Stefan Dudink. Sexualities. Volume 20, Issue 1-2. August 2016.
In the context of conflicts over Islam and multiculturalism, the acceptance and equal treatment of homosexuality have come to have an unprecedented centrality to Dutch politics (Bracke, 2012; Dudink, 2010; Mepschen et al., 2010; Wekker, 2009). Within the terms set by the debate this centrality seems self-evident. Attitudes towards homosexuality appear as the obvious and crucial marker of profound, or even irreconcilable, differences between Dutch and immigrant communities, differences that are seen to make multiculturalism both unfeasible and undesirable. Rather than taking the self-evident centrality of homosexuality in these debates for granted, this article asks why homosexuality has become such an obviously crucial category in setting the terms in which immigration, Islam and multiculturalism are discussed in Dutch politics. Why is homosexuality so central to a political presentation of Dutch and Muslim cultures as opposed and irreconcilable, and why is it equally important to the articulation of a political vision of a post-multicultural order for the Netherlands?
In answering these questions this article draws on insights into the signifying power of homosexuality—and sexuality more generally—in modern western culture. What Joan Scott has argued for categories of gender, also holds true for categories of sexuality: they ‘are at once empty and overflowing’ with meaning (1989: 49). These are highly charged categories that can be used to produce widely divergent meanings in a diversity of fields. In the recent Dutch political debates analysed here, the category ‘homosexuality’ referred not just to lesbians and gays, or to their rights, but also generated meanings in conflicts over national identity, the place of religion in secular political regimes, and the nature of democracy. As Lee Edelman notes: ‘As soon as homosexuality is localized, and consequently can be read within the social landscape, it becomes subject to a metonymic dispersal that allows it to be read into almost anything’ (Edelman, 1994: 6). What fuels this process of metonymic dispersal is the fact that as a cultural category homosexuality is at once empty and overflowing with meaning, but also carries the promise of stopping the flow of signification in order to establish determinate meanings (Dudink, 2011, 2013). Its cultural status as a fundamental truth that is expected to reveal more about a person than anything else (Foucault, 1990), backed up by biomedical discourses claiming this truth to be natural (Rosario, 1997), makes it a category that can be effectively employed to establish truths and determine meanings in fields other than those that pertain to same-sex sexuality strictly speaking (Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1990).
In this article I am interested in particular in meanings generated through references to homosexuality in political discourse. What is it that can be said, claimed, argued for or against ‘through homosexuality’ in recent political debates on immigration, Islam and multiculturalism? Without denying the international and transnational dimensions of the political processes in which homosexuality obtained its special position in these discussions (Butler, 2008; Fassin, 2006, 2010; Haritaworn, 2008; Puar, 2007), I will focus here on the dynamics of a national political culture and its history in answering this question. In this respect I follow Joan Scott’s argument that it is necessary to ‘highlight the local nature of the imagined general conflict between “Islam” and “the West”’ (2007: 9). What appears as a worldwide clash of civilizations is, to a large extent, an assemblage of conflicts of a highly local nature, shaped by the specific dynamics of a national political culture and its history and waged with the means this culture affords.
The emergence in political discourse of a category that is as symbolically powerful as homosexuality is an overdetermined process. It cannot be explained by reference to a single cultural or political point of origin. I do not claim that the analysis presented here, which focuses on the specific nature of Dutch political culture, fully explains this emergence. The dynamics of Dutch politics are an important, but certainly not the only, explanation for the central position of homosexuality in current political discourse in the Netherlands. The element of Dutch political culture that is central to my analysis of the metonymic dispersal of homosexuality in the debates over multiculturalism and Islam is the specific nature of democracy in the Netherlands. Referred to by political scientists as ‘consociational democracy’, the workings of Dutch democracy from the early 1990s onwards became both a crucial frame for, and intensely contested object of, political conflicts over multiculturalism and Islam. I will first outline the history and characteristics of Dutch consociational democracy and then discuss its place in these debates. The main body of the text will examine three episodes in the debates over multiculturalism and Islam that were centrally concerned with homosexuality and that shed light on the specific ideological work performed by homosexuality in critiques of multiculturalism and the articulation of a political vision of a post-multicultural order for the Netherlands. Drawing on poststructuralist discourse analysis, this part of the article concentrates on the question of what part homosexuality played in reconstituting the identity of crucial categories of political discourse the traditional meanings of which had been lost. If ‘Dutchness’ and ‘democracy’ had become such ‘floating signifiers’, was homosexuality the ‘nodal point’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 112-113; Zizek, 1989: 95-97) that helped re-establish their meanings?
A brief note on terminology: throughout this essay the terms ‘homosexuality’, ‘homosexual’ and ‘gay’ will be used as they appear in the rhetoric under analysis. In this rhetoric they are used as seemingly generic terms that however, most of the time—but not always—refer to male homosexuality and men. This political language reproduces the gender dynamics of nationalist and liberal-democratic discourses that have spawned it: discourses that suggest gender inclusiveness but never entirely live up to this promise.
Consociational democracy
The concept of ‘consociational democracy’ has been put forward by political scientists to account for the way political stability is attained in a country that seems an unlikely candidate for it. The constellation they have in mind is one in which the political landscape is made up of minorities unable to obtain an electoral or parliamentary majority. Political fragmentation of this kind forces parties to create coalitions in order to govern—a task that can be further complicated by the existence of ‘cross cutting cleavages’, as in the case of a working-class electorate that is divided within itself along religious lines (Lijphart, 1977).
The Netherlands is seen to have become such a country in the aftermath of the introduction of a liberal constitution in 1848. With the gradual extension of the suffrage, eventually leading to universal male suffrage in 1917 and universal female suffrage in 1919, the erstwhile dominance of the liberal party was gradually eroded by Catholic, orthodox Protestant and socialist parties, with none of them obtaining a majority in parliament. The creation of stable and enduring coalitions between these parties was made more difficult by the fact that increasingly they were embedded in larger integrated complexes of societal organizations and institutions, the so-called ‘pillars’ that organized most of Dutch society well into the 20th century. Initially religious formations, but emulated to varying degrees by socialists and liberals, the pillars galvanized subcultural differences by isolating their constituencies from one another and by creating a general feeling of hostility between them (Aerts et al., 1999; De Rooy, 2002).
Under these circumstances, political scientists have argued, stability was attained through the politics of consociational democracy. They have generally defined consociational democracy as a set of political values and practices that emerged in the face of seemingly insurmountable political fragmentation, and were aimed at creating political stability through a politics of accommodation, depoliticization, and secrecy, which enabled political elites to transcend the political and social heterogeneity that dominated elsewhere in society (Lijphart, 1975).
For these political scientists, the heart of the politics of accommodation consists of the development among the members of the political elite of a habitus that leads them to reach agreements when they can, and to judiciously avoid conflicts when agreement seems out of reach. This habitus is supposed to produce political behaviour aimed at reaching enduring compromises through an elaborate culture of negotiation and consensus-building. All of this is to prevent the emergence of both irreconcilable political conflict, and of resentful losers among potential future coalition partners (Andeweg and Irwin, 2005; Lijphart, 1975).1
This political culture is further thought to be characterized by the presence of a number of routines of depoliticization which help to avoid the emergence at the centre of political life of issues over which no compromises can be reached. One of these is the decentralization of policy-making to the pillars that are made up of, among other things, elaborate social welfare and educational institutions, trade unions and employers’ organizations. When political issues that cannot be resolved by these routines present themselves, various other strategies of depoliticization are employed to avoid having to deal with them. These strategies all revolve around the notion that not taking a decision is a more desirable option than long-term, irresolvable conflict. Decisions are then postponed, issues are reframed in technical rather than political terms, or committees are set up to discuss the contentious matter that has then been safely removed from the political agenda (Andeweg and Irwin, 2005; Lijphart, 1975).
Finally, the political culture of consociational democracy is seen to promote a certain degree of secrecy, which offers political leaders and government a great amount of autonomy to reach agreements without interference from parliament, political parties and voters. The ability of political elites to compensate for the heterogeneity at other levels of social life requires a degree of exclusion of society from politics.
Proponents of an interpretation of modern Dutch politics in terms of consociational democracy generally see it as a way to manage and simultaneously maintain the country’s political and religious pluralism. Critical scholars, on the other hand, have tended to understand consociational democracy and ‘pillarization’ as systems of control, specific ways to dominate and exert power, rather than systems for sharing it among the minorities that make up the country (Stuurman, 1983). The 20th-century history of homosexuality in the Netherlands provides a case in point. The late 19th and early 20th centuries brought about a considerable sharpening of morality legislation, including, in 1911, a partial criminalization of homosexuality. Brought in on the eve of the introduction of universal suffrage, this article of the criminal code was enforced most strictly during the 1950s—the heyday of consociational politics and pillarization. It was abolished in 1971 when the pillars had begun to crumble under the force of secularization and when increasing political polarization undermined the rules of consociational politics (Hekma, 2004; Koenders, 1996; Tijsseling, 2009; Van der Meer, 2007).
In the case of homosexuality, consociational democracy and pillarization did not function as the safeguards of pluralism. As a result of a widely felt moral disapproval of homosexuality, shared by many liberals and social-democrats, homosexuality was placed outside of the political field governed by the logics of consociational democracy and pillarization. With the gradual breakdown of this moral consensus from the mid-1960s onwards, the systems of consociational democracy and pillarization seemed to begin to open up to homosexuality as a minority phenomenon that possibly deserved its place in the precariously balanced system of minorities that constituted the nation. The granting of government subsidies for pillar-like gay-friendly mental health provisions and the access the gay and lesbian movement gained to some of the government’s consultative bodies in particular, have been interpreted as signs of this (Tielman, 1982). Such a view however, is contradicted by the fact that the crumbling of the previous moral consensus concerning homosexuality coincided with the disintegration of pillarization, and that the gay and lesbian movement won limited political influence during a time when growing political disagreement began to put pressure on the consociational system.
Multiculturalism contested
Consociational democracy and pillarization emerged simultaneously, in interaction, and formed deeply intertwined systems of political governance and social control. Because of their entwinement they are regularly treated as one system. ‘Pillarization’ is often used to refer to one system consisting of both a political culture and a set of societal organizations and institutions that manage and divide the nation’s divergent religious and political communities. Acknowledging their entwinement, I will nevertheless analytically differentiate between consociational democracy and pillarization, mainly in order to identify the different historical trajectories they followed from the mid-1960s onwards during which time the pillarized organization of Dutch society steadily declined. Although some of its institutional features proved to be resilient, the system increasingly lost its hold over the country’s population. De-pillarization manifested itself most clearly at the cultural level and in particular in the fast breakdown of the consensus on a restrictive (sexual) morality that had accompanied pillarization as a system of social control (Bracke, 2013; Kennedy, 1995; Van der Veer, 2006). Despite the gradual demise of pillarization Dutch democracy, however, remained consociational. Most political scientists argue that, apart from relatively brief periods of polarization in the early and mid-1970s, the rules of consociational democracy lived on into the 1990s (Koole and Daalder, 2002; Lijphart, 1989; Van Praag, 1993). It was then that they are believed once again to have come under attack, as did the remnants of pillarization, this time as part of a debate over multiculturalism that would deeply divide the country (Entzinger, 2003; Prins, 2004; Prins and Saharso, 2010; Sleegers, 2007). Regardless of the persistence of consociational politics as political practice, it dominated Dutch politics of the late 20th and early 21st centuries as a rhetorical frame in which politicians—well versed in the political science of consociational democracy—debated immigration, Islam and multiculturalism. In this debate over consociational democracy a vision of a post-multicultural political and social order for the Netherlands was articulated. Through a debate over the country’s political culture it became possible to imagine new political and social ways of dealing with cultural, and in particular religious, difference—new ways that were presented as the final break with contemporary and past consociational and pillarized habits.
Two texts published in leading national newspapers, respectively by the then leader of the liberal party Frits Bolkestein, and the social-democratic public intellectual Paul Scheffer, initiated and crucially shaped this debate. Both blamed the legacy of pillarization for immigrants’ failure to sufficiently integrate into Dutch society and argued that consociational political habits had stifled a much-needed debate on this problem.
As they saw it, pillarization had left behind an undesirable legacy in the way the country had dealt with mass immigration and the multicultural society it had produced. Looking upon immigrants as minorities who should be given rights similar to those that other groups (had) enjoyed under pillarization, Dutch immigration and integration policies, Bolkestein and Scheffer claimed, had mistakenly offered them the possibility of maintaining their ethnic identities in pillar-like constellations. They regarded these policies as a major cause of immigrants’ poor integration into Dutch society and their poor socio-economic position. They considered that the expectation that immigrants’ integration would come about as a repetition of Catholics’ and orthodox Protestants’ integration into the Dutch nation-state was unfounded and dangerous in view of growing evidence to the contrary.
Political scientists and sociologists have argued that Dutch immigration and integration policies were not shaped by the legacies of consociational politics and pillarization. By the time Bolkestein and Scheffer published their texts, government policies had already shifted from multiculturalism to cultural integration (Duyvendak and Scholten, 2009, 2010). Earlier policies had never been aimed at the establishment of an Islamic pillar that would mirror those of Dutch Catholics or Protestants. These policies had encouraged the preservation of immigrants’ identities based on the assumption that they would return to their countries of origin, and had given immigrants’ organizations minimal access to the government’s consultative bodies with the aim of obtaining control over immigrants’ groups rather than giving political influence to them (Rath et al., 1999; Vink, 2007). Nevertheless, assumptions about the persistence of pillarized and consociational habits shaped the debate over multiculturalism initiated by Bolkestein and Scheffer.
Aiming to set limits to what he saw as the unbridled multiculturalism that resulted from Dutch immigration and integration policies, Bolkestein relied on ‘fundamental political principles’, such as the separation of state and church, freedom of expression, tolerance and non-discrimination. Emphatically claimed as universally valid, they were also presented as proof of a society’s advanced level of civilization. Scheffer too stressed the importance of the separation of church and state, but concentrated in particular on a renewed awareness of the importance of the Dutch language, culture and history in setting boundaries to multiculturalism. Consociational democracy, he argued, had worked not merely because of its practices of political accommodation, but also because the various minorities and their pillars were united by a shared language, culture and history that helped contain centrifugal forces.
Suggesting that issues of immigration, integration and multiculturalism had been subjected to a politically imposed taboo that prevented their being discussed, Bolkestein and Scheffer posed as fearless critics of a stifling consensus produced by consociational habits. Both were widely applauded for what was perceived as a ‘new realism’ (Prins, 2004)—a willingness to face unpleasant truths that a political habitus of avoiding outright and potentially irresolvable conflict had managed to hide from view.
Homosexuality was not a pivotal element in either text. In his discussion of the ways that the Islamic world failed to live up to the ‘fundamental political principles’ of separation of church and state, Bolkestein briefly mentioned the persecution of homosexuals (in Gaza) as one example amidst various others of Islam’s poor record on tolerance and non-discrimination. Scheffer referred to equal rights for men and women in his discussion of the need to protect liberal values against multicultural relativism, but did not refer to homosexuality—something that was soon to become commonplace in arguments like these.
A text that delivered a scathing criticism of consociational democracy and made homosexuality central to its argument was Pim Fortuyn’s (1997) pamphlet Against the Islamization of Our Culture: Dutch Identity as Foundation. In this text he expounded the ideas that became the basis of his leadership of the anti-Islam and anti-immigration populist movement that would increasingly threaten the position of established political parties and the political culture in which they operated. Identifying moral relativism as the major problem of Dutch society and politics, Fortuyn set out to articulate a set of binding, non-negotiable moral norms that were to establish the limits to multiculturalism and protect the Dutch nation against the threat of Islam which, he argued, had no doubts whatsoever about its moral beliefs.
In Fortuyn’s view, responsibility for the debilitating political moral relativism of Dutch society lay with its consociational political culture. The political elite’s focus on negotiation and compromise had rendered relative all political differences and made irrelevant the question of who governed. Since political decisions resulted from secret negotiations between the members of the political elite, parliament had been made powerless and parliamentary debate had become futile. Depoliticized, technologically oriented and weary of ideology, political elites were interested merely in what was politically feasible and had abandoned the question of what was politically good and desirable (Fortuyn, 1997: 19-31). Fortuyn’s analysis concentrated on the 1980s and 1990s, the period that saw the leading Dutch political parties lower their ideological profile in favour of what was perceived as the non-ideology of neo-liberalism. To Fortuyn, this constituted the latest chapter in a consociational drama leading up to general moral relativism. He presented Dutch politics of the late 20th century as a consociational dystopia that smothered what was most needed—a debate about which set of substantial, non-negotiable moral principles the nation should endorse and around which they could unite.
Fortuyn’s bid to articulate a set of substantial moral values for the Dutch nation started off from the separation of state and church. In a rather grandiose gesture, he appropriated this principle by according Dutch history of the 16th century a pivotal place in the world history of the emergence of this notion (Fortuyn, 1997: 49-57). Secularism, he argued, had enabled the achievements of the women’s and gay and lesbian movements that constituted the heart of Fortuyn’s moral framework. Characterized as the greatest mental and cultural achievements of western civilization since the creation of the welfare state, these advances in women’s and gay and lesbian rights were situated in an equally grandiose temporal scheme. In the future, Fortuyn maintained, traditional men were to be replaced as leaders by women and by men capable of developing feminine characteristic and skills (1997: 58-57).
It is important to stress the centrality of homosexuality to Fortuyns’ criticism of consociational democracy and his vision of a post-consociational future. The moral shallowness of consociational politics was made visible by the contrast with the moral depth Fortuyn accorded the achievement of equal rights for homosexuals. The moral barrenness of consociational politics was exposed by comparison with the riches of a history that had produced equality for gays and lesbians as a binding moral norm. This norm could not be subjected to negotiation; it was to be defended by all means, and it constituted the boundary between what was acceptable and what was absolutely not acceptable. In consociational democracy, Fortuyn claimed, such boundaries had evaporated in unlimited processes of negotiation, accommodation and consensus-building; in his new morality for the nation, gay and lesbian rights were emphatically positioned outside the realm of the negotiable. They became central to the foundations of the proposed morality itself, rather than a separate issue to which it was applied.
Despite its hyperbolic rhetoric and the sketchy nature of its historical claims, Fortuyn’s text succeeded where Bolkestein and Scheffer, in a sense, failed. They were very influential in initiating the debate on multiculturalism and in setting the terms in which it was to be waged. However, with their attempts to find limits to multiculturalism in universal political principles and national identity, they risked initiating a seemingly endless debate on the question of just how universal such principles are and what exactly this identity entails, and did not establish clear-cut boundaries to multicultural politics. Fortuyn’s presentation of equal rights for gays and lesbians as the heart of a non-negotiable set of moral norms for the nation turned out to be capable of doing just that.
In the course of the debates over multiculturalism and Islam, homosexuality acquired an ever more prominent position. Its rhetorical presence grew as Fortuyn rose to political stardom and Dutch political life became highly polarized after 9/11 and the murder of Fortuyn in 2002. Homosexuality became central to the debate and pivotal to the articulation of a view of Dutch and Muslim cultures as irreconcilable. Also, when this non-negotiable moral boundary of the acceptance of homosexuality was invoked in criticisms of multiculturalism and Islam, a criticism of consociational democracy and its inability to draw such boundaries was never far away. The moral norm of the acceptance of homosexuality became intricately entwined with a criticism of consociational democracy. What emerged then was a debate that consisted of a series of ‘episodes’ in a continuous, similarly structured narrative on homosexuality, Islam and consociational democracy. In these recurrent episodes Dutch media reported on a Muslim speaking or writing negatively about homosexuality and these reports were followed by an outcry of public indignation, which was followed by the political translation of this public outcry into terms stressing the need to abandon the consociational habits of the past in favour of strict, non-negotiable moral positions.
Non-negotiable homosexuality
One such episode began on 3 May 2001. Following reports of anti-gay violence by Muslim immigrants in the city of Rotterdam, the current affairs programme of one of the country’s public broadcasting companies presented a feature on Muslims and homosexuality in the Netherlands. The statements made in this programme by Imam Khalil el Moumni of the Rotterdam An-Nasr mosque soon provoked nationwide indignation. El Moumni labelled homosexuality a contagious disease that, if it were to spread, would endanger the existence of Dutch society. Various media presented confirmations of El Moumni’s views by other imams and Muslims. Unanimous condemnation by leading politicians quickly followed, as did apologies on the part of El Moumni, combined however, with the assertion that he had not changed his views, but nevertheless was firmly opposed to violence against gays.
Social Democrat Prime Minister Wim Kok seemed to echo both Fortuyn’s call to take up non-negotiable moral positions and his equation of the protection of gay and lesbian rights with such a position, when he declared that the imam had ‘exceeded the limit’, and that his views on homosexuality were ‘not acceptable’ in Dutch society. He announced a meeting of the Minister of Urban Affairs and Integration with the imam where the latter would be told ‘which norms and values’ obtained in the Netherlands. If this meeting were not to lead to a ‘good result’, this would be ‘a serious problem’.
Others presented similar views and were quite explicit about the fact that the imam’s ideas necessitated a break with the consociational and pillarized past. Paul Scheffer applauded the Prime Minister for his intervention. He welcomed it as a much-needed end to a politics of tolerance and accommodation that had degenerated into a state of moral relativism. Without a firm and explicit position on one’s own ideas and those of others, he argued, the habits of consociational democracy undermined meaningful toleration.
For professor of philosophy and public intellectual Paul Cliteur the affair served as a prime example of the conflict between a fundamentalist, unbending Islam and a morally powerless state whose policies of integration were guided by a naïve moral relativism. In the face of an Islam that had largely proved to be incapable of modernization, Europe could no longer afford to be doubtful about the foundations and guiding principles of its culture. Reflection on these would reveal, Cliteur argued, that they were to be found in an ‘oecumenic humanism’ that centred on a secular morality. Secularism was to be endorsed and actively promoted by the state. Rather than fund religious organizations, as under pillarization, the state ought to sharply separate state and church and promote secularism, for instance through state funded education.
That the statements of Imam El Moumni on homosexuality had produced a powerful attack on consociational and pillarized ways of dealing with religious differences was not lost on the political representatives of the country’s minority of orthodox Protestants. To Bas van der Vlies, member of parliament for a small orthodox Protestant party, the response to El Moumni’s words indicated the emergence of a new humanist-liberal ‘state religion’ that was unwilling to tolerate divergent views on issues such as homosexuality. This he labelled ‘the intolerance of the tolerant’. What Van der Vlies seemed to regret was the disappearance of the manners of consociational and pillarized times, of the habits of mutual accommodation that had prevented the emergence of claims to a binding public morality on contested issues.
The links between homosexuality, non-negotiable moral positions and post-consociational politics were further cemented in another episode in the debate. This episode began on 21 April 2004, when a reporter for a national newspaper wrote about books sold at an orthodox Amsterdam mosque. One of these was a recent Dutch translation of a 1964 book by the Algerian born Wahhabi Saudi scholar of Islamic law, Abu Bakr Jaber Al- Jaza’ri. The book, The Way of the Muslim, was an exposition of Islamic moral duties in a highly conservative vein, which is very popular among European ‘neofundamentalist’ Muslims (Roy, 2004: 241). In his article, the reporter concentrated in particular on prescriptions concerning jihad, resistance to non-Muslim authorities and marriage and sexuality. He quoted parts of the texts that justified the beating of wives and listed the various grounds on which husbands may divorce them. Also, he referred to punishments for non-marital sex (100 lashes of the whip) and adultery (death), and wrote about the punishments for homosexuality—death by burning, stoning, or throwing the perpetrators down from a high building, head first. In the public uproar that followed this publication, the book was identified with these statements on homosexuality, and in particular with the last punishment mentioned. It became ‘the book in which Muslims are called upon to kill homosexuals’, the book that told Muslims ‘to throw homosexuals down from a high-rise apartment building’.
In this case too, the statements by leading politicians suggested that a line had been crossed and that this line needed to be drawn once and for all. Christian Democrat Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende called the texts from the book ‘absolutely reprehensible and disgusting’ and ‘not permissible’. Members of parliament issued statements in similar terms, among them a Christian Democrat member of parliament who stated that ‘a limit has been reached’. Almost immediately the widely expressed indignation fuelled a debate over the question of how views like those expressed in The Way of the Muslim could be denied a presence in the public domain. A shared conviction seemed to emerge that the freedom of religion did not cover the statements made in the book and that the state needed to intervene.
Members of parliament suggested various steps the state might take to keep such reprehensible ideas out of the public domain. They proposed closing down the mosque, legal action against its board or expulsion of its imam. A government minister suggested banning the book altogether. In response to these proposals, the Prime Minister announced that the public prosecutor was considering whether legal action was possible against the distribution of books like The Way of the Muslim. If that turned out not to be the case, the law would have to be amended so as to make it possible.
The constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion was likely to make legal action impossible. It had done so eventually in the case of Imam El Moumni, and of an orthodox Protestant politician before him who had been accused of comparing homosexuals to thieves. Article 6 of the Dutch Constitution grants freedom of religion, within the limits of the law. Since the statements about the punishment of homosexuality in The Way of the Muslim could possibly be construed as incitement to violence or an attempt to stir up hatred, there was a chance that they would be considered as being against the law. Jurisprudence however, showed that this chance was quite small. Article 6 of the Constitution, and the jurisprudence it had resulted in, was a near untouchable product of consociational-pillarized politics. It had become the constitutional foundation of the equal right granted to all religious groups to extensive expression of their beliefs in an equally extensive public sphere. Its power had been reaffirmed during earlier skirmishes linked to multiculturalism and Islam. Conflicts over the wearing of headscarves by Muslim women and girls in public places for instance, had almost always ended in favour of these women and girls who successfully had appealed to the right of freedom of religion (Saharso, 2007; Verhaar and Saharso, 2004).
Nevertheless, Prime Minister Balkenende’s words de facto amounted to a proposal to curb the scope of article 6 by sharpening the laws that could potentially set limits to it. This was a remarkable thing to do for a Christian Democrat representing the groups that had historically gained most from this article of the Constitution and its function in a pillarized society. The fact that he made these proposals in relation to a book that had led to public outcry because of what it had to say about homosexuality made it all the more remarkable.
The Prime Minister’s willingness to set limits to a constitutional freedom that was constitutive for pillarization and consociational democracy was shared by the leader of the Christian Democrats in parliament, Maxime Verhagen. In the course of the debates on The Way of the Muslim, Verhagen too entered a plea for non-negotiable moral positions that centred around homosexuality. He did so in a call to rethink democracy in order to make it able to withstand attacks from its enemies. Verhagen pointed to democracy’s vulnerability to groups that abuse democratic rights and freedoms and claimed that countering this vulnerability required a restriction of these groups’ rights. Claiming to be inspired by German laws that empower the Constitutional Court to deprive anti-democratic groups of constitutional rights, Verhagen proposed to bring ‘sedition against the democratic constitutional state’ under criminal law.
What Verhagen called ‘assertive democracy’ turned out to be directed against the jurisprudence that had emerged around article 6 of the Constitution. He explicitly mentioned El Moumni’s acquittal as a demonstration of the lack of assertiveness of Dutch democracy. The acquittal, he argued, illustrated the need to change criminal law in order to make democracy more assertive. Under the law on sedition against democracy which he proposed, boards of mosques or imams that called for the killing of homosexuals, he claimed, would be liable to punishment. By April 2004 the issue of homosexuality in a multicultural society had become the introduction to arguments for rethinking the nature of Dutch democracy. It led to proposals from all corners of the political spectrum to change political habits, laws and even articles of the Constitution that had been central to the establishment of a consociational and pillarized political system.
The more tangible legal results of these calls to abandon consociational habits in the name of the rights of homosexuals were mixed. Imam El Moumni was acquitted. A year after the first publications on The Way of the Muslim appeared, the office of the Amsterdam public prosecutor decided that it would not start legal action against the mosque that had sold the book (Openbaar Ministerie, 2005). In both cases judicial authorities considered the controversial utterances and passages to be covered by the constitutionally granted right to the expression of religious convictions. The legal legacy of the consociational and pillarized past proved too strong to overcome in these two cases. In the longer run, however, other religious privileges that were the product of the same legacy have been abolished in favour of gay and lesbian rights. The political rhetoric in which the non-negotiable nature of acceptance and equal treatment of homosexuality was linked to a critique of consociational politics was taken up, not just by the leaders of the Dutch populist revolt, such as Rita Verdonk and Geert Wilders (Hekma and Duyvendak, 2011; Vossen, 2010, 2011) who followed in Fortuyn’s footsteps. It pervaded the political rhetoric and practice of a wider group of politicians and parties, making it possible, in some cases, to have gay and lesbian rights prevail over earlier consociational agreements. In 2011 the Dutch parliament decided all registrars were obliged to marry same-sex couples and that conscientious objections were no longer legitimate grounds to refuse to do this. With this decision the parliament made it clear that the equal right to marriage was not an object over which negotiations between the state and (members of) religious groups could be permitted. In the same year the Minister of Education was forced by parliament to include education on sexual diversity in the national curriculum, which is set by the state and which all schools are obliged to teach. In this case, too, the state limited the space religious groups had previously been granted as part of consociational agreements between state and pillars.
The third episode in the narrative on homosexuality, Islam and consociational democracy that I want to discuss began in March 2009. The controversy that had haunted Islam scholar Tariq Ramadan internationally for some time reached the Netherlands. Ramadan, who held a Chair in Identity and Citizenship at the Rotterdam Erasmus University and worked as ‘integration adviser’ for the city of Rotterdam, was accused by the gay magazine Gay Krant of being ‘double faced’ and of speaking with two tongues. Drawing on Frère Tariq: Discours, Stratégie et Méthode de Tariq Ramadan by French journalist Caroline Fourest (2004), the magazine argued that behind the face of respect, co-existence and mutual accommodation that Ramadan presented to his western audiences lurked an unreformed Muslim whose views on homosexuality in particular were dangerous. A similar position had earlier been taken up by Frits Bolkestein in a public debate with Ramadan that had triggered the publication by the magazine.
The media debate that followed demonstrated the extent to which linking homosexuality, the need to take up non-negotiable moral positions, and a criticism of consociational political mores had become a routine rhetorical operation. A columnist for a national newspaper wrote that Ramadan’s views ‘turned back time to the dark ages of the Great Denial before Frits Bolkestein’s wake-up call of the 1990s that at last got the debate on integration started’. Others echoed Bolkestein and Fortuyn in a call to ‘defend the cultural foundations of the democratic constitutional state’ and claimed that in order to protect democracy one needed the courage to ‘recognize, identify and fight the enemy’. Here the politics of mutual accommodation had definitely been replaced by those of non-negotiable positions.
Also interesting is another aspect of the language in which the accusations against Ramadan were couched. These were articulated by using the trope of ‘coming out’. Criticized for being duplicitous, Ramadan was urged ‘to come out of the closet’. His alleged duplicity was described as ‘Jeckyl [sic] and Hyde behaviour’. This language transferred to the Muslim the moral duplicity formerly associated with the homosexual who hid behind a mask of normalcy in 20th-century political discourse, linking them to treason, espionage and the existence of potentially subversive states-within-the-state (Cuordileone, 2005; Giles, 2001; Healey, 2001; Johnson, 2004; Micheler, 2005). In the Dutch debate over Ramadan’s trustworthiness, the Muslim came to occupy this position and open homosexuality became imbued with moral steadfastness. This attribution of moral integrity to homosexuality, obtained through the ritual of coming out, is the key to understanding why homosexuality features so prominently in the Dutch debates on multiculturalism and Islam.
The morality of coming out
In particular one element of the criticism of consociational democracy, as it emerged in the debates over multiculturalism and Islam, has stuck—that of moral relativism. Politicians might have notions of what is morally good and desirable but critics argue that the politics of accommodation force them to compromise on these in the negotiations required by political culture. That these negotiations take place in the backrooms of political life, out of sight of the media and the public, makes them even more reprehensible. Since it has acquired connotations of moral steadfastness and moral transparency, homosexuality can serve as the centrepiece of such criticisms of consociational democracy.
Two intertwined hegemonic narratives about homosexuality sustain the attribution of specific moral qualities to it. First, since its late-19th-century biomedical construction as an individual identity that is as unchanging as it is fundamental, homosexuality appears as a privileged marker of truth, a truth to be arrived at through a more or less painful journey of self-discovery. Second, this story about truth acquires moral salience when combined with the narrative of coming out, the disclosure of this truth to the world in an act of transparency with beneficial consequences for both the individual concerned and the society in which she or he lives (Plummer, 1995: 49-61, 81-96).
Pim Fortuyn had supported his claim that advances in women’s and gay and lesbian rights formed the non-negotiable moral foundation for a post-multicultural and post-consociational society with a wider historical and an autobiographical account. In the latter he described his time as a student in Amsterdam in the late 1960s and his involvement in the student movement. Becoming aware of being gay in his early 20s, he found that the student movement was an environment with little or no interest in homosexuality. Fortuyn gradually discovered the cruising spots and gay nightlife of Amsterdam and began to find his way in the gay subculture. For some time he lived in two separate, unconnected worlds. In 1972, at the age of 24, starting a new job in a new town as an assistant professor of sociology, he decided to no longer live a double life. In an interview with the university newspaper he discussed his sociological views and also disclosed his homosexuality. He dreaded taking this step, but it was met with a quite positive response. It resulted in the two worlds being integrated to a certain degree, and an altogether more pleasant life (Fortuyn, 1997: 63-66).
In the context of Fortuyn’s criticism of Dutch democracy this account of a young man’s discovery of his sexual identity, of his double life and subsequent coming out became a parable about the moral shortcomings of consociational democracy and a rhetorical declaration of his unwillingness to play the consociational political game. Fortuyn criticized the latter’s moral emptiness and linked this to its focus on negotiation, compromise and the politically feasible. He criticized its secrecy, and accused it of avoiding public debate on the nation’s moral values. In his autobiographical account he emerged, by contrast, as unwilling to compromise on crucial matters and willing to end secrecy by disclosing an unchangeable truth, no matter how difficult this might be. Consociational politics required politicians to live in two worlds: one where they held moral convictions and another where they were forced to abandon these because of the compromises the political system demanded of them. In his autobiographical morality tale Fortuyn rhetorically fashioned himself as refusing to live in two worlds and choosing unflinching adherence to what was important to him. In their desire to avoid irresolvable conflict, consociational politicians avoided discussing controversial issues, creating even greater problems as a result. Fortuyn depicted himself as having faced a difficult fact and openly addressed it, thereby resolving a problem instead of making it worse. Fortuyn’s was a tale of superior political morality exemplified by open homosexuality. Eventually it was condensed into his election slogan that served to highlight his moral superiority to consociational politicians: ‘I say what I think, and I do what I say’. The deeply held political convictions referred to in this slogan resonated with the equally deeply felt sexual desires described in Fortuyn’s sexual autobiography. In a similar way his willingness to stand up for and act upon these political convictions resonated with a refusal to deny or hide sexual desires crucial to one’s identity. The result was a rhetorically powerful criticism of consociational secrecy and political and moral relativism.
As a gay man Fortuyn had direct access to this novel rhetorical manoeuvre. Others could obtain these rhetorical benefits only indirectly—through the emphatic expressions, discussed earlier, of support for the equal treatment of gay and lesbians as a non-negotiable moral position. Some mimicked Fortuyn in a more performative manner. During the 2009 Amsterdam Gay Pride event, the government was present with its own boat during the boat parade through the city’s canals. Aboard, among other politicians and officials, were Social Democrat Education Minister Ronald Plasterk and his wife. In a gesture he would repeat again and again Plasterk showed off the rainbow coloured lining of his jacket to a delighted crowd. The Education Minister, who in the previous year had introduced a national Coming Out Day, seemed to be coming out here himself. The identity he revealed to the world, however, was not that of a gay man; he presented himself as a trustworthy, post-consociational politician who held to non-negotiable moral positions.
Conclusion
Consociational democracy has been described as resting on the principle that ‘clear-cut, zero-sum game, yes/no decisions are to be avoided at all cost’ (Andeweg and Irwin, 2005: 30). Central to the debate about consociational democracy’s part in the presumed failure of multiculturalism in the Netherlands is a category that in western modernity has increasingly come to serve as a paradigmatic instance of a yes/no issue. Homosexuality, understood as a given, unchanging truth about sexual identity, became pivotal to both the critique of consociational democracy and the articulation of a political vision of a post-multicultural order. A metonym for moral steadfastness and transparency, homosexuality in Dutch debates over multiculturalism and Islam provided a crucial ingredient for the making of a consensus on the failure of multiculturalism and the need to abandon the habits of consociational democracy.
As a metonym for moral steadfastness and transparency homosexuality became a key component of a critique of consociational mores of mutual accommodation, which, critics of multiculturalism argued, had led the Dutch to compromise on crucial moral values they should have defended against Muslim immigrants. In a similar way homosexuality’s metonymical meanings could be used to criticize consociational practices of depoliticization, which were said to have resulted in a denial of the existence of unbridgeable political differences between the Dutch and immigrant communities. Finally, the transparency associated with homosexuality made it possible to deploy homosexuality in the criticism of consociational secrecy, which its critics claimed had denied the Dutch people a voice in political debate and decision-making concerning immigration and multiculturalism.
In this way homosexuality helped produce a shift in the discourse on the nature of the Dutch political community and its culture. A notion of a political community that reached consensus through mutual accommodation and the judicious avoidance of issues over which no agreement could be reached partly gave way to an emphasis on a shared and unbending adherence to non-negotiable moral and political values, which, if necessary would be imposed on those who did not share them. This shift helped shape the articulation of a post-multicultural politics, which rested on the assumption that Dutch and migrant, in particular Islamic, cultures could not go together.
In terms of poststructuralist discourse analysis homosexuality became a ‘nodal point’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 112-113; Zizek, 1989: 95-97). It emerged as the signifier that reconstituted the identity of a set of ‘floating signifiers’ that had lost their traditional meanings. ‘Dutchness’ and ‘democracy’ in particular, were resignified in relation to the nodal point ‘homosexuality’ as a result of which they appeared as increasingly irreconcilable with respectively Islam and multiculturalism.