Neoliberal Xenophobia: The Dutch Case

Abstract

This article argues for the need to identify and grapple with the complexities of the relation between xenophobia and neoliberalism. In the case of the Netherlands, the rise of xenophobia is part of a larger process of a mostly market-controlled reclaiming of symbolic forms of collectiveness in an increasingly atomized society. The 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker-provocateur Theo van Gogh played a crucial role in cementing a “culturalist,” anti-Islam regime of truth. The analysis of the van Gogh murder informs about how, in the atomized market society, the search for new forms of togetherness has translated, in the Netherlands, into a turn to the ethnos, with fantasies of purity and the moralization of culture and citizenship. Where the neoliberal project has, largely unnoticed, abolished the collective standards and solidarities of the post-World War II era, the faces of immigrants have served as ideal, identifiable flash points for new repertoires of belonging and othering.