 | An unexpected take in the International Herald Tribune subsidiary of the New York Times. |
Geert Wilders, the Netherlands' notorious right-wing extremist who is currently standing trial in an Amsterdam court accused of inciting racial hatred
| Trial currently stopped due to a ruling of judicial misbehaviour -- or perhaps malfeasance, I'm not sure of the technical term which means the judges blew it. It remains to be seen whether there will be a new trial, or if they're going to throw their hands up and go home for a nice ginever with the spouse or significant other. |
| By their definition, just about everyone at the Burg is a 'notorious right-wing extremist'. I'm comfortably certain that's not an error in the definition ... |
-- has emerged as the main power broker in an unsteady coalition that has finally been put together, after months of negotiations, between the Christian Democrat and Liberal-Conservative parties. Wilders' party, the Freedom Party, will provide parliamentary support for the coalition.
| A pretty conventional screed, thus far... |
Wilders is also is the subject of a best-selling new book by the Dutch academic Meindert Fennema, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice."
| Interesting that it's a best seller. Even more interesting to see how influential it is, following the trial cock-up. |
As Fennema puts it, the Netherlands will very soon have two foreign ministers: an official one, sitting in the cabinet and following the establishment line of Euro-Atlantic moderation; and an unofficial one, Wilders, who says that there can be no moderate Islam and that any belief to the contrary will likely imperil Western civilization.
| Although Wilders is careful to note there are plenty of moderate Muslims, and he has no beef with them. It's not quite, "Hate the sin, love the sinner," but the man did start out as a Social Democrat, after all. |
But Wilders is not solely a Dutch phenomenon. His words chime with a wider set of concerns that pervade contemporary European politics: the problem of integrating Europe's large minority of Muslim citizens, the fears of workers who see their wages undercut by inflows of cheap labor, and concern that Western values are giving way to self-loathing and ethical relativism.
Fennema has laid out his analysis of the situation in the Netherlands. The great mistake of the Dutch political class, he says, has been to declare Wilders an Islamophobic racist and to dismiss his views as abhorrent and outside the confines of acceptable political discourse. In attempting to silence Wilders, first politically and now through the courts, the Dutch liberal elite has evaded the thorny question of how to respond to these concerns.
Fennema portrays Wilders as really no more than a republican with a bee in his bonnet about Islam.
| There's the new insight we've been waiting for. The question becomes how many of the book's many readers will be persuaded, and how that will change the national -- and international -- conversation. Also, what a Dutch academic means by the term republican, compared to what we in America believe it to mean. |
He thinks liberal leftists are terrified of him because, in the name of multiculturalism, they have repudiated their own sense of national identity.
| Isn't that part of the requirement for being a multi-culturalist? Almost by definition, a multi-culti favors a world view rather than a national one and sees him/herself as a 'citizen of the world', to borrow a phrase. |
| I used to be a citizen of the world. But then I outgrew it. |
As Fennema put it, they have no answer to Rousseau's famous criticism of those "supposed cosmopolitans" who "boast of loving everyone so that they might have the right to love no one."
In an interview for this article, Fennema argued that what we are seeing today is no less than the collapse of social democracy as it was established in the Netherlands after the World War II. In Fennema's analysis, the answer to the Wilders riddle lies in the collapse of the corporatist bargain. The old business establishment no longer holds the reins of a de-industrialized neoliberal economy. Power now lies in services and in finance rather than in old-fashioned manufacturing.
Those now in control of the economy, a younger generation of newly rich entrepreneurs and financiers, no longer respect the social pact of past decades and chafe at the values so cherished by the 1968 New Left.
| Mr. Fennema is an interesting character in his own right. After the excitements of the Sixty-eighters, he left the elitist New Left for the more down-to-earth Communist Party, as he saw them. Then in the 1980s he had an epiphany, publicly recanting his left-wing past. |
Chris J. Bickerton is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam. |