hear a lot of sweeping proclamations about what Amsterdammers are like. I've been told they are tall, sexy, businesslike, tolerant, intolerant, brave, lazy, humorless, hilarious, stingy, liberal, and blonde. All these things are true in some observer's experience. And everyone wants to believe that having seen some of the world, they understand most of it.
Okay, a lot of original Dutch people are terrifyingly tall. Its just natural selection: with all the flooding in early Dutch history, those whose heads happened to be above water would live to sire future generations. I just wish they'd stand at the back of the crowd on memorial day so the rest of us could at least catch a glimpse of the queen's hat.
But listen. The people living in Amsterdam are from everywhere, and as far as I know they're all different, every last one. If somebody tells you the Amsterdammers are like this or like that, no matter how clever they sound, think twice before you believe them. Life is complicated.
Register Amsterdam and O+S (the bureau of investigation and statistics) tell us that at the beginning of 2003, there were 736,000 people here — with 176 different nationalities. The real number is certainly higher because not everyone is registered — there are illegal immigrants, and some tourists who just forgot to go home. Of those registered, 73 percent are Dutch nationals; 26 percent are either foreign born or dual citizens. The other 1 percent fall in the cracks between categories, like people who don't know what their nationality is. I mean some people might get bumped on the head on their way here.
Among those foreign-borns we can, by the way, count almost 19,000 folks from largely English-speaking countries: Australia, Canada, Great Britain and its territories, Ireland, New Zealand, and the US.
Working with the O+S numbers and my somewhat dim knowledge of world geography, I've tried below to sketch out roughly what portions of Amsterdam's foreign-borns come from where in the world. (It's getting harder to guess what's "Balkan" or "Eastern Europe" nowadays, so I just included everybody from Norway to Greece to Byelorus as European. Forgive me.)
The reason the numbers for Central Asia and North Africa look high is because there are some 35,000 Turkish and nearly 60,000 Moroccan nationals registered in Amsterdam.
But counting nationalities doesn't give a whole picture of the immigration profile. During the twentieth century a series of former Dutch colonies became independent. Each time that happened, a crowd of people got instant Dutch nationality, and came to the Netherlands with their families. Thus a young person who outwardly appears to be Indonesian, Molukkan, Surinamese, Antillian, etc, may in fact be second or even third-generation Dutch. Right now the Surinamese descendants in Nederland already outnumber the population of Suriname.
During the 1970s and 80s thousands of "Mediterranean work-migrants" from Morocco, Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia were invited here to take jobs other Nederlanders didn't want. Now they have settled, and their kids are growing up, sometimes feeling adrift in this society.
Nederlanders as a whole are aging: the number of people over age 65 has almost doubled since 1950. But not so for Amsterdam, which is staying relatively young. That either means the old Amsterdammers are moving out of town, or the city is killing them off at an alarming rate. (Just kidding.)
In any case, the cultural makeup of Amsterdam is changing. And this is not a new thing. Tides of humanity have swept these low lands several times before in search of fortune or refuge. To some extent Amsterdam has always been immigrant-driven. But today the trend has a lot of people nervous. Some paler Nederlanders are troubled by the shift in population balance and what it may portend for their samenleving. (I know samenleving sounds like something you spread on a cracker, but it just means "living together" or society.)
Just over 17 percent of Nederland's population belong to what the government calls "non-western ethnic minorities." What they mean by that is a bit baffling: Surinamers (from South America) are non-western, but the Japanese (from Asia) are considered western. Go figure. "Western" seems to be a weird euphemism for "coming from a complex industrialized economy which we historically never happened to patronize." The people-counters are keeping careful track of this who's who because it's a sensitive subject. About two thirds of population growth by 2010 is expected to be among non-westerners or so-called allochtonen. The Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek can even tell you exactly how fertile the average Moroccan woman is.
Why do the authorities — and lately the media — have so much more to say about non-western minorities than they do about, oh, say the slavic immigrants here?
It's because of the ambient cultural tensions. If a guy from Slovakia acts a bit weird, visibly he's just another weird white guy. But when somebody looks different and acts different, it's easier to associate one with the other. And if, like so many humans, you are genetically programmed to fear the loss of turf to incursions by alien tribes, you may notice a wave of xenophobia rising at the back of your otherwise civilized throat. Especially when the economy hits a speed bump, your tax-base for funding the utopian "care-state" begins to evanesce, and government services start getting trimmed. That's what's happening here now — and it's not terribly dissimilar to what happened in the 1930s.
Racism is still very much a dirty word here. The legacy of Nederland's sometimes passive, sometimes not so passive role in the Holocaust is something the nation prefers to decisively leave behind. Anti-racism is a very firm matter of government policy. But still, some people are torn — and others downright furious — about how their world is changing.
And I should point out that the cultural tensions are not only about "white" versus "less white." My Armenian friend will have nothing to do with Afghanis. And some niet-westersen folks moving in to the brand new neighborhood of De Aker expressed disappointment at finding themselves sharing a street with other allochtone families. They had thought they were "moving on up."
Lately it's something people no longer mutter under their breath about. They're getting more outspoken — in the press, in the theater, in the bar — about whatever irritates them in each other's cultures. New political movements rise which are at least partly powered by fear. How far do they rise before they fall? Time will tell.
We read about this or that gang trouble around the western suburbs, and very often the newspaper tells us whether the suspects were or were not of Moroccan descent. In a fall 2003 survey, 80 percent of respondents confessed that they really do not like Moroccans. Maybe the other 20 percent were Moroccans, I dunno. Some folks in the poll voted to simply "send them all back on a boat" — nevermind the fact that the young people in question were born here and are legally Dutch.
We read one scary report in the paper about unidentified public school teachers who say they cannot teach a history lesson about the Holocaust — because the teenage Moroccan boys in class will not permit it. We read that said boys are spouting anti-semitic rhetoric as a manly gesture of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. If true, this would seem bitterly ironic; cuz if the world's most successful anti-semites were here running things again now as they did in the early 1940s, they would almost certainly be packing their eastbound trains with Moroccans, right along with Jews and Turks and whoever else didn't fit their Aryan spec.
But then, a week or two goes by and we read in the same paper that the previous story was exaggerated, that things aren't that bad in the schools. (This happens a lot in Het Parool — a story is published reporting someone's assertion, to be contradicted the next week by someone else's.)
My down-to-earth Jordanees friend, who is himself not against a little police brutality now and then, tells me the Moroccan thing is totally blown out of proportion by the media. Another friend tells me the Moroccans have a PR problem, that most Nederlanders distrust them simply because they cleave together, refuse to blend in, and blame all their troubles on the rest of the samenleving.
I'm not very well integrated myself, and I have no Moroccan friends. All I've ever seen with my own eyes is the occasional bunch of boys acting all kinda tough and rowdy in public — so that even if they were not actually threatening anybody, your older paler Neds might tend to feel threatened by their demeanor. I remind myself that it's human nature to see the visible and notice the noticable. Loud boisterous guys are the ones we notice, and being a pattern-forming species, we will connect appearances to behaviors. We do not normally scan the ethnicities of all the quiet unassuming people sitting around us on the tram minding their own business. We base our conclusions on the most salient details of our perceived reality.
I simply do not know the reality — for example, what the real crime statistics are for Moroccan teenagers. I can believe that a bunch of kids who never asked to be born into this society feel alienated when they can't get work here. I can believe that a certain adolescent machismo could combine with a feeling of strength in numbers, and the boys might express their personal anger as collective aggression. I can believe that any misbehavior on their part would lead to further mistrust, and mistrust would lead to more alienation, and so on, in a downward spiral.
All that is easy for me to believe — but I do not know it.
What I do know is that reading the newspaper has begun to skew the way I think about Moroccans. It strirkes me when Het Parool openly calls them "Marokkaantjes" (little Moroccans). Jesus, I subscribed to that newspaper because of its origin as an anti-Nazi underground! What is up with that?
A friend who grew up here and probably knows better than I do tells me simply, "Integration in the Netherlands has failed." Now, my eyes don't entirely bear that out: riding the number 1 every day I do see young people from many ethnic origins hanging on each other, chatting, joking. But they're mostly girls or young women. Is sticking with your own people a guy thing? Or am I generalizing again?
One divisive issue in public consciousness right now is the question of whether Islamic girls should be permitted or forbidden to continue wearing their traditional headwear in public school. The Dutch are watching what France is gonna do about it. One school of thought says that since Nederland and its institutions are "non-confessional" — ie they do not endorse any particular religion — therefore people should be forbidden from displaying religious symbols in state-run public buildings. The teacher desires to be ignorant of who belongs to which faith or culture. That view is also fueled by the claim that the headgear is a token of women's oppression in Muslim society. Maybe it is, but isn't that for them to decide? Now, I happen to be of the mind that most religion is oppression. And if everyone on earth, including women, could suddenly shake off all their miscellaneous cultural slaveries, no one would be better pleased than I. But I don't think you achieve that liberation by force of law. As we strip off all other emblems of cultural allegiance we become naked before the state. For me that is no better than state-worship: "you shall have no other gods before me." Once you forbid people to appear in public as the are, you might as well just shave our heads, give us striped pyjamas, and tattoo a number on our forearms. Forgive me, but that would be fucking goofy. And I predict that it won't go over very well here — unless some extreme rightwing government comes to power.
But let's not kid each other, this isn't about preserving the ideological purity of state-run edifices. This is about Europeans being afraid of Muslims.
I am afraid too. When I see a young woman wearing the trad scarf, no matter how garrulous or schoolgirllish she may be acting, I feel like I'm not supposed to be seeing her at all. I know — from the two Islamic acquaintances I do have in the world — that she is not allowed to shake my hand. If I mustn't shake her hand or see her hair, then I assume I should also not look too closely into her eyes, or even be so bold as to give her a friendly good-morning smile. My impression is that it would be impolite for me to know this human being.
And that is ridiculous, and that is my point. The pure fact is we just don't know what to make of each other. But she grew up here; she is an Amsterdammer. I am a newbie.
Last night I was riding the 17 into the Baarsjes, and a woman got on the tram whose head and face were completely veiled. An instantaneous pang shot right across my well-meaning, all-embracing humanism. It was as if I were seeing a ghost. How will I, for whom consciousness of someone's humanity has always involved recognizing signs of their humanity (such as a face), ever be able to quell that reaction? And then again, am I really obliged to suppress it?
Meanwhile back at the bar, a white Dutch man tells me — apparently as a friendly remark — that he likes Americans, because "you are the only people doing something to stop the Islamics."
Okay now that kinda shit scares me.
I may get frightened of people who are not like me. But what frightens me more is that maybe the political, cultural and economic tensions here only need a few more nudges in the wrong direction before things get really ugly again. Maybe it won't be machine-age fascism with big steel and heavy boots. It may be a microfascism, feathery, a thing digital and soft.
By the way, if you enjoyed those population statistics I got off the Register Amsterdam web site, take a trip to the Verzetsmuseum sometime. One of the items on display there is a map using data gathered by the Bevolkingsregister (predecessors of Register Amsterdam). The map shows the city with an overlay of black dots, with higher concentrations on certain streets. That map was ordered in mid-January 1941 by a guy named Hans Böhmker, recently-appointed Beauftragte für die Stadt Amsterdam, and long-time member of the Nazi party. Each dot represents ten Jews.
