Super-Diversity in Everyday Life by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367273156
Goodreads: 44524729
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

Following local elections in March 2011, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte bore witness to the far-reaching transformation of political discourse in the Netherlands over the past few decades. In response to the electoral victory of his free-market, conservative-liberal party, VVD, Rutte stated: “We are going to give this beautiful country back to the Dutch, because that is our project.” His words echoed an earlier promise he had made when presenting his first cabinet back in October 2010 to “give the country back to hard-working Dutchmen”. Rutte’s statement exemplified the normalization of exclusionary politics built on an image of “the people” – in this case, the rhetorical figure of the hardworking Dutchman. The people referred to in this political discourse, it must be emphasized, do not form “a shapeless demos, but a specific ethnos, or natio” (Farris 2017, 66). They are autochthonous, that is, “born from the soil” (Geschiere 2009).

The figure of the hardworking ordinary Dutchman also plays a central role in the rhetoric of the rightwing populist Freedom Party (Partij voor de Vrijheid, PVV). Its leader and single member, Geert Wilders, has for many years claimed to represent “hardworking Dutch people” like “Henk and Ingrid” (sometimes “Henk and Anja”). Wilders argues: “We choose for the people who don’t have it easy [die het niet cadeau krijgen]. Not for the elite, but for Henk and Ingrid.” Wilders’ discourse draws boundaries between “ordinary people” and pluralist elites as well as between “white autochthones” and people of migrant background. “Henk and Ingrid”, Wilders once famously said, “have to pay for Ahmed and Fatima. They have a right to a safer Netherlands that is more Dutch”. Class and cultural boundaries thus merge in a discourse that gives rise to rightwing populism and its social persona: the ordinary everyman, “originally Dutch”, and assumed to be white. This representation raises important questions for the social-scientific study of difference and diversity.

In this article, I will discuss the complex relationship between super-diversity – which seems to hold the promise of a normalization of difference as diversity becomes a fact of life while the very notion of a majoritarian culture loses significance – and the re-emergence of nativist and culturalist perspectives that impose meaning in everyday, local settings.

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