The loss of home

On civilisational fatigue, multicultural universalism, and the disappearance of cultural loyalty in the Netherlands

The Netherlands no longer seems to understand itself as a historical community, but rather as an administrative space in which every identity is welcome — except the identity that once shaped the country itself. This may well be the most fundamental cultural transformation of recent decades. Where earlier generations still spoke of civilisation, continuity, citizenship and shared history, contemporary discourse is dominated by abstract notions such as inclusivity, diversity and global responsibility. The multicultural society was presented as a moral advancement, yet increasingly reveals itself as a process of cultural dissolution in which the native inheritance may only be defended with hesitation.

The British philosopher Roger Scruton foresaw this development long before it became visible to the wider public. According to Scruton, a society enters decline when its elites lose the capacity to love what is their own, the customs, symbols, landscapes and historical memories that bind a people together. He called this oikophilia: the love of home. Opposed to it stood what he regarded as the defining characteristic of the uprooted elite: a constant inclination to approach its own civilisation primarily through the lenses of guilt, suspicion and irony. The defence of what already exists ceases to be a virtue; perpetual self-relativisation becomes one instead.

What is called multiculturalism in the Netherlands is, in reality, often less a form of pluralism than a form of cultural self-relativisation. The distinction is crucial. A confident civilisation can accommodate difference precisely because it possesses sufficient faith in its own moral and cultural foundations. Yet a civilisation that no longer dares to regard itself as normative transforms diversity into disorientation. The result is a society in which every cultural identity deserves public protection, except the culture that historically shaped the nation itself.

This is the paradox of the modern Netherlands.

Never before has so much been said about inclusivity, while simultaneously the very idea that Dutch culture itself deserves preservation has become faintly suspect. As though expressing affection for one’s own civilisation immediately risks accusations of exclusion. As though continuity itself were morally dubious. The Dutch elite appears trapped within what Scruton described as oikophobia: the repudiation of home. No longer proud of the house built across generations, it has developed an intellectual reflex of perpetual suspicion towards its own civilisation.

This mentality no longer belongs merely to political rhetoric; it has acquired institutional form. In education, media, cultural policy and public administration, Dutch history is increasingly interpreted primarily as a history of colonialism, slavery, exclusion and moral failure. Naturally, these chapters belong to historical reality. Yet a civilisation that speaks of itself exclusively in terms of guilt ultimately undermines its own legitimacy.

T.S. Eliot observed in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture that culture is never merely individual, but always embedded within customs, religious memory, forms of conduct, local loyalties and historical continuity. Culture, for Eliot, is not an ideological project but an organically evolved way of life. Precisely for that reason it cannot endlessly be replaced without loss. Once a society dissolves its cultural core into abstract universalism, what remains are institutions without soul.

Modern Dutch society appears scarcely aware of that fragility.

Dutch identity is increasingly reduced to an administrative and juridical category: a passport, a set of procedures, a vaguely liberal disposition. Yet historically the Netherlands was far more than that. It was the product of centuries of cultural discipline: Protestant work ethic, urban citizenship, institutional trust, freedom of debate, civic responsibility, tolerance within the boundaries of order, and a deeply rooted tradition of social self-organisation. Dutch society functioned not despite that inheritance, but because of it.

Alasdair MacIntyre argued in After Virtue that moral values can never be detached from the traditions out of which they emerge. Freedom does not exist within a cultural vacuum. It is sustained by habits, institutions, religious inheritances and shared moral expectations patiently built across generations. It is precisely that historical consciousness which now appears to be fading in the Netherlands.

The Dutch civilisation, shaped by Christianity, humanism, mercantile ethics, Protestant discipline, civic urban culture and institutional trust, is increasingly viewed not as an achievement worthy of preservation, but as a structure of power to be critically dismantled. The result is a society still consuming the fruits of its civilisation while growing steadily less willing to defend the cultural conditions that produced them.

Integration, therefore, has never been a neutral process. Integration necessarily entails entry into an already existing civilisational order. Every society expects, whether explicitly or implicitly, that newcomers relate themselves to the dominant culture that produced its institutions. This is true in Japan, Israel, France and Denmark alike. Only in Western Europe has the articulation of such cultural normativity become increasingly difficult.

Pierre Manent described this as the crisis of the European nation-state: the inability of European elites to defend their own political communities as legitimate historical forms. Europe speaks endlessly of universal human rights while speaking ever less about the civilisation that produced those rights in the first place. As though liberty, democracy and the rule of law were self-generating abstractions, detached from the traditions that gave birth to them.

But civilisations are not laws of nature.

George Steiner understood this perhaps more acutely than anyone else. Europe, continent of Bach, Rembrandt, Spinoza and Goethe, also proved capable of Auschwitz. Steiner therefore understood that civilisation is fragile not because culture is worthless, but because it demands constant maintenance. A civilisation survives only so long as people continue actively to love, defend and transmit it. Once elites reduce their own culture to a catalogue of historical crimes, a spiritual vacuum emerges. And vacuums never remain empty. They are inevitably filled by stronger identities, more radical convictions and increasingly aggressive forms of tribalism.

The multicultural society was once presented as an enrichment of the national community. New perspectives, new energies and new narratives were expected to render old Europe more dynamic and humane. Yet somewhere along the way the ideal quietly changed character. Diversity ceased to function as an addition to the national culture and gradually became an alternative to it. Integration into an existing civilisation ceased to be the expectation; the civilisation itself became the object of suspicion.

It is precisely here that the deeper cultural crisis of the Netherlands reveals itself.

A society can absorb major demographic change so long as it retains sufficient confidence in its own moral and cultural foundations. Rome, Venice, London and Amsterdam were international cities for centuries. Yet civilisations function only when newcomers enter a cultural order that still regards itself as legitimate. Once that civilisation begins to relativise its own right to exist, something else emerges: a society without a centre. A country that still possesses rules, but no longer possesses civilisational instinct.

Perhaps that is what so many Dutch citizens intuitively experience when they enter the public sphere today. Not merely demographic transformation, but spiritual displacement. The old bourgeois culture of responsibility, reciprocity and institutional trust has gradually given way to a fragile equilibrium of identities existing beside one another while sharing increasingly little common story. The Dutch city, once organised around market square, church, town hall and a shared civic morality, slowly becomes a place where history binds less and contemporary polarisation divides more.

The mayor as moral actor

In the Netherlands this cultural transformation has had profound institutional consequences. It manifests itself not only within universities, media organisations and cultural institutions, but increasingly within public administration itself. The mayor, once the embodiment of local rootedness, administrative restraint and civic unity, is steadily transforming into a moral actor within international identity conflicts.

The participation of mayors such as Femke Halsema, Sharon Dijksma and Ahmed Marcouch in politically charged Nakba commemorations is therefore more than an incidental political gesture. It symbolises a deeper shift in the self-understanding of public office.

The question is not whether individuals may express compassion for human suffering. Compassion belongs to every civilised society. The question is why mayors, figures expected to stand above tribal conflict, publicly align themselves with intensely polarising international narratives whilst simultaneously governing cities in which Jewish citizens increasingly experience insecurity and alienation.

What was once an office defined by unifying restraint risks becoming absorbed into symbolic identity politics and memory activism.

Hannah Arendt warned that politics becomes corrupted when public institutions transform into stages for moral self-expression. The modern administrator no longer wishes merely to govern; he wishes to radiate moral significance. He wishes to be seen standing upon the correct side of history. Yet precisely therein lies the danger. Once political legitimacy derives no longer from civic neutrality but from moral positioning within global conflicts, alienation inevitably grows among citizens who no longer feel represented by such symbolic gestures.

Perhaps this explains why so many contemporary administrators appear more comfortable with international symbolism than with defending the cultural cohesion of their own society. Global politics offers moral clarity; one’s own civilisation confronts uncomfortable questions concerning loyalty, borders and continuity.

Gaza becomes safer territory than Gouda. The Nakba more comprehensible than the Dutch canon. Global citizenship more comfortable than civilisational consciousness.

It is here that the blindness of much of the contemporary political, administrative, academic and media elite reveals itself most clearly. Endless language is devoted to inclusivity and diversity, yet almost none to cultural continuity or civilisational responsibility. Dutch identity may exist only insofar as it permanently relativises itself. Any normative attachment to the native inheritance is viewed with suspicion, while abstract global morality increasingly replaces concrete national loyalty.

Such a transformation cannot occur without consequences. A society that no longer dares place itself culturally at the centre of its own borders ultimately loses the capacity to morally anchor its institutions. Universities become places where the civilisation that created them is analysed primarily as a problem. Media organisations reduce historical complexity to moral simplification. Administrators confuse public responsibility with symbolic virtue.

And precisely within that vacuum modern antisemitism begins once more to flourish.

The abandoned community

It is precisely here that the position of the Jewish-Israeli community becomes painfully significant.

The very community that post-war Europe regarded as the moral compass of its own civilisational catastrophe increasingly experiences a growing sense of abandonment today. Not merely because of physical antisemitism, but because of the hesitant posture adopted by institutions once expected unequivocally to defend its security and civic standing.

The symbolic distance between public authority and the Jewish community appears to have widened in proportion to the degree that progressive elites increasingly interpret politics through postcolonial frameworks of power. Within this moral schema Israel appears less and less as the refuge of a historically persecuted people and more and more as a representative of Western power. Consequently the emotional hierarchy of victimhood shifts as well.

The result is an uneasy silence surrounding the growing insecurity felt by many Dutch Jews — a silence made all the more disturbing given Europe’s historical responsibility towards its Jewish communities.

The uncomfortable reality is that a significant part of the Dutch elite has gradually abandoned the Jewish-Israeli community. Not formally, not explicitly, but culturally and morally. Solidarity has become conditional. Understanding dependent upon political positioning. Jewish concerns regarding antisemitism are increasingly met with relativisation, contextualisation and references to geopolitics.

As though Jews must first morally distance themselves from Israel before their vulnerability may be fully recognised.

That marks a profound historical rupture. After 1945 Europe implicitly accepted that Jewish security should never again depend upon political fashion or social convenience. Today that certainty appears to be eroding.

This process is reinforced by the moral vocabulary of contemporary multiculturalism. Within a postcolonial worldview, conflicts are increasingly interpreted through binaries of oppressor and oppressed, power and victimhood, whiteness and marginality. Israel becomes reduced to a symbol of Western power, while the historical reality of Jewish vulnerability fades into the background. In turn, the ability to recognise antisemitism when it emerges within new ideological coalitions begins to disappear as well.

Even sections of the organised Jewish establishment appear unable adequately to respond to this cultural transformation.

Too often the response remains confined to the language of dialogue, connection and conversation, as though the present situation were still defined primarily by misunderstandings solvable through sufficient goodwill. Yet that phase appears largely to have passed. Contemporary antisemitism is no longer merely a communicative problem; it has increasingly become embedded within broader ideological structures in which anti-Western ressentiment, identity politics and anti-Zionism converge.

Institutional reflexes formed within the moral landscape of the post-war decades appear increasingly incapable of confronting a cultural reality that has fundamentally changed.

Christopher Lasch described how modern elites steadily detach themselves from the cultural reality of their own societies. They continue speaking the language of procedure, nuance and therapeutic dialogue whilst the underlying social cohesion has already begun to fracture. Perhaps this also explains the impotence of many institutional responses to contemporary antisemitism: insufficient recognition that the crisis has become not merely political, but civilisational.

A civilisation uncertain of its own foundations ultimately loses the capacity to protect its minorities as well.

For that reason the position of the Jewish community increasingly feels like a warning sign, not merely for Jews themselves, but for the condition of Dutch civilisation as a whole. Historically, the treatment of Jewish communities has often served as a measure of a society’s broader moral and cultural health.

Perhaps that is the most disturbing insight of all.

Not that the Netherlands has changed, every society changes, but that the country increasingly no longer knows what it wishes to preserve. The Dutch crisis is ultimately not economic or administrative, but a crisis of cultural loyalty. A civilisation that no longer loves itself eventually loses the ability genuinely to protect others as well.

Roger Scruton understood that civilisation is sustained not primarily by laws or economic systems, but by love: love of place, history, custom, landscape and continuity. Once elites replace that love with perpetual self-relativisation, a society may continue functioning as a state whilst steadily ceasing to function as a home.

Perhaps civilisations do not perish when their borders disappear, but when their elites cease believing their civilisation deserves preservation. Once loyalty is replaced by suspicion towards the native inheritance, a nation slowly transforms into a collection of individuals without a shared moral centre.

George Steiner understood perhaps better than most Europeans of the twentieth century that civilisation is never secure. The same Europe that produced Bach, Rembrandt, Spinoza and Goethe also revealed itself capable of barbarism and annihilation. Culture, Steiner knew, does not sustain itself automatically through prosperity, institutions or technological progress alone. It survives only when successive generations continue to feel responsible for what they have inherited.

The loss of home is therefore ultimately not geographical, but spiritual. A society ceases to feel like home when its history is remembered only as guilt, its culture regarded merely as a structure of power, and its institutions no longer possess the courage to defend the civilisation that produced them.

Perhaps that is the deepest uncertainty haunting the contemporary Netherlands: not that it has changed, but that it no longer knows why it should preserve itself at all.