Within two years, Hirsi Ali had risen to become a member of the Dutch parliament and a fixture on television, as Amsterdam, and the world, debated the issues of immigration and Islam. She highlighted outrageous features of Dutch multiculturalism, such as the fact that while well-intentioned liberal Dutch observers criticized African countries for allowing female circumcision, the same barbaric practice was being conducted in immigrant communities in Dutch cities. As she drew ire—from Dutch liberals and from some Muslims—she was emboldened, becoming a critic of Islam as a religion and way of life and of the West for not standing up to what she said were threats to liberal culture inherent in Islam.
Hirsi Ali found an unlikely ally in Theo van Gogh, great-grandson of the brother of Vincent van Gogh, a filmmaker and artist whose mission, like Robert Jasper Grootveld’s, was to provoke the establishment (but with the distinction that Van Gogh declared that chain-smoking was healthy). Van Gogh wanted to attack multiculturalism. He and Hirsi Ali collaborated on a ten-minute film, Submission: Part 1. It shows a young Muslim woman in the act of prayer. She is dressed head to toe in traditional costume, except that the middle of her body is exposed and covered with verses from the Quran. As she prays, we hear a series of stories told by different women who have suffered rape and other forms of outrage from men and yet, under Islamic law, must remain submissive.
The film was meant to be provocative, but when it aired on Dutch television it didn’t get much immediate attention. Then on November 2, 2004, Van Gogh was shot to death as he was bicycling down the street near his home just off the Oosterpark. After firing eight bullets into him, Mohammed Bouyeri, a twenty-six-year-old Dutch Moroccan who had grown up in Amsterdam, slashed Van Gogh’s throat, then stuck a five-page letter to his chest with the knife. It was a death threat directed at Hirsi Ali and an Islamist rant directed at the relativist, godless West.
Hirsi Ali went into hiding and became an international sensation. 60 Minutes profiled her; Time named her one of the hundred most influential people in the world. Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens lionized her as a champion of the Enlightenment arisen from the darkest regions of Islamist Africa. In the Netherlands, where she didn’t shrink from the attention but used it to further her strident attacks on Islam, she became too controversial to be endured. In 2006, Rita Verdonk, then the minister for integration, revoked her passport, on the grounds that she had lied about her refugee status when she sought admission to the country. She was no longer a Dutch citizen. The furor over her actually brought down the Dutch government. Meanwhile, Hirsi Ali accepted an offer to become a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and promptly stepped away from the aftermath of the explosion she had touched off.
Not long after, I had lunch with Hirsi Ali in New York, in order to interview her for a magazine article. She was every bit the poised, arresting fashionista she had been made out to be. And she was in a sense a near-perfect advocate for Amsterdam and its liberal tradition. You could feel the strength of the grasp that her outsider’s perspective gave her on the worth and meaning of the liberal tradition. She insisted that the commitment to reason and individual freedom that Amsterdam had fostered is more vital than ever as a weapon against religious superstition. “The West was saved by the fact that it succeeded in separating faith and reason,” she told me. “The only way to stand up to radical Islam is to revive the message of the Enlightenment, to make Europeans and Americans remember that their modern society didn’t just fall out of the sky. There is a long history of struggle that led to this complex functioning society. And religion, including Christianity, has most of the time hindered that.”
I found myself agreeing with her in large part. Religious absolutism has been a huge force for ill. I agreed that the separation of church and state is fundamentally important. I think we all need as many Voltaires—and Spinozas—as we can get. But Hirsi Ali’s attack on Islam itself, and on all who practice it, was too much for me. And it was too much for the little world of Dutch politics through which she rose to fame. She seemed to long for a culture clash, on a biblical scale, as it were.
Amsterdam, meanwhile, reeled from the Van Gogh murder. People wondered if militant Islamism was about to break out into mass violence. If multiculturalism was wrong, what, people suddenly needed to know, was the right way to integrate, to adapt Western society to an ever more interconnected world? The city was so shaken, down to the level of individual households, that on the very evening of the assassination Mayor Job Cohen called for a mass gathering on Dam Square. At first he had thought to hold a silent vigil, but on learning that Van Gogh had detested silent vigils he made it a “noise vigil” and asked people to bring noisemakers.
Thousands streamed into the place that was the site of the medieval dam that gave the city its name. Many carried not only noisemakers but signs disparaging Cohen for not having foreseen the rise of militant Islam. In fact, in its multicultural heyday, the city had fostered the ghettoization of Muslims and subsidized Islamist organizations, which taught that women were naturally inferior and that Jews were enemies. People said you could almost feel the collective consciousness changing during the vigil, as people woke up to realize the scope of the failure of multiculturalism.
After the demonstration, a fascinating two-man team went to work: Cohen, the Jewish mayor, and Ahmed Aboutaleb, a city alderman who had been born and raised in a Berber village in Morocco. Aboutaleb was the son of an imam; he had emigrated to the Netherlands at age fifteen. Together, the Amsterdam Jew and the Amsterdam Muslim conducted a series of gatherings, sounding out the city neighborhood by neighborhood. “We operated as a kind of couple,” Aboutaleb later told me. “It was a kind of city therapy.” To neighborhood groups and the media, the two men offered different but complementary messages. Cohen stressed that non-Muslims had no reason to feel threatened by Muslims: investigations indicated that the young man who had killed Van Gogh had acted alone. In a way that Cohen himself couldn’t have gotten away with, Aboutaleb used the occasion to push the city’s Muslims to do more to integrate. Speaking at a mosque, Aboutaleb declared, “Whoever doesn’t want to go along with Dutch society and its achievements can pack his bags.”
At some point, Cohen, when asked to define his strategy, used the phrase de boel bij elkaar houden, which translates roughly as “keeping things together.” Some ridiculed him for what sounded like a wishy-washy philosophy of governing. It fed into the rhetoric of Geert Wilders, the far-right politician who was using the furor over the murder to push his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim agenda. After it became known that Cohen and Aboutaleb had drunk tea in mosques with groups of Muslims, Wilders turned “tea drinking” into an epithet: Cohen personified the ever-weakening West, kowtowing to an ascendant, aggressive Islam.
But Maarten Hajer, a political scientist at the University of Amsterdam, put it in a different context for me. “Tea drinking is the form of socializing in these communities,” he said. “And while Cohen was doing that, he was also standing up for gay rights. In that sense, ‘keeping things together’ becomes a very meaningful phrase.”
In the aftermath of the Van Gogh killing, Time named Cohen a “European hero,” and in 2006 he came in second in a World Mayor contest. Both Cohen and Hirsi Ali, then, were lauded internationally for their very different ways of answering questions about immigration and integration, in particular the question of Islam in the West. In the years after the furor over the death of Theo van Gogh, even as immigration receded from the agenda in many places as the cutting issue of the day, and as Cohen ran for prime minister, lost, and retired from politics, people in Amsterdam continued to puzzle over the conflicting approaches that Cohen, the conciliator, and Hirsi Ali, the Enlightenment firebrand, personified. Which was the better path? More broadly, what—for those who believe in liberalism, not just in terms of immigration but in all respects—is the way forward?
Maybe the best response to such a serious question is to begin at the level of the ridiculous. Every
city has its bad art. In Amsterdam and other Dutch cities, up until 1987 bad art held privileged status: it was funded by the public. Through the Beeldende Kunstenaars Regeling (BKR), or Fine Arts Subsidy, the government paid virtually anyone who applied and said he or she was an artist—three thousand people at the program’s height—a living wage, which totaled $70 million a year in public funds. In exchange, the artist had to produce three works per year for the government. Most of the works—hundreds of thousands of them—were stored in warehouses, for an additional curiosity of the BKR was that the artworks submitted could not be sold. Since generally speaking artists are not keen to have their work sit in storage but also since some of the individuals partaking of the system were not so much dedicated artists as scammers, many pieces were mockeries of the process: people sent in items of household trash and called them sculpture.
The BKR is an example of the socialism-gone-wild comedy that set in in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities as the lowercase-l liberalism of the late twentieth century reached its absurdist low point. With the laudable intent to spread rights and freedoms as far as possible, to see just how far their commitment to liberal ideals could go, the Dutch created some systems that were truly worthy of parody. Maybe most ridiculous was the phenomenon of kraken, or squatting. In 1971 it became legal to break into an empty building and take up residence in it, and by the 1980s it was a rite of passage for groups of young people to take over a building and set up a neolithic existence in it (without electricity or running water). The squatting phenomenon, combined with the declawing of the police after the Provo period, produced absurdist street theater performances, in which a battalion of officers, in full riot gear, would show up outside a squatted building (its windows festooned with anarchic messages), making noise and brandishing their shields, while the kids inside would sneer from the windows. Then the police would go home.
Squatting was finally declared illegal in 2010, as part of the general official retreat from the lunatic horizon of liberal policy. By then, of course, the image of the city was well entrenched. A 2008 piece on Fox News’s O’Reilly Factor that became a minor cult classic in Amsterdam used the city as a warning to the United States, in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s first election victory, of what liberalism portends. Conservative commentator Monica Crowley, in conversation with host Bill O’Reilly, declared that the Dutch were engaged in “experimentation with social tolerance, free love, free drugs” and concluded: “Amsterdam is a cesspool of corruption, crime, everything’s out of control—it’s anarchy!” O’Reilly agreed, saying, “Every questionable person in Europe heads to Amsterdam because it’s all there!” A twenty-five-year-old Dutchman named Robbert Nieuwenhuijs responded with a video that swept the Internet, putting the lurid claims of the commentators over images of ordinary life on the city’s streets: people cycling, riding boats on the canals, kids playing. And he added some statistics for perspective: 40.3 percent of Americans have used cannabis, while only 22.6 percent of Dutch people have; drug-related deaths in the United States are 38 per million people, in the Netherlands 2.4 per million.
In fact, people in Amsterdam had long been aware of the truth embedded in the surreal exaggerations of the Fox News report. What the report ignored—what gets lost in the hippie-hazy image that the city has in the outside world—is the other side of its liberal tradition. In many ways Amsterdam still stands at the forefront of the advance of civil rights. In 2001, Job Cohen, shortly after becoming mayor, performed the world’s first same-sex marriage—or actually four marriages, since he had arranged to have four couples standing ready at the moment the law went into effect, to make sure his city maintained its position at the vanguard of civil rights.
The social welfare system similarly reflects a real commitment to individual rights, one that may not be well understood elsewhere. Like the Fine Arts Subsidy, it was in the past subject to widespread abuse, with people making fake claims for sick leave and the like. But it has had several overhauls, and it works. Even through the economic crises of the early twenty-first century, Amsterdam has found ways to manage its blend of economic and social liberalisms. As an outsider, I was at first bewildered by the social welfare system, then slowly I became a fan. I will never forget my confusion on first receiving a payment for kinderbijslag, a quarterly child subsidy, simply because I had children. Or vakantiegeld: vacation money, 8 percent of one’s annual salary, which every working person receives in the spring, to help finance the cost of holiday travel. Again, such forms of assistance take place within the context of a capitalist culture; they are meant not to dissolve individualism but to give individuals some solid ground beneath their feet. I have found that, mostly, the idea works: you run your own life yet you feel that you are not entirely alone; you are a part of something. Sitting one chilly afternoon in the pleasantly dark recesses of Café Scheltema, a journalists’ hangout since the days of the Nazi occupation, the Dutch writer Geert Mak contrasted for me the American and Dutch approaches to freedom. “My American friends say they live in the best country in the world, and in a lot of ways they are right,” he said. “But they always have to worry: ‘What happens to my family if I have a heart attack? What happens when I turn sixty-five or seventy?’ America is the land of the free. But I think we are freer.”
Freer … because you’re not alone. That is the story that Amsterdam tells. Working together, we win land from the sea. Individually, we own it; individually, we prosper, so that collectively we do. Together, we maintain a society of individuals. For an American, raised on a diet of raw individualism, it remains a bit of a challenge to parse that logic. Another Dutch friend, who happens to be an expert on water management, drove home the differing sensibilities when he told me that the fable of Hans Brinker, the little Dutch boy who sticks his finger in the leaking dike to save the city and is rewarded for his heroism, is completely incomprehensible to the Dutch themselves. As it happens, it’s not a Dutch tale at all but was written by an American in the nineteenth century. Carving their city out of the effluvial medieval muck necessitated a high level of cooperation among individuals, a communal sensibility that is evident today in the social welfare system. This is why, according to my friend, the fable doesn’t work for the Dutch. “The heroism in the story,” he said, “is purely American.” Dike building and dike repair are communal enterprises; were the Dutch to construct such a fairy tale, the “hero” would probably be the town water board.
And yet, Amsterdam also goes far in the other direction, farther than any other place on earth. If maintaining individual freedom means treading a line between chaos and control, Amsterdam has shown a strong preference for erring on the side of chaos.
Amsterdam’s history is so specific, so bound up with water, that its approach to individual freedom is different from that of most of the rest of the Western world. Still, many of us have long believed that the basic elements of liberalism are universal, and necessary for the future. But the future is shifting. Western democracies make up only a small portion of the world, and experiences with “nation building” have not had great success in transplanting democracy, for example, to regions that have never known it. And the political scientist Francis Fukuyama has argued that societies that have the concept of preserving individual liberties as part of their foundation are now at a crippling disadvantage. Fukuyama points to China and Singapore as examples of governments that operate without checks on power or accountability to the people—two hallmarks of liberal government—and whose orientation is not toward preserving individual freedoms but rather toward pushing the nation forward. Such countries are able to act faster to adapt to changing global situations, while Western democracies engage in congressional debates, parliamentary procedures, and media investigations, slowed by institutions whose noble founding goal was to ensure liberal values.
If liberalism is under threat in some places, then surely testing grounds for expanding individual freedoms are all the more vital. By the standards of world cities today—
New York, London, Istanbul, Paris, Mumbai—Amsterdam is a pokey place. It is small in population; in terms of geographic area you could tuck the whole of it into a corner of Shanghai or Karachi and it probably wouldn’t be noticed. It has no skyscrapers. But the advantage of a modest skyline is the seemingly limitless horizon.
POSTSCRIPT
One gray, late-February morning, with a light mist in the air, I altered my weekly bicycle routine from my house in Amsterdam’s Oud Zuid. Instead of taking my son, Anthony, to day care and then cycling to Frieda Menco’s apartment to interview her about her experiences in the city before and after World War II, I brought him with me to see Frieda. She had called me the day before saying she had found a letter we had been talking about: a long letter her mother had written to a brother in New York in September 1945 summarizing all the suffering the family had been through, from the first appearance of Nazi uniforms on the streets of their neighborhood through the horror of Auschwitz. Since Frieda had been asking me lately about my little son, I told her I could come by her apartment on the way to day care and that way she could meet Anthony too. I had said we would be there between nine and nine thirty. She said, “So late for day care!” which seemed an odd comment. As it turned out, there had been a miscommunication. She thought I was coming after nine o’clock at night, after day care. She blamed the mistake on her age; I blamed it on my Dutch. At any rate, when I arrived at nine in the morning, Frieda was still in bed. I said I would come back another time, but she insisted we come in. We then had a little encounter in the hallway of her apartment that began with her apologizing for her appearance. Normally she was impeccably dressed and made up; now she wore a nightgown; without makeup, and having just roused herself from bed, her skin looked gray.
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