pragmatic thing to do. As one centrist MP remarked, ‘The Netherlands can’t be the country that feeds the world while at the same time shitting itself.’
These green proposals triggered a wave of farmer protests – farmers blocking roads with their tractors, occupying squares and other public spaces, breaking into government buildings and turning up at the homes of politicians – as well as the formation of the BBB. After a brief pause during lockdown, the movement has now reached new levels of intensity. Since spring 2022, along the roads and highways leading into the forgotten parts of the Netherlands, farmers have hung innumerable inverted national flags: a symbol of their discontent, sprouting up like mushrooms after an autumnal shower.
Almost one fifth of the electorate, approximately 1.4 million people, turned out to vote for the BBB – a significantly larger number than the 180.000 farmers who comprise its core constituency. This suggests that more is at stake here than simple nimbyism. Pensioners, the vocationally trained and the precariously employed are overrepresented among the BBB’s supporters, and its largest electoral gains were in peripheral, non-urban areas which have been hit by falling public investment over a long time. Such groups have rallied around a class of farmers who present themselves as victims, but who are in fact among the most wealthy and politically well-connected in the country: one in five of them is a millionaire. It is clear that this heterogeneous bloc could only be assembled as a result of deep disenchantment with mainstream politics in the Netherlands – which has long been blighted by the arrogance and incompetence of its ruling stratum.
A number of historical factors laid the groundwork for the farmers’ movement. First, the Netherlands underwent an extremely rapid neoliberal makeover since the early 1980s, resulting in the fire sale of public services, the marketization of childcare, healthcare and higher education, a steep decline in social housing, the emergence of globalized banks and pension funds, and one of the most flexible labour markets in the EU, with one in three employees on precarious contracts. Next, the 2008 financial crisis led to one of the most expensive banking rescues in per capita terms, followed by six years of austerity which punished the poor and served to redistribute wealth from everyone else to the rich. The four lockdowns imposed between 2020 and 2022 had the same effect: workers lost their jobs, saw their incomes fall and died in greater numbers. Rising consumer prices, sparked by the war in Ukraine, subsequently pushed many Dutch households in the provinces into fuel poverty.
All this was interspersed with constant bureaucratic failures across a range of government departments: childcare, primary education, housing, the tax office, transport and gas extraction. At the same time, regressive subsidies were handed out to middle-class environmentalists to reimburse heat pumps, solar panels and Teslas, which of course only they could pre-finance. Add a constant trickle of high-handed insults about the lower classes from the putative experts who dominate public debate, and you end up with a festering and combustible mixture of resentments. The situation was finally ignited in 2019 by the mentioned court ruling, after which latent regional-cultural identifications of the provinces against the city (the ‘Randstad’, the Western urban conurbation that accommodates circa half the Dutch population) provided the raw symbolic material for the farmers’ adversarial narrative: core versus periphery, elites versus masses, vegans versus meat-eaters. With the help of some savvy political entrepreneurs, this message began to resonate far beyond the farmlands.
The French writer Houellebecq once wrote that the Netherlands is not a country but a limited liability corporation. It perfectly captures the view of Mark Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy. For thirteen years now it has reimagined the Netherlands as a European Singapore on the Rhine. It is a form of mercantilist neoliberalism that aims to attract as much foreign capital, both financial and human, to the Netherlands as possible. The tax rule book is arranged with that goal in mind, transforming the Netherlands into one of the largest tax havens in the world. The social security regime has been redesigned to serve highly educated expats, turning the city of Amsterdam into an Anglophone outpost where shopping and dining requires one to speak English, while refugees and asylum seekers are locked away near some of the poorest villages in the Dutch outback. Public investment has been rechanneled into the shiny metropolitan areas in the West, while largely surpassing the peripheries along the German border. Last week it took me nearly four hours to go from Arnhem to Veenhuizen in the North of the Netherlands by public transportation, a distance of less than hundred miles.
As in the UK where everything goes to London and the home counties, this was legitimated by the mercantilist narrative of the triumph of the city and the creative class, peddled by hip geographers like Richard Florida and Edward Glazer, that told post-ideological, neoliberal politicians to stop backing losers and start picking winners and steer massive amounts of public funding to cities. For that is where human capital resides, so the story goes, and that is what is key to national economic success. And so it went: while hospitals, schools, fire stations and bus lines slowly but gradually disappeared from the periphery, the metropolitan core was sprinkled with massive public investments in glittering metro lines etc, Amsterdam on top.
The one that has overseen it all, Mark Rutte, who is in the race to become the longest sitting head of state in the two hundred years history of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, fits to a tee with the reckless opportunists so wonderfully described by the New Zealand sociologist Aeron Davies (2018): Rutte is the ultimate expert in surviving the political game but totally lacks the vision that is required in times of crisis. In fact, Mark Rutte famously quipped that voters who want vision should better go to an optometrist.
The disaffection of a growing slice of the electorate is not a performative effect of media framing, as some maintain, but is based in real, material neglect. As was hammered home two days after the election results came in by a report from one of the Dutch public think tanks: there are large discrepancies in life expectancy between core and the periphery of the country as well as huge gaps in terms of wellbeing and trust in politicians (2013). The report concluded that this was the unintended effect of decades of underinvestment in the provinces: the places that, in the worldview of people like Mark Rutte, do not matter
Demography, balanced budgets, the euro, Covid-19, war, climate change: these are the imponderabilia that centrist politicians, backed by their battery of experts, have used to discipline voters into submission. Nitrogen emissions fit seamlessly into this technocratic pattern. The plan to halve livestock numbers in the Netherlands was not drawn up after a lengthy process of democratic debate; it was a summary decision made by politicians hiding behind an unaccountable judiciary and a set of scientific numbers.
Hence, it may be necessary to revise the famous observation by the German poet Heinrich Heine: ‘In Holland, everything happens fifty years late’. Here, it seems, the backlash against the green technocracy has come early (though France’s yellow vests had been there already). The Dutch (and French) conjuncture foreshadows the fate of other countries in the global north – as centrist governments, striving to assert their green credentials, begin to make heavy-handed policy reforms with major redistributive consequences. This, after forty years of neoliberal upward redistribution, and in a situation where governing elites in the preceding decade had already felt very uncertain in the face of the ‘populist’ revolts.
What Andreas Malm (2016)calls the ‘energetic regime’ of global capitalism has so far taken up most of our political attention; but as the environmental fallout of its ‘caloric regime’ becomes impossible to ignore, livestock farming (among other forms of industrial agriculture) will enter the crosshairs of governments and climate activists. Recent data from Eurostat show that livestock densities are particularly high in Denmark, Flanders, Piemonte, Galicia, Brittany, Southern Ireland and Catalonia. Soon enough, these regions will have to introduce measures similar to those currently under discussion in the Netherlands. And if the Dutch case is anything to go by, technocracy will hardly do the trick. A state that has imposed privatization, flexibilization, austerity, disinvestment and regressive environmental subsidies on its citizens for years cannot expect to be trusted when it comes to climate politics. Instead, it will have to redress the ruinous effects of these policies, while slowly building support for the green transition through a process of engagement that does not shy away from democratic disagreement and the hard work that entails.
Ewald Engelen is professor of financial geography at the University of Amsterdam and a feature writer for De Groene Amsterdammer.
This text first appeared on NLR’s Sidecar (6 April 2023).
References
Davis, Aeron. 2018. Reckless opportunists: Elites at the end of the Establishment. Manchester: Manchester University Press
Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso.
This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).
In the Netherlands from 2015 onwards, the ‘spectacle’ (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015) of people arriving into Europe seeking refuge was channeled by vast media attention and political debate. These events triggered a vast response of bottom-up initiatives in the Netherlands wanting to support refugee status holders. In this contribution, I focus on such newly emerged initiatives that seek to support refugee status holders in Rotterdam, the second-largest city in the Netherlands. It discusses the struggles that the initiators of these initiatives face, who more often than not have a refugee background themselves. It shows how these struggles originate from the ambiguous categorizations of group-making that experimental policies presuppose in the field of refugee reception and support in urban spaces today.
I focus on initiatives that are not established yet, but are still in the process of becoming. By studying initiatives that are still fine-tuning their focus, grappling for funds, searching for volunteers, seeking collaborations with others et cetera, I had an insight in the constitutive and generative elements of the infrastructure of refugee reception and support.
During a 12-month ethnographic fieldwork period in Rotterdam in which I studied such initiatives, I followed several aspiring initiatives in their efforts to establish partnerships with other organizations. When the community organizers of these initiatives would meet with people who know about funding circuits, discuss their project proposals with the municipality, pitch their plan in network sessions, organize events to acquire volunteers and so on, I joined them. In doing so, moments of breakdown (Larkin 2013) were particularly insightful; when my research participants hoped for or anticipated something that did not arrive, I learned about who may do what, where and how.
Rotterdam is an illuminating case to study grassroots initiatives in the field of refugee reception and support. It is considered ‘policy laboratory’ (cf. Van Houdt and Schinkel 2019) and is celebrated for its allegedly innovative urban and social policies, including in relation to migrant integration. Rotterdam cherishes its alleged hands-on mentality – a mentality captured by the popular slogan ‘actions speak louder than words’. Contrasting with Rotterdam’s self-image as experimental and bold, the city has the highest number of low-income households in the Netherlands. Another central force in the city is Livable Rotterdam [‘Leefbaar Rotterdam’], a rightwing party with populist traits and the highest share of votes in local elections. Their policies focus on so-called immigrant assimilation and are explicitly anti-immigration – which translates into policy frameworks that the resident initiatives I study here are affected by and provides context to the fierce anti-immigrant protests in the city in 2015.
Intersecting struggles
Between 2016 and 2020, the so-called Rotterdam Approach for Status Holders explicitly reached beyond the integration objectives articulated by the national government. For example, in Rotterdam, the City Council expects refugee status holders to pass the civic integration exams one year earlier than usually required. In addition, through the ‘Time Obligation’ measure [dagdeleneis], the City Council expects refugee status holders to be ‘active in society for at least four days a week or more with education, work, or voluntary work’. This measure is part of the so-called ‘Participation Act’, which applies to everybody in receipt of benefits. Although a policy evaluation pointed out that only 47 per cent of the status holders in Rotterdam was indeed ‘active’, the most recent (2019-2022) Rotterdam Approach to Status Holders largely continues the existing approach. As a consequence, the refugee status holders that I worked with struggle to live up to the demand to integrate fast, struggle to find their way in the incomprehensive field of initiatives, and fear to be unsuccessful in managing their new lives.
Resident initiatives that seek to support status holders struggle too – although on first sight, Rotterdam seems the place to be for resident initiatives. The Rotterdam Approach for Status Holders states that, in ‘coordinating additional activities’ for accepted asylum seekers, it ‘smartly uses […] private initiatives for refugees and volunteer work,’ thus explicitly opening up the floor for participatory initiatives to play a role. The document claims to ‘believe in the added value of civil society,’ to recognize ‘that creative and innovative initiatives from volunteer organizations give new energy and help integration,’ and that it ‘encourages such initiatives wholeheartedly.’ It thereby responds to recommendations from The Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) to mobilize to ‘society’ and ‘volunteer projects’ in ‘speeding up integration’, as well as to the general appeal to ‘active citizenship’.
In practice, however, funds are drying up. In 2014, the city administration agreed to ‘stop irrelevant subsidies in the field of diversity and emancipation,’ for ‘tax payers’ money gets lost’ and ‘subsidizing activities is not a goal in itself’. This shift away from subsidized activities is explicitly mentioned in a recent policy document regarding support to refugee status holders: ‘only a small part of the budget remains available for subsidies for small-scale, innovative initiatives from society,’ the document points out. As such, the initiatives I worked with find themselves faced with competitive funding schemes; they fear being excluded from subsidies and collaborations, while trying their best to build an image of professional legitimacy.
Opaque group-making
The different forms of struggle identified thus far can also come to intersect, as illustrated in the case of Aida. Aida received a refugee status several years ago, is in receipt of social benefits, and is in the process of setting up an initiative to help Eritrean status holders with their paper work. However, she is afraid she will not be able to get support from the City Council. This is so because the abolishment of the so-called ‘target group policy’ in Rotterdam prescribes that policies should target the population of Rotterdam in general, and not have specific interventions that assume ethno-racial differences (such as people with an Eritrean nationality). Although the Netherlands has a strong tradition of implementing targeted policies, the shift from group-specific policies to generic policies has been a political priority since at least the 2000s (Scholten and Van Breugel 2018). As a result, there is evidence of a declining consciousness of migrant integration concerns, because generic policies often fail to incorporate immigrant integration priorities in the ‘mainstream’ (idem).
For Rotterdam, Dekker and Van Breugel have deconstructed the move from target group policies towards generic policies. They identify a ‘continuous act of balancing between generic and specific policies’ (Dekker and Van Breugel 2019, 128) that at one time implements targeted policies for migrants and at another time subsumes migrant interest under generic policies. These interchanging approaches to group-making in Rotterdam now seem to have reached an equilibrium in which generic policies are the norm. Regarding the support of civil society organizations that seek to assist refugee status holders, the municipality decided to no longer support ‘mono-ethnic and/or mono-religious activities’ to the extent that initiatives ‘will not be financed, unless there are substantive reasons to do otherwise’ because activities should be ‘focused on participation and integration.’ In another policy document, the city’s discouragement of such activities is explicitly linked with Rotterdam’s earlier-mentioned self-image as ‘innovative city’: in ‘giving room to new innovative organizations and ideas,’ the City Council explicitly breaks with ‘whatever is done in the past’.
Yet despite the fact that Rotterdam seem to have reached an equilibrium in which generic policies are the norm, the city publishes annual reports on the achievements of ‘people with a migration background’ that fly in the face of any ‘generic’ policy assumption. Moreover, to my research participants, the ‘group policies’ are elusive and subject to change. For example, Rotterdam’s ‘Somali-resolution’ in 2015 has resulted in the formal recognition of people of Somali descent as ‘group’ and led to the subsequent availability of subsidies to community organizers that sought to assist this ‘group’. And considering recent publications about ‘the Eritrean group’ – such as this and this and this one – my research participants now expect the same thing to happen to people from Eritrean descent as ‘group’.
Exactly because of this instability and opacity with regards to group-making, community organizers such as Aida are striking out blindly with regards to what ‘groups’ can be identified without risking eligibility to municipal funding.
What adds to Aida’s confusion, is that different municipal departments work through different logics. The department that is responsible for procurements in the field of refugee receptionand support (Work and Income) has different expectations from initiatives than the department that is responsible for subsidies (Social Support). The former department is now experimenting with so-called ‘customer profiles’. As an example of such profiles the policy advisor mentions ‘the single mother with three kids’ and adds that ‘customer profiles are a good way to offer tailor-made solutions without working with target groups.’ Customer profiles thus are meant to ‘objectively’ describe ‘groups’ of city dwellers without assuming ethno-racial differences, they make use of stereotypes such as ‘the single mother with three kids’ – a figure that appears as ‘the inversion of morality and family values par excellence’ (Koch 2015). To Aida, it is unclear to what extent these customer profiles are something that concern her and her endeavors; although she now applies for subsidies, she hopes for her activities to be included in the procurement structure some time. Again, she gropes along in the dark.
Eclectic initiatives
As a result of her insecurity about what constellations of people are accepted as a target group, Aida has started to organize dinner parties for long-term Rotterdammers with little money, alongside offering administrative support to Eritrean refugee status holders. She does so because she is scared that if the municipality found out that she only offers support to Eritreans – which she in fact does, with a few exceptions – she would be accused of catering only for one ‘target group’ and as such miss out on funding and collaborations.
These dinner parties however create awkward moments, because the long-term Rotterdammers – who are all white – usually sit on separate tables to black Eritrean people. It is not that Aida has intentionally designed the dinner-setting as such; it is rather that she does not know how to deal with the situation. Recently, the initiative of Aida was declined funding again. In the refusal letter said that ‘there are good reasons to assume that the subsidy would not (or not sufficiently) be spent on (or contribute to) the (policy) objective for which the subsidy is meant.’ In a subsequent meeting with a policy advisor at the town hall, it was specified that Aida’s initiative was considered ‘too broad’. Never mind that very reason the constellation of beneficiaries is indeed quite diverse is that Aida is scared to be accused of focusing on one group in the first place.
Image 1: Right-wing protest in Rotterdam (Banner on the right says: ‘Preserve Dutch Culture Traditions Norms and Values’; Photographer: Lieke van der Veer, 2018)
Reception brokers
Because it is so difficult for Aida and other initiatives to navigate the municipal frameworks, she has asked the help of Jozefien. Jozefien is a woman who has co-founded the platform called You Are Welcome. She once introduced herself as ‘from a little village in the Netherlands’ yet added that ‘I feel more like a Middle-Eastern person, I think.’ You Are Welcome was established to strengthen bottom-up initiatives that engage with refugee status holders, and to spread a positive message on integration. The platform was launched in 2015, explicitly in response to violent protests that broke out during an information meeting about the construction of the reception center.
What is problematic, however, is that some of the initiatives that Jozefien helps, dislike one another. In particular, Aida really dislikes Luciano, the founder of another aspiring initiative for Eritreans, who is born in Rotterdam in a family of refugee parents. Aida is upset because she fears that Luciano is trying to take clients from her. Aida is hurt, she says, because she feels that Luciano is a smooth-talker, that he smiles arrogantly at her on the street, and that, given that Luciano has more contact with city administrators, he forces Aida into the shadows.
For Jozefien, although she tries to equally promote both initiatives, it is difficult to deal with the tension between the two. It also has ramifications for her own relationships with Aida and Luciano. Especially for Aida, the competition she experiences with Luciano makes her deeply distrust Jozefien. One afternoon, Aida complained to me that ‘so often she [Jozefien] is at Luciano’s. But she doesn’t come to us! And she has taken him to the councilor [‘wethouder’]! She has arranged an appointment for Luciano with the councilor! I asked Luciano if I could join. But Luciano said: “no”.’ […] And she [Jozefien] has never even come to our Friday dinners! She only came once, to take a picture, and then she left again. From the very beginning, I didn’t feel welcome at You Are Welcome.’
Discussion: solidarity, humanitarianism and neoliberalisation
Recent ethnographic work contrasts solidarity with humanitarianism and juxtaposes emic accounts that frame solidarity as horizontal, anti-hierarchical, and as an emphasis on similarities between people with the viewpoints of professional humanitarian NGOs (see e.g. Cabot 2014). In Rotterdam, because grassroots initiatives generally turn to the municipality for funding and collaboration and feel pressured to professionalize, the distinction between solidarity and humanitarianism is remarkably fuzzy. The community organizers of refugee support initiatives ‘yearn for’ the state (Jansen 2015) to formally recognize their initiative through a tendering contract and compete to perform professionalism. They seek to use licensed software to prove impact, assimilate to municipal buzzwords, match funding calendars, formalize their organizational form, and forge lucrative partnerships.
These emerging forms of humanitarian volunteering (Youkhana and Sutter 2017; cf. Rozakou 2017) summon a complex assemblage of forms of humanitarian reason, forms of authority and technologies of government (Fassin 2007). Because grassroots initiatives seek to incorporate policy objectives (cf. Van Dam et al. 2014), are subject to mechanisms of raising funds that are part of the technologies of government (Fassin 2007, 151), and thereby gamble on which ‘target groups’ the municipality will acknowledge, they are shaped by these forms of authority and technologies of government. The case of Aida is an example of how refugee support has become intertwined with control mechanisms that are part of experimental municipal policies.
To Aida as well as to the brokers she turns to for advice, is unclear which ‘groups’ may be identified and which not. A lot of ‘information’ in this regard is distorted and comes from hear-say. Although the interchanging approaches to group-making in Rotterdam now seem to have reached an equilibrium in which generic policies are the norm, this equilibrium is unstable, as reports about specific ethnic groups have proven to result in the recognition of these groups and the subsequent availability of subsidies. Moreover, different municipal departments – that deal with subsidies and competitive tendering contracts respectively – work in accordance with different logics, yet is it unclear where one logic begins and the other one ends.
This opacity of group-making policies and related funding schemes gives rise to fierce competition and distrust between initiatives, which has fueled divisions within the refugee solidarity movement. In the grappling race for funds between (aspiring) initiatives which give in to the criteria for competitive success, neoliberal market logics and humanitarianization become further entwined. Community organizers seek to act as successful entrepreneurs – by reaching targets, increasing numbers, seizing volunteers, and laying hold of the target group. In doing so, they may present their core issues as side affairs and vice versa.
This contribution shows that not only beneficiaries suffer from the contemporary mechanisms that mix care and control; some of the aspiring community organizers with a refugee background find themselves in a precarious position as well. Underneath the seemingly universalizing pretense of generic policies, ambivalent practices of institutional selectiveness exclude vulnerable community organizers and the initiatives they are trying to launch. The inequalities that these exclusions are premised on are produced as well as obscured by the mantra of generic policies.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 679614).
Lieke van der Veer(Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands) is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology in an ERC-funded research project on participatory urban governance. She has a background in Philosophy. Based on 12 months of ethnographic research in Rotterdam in 2018, she studies aspiring grassroots initiatives that provide support to people with a refugee background.
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Cite as: van der Veer, Lieke. 2020. “Group-making and distrust within the infrastructure of refugee support.” FocaalBlog, 3 August. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/08/03/lieke-van-der-veer-group-making-and-distrust-within-the-infrastructure-of-refugee-support/
