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Governmental attempts to reinvigorate Dutchness and their self-
defeating effects
Rogier van Reekum
Research project: The culturalization of citizenship in public debates on
Dutchness
Two questions on solidarity
• Which psychological force: love of self or love of us?
• Which collective: only us or also them?
Dynamics of public discourse
What does discourse do?
1. Culturalist-psychological answer: meanings determine actions, people are caught in culture (except for the analyst)
1. Sociological-pragmatist answer: meanings are actions, people are trying to deal with problems (just like the analyst)
Nationalism and Solidarity
A problem of industrial modernity: who is included in collective re-arrangements
of risks and benefits?
Nationalism has been a very successful way to treat people as equals*: national / citizen
- impersonal ties between nationals- each national is one individual- one belongs to a nation immediately- categorical belonging, not relational
* thereby at once justifying the unequal treatment of people, making discrimination just.
In other words:
nationalism has been an important answer to the question “whose equality?” by making the immediate belonging of each individual member self-evident: “the Dutch”.*
nationalism’s power lies in its self-evidence: justifications are no longer needed.
* it also makes the other’s inequality incontestable.
Two preliminary conclusions:
1. Self-interest?:
nationalism enables people to deal with each other as individuals, equal exemplars of the national essence.
2. Also them?:
identity is a temporary condensation of justificatory dissensus, rights become natural.
1980-2002: return of public dissensus
• debates articulate the outside: immigrant, minority, allochthones, Muslim, not-yet-integrated
• on the inside Dutchness itself remains indefinable: open, modern, progressive, liberal, free, pragmatic
2002 - 2010: governmental reactions
• vagueness is taken as a problem
• governmental measures to impose Dutchness
Three performative effects
1. marking difference: only not-yet-Dutch need to be imposed upon
1. marking dissensus: Dutchness can/cannot be imposed
1. culturalized citizenship and dissensual nationhood
Nationalism and Solidarity
• Not: excluded from nation; migrants were never included
• But: denaturalized nation; collective equality loses self-evidence
Cul-de-sac: public dissensus over Dutchness impedes the articulation of 21ste century commons
Thank You
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