BEFORE the assassination of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, the Dutch were apt to give you the impression that they had cracked the secret of life and knew without doubt how it ought to be lived. They viewed other, less enlightened societieswhich meant all the rest-with a kind of complacent pity, tempered by the certainty that eventually even the most benighted of them would follow where the Netherlands led.
All that has changed. Whatever other effects the two murders have had, they have rendered the Dutch and their society much more interesting than when Holland was merely the land that permitted everything. The era of complacency is over; that of anxiety and doubt has well and truly begun. For the first time in several decades, liberal consensus is not enough; real thought has become necessary in Holland. In the not-distant past, Holland’s less-than-glorious performance during its occupation of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia)-and its violent attempt to reestablish its power there after the Second World War was over-acted as a reproach to any Dutch conservatism or sense of national pride. But far from remaining a liberal paradise in which it is heresy to question the tenets of multiculturalism, Holland has become a country in which fear of inter-ethnic and religious strife is never far from the surface.
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