The Caged Virgin - Ayaan Hirsi Ali [34]
Multiculturalism has been the biggest influence on Dutch integration policies since the realization, around 1979, that the guest workers who had flowed in from other countries to perform service jobs were going to stay for good. Multiculturalism is so influential partly due to the nation’s history of having learned to live with many minorities in a peaceful way. This coexistence was based on the principle of “emancipation through the conservation of identity,” of the integration of different peoples as they preserved their own ethnic, cultural identities. Multiculturalism is also influential because of the guilt that the Dutch feel over their colonial history and over the racism against and genocide of the Jews during World War II.
The problem with this multicultural view is that it denies that cultural and religious standards can have negative effects and retard the integration and emancipation of peoples, particularly Muslims. Thus, the multiculturalists welcome the emergence of a Muslim section of society because they are under the illusion that it will help encourage Muslim economic emancipation as it did with the Roman Catholic sectors years ago. The Catholics in a largely Protestant Dutch country were for some years poorer, with large families and low-paying jobs, like Muslims today. But they organized themselves around the Catholic Church and improved their financial and economic lives until they became quite integrated.
The multiculturalists say, “If it worked for the Catholics, why shouldn’t it work for the Muslims?” But this is a dangerous misconception about the vast majority of Muslims and will merely encourage their separate, inward focus on their own isolated culture. What the multiculturalists forget is that the Catholics shared with the other Christian/Protestant sects the same language, the same national identity, a common history, and basically the same ethnicity. And they were both Christian, although they might disagree on how to express their religion. The Muslims in Europe have myriad different languages and ethnicities that further separate them from their new country. The socioeconomic background of these many peoples is also quite varied and starkly different from the European background. Because multiculturalists will not classify cultural phenomena as “better” or “worse” but only neutral or disparate, they actually encourage segregation and unintentionally perpetuate, for instance, the unsatisfactory position of Muslim women. State subsidies for nonstate schools allow Muslims to have their own schools, including separate boarding schools for boys and girls, in which young girls are indoctrinated to expect a future as mothers and housewives in accordance with very conservative Islamic practices.
THE SOCIOCULTURAL APPROACH
The economist Arie van der Zwan recently concluded that the lack of progress in integration cannot be explained by objective socioeconomic factors alone. Sociocultural factors are equally important and combine with very real socioeconomic disadvantages to cause the integration problem. He draws distinctions, for example, between the various groups of non-Western immigrants. On the one hand, there are the people from Surinam and the Antilles, and on the other the Moroccans and Turks. Referring to the study by the Netherlands Scientific