When my inlaws decided to move to the countryside of Drenthe in 1979 to raise their children, a friendly neighbour cycled up to their house in the village of Exloëerveen to share some handy tips.

Among the small variety of shops, general practitioners and churches in the area, there were some that leaned toward one religious denomination in favor of another. The neighbour wanted to save my inlaws the trouble of having to make these discoveries themselves. The northern provinces of the Netherlands are historically Protestant, but there are many variations of Protestantism to be found in the area. Similarly, the southern provinces have a Roman Catholic history. My grandparents were from Limburg, and in his free time my grandfather volunteered as a treasurer for a Catholic school catering to troubled boys. The school was in Den Haag, where my grandfather befriended two clerics who would often be at the family home at birthdays and religious holidays. Catholicism was the mortar between my Dutch family and the rest of Dutch society in the first half of the 20th century.

For a country that is so fiercely secular today, the Netherlands is still under the influence of De Verzuiling, in English: the Pillarization. From roughly 1917 to 1967, Dutch society divided itself into ideological streams based on religious denomination. Each “pillar” represented a parallel segment of society which did not interact with other pillars of society, while simultaneously holding up “the roof” which was the Netherlands as a nation. The Pillarization was very much a topdown organization in which only elites and politicians representing the four pillars interacted out of necessity in order to de- fine the national interest to which all pillars contributed. In the 400 years 1 leading up to the 20th century the Dutch experienced brutal internal conflict stemming from religious differences 2, and equally brutal conflicts abroad stemming from colonization 3. Yet the Pillarization is still widely regarded as the most politically stable period in Dutch history.

Defining the Pillarization is rather difficult. Officially the four pillars were based on religious denomination, but in fact only one was a truly cohesive religious pillar; the Roman Catholic one. The many denominations of Protestantism were lumped into a second pillar. The third and fourth pillars were not defined by religion but by political or moral ideology, in the form of Socialism and Liberalism.

A significant mythical element has also been thrown into the mix, integrating the Pillarization into a cohesive national history and framing it as a high point of tolerance and stability. Popular writers and journalists sometimes look nostalgically upon to the “simplicity” of the period, perceiving the idea of “knowing one’s place in the world” as both positive and impossible to revive 4. On the other hand, one could also perceive these peaceful 50 years as a transitional phase to the more sophisticated and diverse country we inhabit today. The arbitrariness of the official dates assigned to the Pillarization does not help matters either. According to political scientist Arend Lijphart 5 the 400 years preceding the Belle Epoque 6 laid the ground for the Pillarization, and its breakdown can be traced to the end of WWII – but this breakdown is difficult to pin down and could be said to stretch into the present day. Hazy beginnings, vague historical facts, and a strong ideological current underlying the unification of a country can be useful tools in politics.

Imagine the four pillars as vertical institutions with horizontal axes representing gradations in socio-economic class position. Each pillar had its elites, its middle class and its working poor. Each pillar had its representative political party, television and radio stations, newspapers, schools, universities, shops, and clubs. One could live in a world dominated by one’s own ideology and never have to mix with anyone who thought the slightest bit different. Both rich and poor felt more loyalty to their denominational pillar than solidarity to an equal socioeconomic class in a different pillar. The defining characteristic of living within a pillar was that citizens focused so narrowly on the pillars themselves that the negative space between the pillars came across as a nonexistent vacuum.

“Pacification Politics” is the adjective used by Lijphart for the effect that the Pillarization had on the Dutch population. Although two explosive world wars changed the face of the Netherlands and Europe during the first half of the 20th century, political stability within the country reached an all-time high. The Dutch population may have been divided by ideological differences, but it remained for the most part ethnically homogeneous. A shared language, geographic location and economic interests placed the pillars under the same roof. This has been gradualy changing. Martin Sommer (author of the foreword to the 9th edition of Lijphart’s book), encapsulates the western zeitgeist of the first decade in the 21st century, where an incessant preoccupation with Islam reveals the Dutch people’s difficulty to deal with forms of otherness that do not stem from divided homogeneity.

Despite being a moralistic and religious ideology, which would make it a solid candidate for Pillarisation, Islam is coupled with a multitude of different cultural customs emerging from the countries where it is practiced. Islam came to the Netherlands as the religion of Moroccan and Turkish migrant workers invited by the Dutch government to take part in a “guest worker” program targeting unskilled labourers during the 1960’s and 1970’s. The aim was to have the guests return home after the work was completed, but as things go, people settled into their new homeland and started families.

Islam itself is a religion characterized by 5 pillars of faith which hold up the religion, so it’s rather ironic that it could not find its place among the existing Dutch pillars. The influx of new citizens from the former Dutch colonies in the mid 20th century also played a role in dismantling the delicate myth of the Netherlands as a model of peace and tolerance. These citizens, often descended from slaves or a colonial educated elite, brought with them a myriad of different values and attitudes, starkly different to the four familiar ones and every bit as legitimate 7.

The Pillarization has contributed to a tendency among the Dutch to size up other Dutch citizens. Since the movement toward secularization that began in the late 1960’s, the practice of ideological segregation has been reconfigured around issues of socio-economic class, education and ethnicity. While the political landscape has become more unstable and varied now, the Dutch school system in particular is designed to separate children from the age of 12 onward into different intellectual classes that will foster the talents that become apparent at that age. The names used for these trajectories betray their hierarchical history: the difference between an academic education and a technical one is respectively characterized as high versus low (hoogopgeleide v.s. laagopgeleiden). Technical and academic educations take place on different campuses and groups of students never meet because they are on different educational trajectories, creating “separate but equal” worlds within a country in which each citizen has a role to play, but does not necessarily have to mix with others.

One of the many consequences of this type of education has been drempelvrees, which means “fear of the threshold.” You will not see working class families lining up to see a play at a local theatre, nor a family of academics lining up to watch a local football match in earnest, for fear of crossing over the wrong threshold. In Den Haag alone there are two persistent caricatural tropes that divide the population: the Hagenees and the Hagenaar. The first is characterized by a working class background, while the second is characterized by an academic background. They have different accents, live in different neighborhoods, have different career trajectories: they inhabit different worlds within one city. The heritage of Pillarization is that Dutch people are in constant need of knowing their place in the vertical and horizontal scheme of things, as well as the place of others.

  1. The Dutch state formed in 1648.→
  2. For instance, the 80 Years War (1568-1648), or the Beeldenstorm, the destruction of Catholic Churches and imagery by radical Protestants (1566).→
  3. Among examples, the active slave trade by VOC, the Dutch East India Company (1602-1799) and WIC, the Dutch West India Company (1612-1792), or the Dutch Military Agressions in Indonesia (1947-1948).→
  4. Journalist Yvonne Zonderop and novelist Franca Treur, both interviewed by Lex Bohlmeijer for De Correspondent→
  5. Author of The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands, University of California Press, 1968. (Verzuiling: pacificatie en kentering in de Nederlandse Politiek, De Bussy Amsterdam, 1968).→
  6. Approximately, 1871-1914.→
  7. Due to the active slave trade by VOC, the Dutch East India Company (1602-1799), and the WIC, the Dutch West India Company (1612-1792), the Netherlands had a colonial and trading post strongholds where the inevitable blending and mixing of cultures took place, despite strong hierarchical measures and structures created to prevent this. Locations worldwide included in Asia: Indonesia, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Malacca, Deshima, parts of Australia, parts of Iran, parts of Pakistan; in Africa: South Africa; and in the Americas: New York, Surinam, Guyana, Brazil, Virgin Islands, Tobago, Aruba, St. Maarten, Antilles, Curaçao.→