Civic Integration in the Netherlands

Abstract

It was in the home of tolerance and multiculturalism, the Netherlands, that new European forms of testing for citizenship first came into prominence. The Dutch case has received a great deal of attention, both scholarly and popular. As one commentator puts it: Dutch integration policy has been well documented and one can safely say that, for a medium-sized country, the Netherlands is one of the most over-studied cases in the international migration literature. (Vink, 2007, 337) This chapter is not yet another study in the field. Rather, it places the Dutch case in context. The Netherlands were so widely regarded as leaders in the field of tests for civic integration that when Australia was considering introducing a test for citizenship in 2006, the Government dispatched Immigration officials to the Hague.1 The Dutch case is particularly informative since the Netherlands were regarded as the European bastion of toleration and multiculturalism through the second half of the twentieth century. The seismic shift became most evident in the years post-9/11. Following the murder of the film maker Theo van Gogh in 2004, there was a rise of suspicion of Islamic minorities in the Netherlands, the murder sending shockwaves through Dutch society.