THE POLITICS OF TOLERANCEwho had been part of coalition governments for a century. This reflected the decline of
the significance of religious identity in society, as evident from statistics of church atten-
dance and its effect on voting patterns. The 1990s were a period of economic growth and
of strong consensus among employers, trade unions, and politicians about the direction
of policy making. Political opposition came from marginal radical leftists and from the
largely impotent Christian Democrats, who were expected only further to decline in
power. The two traditional opponents, the Labor Party and the Liberal Party (which in
Holland is more or less a conservative, right-wing party), were both in the secular govern-
ment coalition and could thus not politicize differences of opinion. Since consensus was
the basis of both politics and civil society, parliamentary debates became boring. At the
end of the 1990s, the socialist prime minister, Wim Kok, stated with great complacency
that the Dutch welfare state was now complete and only minor technical details were left
for political discussion. How little did he guess that everything would be overturned by
events in 2002! It at least shows that technocratic politics tends to ignore the emotional
side of mass politics.
Something seems to have upset Dutch collective well-being at the end of the 1990s.
First there was the issue of migration and asylum. Asylum seekers flooded into Western
Europe and also into Holland. The asylum seekers were put in ‘‘conditions of exception,’’
sometimes for five or six years, in which they could not work but lived in nicely furnished
camps before any decision was taken to send them back or grant them asylum. When
asylum was denied, feeble attempts were made to escort the rejected immigrants over the
border, but the media quickly showed how unsuccessful this approach was. Most of the
rejected asylum seekers became illegal immigrants, and a whole range of measures was
taken to regulate illegality. This situation, especially in the big cities like Rotterdam,
Utrecht, and Amsterdam, has become a source of anger among the so-called autochtho-
nous population.
In addition, the Netherlands faced a problem with Turkish and Moroccan so-called
guest workers, who had immigrated in the 1960s. Most of these workers had remained in
Holland but lost their jobs with the decline of manufacture and lived on welfare. Most
had brought their families, and their children tended to marry native Turks and Moroc-
cans, thus creating ethnic enclaves that were as much connected to their countries of
origin as to the Netherlands. Immigrants developed a reputation for being criminals, as a
growing underclass of Moroccan youths, in particular, became involved in petty crimes
like purse snatching and auto theft. Since many asylum seekers and guest workers were
Muslim, Islam was increasingly understood as the unifying symbol of these unwelcome
foreigners. In Holland far-right parties, leaning toward fascism, had taken up this issue
with slogans like ‘‘Our own people first,’’ but the mainstream parties more or less declined
to politicize immigration. It is this vacuum that was so eloquently exploited by Fortuyn.
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