The debate about the multicultural society is dominated by the position of the Islam. The headscarf issue is a daily topic in the discussion about the Muslim community. It is argued that the Muslim culture doesn’t ‘fit’ in the Dutch ‘national culture.’ I want to examine these two concepts – nation and culture – in order to show that the headscarf debate is non-sense.
The proposition that Muslims must adapt themselves to our culture is based on the assumption that the ‘national’ ‘culture’ is an existing reality. Yet, Neither the Dutch ‘nation’ nor the Dutch ‘culture’ are fixed entities. Therefore they don’t exist.
Firstly, a nation is not a natural existing entity. As an objective, unchangeable and tangible phenomenon it does not exist. The history of nation formation shows that a nation is merely an ideological project, invented by the political elite.
People only identify with groups (family, professional group, religious group) that they are connected to in a direct way. These kinds of relationships determine the identity of people. Humans are social creatures and they naturally don’t identify themselves with nations because it is not possible to have face to face relations with all the persons within a nation. Therefore no one in the Netherlands feels naturally ‘Dutch.’The masses, that ought to the natural bearer of the national identity, don’t behave ‘national’ at all. They exist of indifferent individuals, that are solely focussed on their self-interest and the interest of the particular group, they are part of. This natural indifference is a thorn in the flesh of politicians, because they fear that it will affect the order. Therefore they strain every nerve to nationalize the masses. For that purpose they first design a blueprint, which establishes the ‘national’ standard, to which the masses have to conform. Then they develop comprehensive programmes of national education with the attention to make the Dutch feel Dutch. This already happened in the nineteenth century and is still happening today, namely with the immigrants and ‘antisocial’ groups. Argumentations stressing the importance of national identity are therefore manifestations of disciplination. A ‘nation’ is not the sum of individuals with natural national feelings, but a fabrication, set up by the political elite in order to preserve order.
In times of great social and economic changes, when familiar traditional bonds are about to lose their meaning, there is always a fear of disorder within the political elite. In these times, many politicians feel the desire to return to the well-tested national virtues, that have provided order and security in the past . It’s not surprising then, that exactly today, in a time of globalisation and drastic individualisation, the headscarf gets a lot of attention. Immigrants pre-eminently symbolize that nothing is unchangeable and that strikes the political elite with terror. It’s interesting to see how in the headscarf debate the argumentation is more focused on what the national character is threatened by, than on what this national character exactly signifies. Moreover, politicians knows precisely where to locate the groups where the danger is coming from. This is a pattern that is as old as the pre-modern witch trials
When the Dutch ‘nation’ doesn’t exist and the Dutch don’t naturally feel Dutch, it is strange thing to claim that Muslims must learn to feel Dutch; especially when this claim is only based on fear of change. Pliticians who want to forbit the headscarf are conservative culture nationalists.
Secondly, the Dutch ‘culture’ doesn’t exist either. It has no fixed core. Culture nationalists are usually inclined to provide a culture with a certain essence or core, which gives it it’s characteristic property. Because of this, cultures are perceived as entities with a fixed content. They are considered to be natural categories.
The tendency to classify cultures in fixed categories is closely connected with the view on cultural history someone has. Culture nationalists prefer to look upon the history of a culture as a process of evolution and continuity. In their view history is a straightforward process of progress, in which in a logical succession all sorts of values – such as democracy or freedom – have been developed. In this way of thinking, ‘our’ culture is the end point of this evolution process.
A vision that departs from the idea that history is a process of evolution and continuity, overlooks the existence of breaks in history. Nowadays, many cultural anthropologists demonstrate that culture is not a product of a straightforward development process, but a process in which the content of it is continuously redefined. We get our identity by continuously marking our differences in regard to the ‘other.’ Not so long ago, the opposite between the West and the communistic East served as a reference point for defining the content of our culture. ‘We’ (e.g. people living in the West) were the free West; ‘they’ were the unfree East. As soon as the iron curtain fell down the communistic East made room for the Islamic East as a point of reference. Suddenly ‘we’ became the ‘modern’ West; ‘they’ became the pre modern East. The content of a culture is thus never fixed. It changes as soon as a new ‘other’ pops up from behind the horizon.
The process of continuously redefining the content of culture provides another reason why cultures don’t have a fixed content. Each time when a new ‘other’ turns up and the content of a culture consequently is reinvented, the inventors of culture don’t base themselves on present cultural norms and values, but ‘dig’ them up from the past. They make a selection from a broad reservoir of norms and values of the past. Each time they do so, they focus on specific historical periods and movements. The final content of the culture is then the accidental result of this selection. The one time Kant is a part of the culture, the other it’s Nietzsche. Traditions, identities and cultures are invented everyday. Natural, fixed cultures therefore don’t exist.
When culture and nation are myths, the proposition that Muslims should not wear headscarfs is no longer tenable. Muslims should be allowed to stick to their own identity. However, from what has been stated above, follows that this own identity of Muslims is ambiguous as well. Their culture too is not fixed anymore. Rushdie speaks, when he is referring to Muslims, of transcultural hybrids. Therefore the discussion about headscarfs becomes pointless. In the first place we cannot univocally determine what exactly the identity is, which Muslims have to give up. Is a boerka or the suppression of women for instance an essential feature of the Muslim culture? Subsequently, it is impossible to determine unambiguously what the exact identity is, to which Muslims have to adapt themselves. Is niggardliness or the mercantile spirit for instance an essential feature of the Dutch culture?