Chador or forced prostitution: liberal fundamentalism in the Netherlands

Although this article, reposted from http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/ confers an unhealthy amount of attention on an already well publicised media star, What is more useful is that it gives a deeper analysis of the Dutch turn to the right, the resurgence of national-conservative party VVM, the role of Pim Fortuyn in the return to 'mono-culturalism' and the volksgemeenschap ,whilst asserting the asymetrical social relations offered to immigrants, the poor and the less-than-100percent-Dutch under both regimes. Whilst there is an argument here that Ayaan Hirsi Ali plays a pivotal role in the Dutch rejection of multiculturalism, perhaps more attention could be directed to the specific conditions of workers and immigrants and the challenges they might make in the new political rather than the moral/immoral double bind that is being shaped by liberal fundamentalism in dialogue with more traditional rightist assertions

The Somali-born Dutch political scientist Ayaan Hirsi Ali is perhaps the most assertive critic of Islam in western Europe. In the 'post-Fortuyn' national election in January 2003, she was elected to Parliament for the VVD party - free-market liberals with a strong national-conservative orientation. She has been threatened with death, and after the killing of Theo van Gogh in 2004, she was flown to a US Navy base in Maine, returning under heavy guard two months later. To combat the isolation of women in Islamic immigrant communities, Ayaan Hirsi Ali wants to force their integration into Dutch culture, and into an lifestyle where individualism and career are central values. In some cases, the 'emancipatory' career will be prostitution. As a consequence of legalisation, claimants of social security are obliged in principle to accept work as a prostitute, even if they find it degrading. It is a classic conflict of values, but liberalism can be as fundamentalist as any religion in imposing its concept of 'personal freedom'. Liberals claim that they favour freedom, but the liberal idea of freedom is specific and narrow. Human freedom, for liberals, consists essentially of participation in the market, preferably an unregulated market. Of course there are differences in emphasis between market liberals, political liberals, neoliberals, and libertarians. Mainstream liberalism in western Europe is market liberalism, and the VVD - since 1945 the only Dutch liberal party - is a market-liberal party, with conservative-nationalist and neoliberal influences.

The liberal ideal of freedom does not mean that individuals get what they want, or that they are satisfied with their lives. It is a narrow ideal in the sense that it is is heavily commercialised, but also because it sometimes defines inability to do something as freedom. As far as a liberal is concerned, going to the supermarket to buy a can of beans is the exercise of human freedom, because it is a market transaction. By exercising free choice between brand A and brand B, the customer is fully free, so liberals think. But worse, liberals see the inability to buy even a can of beans as 'freedom'. If you are starving that is simply because market forces have pushed the price of food beyond your current purchasing power, and no doubt that will encourage you to be more co-operative in your dealings on the labour market. "Poverty is not unfreedom" is a classic liberal slogan: liberals think it is better for millions of people to starve in the presence of great wealth, than for the government to redistribute that wealth in order to save them. Starving to death in an unregulated free market is human freedom, according to liberals. Liberals are evil people.

Liberals claim they believe in equality - but the liberal ideal of equality is also narrow, to say the least. Liberals believe in the inequality of talent: some people, they think, are of less value because they have less talents. The workings of the market, they say, should reward the talented, and punish the untalented. And indeed, markets work this way. So for liberals, the fact that people starve in a free market simply indicates that they are very 'untalented', and therefore have no moral entitlement to food. Within western societies, this attitude has resulted in 'workfare liberalism', a philosophy directed at punishing the poor for being poor, and punishing the unemployed for being unemployed. The VVD is by European standards harsh toward the unemployed: one Amsterdam VVD alderman achieved notoriety by insisting that every sick person should be forced to work - packing chocolate, he suggested as an example.

The attitude of the VVD is illustrated by a December 2002 article by the party leader Gerrit Zalm, demanding the expulsion of illegal immigrants. He criticises those who say that illegal immigrants contribute to the economy, and he uses the example of the asparagus crop. The asparagus harvest is typically done by illegal immigrants: the work is hard and unmechanised. The growers can find no Dutch people to do the work - at least not for the wages they are offering. Zalm says that the government should force the unemployed to work on the asparagus harvest, and then expel the illegal immigrants. He specifically complains that the unemployed are often foreigners who came here as legal immigrants. Note that while classic liberals seek to minimise state intervention, Zalm wants an active state - to hunt down those who do not belong to the nation, and to punish the 'lazy poor' with hard physical work. This combination of neoliberalism, welfare-bashing, and anti-immigrant nationalism attracted the black conservative Ayaan Hirsi Ali to the VVD. Liberals are vindictive people, who seek to maximise harm to the weak, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali targets a vulnerable section of the immigrant unemployed: Muslim women.

Before the specifics of her proposals, a note on the political climate in the Netherlands, and the abandonment of multiculturalism. For the last 20 years, multiculturalism was the norm in the Netherlands: in practice it meant the subsidising of small elites within each migrant community, and a folklore concept of culture. It emphatically did not mean equal access to Netherlands society: immigrant communities remained at the bottom of the labour market and social ladder, as an ethnic underclass. This was nevertheless seen as 'successful integration', and the issue of equality disappeared from the political agenda. One indicator of the political priorities is that under Dutch law, it is almost impossible to prove discrimination: open discrimination on the labour market is therefore normal.

A more assertive Islamic identity undermined the fiction of successful national integration. More important was the return of a nationalist, and emphatically mono-cultural, ideal of the Netherlands - an explicit reaction to multiculturalism. Mono-culturalism now dominates Dutch political culture: probably no other western country has gone so far, and so fast, in the abandonment of multiculturalism. There is now a political consensus that immigration is inherently wrong, a threat to society, and that it must be minimised by all possible means. There is no entry procedure for economic migrants in the Netherlands anyway, no 'green card'. Asylum or family reunification are the only way for non-EU nationals to immigrate. The Netherlands has already succeeded in closing off the asylum procedure as a backdoor method of immigration, and attention is now focussed on reunification. On average, each legal working immigrant brings four family members to the Netherlands, in the course of his life - children, parents or spouse. If this 'back door' can be closed, the Netherlands will approach zero immigration, at least from non-EU countries. So political parties now compete with each other, in proposing new restrictions on family members coming to join legal immigrants.

At the same time, the main political parties insist on the assimilation of immigrants already here. They compete in devising new and more rigorous citizenship courses and language tests, often as a pre-condition for immigration. Sometimes it is difficult to tell what the intent of the policy is - assimilation or deterrence of new immigrants. For instance, the Socialist Party insists that children of Moroccan immigrants learn Dutch in Morocco, before they are allowed to join their parents. Obviously, there are no facilities to teach the Dutch language in rural Moroccan villages, and the Socialist Party knows that.

The fact that monolingualism is now a political issue in the Netherlands, is one of the most surprising aspects of the current political transformation. The Rotterdam city councillor Michiel Smit became a national political figure with his linguistic demands: 'you speak Dutch here'. He wants Rotterdam to ban multilingual information material, and require that Dutch be spoken in mosques. The new leader of the Labour Party, the Blairite Wouter Bos, later adopted Smit's policy: he also wants to make Dutch compulsory in mosques. The short-lived 2002 coalition (VVD-CDA-Fortuyn) introduced compulsory language courses for new immigrants: the Labour Party is equally tough, supporting compulsory language courses for all non-EU foreigners, not just those applying for citizenship. In most cases they are part of 'citizenship courses' - although the Dutch word inburgering, literally citizen-isation, is best translated as assimilation. The VVD party combines national pride with assimilation: it assumes the immigrant came to work, although in fact most are dependents. Their 2003 election programme proclaimed:

We should be proud of the Netherlands, and of our values, as they are codified in the Constitution...Before an immigrant can live and work in the Netherlands, he must learn Dutch and adopt the Netherlands values as his own. And he must be ready to learn our language as well as possible. Of course, the most important figure in the return to mono-culturalism was Pim Fortuyn, who dominated the 2002 election campaign, until his assassination in May 2002. Although he was portrayed as a political maverick, his party relied on disaffected members from the right wing of the VVD and CDA. Fortuyn also had the support of influential figures in the political establishment, who were disgusted by mass immigration and the 'loss of Netherlands identity'. Fortuyn was not simply an immigrant-bashing racist. He represented nothing less than a return to the ideals of 19th-century Dutch nationalists - the 'northern-Netherlands' nationalism after the 1830 split with Belgium. Here is the implicit catechism which Fortuyn presented, and which has become the defining credo for the Netherlands political climate.

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The Netherlands has an absolute existence right, for an unlimited time. The Netherlands exist in principle for ever, and may never be deliberately abolished. The Netherlands shall never be absorbed into a single European state, in whatever form, and it is treason to advocate this.

The Dutch people consists of the descendants of those who lived in the Netherlands in past centuries. The Dutch people derives its right to existence, and its claim to the territory of the Netherlands, from this descent.

Netherlandership, the quality of being Dutch, is transferred from generation to generation, from parents to children. The children of Dutch parents are Dutch. Those who are not children of Dutch parents, can become Dutch only with the permission of the first group, and on the conditions they set.

The Netherlands borders are sacrosanct. No surrender of territory is permitted, with the exception of small boundary changes for spatial-planning reasons.

All permanent inhabitants of the Netherlands shall be Dutch. Temporary residence and visits by foreigners are permitted, for business, study, or tourism. Migration - permanent residence in another country - is wrong in principle. The Netherlands is a land for Netherlanders with a Netherlands culture. The permanent presence of non-Netherlanders disrupts this unity of land, people, and culture. The large-scale immigration of the last 40 years was for this reason a great mistake. Its effects must be corrected as soon as possible. Zero migration must be the goal. Immigration is in principle a hostile act against the Netherlands. Citizens who encourage it commit treason.

Netherlanders should marry Netherlanders: they choose their partners from among their own people, that is natural. Partners from other countries are only acceptable in exceptional circumstances, and this form of immigration may never take on a structural character. In such cases, the immigrant partner has an absolute duty to assimilate into the Dutch culture: any children must be raised as Dutch. If immigration is permitted in other exceptional circumstances, assimilation is an absolute duty. The government must enforce this assimilation process: no exceptions shall be granted.

The permanent inhabitants of the Netherlands shall have the Dutch culture. They shall be loyal to the Netherlands, as nation and as nation state. No group of permanent residents shall have any other culture, or be loyal to any other state. The ideal is a Dutch society and economy, in Dutch cities and villages. However, as a result of the mass immigration, there are now enclaves in the Netherlands, where for instance Turks can live as if they were in Turkey - with Turkish shops, Turkish businesses, Turkish associations, and Turkish mosques. This is unacceptable: an assimilation policy must ensure that these enclaves disappear.

The Dutch culture is an inheritance from past generations of Netherlanders. Cultural change is only permitted when this inheritance is not damaged. A complete replacement of all cultural elements in the Dutch culture would be equivalent to its destruction, and the bearers of the new culture would not be Dutch. That is equally true if all Netherlanders assimilate to a foreign culture. If all Netherlanders, for instance, converted to Islam, and spoke only Turkish, then they would no longer be Dutch, even if they were born here as children of Dutch parents. A nation must preserve not only its biological continuity, but also its cultural and linguistic continuity. The Netherlands identity is primarily derived from this bond with past generations of Dutch people, and not from any future vision of the Netherlands or Europe. The Netherlands is not a utopian community, but a transgenerational ethnic community (volksgemeenschap).

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Fortuyn made open discrimination politically acceptable: right-wing parties can now propose banning Moslem immigrants, simply on the grounds of their religion, or restricting social security to ethnic Dutch claimants. Ten years ago,that would have brought a prison sentence (Fortuyn himself first suggested the religious immigration ban).

That is the climate in which Ayaan Hirsi Ali's vindictive liberalism flourished. She is popular with Fortuyn's racist supporters, who are prepared to overlook the fact that she is black. She even has a following among Dutch neo-nazis, a unique and dubious achievement for a black woman. She has become an idol / icon for right-wing intellectuals, in Europe and the United States. Evidently, she has some official backing from the Bush administration, who would not otherwise have offered protection at a US military facility - Brunswick Naval Air Station in Maine. The United States has a great strategic interest, in limiting or reversing Islamic immigration to Europe. The immigrants are reservoir of Islamist recruits, and as their numbers increase, their political influence might damage US interests. It is therefore in the US interest to support anti-immigrant groups in Europe, up to and including neo-nazi groups.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is also exceptionally interesting for the media: an articulate African immigrant from a poor Muslim country, she speaks excellent Dutch. She is from a political family: her father Hirsi Magan was an opponent of the Somali dictator Siad Barre, though his political motives for that opposition are not clear. (Her name is also spelt als Ayaan Xersi Cali, Ayaan Xirsi Cali, Ayaan Hirsi Magan, or Ayaan Xirsi Magan).

After university in Amsterdam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali soon made a career as an anti-Islamic opponent of multiculturalism. Before she joined the VVD, she worked as a researcher at a Labour Party think-tank which is hostile to immigration. Like Fortuyn - who justified his crude anti-Moroccan racism as a defence of gay rights - she appeals to liberal themes to justify injustice and repression. As a VVD member she promotes the forced-assimilation policy of the party - and she consciously seeks to legitimise this by appealing to her ethnic origins. Her specific target is Muslim women immigrants from mainly rural communities, usually those who arrived to join a husband, or who came as asylum seekers from war-torn countries. These women are socially isolated and rarely leave their house: contact with Dutch society, such as it is, is through the husband and/or family. Sometimes the husband or father insists that they wear Islamic dress if they leave the house: usually that means a long coat and headscarf, in a very few cases the chador. Those women are clearly being pressured: there is however a substantial group of second and third generation immigrant minorities, who deliberately adopt Islamic dress, even the chador. Several highly-publicised incidents in 2003 made Islamic dress a political issue, with calls for a ban on the burqa, chador and niqaab. It is also a divisive issue in France, and in Belgium, where several cities have banned wearing of the chador and burqa. But by now the debate is shifting away from symbols, to the admissibility of Islam itself:

Why are we afraid to tell Muslims to adapt to us, simply because our values and norms represent a higher level of civilisation - better, more pleasant, and more humane. No more integration, but assimilation! Geert Wilders, Member of Parliament, quoted in De Telegraaf, 04 February 2004.

In January 2003 Ayaan Hirsi Ali attacked Islam and the position of women in Islam, in an interview, one of a series where prominent figures were invited to comment on the Ten Commandments. Here is her comment on the third Commandment:

"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain". Insulting his prophet Mohammed carries the death penalty. The prophet heard that from God himself - and he often got messages that suited his plans. Read the Koran: he stole Zayned, the wife of his follower, by claiming that it was the will of Allah. And worse: he fell in love with Aisha, the nine-year-old daughter of his best friend. Her father said: 'Please wait until she has reached puberty', but Mohammed would not wait so long. So what happens? He gets a message from Allah, that Aisha must prepare herself for Mohammed. That is evidently the teaching of Mohammed: you are entitled to take the child of your best friend. Mohammed is, by our western standards, a perverse man. A tyrant. He is against free speech. If you do not do what he says, then you will suffer. It reminds me of all those megalomaniac rulers in the Middle East: Bin Laden, Khomeini, Saddam. You wonder why there is a Saddam? He takes his example from Mohammed. Mohammed is the shining example for all Muslim men. You wonder why so many Muslim men are violent? You are shocked when I say this, but you make the mistake of most Dutch people. You forget where I come from. I was a Muslim, I know what I am talking about. It's terrible that even though I live in a democratic country, where free speech is the greatest good, I still face the posthumous blackmail of the prophet Mohammed. Here in the Netherlands Aboutaleb [Moroccan minority spokesman] can read the Koran and think Mohammed is fantastic. And I can say: Mohammed is a despicable individual. Mohammed says that women must remain indoors, must wear a veil, they may not do certain work, they may not inherit property like a man, they may be stoned for adultery - I want to show that there is another truth, than the 'truth' propagated with Saudi money all over the world. I know that the women who consider themselves Muslim will not understand me yet, but one day they will remove the blindfold. We must use all channels of socialisation - family, education, media - to ensure that Muslim women are independent and have their own income. That will take years, but one day those women will realise, as I once did: 'I do not want to live the same life as my mother'. Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Trouw, 25 January 2003.

Later, in 2004, she explained that by 'perverse man' she meant a paedophile. However, that claim apparenly made the VVD leadership so nervous, that she has not repeated it since. The position of women in Islam was also the subject of the short film 'Submission', directed by Theo van Gogh in 2004, based on her script. It depicted naked women with Koran verses written on their bodies, with a voice-over monologue criticising Islam. That offended many Muslims, but whether that precipitated the killing of its director, is another issue. The official version - the only one featured in the international media - is that the killing was an Islamist reprisal, with Ayaan Hirsi Ali as the real target. Since that version is convenient for almost everyone, includuding the Islamists, it is unlikely that the background will emerge.

Two days before the killing, Ayaan Hirsi Ali published an article in defence of the film. She gave an apparently fictional example, which she sees as a justification for her campaign. It concerns a Muslim woman, aged 23, illiterate, from a rural village in a Muslim country. She is married off to a man who had emigrated. She is brought to the Netherlands, where he keeps her inside his flat, in a deprived area, for three years. Her husband beats her, and ultimately the police intervene. They bring her, and her baby, to a women's refuge. It is hard not to feel sympathy for this woman - but Ayaan Hirsi Ali doesn't say what her solution is. In fact, it is to deport the woman and her baby. VVD policy is to refuse entry to illiterates, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali strongly supports that policy. If such a woman can pass a Dutch language test, then she might be allowed to stay - but then she becomes the target of an aggressive assimilation policy.

The issue is this: if 'Islamic' isolation of women is enforced, does that justify subjecting them to injustice, discrimination, and humiliation on the Netherlands labour market? Ayaan Hirsi Ali is clearly convinced it does: she sees forced assimilation into a liberal market society as 'emancipation'.

Now, the government of the Netherlands is in a position to enforce such policies, because so many immigrants receive some form of social security, or unemployment / disability benefit. That may seem strange to people in some countries, but most of the extra immigrants who arrive as dependents (of the original labour migrants) are 'unemployable', by the standards of the legal labour market in Holland. Pressure on immigrants is exerted via the social security offices, rather than through the immigration service. It is easier to enforce such policies through the benefit system, because claimants already have a wide range of obligations - not simply to accept work. The workfare policies of the last 10 years have created a whole new sector of the economy, which enforces these obligations, in the form of courses, debt counselling, addiction treatment, 're-integration processes', and workfare jobs - unskilled work in public services and the health sector. Most private-sector employers simply don't want to employ these people, even with subsidy. So only the worst jobs are offered through the official employment offices, the kind of jobs that get zero response if they are advertised in a newspaper. It is these jobs which form the route to 'emancipation' advocated by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for the otherwise unemployable immigrant dependents.

One of those unpopular jobs - so unpopular that the work is done almost entirely by immigrants - is prostitution. It became legal in the Netherlands in 2001: the so-called 'brothel prohibition' dating from 1912 was repealed, and a municipal licensing system introduced. The declared intention of the then government (VVD -Labour -Democrats) was to treat it as a normal job, 'sex work' in the terminology of the liberal-feminist legalisation lobby. Since legalisation there is a small legal sector, mainly in sex clubs. However, most prostitution is in illegal clubs, or via illegal escort services (which require nothing more than a telephone number).

There is no 'workfare prostitution' in the sense of projects specially for that purpose, but government-enforced prostitution is a reality for the Dutch unemployed. It is a threat hanging over the head of unemployed women (and in theory, young men) if they have no education, skills or experience. The only reason that there is no large-scale placement of unemployed women in prostitution is, that almost all prostitutes are technically self-employed. Claimants are only obliged to seek 'employment' in the literal sense, meaning that there is an employer-employee relationship. However, for tax reasons, almost all sex clubs and escort services avoid that status. If a future legal ruling confers employee status on the technically self-employed women in sex clubs, then many more 'job vacancies' would result. The sector has a large and permanent labour shortage.

No specific official decision was ever taken, to introduce compulsory prostitution for the unemployed. The policy is a result of changes in the law and workfare policy. The position is now similar in Germany, see 'If you don't take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits'. Claimants were always obliged to seek work, but the enforcement of this rule became much tougher in the last ten years. In addition, its enforcement has been delegated to private companies, who are paid by the number of claimants they force back into work, and are often unscrupulous. They can sub-contract their work to other firms: there is no official control of their methods. Almost certainly, these private re-integration firms, and their temp agency subcontractors, are the ones who will pressure women into work in sex clubs. Temp agencies in the Netherlands are unregulated (a VVD policy success in the mid-1990's) and many are criminal fronts. However, the official national employment offices (CWI) did offer work in sex clubs - in the minority of clubs that hire the women as employees. If an unemployed woman receives social security benefit, she is obliged to accept the work - any work, in fact. (Similarly, there is no conscription, but the unemployed can be compelled to join the Army). The obligation to accept work covers all paid employment, no exemption is made in the law. So the legalisation of prostitution, in itself, created an obligation for the unemployed to work in prostitution: no specific policy decision was necessary. Work is work, says the CWI: the integration companies will say the same thing, and will generally back it up with a threat to cut off benefit immediately.

Now, university-educated white women are not likely to be forced to work in a sex-club. Nor is a university-educated black woman like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The weakest entrants to the Dutch labour market are most at risk - legal immigrant women without secondary (or any) education, speaking almost no Dutch. That includes the Muslim immigrant women whose 'emancipation' Hirsi Ali wants to promote. Of course illegal immigrants are also at risk in illegal prostitution - but not at the behest of the government. Conditions in the legal sex clubs are certainly better than in the illegal sector. The question is, whether that justifies the humiliation which many women (immigrant or Dutch, Muslim or not) would feel, at being officially placed in work as a prostitute.

The fundamental question is: is that better than being locked up in a flat, in an unfamiliar country, where you can not speak the language, and being beaten by a brutal husband? Is it so much better that it constitutes a liberation, an emancipation, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali would claim? Does the transition from chador to prostitution constitute, in itself, the 'liberation' and 'emancipation' of the woman concerned? Is forcing a woman into prostitution morally any better, than forcing her to wear a chador or burqa? Of course I have taken prostitution as an exceptional example - but is is real example, and illustrates the conflict of values clearly. In practice, most of the Muslim women affected by such assimilation policies would get jobs cleaning toilets, or cutting up chickens. But is that 'human freedom' either?

Liberals, people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, are absolutely convinced it is. In her reaction to the killing of Theo van Gogh, she restated her absolute faith in liberal values - an attitude which ironically mirrors the absolute Islamism of the killer. European liberalism is not as different from religious fundamentalism, as it likes to think. Libertarian propaganda exemplifies the sometimes hysterical adoration for the market, which most liberals share. In the liberal view, a woman who works as a prostitute has taken the initiative to participate in the labour market. She has become an entrepreneur of her own 'talents', in this case her body, and she has negotiated a price which is determined by market forces, not by the government. If that market is free, then she is a free human being - regardless of how she feels, regardless of any inequality or pain or injustice. It should be emphasised, that liberals genuinely believe in this nonsense - but it is cruel nonsense, enforced with great hypocrisy. No-one in the generally conservative VVD would think work in a sex-club was a suitable job for their children, and I don't think Ayaan Hirsi Ali would accept it either. It is clear that behind the rhetoric of freedom and emancipation, the driving force is old-fashioned immigrant-bashing. Liberals are very good at combining vindictiveness toward the weak with noble rhetoric, and that seems to be the central theme of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's political career.