Institutionalizing the Muslim other : Naar Nederland and the violence of culturalism

On the brink of the European demise of multiculturalist discourse, "culture" configures prominently in the debates on immigration of European nation-states. New discourses of integration emphasize dominant values and norms and define civic membership through cultural commitment or loyalty. How are the Dutch doing integration? And what is integration doing to Dutchness? Taking our cues from the new integration exam we analyze how "culture" is paradigmatically disciplined upon new aspiring citizens. By employing cultural tropes of sexual freedom, gender equality, freedom of speech, and individualism as emblems of Dutchness, integration is identified as the successful adaptation to hegemonic liberal and secular virtues, leaving little room for cultural or religious variations. We argue that this need of reinstating Dutchness signals its very crisis, and that culturalism reinforces revivals of national identity. Understanding discourses of multiculturalism (historically) as a depoliticized ideology of secular liberalism, we argue that, rather than simply seeing the strive for multiculturalism (in terms of moral position) as better than that for integration (see for instance Duyvendak, Engelen, and de Haan), we should consider and analyze the premises and complexities in which it operates. The entanglement of migration and globalization is key to understanding current changes in thinking about citizenship and multiculturalism. What is more, culturalism, while obscuring its nature as a form of racism, is in fact a mode of racist and (post)colonial ressentiment. It is a violent mechanism that appeals to exclusionary mechanisms of racialized, classed, and gendered identification, that reduce groups of people to essentialized characteristics, and that affirm constructions of "us" and "them" by using them as absolute forms of differentiation. We emphasize the need to understand the concept of culturalism as an inherent complification of the concept of racism. Culturalism is no new phenomenon. It is very close to cultural racism, which has already been identified by Essed (288). Our discussion of a notorious video on Dutch national identity will help to clarify the nature of culturalism, which we see as the form Dutch racism has taken on since the last few decades. What makes culturalism different from the cultural racism in the past is its (obsessive) instrumentalization of religion. It is in such a way that culturalist discourses operate successfully in the Netherlands today.