Amsterdam Rednecks

There are a lot of people in Amsterdam who have never been there. Well, physically they are present within the city limits, in the tightly-knit continuum of work – supermarket – home – pub, which has precious little to do with the bustling cosmopolitan port of Amsterdam, a melting pot of nations, cultures and cuisines, the springboard to the world.

Even among the supposedly enlightened educated middle-class professionals I know people who have never met a gay person, have never eaten a shrimp and whose idea of a vacation abroad is going camping to Belgium in a caravan stocked with frozen Dutch food. Amsterdam may be host to 160 nationalities but most people stay in their ethnic comfort zone, hanging out exclusively with their own kind.

It must be the same deal everywhere: only a fraction of big cities’ populations are interested in international lifestyles. Tokyo may have baffling scores of authentic ethnic restaurants frequented by locals but that is as far as 9 out of 10 Tokyoites venture out in their kokusaika (move towards a more cosmopolitan society) quest. “Japanese restaurant on Monday, Indian on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, Carribbean – not too spicy please” may be a New York socialites’ lunch schedule but they wouldn’t be able (and care) to locate on the map where the cuisine comes from.

Amsterdam is world- renown as a vibrant bulwark of liberalism, the beacon of tolerance and multi- culturalism but in reality more than a half of the autochtoon (ethnic Dutch) populace here are first- generation arrivals from staunch Protestant and Catholic villages where lifestyles and views are not much different from the American Bible Belt. The official Dutch social policy of verzuiling (pillarisation), still alive in practice and people’s minds today, likens the Netherlands to a sail ship, where the sails (classes, races and religious groups) hang separately on separate masts but all contribute to propelling the Dutch ship forward.

With such live-and-let-live attitudes prevalent in the city, the pressure to integrate is non-existent. Acceptance is never asked for, while doggedly cultivated indifference is marketed as tolerance. Back home in the Dutch flatland hicks, those very same recent urbanite converts would time after time keep electing Christian Democrats whose programme is a very far cry from what we think of as Dutch liberalism. In the city, tolerance exists on the level of general ideas, as the Dutch Dream, a self-image that probably cropped up as a defence mechanism against the sense of national guilt about Dutch collaboration during the WWII.

This carefully cultivated identity appears more and more divorced from reality as daily challenges of living in a racially mixed society prove too much to handle for tender Dutchness. Many burgers find refuge in their set daily routines and racist tabloid headlines. But then again, this is nothing new nor endemically Dutch.