Multiculturalism in the Netherlands

Multiculturalism in the Netherlands began with a major increases in immigration during the 1950s and 1960s. As a consequence, an official national policy of multiculturalism was adopted in the early 1980s. This policy subsequently gave way to more assimilationist policies in the 1990s. Following the murders of Pim Fortuyn (in 2002) and Theo van Gogh (in 2004) the political debate on the role of multiculturalism in the Netherlands reached new heights.

Lord Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, distinguishes between tolerance and multiculturalism, and says that the Netherlands is a tolerant, rather than multicultural, society.

After World War II there were three successive waves of major immigration into the Netherlands. The first originated in the former Dutch colonies (such as Indonesia, Suriname and the Dutch Antilles) in the 1950s and 1960s. The second wave originated in Southern Europe (Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal) and arrived during the mid-1950s, and from Turkey and Morocco during the 1960s. These waves were in the form of labour migration. The third wave consisted of refugees from former Eastern Bloc countries (such as Hungary) who immigrated since the 1970s and from different countries such as Iran, Iraq, and former Yugoslavia since the mid-1980s.

Multiculturalism was adopted as a policy by the Netherlands in the 1980s. In 1983 a "Ethnic Minorities Policy" was adopted. The anti-immigration Centrumpartij had occasional electoral successes since 1982, but its leader Hans Janmaat was ostracized, and fined for his discriminatory statements and promotion of ethnic cleansing.

The Netherlands has now attracted international attention for the extent to which it reversed its previous multiculturalist policies, and its policies on cultural assimilation have been described as the toughest in Europe.

The multicultural policy consensus regarded the presence of immigrant cultural communities as non-problematic, or beneficial. Immigration was not subject to limits on cultural grounds: in practice, the immigration rate was determined by demand for unskilled labour, and later by migration of family members. The total Western and non-Western immigration and re-migration resulted in an immigrant population of about 3.5 million. In 2014, about two million inhabitants were non-Western immigrants (1,095,731) or the direct descendants of these. Net immigration and the initially higher birth rate of the immigrant communities, have transformed the Netherlands since the 1950s. Although the majority are still ethnic Dutch, in 2006 one fifth of the population was of non-Dutch ethnicity, about half of which were of non-Western origin. Immigration transformed Dutch cities especially: in Amsterdam, 55% of young people are of non-Western origin (mainly Moroccan, Surinamese and Turkish).

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