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,........

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