Go Back to Where You Came From

by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

  Indeed, if the burkini law were truly neutral and focused solely on preventing full coverage of the female body at the beach, then nuns and Orthodox Jews would be equally targeted for fines and removal, and any woman choosing to cover up—whether out of modesty, shyness, or a desire to avoid sunburn—would be suspect and a legitimate target for questioning. But despite the verbal acrobatics of certain intellectuals and public officials, the law always had a clear target.52

  The more honest argument offered by proponents of the ban is their contention that the burkini is a garment that expresses affiliation with extremist groups. A ban on these grounds has little to do with defending secularism and more to do with preventing open display of terrorist sympathies. There is no proof that women wearing burkinis have such sympathies; on the contrary, most women arrested in France in connection with terrorist attacks all dressed casually in modern clothes. Moreover, if banning garments with certain extreme political messages were the true objective, then presumably France would also be banning T-shirts with ISIS logos or Osama bin Laden’s face and the large market for neo-Nazi clothing and paraphernalia. There has been no ban of the sort.

  In the end, it was the courts that saved the French government from itself. In response to an emergency application lodged by human rights groups against the southern towns that had banned burkinis, the Conseil d’État, the country’s highest administrative court, declared on August 26, 2016: “The emotion and worry resulting from terrorist attacks and especially that committed in Nice on July 14 do not suffice to legally justify the prohibition contested here.… The disputed decree has thus infringed seriously and in a manifestly illegal manner upon the fundamental liberties—the freedom to come and go, freedom of conscience and personal freedom.”53

  Whereas other laws in Europe, such as banning full-body burqas, had legitimate security rationales, this one did not. The hostility toward a single faith was blatant.54 The problem with the Conseil d’État’s ruling is that it set France’s legal institutions at odds with an angry population that has become increasingly suspicious and even hateful toward Muslims. Surveys showed widespread popular support for the bans. As in Denmark, larger and larger numbers of French were calling for restrictions on Muslims’ religious freedoms and favoring openly discriminatory policies, a classic demand of majoritarian populists who proclaim themselves democrats but have no time for constitutions.

  The dilemma, according to the Harvard political scientist Yascha Mounk, is that politicians in liberal democracies would either have to obey the will of an angry and increasingly illiberal electorate—which would inevitably lead to the violation of unpopular minorities’ rights—or vest more power in unelected courts and bureaucracies that protect those rights. Either way, he argued, “liberal democracy is increasingly under siege” and likely to “decompose into its constitutive elements, facing us with a tragic choice between illiberal democracy (or democracy without rights) and undemocratic liberalism (or rights without democracy).”55

  It is true that politicians will increasingly face such a choice, but in nations like France or Germany with strong legal traditions, independent courts, and deeply held reverence for core documents like the Declaration of the Rights of Man or the post-World War II German constitution, deferring to the courts—and the expert interpretation of the law—does not constitute a descent into undemocratic practices. It is an exemplary case of one democratic institution checking the power of another when the latter’s decision-making risks being influenced by the fleeting political whims of the mob.

  The French court’s decision was not an exercise in undemocratic elitism; it was a show of resilience for France’s long-standing democratic institutions and their ability to uphold French values that are far older and far more established than the passing wave of Islamophobia on the Côte d’Azur’s beaches.

  10

  BARBARIANS AT THE GATES

  As the refugee crisis spread across Europe in September 2015, Geert Wilders declared that the arrival of Syrian refugees in Europe constituted “an Islamic invasion” and warned of “masses of young men in their twenties with beards singing Allahu Akbar across Europe.” He labeled their presence “an invasion that threatens our prosperity, our security, our culture and identity.”1 His stance had significant public support: 54 percent of Dutch voters did not want to accept more than the paltry quota of two thousand refugees per year even though the EU was calling on Holland to take nine thousand people.

  At the grassroots level, citizens’ groups formed to protest the resettlement of asylum-seekers in their towns. In October 2015, Klaas Dijkhoff, the state secretary in charge of resettling refugees and asylum-seekers, was attacked in the rural village of Oranje, a town with a permanent population of 150 people where the Dutch government had already placed over 700 asylum-seekers.

  Dijkhoff had come to deliver the news that even more asylum-seekers would be housed in Oranje; in response, outraged villagers blocked the road leading to the vacant building where the government ordered the refugees to be housed, kicked Dijkhoff’s car, and tore off its side mirrors.2 Elsewhere, the violence was more threatening; in the town of Woerden, halfway between Amsterdam and Rotterdam, a group of twenty young men wearing ski masks stormed a local gym that was serving as temporary housing for Syrian and Eritrean refugees.3 They threw fireworks, eggs, and smoke bombs into the centre, known as an AZC (a Dutch acronym for asylum-seeker centre) housing 150 people, 50 of them children. The police managed to arrest 11 people, and the government roundly condemned the attack, but the anger has not gone away.

  According to Amanda Vermeulen, a former activist with a group called AZC-Alert in a rural area east of Amsterdam, “the major parties are on some sort of fantasy island. We have no voice.” And as soon as anyone questions resettlement of refugees, she complains, “very fast you get a stamp on your head as racist.” While she claimed the group was apolitical and focused on warning locals about plans for housing refugees in their midst, she acknowledged that some members support Wilders and that many more could soon join them because no one else in the government seems to listen.4 Since that time, Vermeulen is no longer a spokesperson, and the group seems to have drifted more explicitly into the orbit of Wilders’s PVV. Several AZC-Alert activists, judging from their Twitter profiles, double as local spokespeople for the party.5

  Tanja Jadnanansing, a Labour MP who stepped down in late 2016, understands the anger. When one thousand asylum-seekers show up in a village of a few hundred, “we should think more about where do we put them.” But in cities like Amsterdam, there is not much of a problem, she claims. She describes a recent visit to Amsterdam Southeast, a diverse area where housing is cheaper and where many asylum-seekers live after they arrive. Outside the office where they go to register, she ran into three Dutch locals having a beer. “The more the merrier!” they told her. It was very different from what she heard in other parts of the country. Regular rank-and-file party members have come to debates at party meetings, and they tell MPs, “I understand that we have to let people in, but how about us?”6

  That sentiment was on full display last spring in the provincial Dutch capital of Den Bosch, a pretty town in the country’s south that is surrounded by a moat and endless green fields. The debate came to a head on April 18, 2016. A small group had descended on the provincial legislature to voice their opposition to refugee resettlement plans. Outside, the building was blockaded with almost as many police officers as protesters. Ten or twenty protesters gathered, clad in leather and black boots, and holding signs denouncing “multicultural terror.” But the real action took place inside.

  Members of AZC-Alert watched from the gallery in a blue-ceilinged chamber of the provincial legislature, a structure of modernist concrete festooned with paintings of seventeenth-century nobles. They applauded as the local PVV leader bombarded provincial representatives and the king’s commissioner, an official charged with implementing the national government’s policies, with questions about the con
struction of asylum-seeker housing. The tense session lasted for almost two hours before everyone gathered collegially for drinks overlooking the flying-saucer-like lobby.

  The founder of AZC-Alert, Anita Hendriks, also works for the PVV’s provincial delegation. She is a soft-spoken woman from the southern city of Eindhoven, who got angry when, as she puts it, the mayor “decided to start an AZC almost in my backyard—for seven hundred people.” She complained but never got a meeting. Two weeks later, the asylum-seekers were there.

  “We’re normal people with complaints,” she said. “And we don’t get heard.” In her view, the government wants to show its power by deciding where to place people and “they neglect us.” Her colleague, a man named Sander Booij, interjects with a quick feminist diatribe. “The people who do come think their culture is better. They think women are objects. We think women are equal to men.” Holland is a Christian society, he insists, and they come from an Islamic one. Moreover, he argues, “there are seven safe nations between the Netherlands and Syria.” As Hendriks tells me, the “real refugees don’t come here. They stay in the camps.”7

  A few PVV officials on their way to the legislative chamber stop by our table to say hello to Hendriks. When I ask about their links, given her job as a secretary for the party, they explain that AZC-Alert is purely grassroots. But her colleague Booij, who once ran for local office on the PVV slate, admits, “The PVV is the only national party that shares our view.”8

  AZC-Alert spread largely on the Internet. “If there’s a plan for an asylum centre in a town, we try to contact locals in the town. We say if you want we can help you with the resistance against it,” Sander explains. But they draw a line with more radical groups like the leather-clad, black-booted men outside the building. When I mention the German anti-Islam group PEGIDA, he explains, “we keep separate from them.… We think they’re putting the resistance against asylum-seekers in a bad light.”9

  Booij is intent on hammering home the message that “we’re not fascists and we’re not right-wing extremists. We’re normal people with very big complaints about the refugee crisis, and we don’t get heard.” He comes from a small village with two thousand people. This plan, he says, could place centres with one hundred people in a town like his. “The provincial government is telling the little communities what to do,” he complains. “They’re saying to local governments, ‘You’re going to place these people, and if you don’t do it, we’ll do it for you.’” The government has simply decided, he says. “And the people didn’t have anything to say about it.”

  He thinks that real war refugees need to be safe in their own regions, “if possible in Turkey or Saudi Arabia.” He is convinced that the real draw is Dutch benefits and generous immigration policies. “Our social welfare state is much better than surrounding countries’,” he explains. And people are coming to the Netherlands, rather than Denmark or Germany, he believes, because Holland offers a shorter wait for family reunification.

  Given that she works in the building, Hendriks is particularly upset at the lack of coordination. “They could ask me, ‘Anita, how many people do you expect? What do you want to achieve?’ No one asked me.”10 Hendriks feels that “democracy is under pressure now. We have to shut up.” She gestures to the oversized bike-riding police force outside, mild by American standards. “You see here the crazy police force for a few people. They criminalize us.” She compares it to a protest by environmentalists and angry farmers that she witnessed a few years ago. “They dumped pig shit outside the building,” she says with a laugh. And nothing happened.

  Apparently, public questions are quite common at most meetings of the provincial legislature, but tonight, it is strictly the elected officials who do the talking. Still, the PVV is taking Hendriks’s concerns to the floor. Alexander van Hattem, the local party leader and also a PVV senator in the national government’s upper house, lists the objections exhaustively, speaking for close to forty-five minutes in the chamber.

  Arnoud Reijnen, the provincial government press spokesman, wears a suit and seems troubled that the one foreign journalist at the event has arrived in the company of the protesters. As he tells it, the Dutch agency COA, in charge of refugee resettlement and housing asylum-seekers, was shrinking due to lack of demand. Then 2015 happened. The government needed to find short-term housing for people, and instead of letting them build camps like the Calais Jungle, the organization asked the various provinces and municipalities to deliver emergency shelters for two to three years. It was a national government assignment. Municipal and provincial governments, along with COA, started researching where AZCs could be built. In some places, there were easy answers; one old military barracks, for instance, was used to house two thousand people.

  Reijnen argues that there’s actually a labour shortage that refugees could help fill. “If you’re a plumber or carpenter, you have a job tomorrow,” he says. Fleur, a middle-aged woman working for the cafeteria, is laying out coffee cups and comes to join us. She is Armenian and arrived in Holland as a refugee in 1971. She says among her neighbours and friends, “most of the people are worried; we don’t have enough work for us.”

  Fleur views things differently because of her own history. “I think they can come—I was one of them.” But she shares some of the complaints often heard from PVV voters. “I’m waiting for a house for six years now,” she tells me. “I live with my mum now.” Yet she sees new asylum-seekers arriving and getting housing quickly.

  Embarrassed by his employee’s populist tirade, the press chief intervenes. “It’s a problem. We had building of social housing until new cabinet [sic] came along.”

  Fleur continues, “When my dad came here, there was lots of work. Now our children go to school and they can’t find a job.” And much like Hendriks and the protesters, Fleur is also adamant that the refugees most in need aren’t coming. “The people coming from there to Holland, they have money. The people who don’t have money, they only go to Turkey. I know,” she says with absolute confidence. “It’s the reality.” She says it was the same in the 1960s when the wealthiest Armenians left Turkey to come to Holland. “They had lots of money.… The people who don’t, they’re stuck in Turkey.”

  The reason that opposition to the AZCs ballooned so quickly is, according to Reijnen, “the coming of social media,” which has allowed activists to mobilize crowds quickly—often far beyond their own hometowns. With popular anger increasing the PVV’s popularity, he says, Wilders is able “to hold centre and right-wing parties hostage.”11

  After the meeting, the man presiding over it seems mostly annoyed. The king’s commissioner, Wim van de Donk, was asked to ensure that the province had enough space to host refugees, he explains. “This was not a political debate. The role that I play is debated in the national parliament. If they want to have a political debate, they have to do it at a national level. The policy was decided by the government, and they’re in opposition.” He scoffs at the complaints that the process is undemocratic. “I have an assignment from the national government. I’m a civil servant. I do not decide on the policy,” he says, exasperated. The reason he was speeding up implementation was out of fear that another mass influx over the summer might hit Holland when it didn’t have the capacity to take more people.

  Van Hattem, the province’s PVV leader, concedes that the provincial government doesn’t have a formal role in making refugee policy, but he argues that the commissioner has overstepped his bounds by getting into matters of integration, social housing, and the local labour market. “That kind of policy belongs partly to local communities and the province.” And if there is going to be a change in labour market policy, then, “as a democratic organ, we have to decide about the policy. But we’ve never had a discussion in the meeting hall about that.”12

  His PVV colleague Patricia van der Kammen, who served as a member of the European Parliament, is harsher. The government is telling citizens, “We are going to make a policy whether you like it or no
t.” All they seem to care about, she says, is “how do we convince them that they want this?” She argues, like Wilders, that referenda are the solution to all these problems.13 “The government has to listen to the citizens, and they don’t. They don’t look at what in opinion polls most Dutch people think about asylum-seekers. They ignore it completely.”

  Asked if there could ever be too many referenda, she points to Switzerland. “Why not have twenty per year? On this, we think it’s very wise for every local government to vote on this issue.”

  Van Hattem insists that the PVV is not trying to direct grassroots groups. “They tell us their worries. The initiative is on their side. We don’t have relations to steer them,” a dubious claim given that, at the event I attended, there appeared to be a near-total overlap between PVV supporters and the staff of the AZC-Alert leadership. Both are confident that the PVV will grow and that soon the larger parties will no longer be able to ignore them. “If the Dutch voters will make us big enough,” he says hopefully, “they can’t say anymore, ‘We don’t need you.’ They’ll have to work together with us.”14

  Although the party grew from fifteen seats to twenty in the March 2017 election, it underperformed expectations and was excluded from a right-leaning coalition government. Van Hattem did not get his wish this time, but the process that he, Wilders, and the angry citizens of AZC-Alert have set in motion is not going away.

  It draws on reflexes and resentments that are deeply rooted in human behavior and are being activated by a perceived threat to the social order.

  Countless activists, columnists, and politicians have weighed in on questions of integration and multiculturalism. What has been less examined but is of far greater consequence is how the encouragement of public displays of difference may impact voting behavior. The political psychologist Karen Stenner has argued convincingly that support for far-right parties is a direct result of members of the majority perceiving a threat to their culture, community, and way of life. Her work is a twenty-first-century revision of the famous F-scale designed by the Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno to measure fascist tendencies and other authoritarian personality traits, a study that has influenced much of modern social science since the 1950s.15