Populism, sexual politics, and the exclusion of Muslims in the Netherlands

The discourses framing Islam as deviant and problematic for Europe described in Chapter 1 have had a loud expression in the Netherlands, where political leaders and public figures have reconfigured what had been values of universal liberal citizenship into national values of cultural distinctiveness: “Dutch values” versus “Islamic values.” Some analysts join these public figures in arguing that “multiculturalism” was once the Dutch national model and is responsible for weakening Dutch values by adopting a soft position on Muslims and Islam.In this chapter we examine the Dutch case as a particularly visible instance of a European exclusivist “neocultural” framing of migrants as outsiders who must either completely assimilate into or be actively excluded from the “modern” moral universe. We use the term “neoculturalism” to identify a form of cultural protectionism, representing the world as divided into different, inimical cultures, and to distinguish this way of thinking from forms of cultural relativism. Muslim citizens have become the most conspicuous objects of this neoculturalist discourse, portrayed as backward, intolerant, and incongruous with European secular modernity.

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