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HENT DE VRIES

during the national elections). Over the years, Cohen has gained enormous popularity
and respect, especially in the wake of the murder of van Gogh (a relentless critic of
Cohen),^165 when he immediately called upon the city population to ‘‘kick up a ruckus and
make yourself heard,’’ a call to which some twenty thousand demonstrators, including
the Muslim community, responded by gathering at the central Dam Square, in an outlet
for outrage that defused tension and undercut subsequent acts of reprisal (of which there
were, sadly, many in the rest of the country), setting a counterexample to some of the
more irresponsible, inflammatory comments by Dutch politicians in the heat of the mo-
ment. After a career as a professor of law andrector magnificusof the University of Maas-
tricht, Cohen has played a prominent role in national politics, in which, as an
undersecretary of state (or junior minister) forVreemdelingenbeleidfrom 1998 to 2000,
during the government of Wim Kok, he was not only the architect of some of the Nether-
lands’ new and tougher asylum procedures and immigration policies but was also respon-
sible for the introduction and legalization of same-sex marriages. The Netherlands was
the first country in the world to do this.
Cohen’s leadership has contributed to a sound policy that pairs a soft-spoken per-
sonal style and calm modesty with courageous statesmanship, in a city in which almost
half of the population is now of non-Dutch descent—and this in a society that does not
typically see itself as a nation of immigrants. Social and cultural tensions, until recently
simply ignored or glossed over, have been legion. Yet Cohen declared toTime Europe
Magazine: ‘‘Immigrants have always been part of our city and Amsterdam is, and remains,
tolerant. Jews should not be afraid to walk the streets wearing their skullcaps, Moroccans
must be able to find jobs, and homosexuals must not be insulted. The only ‘us and them’
that exist are the citizens who want to live together in peace and those who don’t.’’^166
While being a popular mayor, Cohen plays the role of an intellectual, issuing a steady
stream of theoretically and juridically ambitious policy papers, the most recent of which—
his 2005 ‘‘Multatuli Lecture’’—we reproduce below. The lecture follows on a series of
earlier public presentations in which Cohen has outlined a consistent and daring ap-
proach to the question of the relationship between Enlightenment tolerance and civil,
multicultural society, church and state, national identity and the integration of ‘‘strang-
ers.’’^167 Cohen argues that, historically and in more recent times, the Netherlands has
been a nation of minority groups (cities, provinces, pillars, and parties), each in need of
pragmatically compromising their interests with regard to those of the changing—and
partitioned—majority from which they demarcate themselves economically, geographi-
cally, religiously, culturally, and politically. To this general pattern, which runs from the
Golden Age through the nineteenth century, the twentieth century added gradual recogni-
tion of the dignity of others (workers, women, homosexuals, etc.) and equal treatment
for them, followed in the 1960s and 1970s by a wave of migration of ‘‘guestworkers.’’
Cohen uses the termminorityas a descriptive category, while acknowledging that it has
come to designate ‘‘newcomers’’ or, worse, ‘‘allochthons,’’ that is to say, newly immi-

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