Death of the Dutch Dream

The line of people snaking around the stairwell in Amsterdam's Stopera yesterday was modest, and the collection of sad plastic-wrapped carnations propped in front of the tables rather underwhelming. But the resolve of those who had turned up at the city hall to sign books of condolence was undiminished. "I am so mad I cannot speak," said Andrei Venecourt, his lips set tersely against the chill wind that nipped through the Dutch city, battering the early-blooming tulips in the city squares. "It's unbelievable. Unbelievable. It is a crime against Holland. How could this happen here?"

It was the only question anyone was asking yesterday in Amsterdam. "Holland is tolerant and peaceful," said Umar Arif, 22, a student from the Hague, shaking his head blankly at the strangeness of it all. "We are very laid back here. It feels like something that would happen in America, but not here."

If the Dutch are still reeling from the murder of Pim Fortuyn, the extravagant, gay, rightwing millionaire-lecturer-turned-journalist-turned-politician who had injected a flash of vibrant - if distasteful - colour into Holland's moribund political scene, the rest of Europe has been finding it just as hard to reconcile the events of the past few days with its image of Holland.

Wasn't Holland supposed to be Europe's great liberal success story, a small, over-achieving nation navigating a bold and progressive course though many of the social problems blighting its neighbours? Didn't the Dutch enjoy some of the highest living standards in Europe and a health service that was the envy of the world? Weren't we just coming round to the view that in areas of social policy such as drugs, teenage sex and euthanasia, the Dutch way was best? Weren't they just, well, a very civilised lot?

As he cruised through Amsterdam helping out hippy squatters with their shopping and explaining his country's radical approach to burglary ("we've legalised it"), Harry Enfield's policeman character, Captain Stefan Van Der Haast Graacht, embodied the stereotype of good-natured tolerance. Showing off his truncheon and handcuffs, he once memorably explained: "Of course, dere are very strict guidelines for deir deployment . . . De Commissioner of de Police only lets us use dem in emergencies, and in our private sex games." Who'd have thought Captain Van Der Haast would be called on to investigate a political assassination? Come to think of it, who'd have thought a man who advocated the closing of the country's borders to immigrants could rise so spectacularly on Captain Van Der Haast's patch?

In Holland itself, the shock is rarely far below the surface. In Rotterdam, where the streets would have been full of Feyenoord fans looking forward to last night's Uefa cup final clash with Borussia Dortmund, the atmosphere was muted. "I'm glad the match is being played," said Feyenoord fan Koert van Mook, "Pim would have wanted it. But in some ways the result does not matter any more." Another fan, Martijn Kluynen from Limburg captured the mood: "I don't really know what to feel any more, OK, now we watch some football and the cup but then . . ."

Fortuyn's rise and assassination are not the only signs that all is not well across the North Sea. Last month the entire Dutch government, led by the Labour prime minister Wim Kok, resigned en masse after the publication of a damning report it had itself commissioned into the conduct of Dutch troops in Bosnia in 1995. The Dutch battalion, the report found, while supposedly charged with keeping the peace on behalf of the UN, had handed up to 8,000 Muslim refugees in Srebrenica over to Bosnian Serb forces, "in full awareness that the fate of the men was uncertain". What followed was one of the most grotesque massacres of modern times, the Serb troops tying the men up and shooting them late into the night, then bulldozing their corpses into mass graves as the outnumbered Dutch troops, who had refused American offers of intelligence assistance, could only look on.

"Humanitarian motivations and political ambitions drove the Netherlands to undertake an ill-conceived and virtually impossible peace mission," the report concluded tartly. The little nation that once ruled great swathes of the globe, proud of its all-round liberal niceness and tradition of punching above its weight internationally, had allowed hubris to go to its head with catastrophic results.

"The Dutch always have this Calvinistic attitude to everybody else, telling them what to do and considering themselves rather better than them," says Jan Zielonka, a leading Dutch academic and professor of political science at the European University Institute in Florence. "They are somewhat patronising to other countries. This was totally shattered by the Srebrenica issue, when it occurred to the Dutch people that nothing at all was perfect about Holland, especially not the government. In Holland, somehow, everyone assumed that this was a country with no problems. Srebrenica showed that the government itself didn't know what it was doing."

In a country prone to introspection and acutely aware of its its own image, Srebrenica and the Fortuyn murder have triggered a painful bout of self-examination. And when it rains, it pours: yesterday a nurse in the Hague was charged with the serial murder of 14 people - babies, young children and elderly patients - at four hospitals over more than four years. What's more, next month the Dutch will have to suffer the indignity of watching the World Cup finals unfold without any prospect of glory - the country's team, arguably one of the world's best, somehow failed to qualify. "It's absolutely humiliating," Arif said yesterday, "it's a national catastrophe. Every single one of our players on our national team is world class. How could we lose to Ireland?"

So how did a nation that not so long ago seemed a model of successful immigration policy spawn Fortuyn? Peter Van Ham, a senior research fellow at the Clingendael Institute of international relations at the Hague, attributes his rise to mounting popular dissafection with the particular brand of consenus politics of which the Dutch were long regarded as masters. "We have been very proud of consensus politics in this country, but the government had such big problems finding consensus behind closed doors that it could not afford to do so in open parliament. So the Dutch parliament has become a charade, a circus for the voters. People felt they were being overlooked, that no one spoke for them. And here, at last, was a man who gave voice to a lot of things that people have felt for some time that they couldn't say in the public domain."

Certainly Fortuyn made a virtue of saying the unsayable. He believed that "16m Dutch people is enough", that asylum seekers should be admitted "only in exceptional circumstances", that Islam was a "backward religion". "You want more?" he once addressed drug addicts, "An overdose? Go ahead!" In a European climate that was beginning to show cracks in its liberal facade, he gave voice to a hard-right constituency that was finding its voice across the continent to the alarm and distaste of many.

But - and this is the enigma of Fortuyn - it is difficult to find anyone on the streets of Amsterdam who believed that he was a racist, as his enemies, and many dispassionate commentators since his death, have labelled him. Paolo Sergio, 31, a medical secretary whose parents came to Holland from Cape Verde when he was a child, said that many black people feared Dutch society would become more tense and less safe following Fortuyn's assassination, but that he wasn't a racist. "It wasn't good that he thought immigration should be stopped, but I agreed with many of his policies." Arif, a Muslim whose parents emigrated from Pakistan, agreed.

"He was more of a comedian than a politician. He said that Islam is a backward religion but he didn't mean it. Sure, it was dangerous because some people can get the wrong impression, and if he had become prime minister we might have seen his real face. But he was just very smart. To get the people's attention he said a few shocking things. When he had their attention he toned them down, to attract a different kind of support."

Dutch society, similarly, has become simply too complex to fit comfortably into the myth of liberal tolerance it had cast for itself. Key to the apparent Dutch social successes has always been an unofficial policy of "gedoogbelied" which essentially translates as turning a blind eye to all but the most serious transgressions. Holland's liberal policies on drugs, sex and euthanasia in fact had less to do with tolerance than pragmatism. Criminalising so-called social evils such as drug abuse and prostitution, the reasoning went, would simply drive them underground. What the policy ignored, or at best postponed, was the fact that at some point the inevitable problems of addiction, crime and poverty that any affluent society will encounter would have to be addressed. The emergence of a pragmatic personality politician, raised to prominence without ideological imperatives to keep silent on such issues, was perhaps an inevitability in Holland.

And in Fortuyn, at last, the Netherlands had a politician who encapsulated many of the complexities and contradictions of Dutch society that other politicians had apparently sought to deny. The openly gay politician who preached intolerance of immigrants in order to protect Holland's legendary tolerance; the former Marxist academic who was happy to espouse rightwing policies; the apparent racist (he strongly denied it) who surrounded himself with non-white faces. Fortuyn's was not a coherent political strategy in the mould of any comparable European politician - and it was this admission of his own internal contradictions that was behind his remarkable, sudden appeal to the Dutch electorate. "You could say that Fortuyn encapsulated a lot of the complexities of Dutch society," said Van Ham. "And with his death, we have a period of real uncertainty that is dawning. It's a time of almost religious reflection for us. It means that bad things happen to us as well. We are not the innocent society we thought we were. Holland is a country with all the same warts as any other. We knew that, of course, but until now we have managed to hide it from other countries. And now the Netherlands will have to think again about what it stands for."