“The state is not the enemy”: Interview with Prof. Wijnand Mijnhardt

Laura York and Kryztof Urban

The following interview was conducted in March 2002. Professor Mijnhardt was a visiting professor from the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, as part of an exchange program between the history departments of UCLA and UU. He specializes in Dutch 18^th century, cultural, and early modern history.

KU: First things first: how does a Dutch expert on Dutch history end up in Los Angeles?

WM: I think this is a long-term relationship with what has been a very minimal beginning. The first time I’ve actually been here was in 1985 on a William Andrews Clark summer fellowship that allowed me to stay here for two months. It was a seminar with about six American and European post-doctoral scholars. We were under the directorship of Margaret Jacob, which I already knew for a couple of years, because she had been travelling the Netherlands widely to do research. We almost immediately became friends, as we were interested in the same type of history and the same type of ideas and developments. Since that time I’ve been in Los Angeles on and off, because I like Los Angeles, I like the city, and I like the holdings of the library. That’s a real problem in the Netherlands in general: we don’t have as much money to spend as you have on libraries. Of course, you can say there are so many universities here which don’t have a good library at all, but the few good ones that are there, the good research universities, they have tremendous holdings. And I’m not interested so much of course in primary sources because when you do European history you don’t need to go to the United States for primary sources, only in very specific cases. But you have great holdings of secondary literature that we would never be able to buy. So if I want to consult those books in the Netherlands then I have to travel all around the Netherlands, or even to Paris or London. And here you have them all in the stacks, and that is marvelous. So it is much more efficient to do book research here in LA than to do it in the Netherlands.

LY: What is the status of Dutch studies in the UCLA history department?

WM: By an act of God—you never know how things like that happen - Margaret Jacob [Professor, UCLA Department of History] became professor here in UCLA. We already had been pondering the idea that it would be interesting to do something about Dutch history in the European curriculum in the US, because it is largely ignored, and that’s a pity, not because I’m a nationalist—I am also a nationalist, but that’s a different story—but because I think the Dutch experience is very interesting to the European experience as it’s in many cases different. And I think history should always make us attentive to things that are different, and not to things that are similar, because we don’t learn very much from similar things. And so we started to think about the idea, and we decided to do two things at a time: we first should try to mount a Utrecht-UCLA exchange for faculty and graduate students. That’s what we did, and the system works very well. I was the first to come here, and a professor from UCLA is now at Utrecht University, Claudia Rapp. And there are already people here lining up who would like to go next, and people in the Netherlands would like to come here during the next couple of years. So I think that the faculty exchange will go from there. That’s very good, not only for people to study Dutch history, but also the way the Dutch do their humanities research might be of interest to people here. But apart from that we also decided to try to get a sort of Dutch center in place.

KU: You mean here at UCLA?

WM: At UCLA, a Dutch history center that will allow for a Dutch professor to come here for a quarter, every time a different one. And that center should also take care of graduate students on both sides of the Atlantic. Dutch graduate students who want to come here (some Dutch students are here now, some will come later in the year) but also graduate funding enabling UCLA students to conduct research in the Netherlands, getting travel fees, living expenses etc paid. That’s what we’ve been trying to put into place this year. We have now, I think, a very effective fund raising committee, and that has pledged itself to get in the money involved within the next two or three years, and then we hope to have that center here officially. But in the meantime, we already have begun. Last year was a very successful year, because I never knew why and how, but three or four graduate students got hooked on Dutch history. I suppose I was thinking when I came here last year that it would be just nice to teach here for a while. But I never expected that so many people as a result would want to incorporate part of Dutch history into their research. But three or four students were interested. That remarkable phenomenon gave us the idea: maybe we should try and build on that growing interest already now for a bit, because the fire is now burning, so let’s keep it alight. If in the near future a Dutch center is going to be a reality from the money side, we hope that the center already will be there, virtually, but not yet institutionalized, and it’s much easier to institutionalize something that already is a going concern.

KU: Are there other Dutch centers on the west coast?

WM: Of course you have Berkeley with professor Jan de Vries, but he is an economic historian. That is not any criticism on him, he’s a great historian, but what we want to have here is a Dutch history center that is beginning with Dutch history in the 13th century and that is going on until the present day. We will put some emphasis on the early modern period, because for that period it’s the least complex to explain why Dutch history is relevant to the European experience. But I think the other periods are just as interesting. For instance, one of the students here, Laura York, is working on map-making in France and the Republic in the17th and 18th centuries and Sara Hendren will be comparing jazz in Paris and Amsterdam in the beginning of the 20^th century. I think that of course it is much too early to talk about success, but as a concept, as an idea, the Dutch center is very alluring. And there are many more topics like that to be discussed and to be worked on. People are always complaining there is so little done in Dutch history, and that’s true. Not because Dutch historians are lazy, but … people tend to forget that Dutch history as a theme is just as big as American history, has just as many questions and topics, just the same amount of historical problems as England has or the United States has or France has. But how many people are working on French history? They are legions, all over the world! How many people are working on Dutch history? It’s a small number, maybe 200. So there are so many topics left that can be studied successfully. And I think that American students have a lot to contribute to Dutch history. American graduates are very good at is conceptualizing history. They are better at that in general than Dutch students.

KU: What do you mean by “conceptualizing history”?

WM: You see, Americans want to work not so much in history itself, they are interested in historical problems. That’s the way they are trained. That has also to do with the system here. Here you have a –how should I say—a master-pupil relationship with your committee and with your dissertation advisor, because he’s going to be there all your life. That’s the way it works. So you get many schools here, if you understand what I mean. People have certain ideas, certain ways to looking at things, and they’re trying to bring that over to their students. If they are very good professors, they are given their leeway as well, but still, American graduate students are working within models. I’m not thinking so much theoretical models, but explanatory models. In the Netherlands, we don’t always work that way. We have a much more, I would say, German way of looking at things: when people are going to study something, and they’re going to do some kind of archival research, they don’t start out with a problem, but with a topic. Of course both approaches have their inherent dangers. The good thing about the Dutch approach is that from a historical perspective it’s very sound. Though it sometimes can be very dull, and you ask yourself “Why do I want to know all those dull things?” The problem with the American approach—and now of course I’m simplifying—is that they are thinking in models, in terms of the big questions, and they are just looking for enough material (secondary or primary) to support the model. And that’s of course a danger too, because history is much too complicated can’t be simply fit into models, and you have to be very careful. But I always like it when I see an American graduate student paper. You see, graduate students can write a paper on any subject, especially the first four or five pages, they’re always looking great, there’s a great introduction to the problem, it has very nice footnotes, and it is well researched and well written. But then they start having a problem because after that you need to have the facts to fit the problem. Our students are the other way around. They come to present me with an enormous amount of facts and they often don’t know how to organize those facts into something that’s coherent. So our way of doing history and your way of doing history, I think if they were put together it would be fruitful.

LY: I’m curious why you decided to become a historian, and why a cultural historian.

WM: I never decided to become a historian. It came to me. I hated school from my 4th class on, I think that’s the 10th grade with your class system, but I already was an avid reader. And the only thing I wanted to do when I went to university was to continue reading, because that seemed interesting to me. I was very young and naïve. I went to the university in Utrecht and asked whether it was possible to make a combination of Scandinavian languages, German languages, and English languages. That’s what I wanted to study so that I could continue to read. Now of course the university would never allow that sort of levity, so I had to choose, and I chose English language and literature. I went in there, and then of course I never got any literature, I had classes in phonetics, and I went to language labs and all that, and I hated it. And I had some friends who were reading history. They were telling me nice stories, and I was lying in my bed at night and wondering,  “Why am I studying English? I don’t want to study English.” So after three months I quit English and began to study history. Since I have never stopped liking history. I enjoyed history when I was in school, but we had that type of teacher that everyone knows, that was very thorough, but very uninteresting. I thought history was interesting, but I liked novels more. And that changed then—I like history more now and novels less.

LY: Where does your interest in the 18th century come from?

WM: At university. I noticed something remarkable, that nobody did actually anything on Dutch 18th century history. Nothing on Dutch history since the 1660s until the 1850s, because that was the age of decline. According to many historians, 18^th century people were just not able to understand what was going on in Europe, just as they were not able to understand what was going on in the economy. And that enormous amount of stupidity that was ascribed to those two centuries, that was impossible to me, that couldn’t be. Of course there must have been unintelligent people, but not that many, and not just during two centuries. So that’s what I started out to do, already very early in my student career, doing 18th century history, first in Europe and then in the Netherlands. Everybody was discouraging me from that, because they wanted me to do the real history. “Don’t do 18th century history that is bad for your career. Do 17th century history, or contemporary history, or the history of the Dutch revolt, those are the great topics.” And to do the revolt of the 16th century against Spain, that was also interesting from a European perspective. And the 17th century of course was the Golden Age, everybody knew that, that’s also internationally interesting. And the 20th century is interesting because it’s contemporary history. And very early I started out to think, first we have to restore the 18th century to what it’s really worth – maybe it’s not a great age, but it’s not the island of stupidity that people are taking it for – and the only way to do it, is to study the Dutch 18^th century from a European perspective …in short it was my aim to convince people that not only Dutch 17th century was internationally relevant history, but also Dutch 18th century history. That’s when I met Margaret Jacob. She was not so much interested in later 18^th century history, but in the first part of the 18th century. Now at least I had an international partner, and that resulted in joined conferences, books, and activities. Not on a continuous basis, there have been years where we haven’t seen one another and worked separately. But sometimes we do things together, just like now we are busy on creating a new, larger international research program, which we hope will be funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and its Dutch equivalent on what we call the “The Transformation of the Republican ideal and the International Republican Conversation”: Republican thinking and Republican models 1660-1800, in which we’re going to include England, the Netherlands, Drance and America. Of course the hope is that if the Dutch history center is going to be there, the program can be supported by the center. And if it’s not going to happen, then at least I will have enjoyed myself very much here.

LY: How has Dutch historical scholarship, its historiography, changed during your career?

WM: It has changed very much. When I went to university, it was still very much a national history, it was very much a religiously oriented history, and it was still very much a political history. And what has happened since? First we lost the national orientation. That’s not typically a Dutch movement, but I think it’s important because at that moment younger Dutch historians began to interpret Dutch history as part of an international movement, and that was rare at the time. To put it otherwise, when I was a student, almost none of my professors went abroad. If somebody of my institute went abroad, that was an event! The whole institute knew about it, and everybody was very eager for the stories they he were to tell on their return. Dutch history was very insulated and provincial. And I think it’s my generation that first experienced the change. I went to university in 1968, so I’m of that generation, and we were international. Not because we were cleverer, but that was the way we thought the world should be organized. This has been a very important change for us, and that has brought about very important changes to Dutch openness for international historiography. And because we were very open from that moment, we wanted to know about what was going on in French, English, German, and American history. It came as some sort of surprise, especially for my generation, that many foreign historians did not have that kind of training yet, that familiarity with so many historiographic traditions. The only weakness is that if you are so open, you’re very adaptable, and that means you’re just following international hypes and models and whatever very quickly. And so from the 1970s on Dutch historians very quickly accepted the new models of socio-economic historiography. And then in the 1980s, the new cultural history slowly came into being. One of the professors who is now here, Lynn Hunt, did a very interesting book in the mid-1980s, called “The New Cultural History”. Now we adapted ourselves immediately to that, and that’s something I do not like that much. I’m not against the new cultural history, but I do not like very much that so many people think we’ve got to adopt something just because it’s international, because it’s new.

LY: When did you specialize in cultural history?

WM: You see I’m not really a cultural historian. I’m very much interested in cultural developments, but I feel myself first of all an early modernist. I’m interested in social processes and political processes and cultural processes, and in their interplay in the early modern period. I’ve not been trained as a cultural historian. We read history divided into periods: ancient, medieaval the early modern period, and I’ve been trained there, and I took my PhD in early modern history. I am a professor now of cultural history, because they abolished those traditional divisions and its professorships, and they replaced it by “Professor of political history”, “Professor of social history”, “Professor of cultural history”. Those were the job openings and I wanted to become a professor, it’s that simple. But if they came to change my title to “Professor of early modern history” I would be very grateful, because I always feel like I have to explain something, that I am not what people think that I might be. I know what intellectual history is, I know what political history is, I know what economic history is, but cultural history—that’s the rest, and including everything. That’s not a field.

KU: I’d like to focus a little bit on your work on Dutch Enlightenment and the role the Netherlands played in the Enlightenment. I remember growing up and going to school in Germany, I learned in my history classes that Enlightenment was a French invention. But in your article in the Rekenschap in 1998, “Nederland en de Verlichting”, your thesis is that the Dutch Republic was more advanced intellectually than France and England in the late 17th century. Could you fill in the details as to what the role of the Netherlands was for the enlightenment movement?

WM: I think there are two things in play here. First, at the time they taught you the standard view, the German standard view, of the Enlightenment as a French phenomenon, that view was already under attack, and it was replaced by the view that Enlightenment can be broken up into various national Enlightenments. And that was my first approach, too:  there must have been a Dutch Enlightenment, and, of course, the breakthrough of the national Enlightenment concept internationally gave it some support. Whatever I would find in the Netherlands could now be just dubbed national Enlightenment. But that was only the beginning. Soon I realized that a lot of things that were going on in the international Enlightenment were already there or already invented, already theorized about in the Dutch Republic in the 17th century. Very often in Latin, so they were not publicized widely, or very often in kinds of books and articles and publications that ordinary literary and intellectual historians would regard as second-rate, because their authors were seen as second rate literary authors nor did they belong to the canon of famous intellectuals.

KU: For example?

WM: Adriaen Koerbagh, for instance, and Lodewijk Meijer. Everybody knew about them, they were not unknown, they hadn’t been lying hidden all the time. And starting from two points, the fact that they were amateurs, and the fact that they were proposing ideas that would become much more relevant to the later European Enlightenment than people would have thought, I started—and I was not the only one, not at all—I started to think about those problems, “Why is it that we have been ignoring these people for so long, and secondly, why were those people thinking the way they were thinking, what problems were they addressing themselves to? And did these problems have specific Dutch origins?” And then I came accross two elements that were very important to me, and that was, firstly, the republican nature of the Dutch Republic, which of course was something exceptional in a European context, which even the Dutch themselves found often difficult to live with, because the model, the biblical model, the ideal model at the time was monarchical. Everybody was praising the monarchy: James I in England, Louis XIV in France, and everybody was just complaining about republics, because republics lead to chaos. But the Dutch Republic was not in chaos, the republic worked. Now, then secondly, the position of the author in the Netherlands seemed to be different. For example, you do not have a patronage system in the Dutch Republic. Sometimes you encounter dedications of books, but very often people are taking part in publications and in debates on their own initiative and on their own stature. They feel they have a role to play in society because they are part of a community that is commercial. Therefore they feel entitled to earn their money by just writing. It was a very difficult way of earning a living because it’s very badly paid, but that’s not the issue. The point is that they thought that they were allowed to do so because they were living in a commercial society. It is very interesting that you have a similar development in Dutch whoring in the 17^th century. Dutch whores see themselves as commercial entrepreneurs, they certainly do not see themselves as “maintenées” which they thought to be a French habit. They are on their own, they are not kept by anybody, they are not submitting to anyone. And it’s similar with the author—the author was not somebody who’s writing for somebody else, he’s writing for himself. And why is that? Of course we’re only replacing the problem all the time. That has to do with the fact that the Dutch Republic is a republic dominated by cities. And cities are extremely important, because the city gives people a specific position. You are part of the city community, you have specific rights in that city community. Maybe very limited political rights, but only very limited political rights in our understanding, because we think in terms of the one man one vote system. But you should be able to able to imagine other kinds of democracy as well. Dutch city dwellers were living in a different kind of system. If, as a Dutch 17^th century citizen, I am worried about the amount of heat or dampness caused by the industries in my street, I’m presenting myself to the burgomasters of the city and I will enter a complaint, and on the basis of that complaint I expect some new measures to be taken. Not always, of course, but in many cases it did. And almost all new legislation of the cities of the Republic is based on these kinds of requests of individual citizens. Now that is a completely different type of democracy than we now have. We are fixated on the French model that has been introduced at the end of the 18^th century. As a result, when studying systems in use before, we tend to look only for elements that make them look a little bit like a democracy as we know it, instead of interpreting them in their own right.  There were all kinds of democracies, and the Dutch one was a system that functioned. It gave people that had to lose something in society a say in those things that really mattered. Most people aren’t interested in international or even national politics, they are just interested in the things that are happening in their street or in their neighbourhood. That’s today the case, that was in the 18^th century the case, and in the 16th century that was the case. There is another sense in which the city in the Netherlands was completely new. It had completely usurped the countryside.

KU: There were relatively free cities in neighboring states. What made Dutch cities special?

WM: Yes, Hamburg for instance. Hamburg is a very important case in point that should be studied under the same perspective. But the interesting thing in the Netherlands is that very early Dutch cities have lost their dependancy upon agriculture to feed themselves. In the rest of Europe, governments always had a very uneasy relationship with “la campagne”, because bread is very important, and without bread, a monarch would not be able to govern. So the “campagne” is very important. For the Dutch the “campagne” from the 16th century onwards, was not essential anymore—well, of course it was important as a source of income, but it was specialized agriculture, it was cattle feeding, all kinds of specialized breeding, and market gardening. But the Dutch were able to feed themselves on the grain of the Baltic. And it was due to their commercial talents that they were able to feed themselves. And that means that you have—in an early modern perspective—a completely different way of looking at how a society is organized. And I think all those fundamental factors related to urbanization made it that the Dutch had different problems, maybe problems they had at an earlier stage than other people in Europe. For example: How do we explain and sustain our republic? And, if we are allowed as citizens to think for ourselves, if we are not just completely dominated by authority, then maybe we can find our own systems? And that’s what they did, although their results were not accepted widely. The result of all this debate at the end of the 17th century was a very workable modern republican compromise that became the basis of the Dutch 18th century Enlightenment. And the Dutch 18th century Enlightenment is different from what was happening elsewhere, in the sense that the Dutch at the end of the century were able to devise the blueprint of the modern social welfare state, not implementing it, but debating the model. They introduced the right of the citizen to be fed by the state, to be supplied work by the state, to get education from the state, and to be taken care of by the state in terms of health care. We should not forget that the introduction of the whole system was a complete failure. But that can be explained very easily, because of the Napoleonic occupation, which resulted in enormous public debt of the Netherlands, which amounted to about 400 percent of the GDP at the end of the Napoleonic period. [Explanatory Note: In 1795, French armies invaded the Dutch Republic, creating a Batavian Republic ruled as a satellite state by the French revolutionary government until 1806, when Napoleon Bonaparte abolished therepublic and established a monarchy in its place.] But the interesting thing is not only that the Dutch did have that enormous debt, which made it impossible to implement those new measures, but also that this was such a stable society that it was possible to carry a debt of 400 percent without everybody trying to flee the country. People stayed because of their different view of the state. … We have a completely different relationship with the state. The state is us, it is not something alien.

KU: There were two phases of Enlightenment in the Dutch history: a radical phase in the 17th century and then a mild phase at around 1750. What caused the end of the radical phase?

WM: The radical phase of course had never any chance.

KU: What happened to the people at the center of the radical movement?

WM: They died, some few died in prison. Moreover, if we take numbers into account, it was a very limited movement; but do not let us forget, the Enlightenment was also a very limited movement. And the final outcome of the Enlightenment was also a very moderate variety of the Enlightenment. The La Mettrie enlightenment, the Diderot enlightenment, the De Sade enlightenment, that was not the enlightenment of France of the 19th century, not at all. The Dutch moderates accomplished something very important. They were able to establish themselves as a sort of defenders of the traditional establishment on the one hand. At the same time, that enabled them to attack the real orthodox people to create a moderate compromise.

KU: Who were the moderates?

WM: The moderates were people who were basing themselves on non-authoritarian, libertarian principles like the Cartesian philosophy, but were still trying to find a compromise between Cartesian philosophy and sensible elements of the Christian religion. For instance very important in this respect was Hermann Röell, a professor from Franeker University, who professed for the first time, even before John Locke did, that the Christian religion is the most reasonable of all religions—which of course is nonsense, if you take it at word value, but the implication is very important. First of all you accept the Christian religion. But secondly you say at the same time that everything that’s in the bible and that’s not reasonable is not Christian. By that way, you’re taking the sting out of modernity. Thouh it was still modern, it was not radical anymore. Many of the real radicals, followers of Spinoza and Koerbagh, they didn’t think anything of religion. For them religion was just a way of deceiving the people. And that kind of thing you cannot get across; it is very interesting, but it doesn’t work. The radicals are intellectually very interesting, they are ideologically very interesting, they can serve as a basis for other schools of thought. But there is a problem here that still needs a lot of explaining: that the radical element which had been so effective in the 17th century, which was followed by a moderate compromise at the beginning of the 18th century, which was then built upon in a moderate enlightenment—why never, really never anymore, that radical element came back. I have some hypotheses about that. But I’m not fullly convinced by them. For me at the moment the very important factor in explaining the absence of radicalism, is that of decline, which 18^th century intellectuals saw as an essentially moral problem, because they didn’t have the economic apparatus and the concepts and ideas to be able to explain the enormous decline of the republic in economic terms. As a result they were just explaining it in moral terms. And in order to explain a decline in moral terms you need religion. It is a very big step then to say “No, we have a moral problem here, but we’re going to base our morality on an atheist philosophical system without taking any recourse to a god.” That did not happen, and that still is the problem to me. It is the overwhelming fear about what was happening to the Republic, because it was a very important state in the 17th century, and it became a minor state in the 18^th century. And if you try to compare it to something similar, take a look at England. England was a major power in Europe, even after the Second World War. Now it’s nothing anymore. Of course, as partners of the United States, they might still send five Tornado fighters to war zones, but the Americans send 500. But the pathetic thing is that they still care about sending those five tornados. That is exactly stressing the deepness of Britain’s decline.

KU: I guess it serves a symbolic purpose …

WM: Of course it does, but it is also a sign that you have not come to terms with the fact that you are just a minor European nation. And that is exactly the process that the Dutch were going through in the 17th and 18th century.

KU: I want to move forward in time now. The conclusion in your article was that Enlightenment is the result of the Dutch Republic trying to cope with its own problems and traditions. If you look at the Netherlands today, they have very interesting solutions to social and other problems, for example the frequently cited drug policies and euthanasia. Is there a parallel between the old Republic and the modern Netherlands in terms of how they tackle their problems quite radically?

WM: I think there is a connection. It is a continuing process. Being a city state, that of course remains something exceptional until the present day. We are still the most urbanized country in the whole world, with the exception of Hongkong and Singapore, which of course are very peculiar states.

KU: Are they city states, too?

WM: And of course they are not in the western hemisphere, they have completely different traditions, etc, so they are difficult to compare. But in the western tradition, the Dutch are still very much an exception. Not in all respects, of course, because the drug problem is also a question that is attacked this way in Switzerland. But it’s interesting that parts of Switzerland are also very much urban societies in which urbanity has taken over from the agricultural element.

KU: I believe the Dutch implemented the system first.

WM: Yes, the Swiss came later. But in other senses, too, they are very similar. You see, life in Switzerland and life in the Netherlands is rather dull. We don’t have any extremes. The United States is the opposite. That doesn’t have anything to do with your political position—the US is a jungle, not a well-ordered society. This leads to enormous extremes. Now that makes the United States such a thrilling experience for a dull Dutchman or Swiss citizen, because we lead very restricted lives. We have to adapt ourselves on a continuous base to city life and to living with so many people on such a restricted amount of soil. There are so many strictures, not as something that is put upon us, but as something we have internalized in order to really survive in that society. And that makes Holland and Switzerland into very different cases. The second important element is that we are small. If you are a small society you can experiment. It is very difficult to experiment in a large society, because the risks involved are much bigger. I keep quoting those utterances of 17th and 18th and 19th century Dutch philosophers—in their view the nice thing about improvement and reform in the Netherlands is that it is always possible always oversee what is the consequence of what we are doing. And we can modify the reforms while they are in process because we are so close to it. Moreover, this is a society where the state, as I have mentioned before, is not the enemy. So you entrust the state with all kinds of essential functions. The case of the INS officers supplying Mohammed Atta with his student visa—I think that is exactly the American paradox. The immigration services will be attacked from all sides, but the point is that Americans are not prepared to supply these people with the money needed to put a good system into place.  And the system is completely inefficient It’s crazy—every time I’m coming here I have to fill out those forms, and I have a very bad handwriting, it’s completely illegible, and then those people are going to process them, in many cases by hand. And they tell you that you are only allowed to stay for 90 days. But who is enforcing that system. Nobody does. That system doesn’t work, but the responsible people won’t get the money to change it because Americans fear the state. Giving money to the state would give too much power to an alien institution. The state here is always “They’”. The Dutch trust the state—not always, and we hate to pay taxes just like everybody else, but we are nevertheless prepared to pay 40 or 50 percent of our income. That’s much higher than you could ever imagine here. And I hate that I have to pay it, but I also like to do it, because I’m part of a society and that society is also part of me, and it’s not the enemy.

KU: That society is about to change. In 1952, the Netherlands became one of the founding members of the EEC, and since the beginning of the 1990s, even the Dutch Euroenthusiasts are getting more critical about the EU venture. How will the EU change the Netherlands, and how can the Netherlands contribute to the EU?

WM: That’s the great issue. The nice thing is that the Netherlands actually succeeded in building out their welfare system, still in the last phases of the national state in a period of history when the influence of the EU was still very restricted. And now we have two major problems—not only we of course—but our possibilities of developing our own, different, solutions for those problems are going to be limited all the time.  First of all, the enormous amount of immigration, unheard of in the Netherlands before. The Dutch system depends on solidarity, on people that have a relationship with the state. But modern immigrants do not automatically have such a relation with the state, nor with a welfare system based on solidarity. Of course they want to profit from it, but they don’t see themselves as part of it, not yet at least. Maybe some of them will in time, but you do not get it automatically. It is not as simple that the moment you cross the border you feel like a Dutch citizen, that you are prepared to pay up to 52 percent of your income in taxes and support the system. So that’s one thing. And the second thing is of course the EU that is imposing all kinds of new rules that are not automatically Dutch, which people do not relate to. The drug problem is an interesting case, because the Dutch solution always has elicited complaints from the French, not so much from the Germans, but especially from the French, because they have a different approach to the problem, and they want to have a unified European (preferably French) approach, and that would mean that the Dutch approach will have to be finished.  And what the Dutch are trying to impose is that there should be room for other approaches as well, so that you should allow things to go on in a decentralized way. The French of course do not understand that as they have a very centralized way of doing things since, let’s say, the later middle ages. The Dutch way is the opposite.  And that’s what the Dutch are just trying to maintain in Europe.

KU: The Netherlands changed their approach to the EU since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty. That day is being referred to in the Netherlands as the “black Monday” because it was a major diplomatic and political embarrassment.

WM: Yes, but you know there is some peculiar element in the Dutch approach to the EU. Why was it “black Monday”? If I recall it well, part of the proposed Maastricht Treaty was a much more extended proposal for a federal Europe, and that was completely shot down. The Dutch … on the one hand they want to have a master plan to transform Europe into a federal structure, which is much too quick for the other nations which are still much more caring about their national individuality. At the same time, the Dutch have become very reluctant to give up their sovereignty, and that’s what’s happening now all the time. First they were one of six members, and the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg were three of the six, and now we are one of 15, and in the near future one of 21 and more. I think it’s not only a Dutch problem, but it is a European problem. A European citizenship is not the same as the national variety with something added to it.  If we do not reinvent citizenship in a European manner, one that is adapted to the EU, just like modern citizenship was adapted to the nation states of the late 1790s, we will be in trouble. What we are trying to do is to keep the traditional concept of the citizen in place, while thinking of a completely new government system. Now that cannot be done. And there is another problem as well.  I’m very much afraid—of course, historians can’t predict anything, so you don’t have to buy any of this—that our political think we can continue to manage things our own way things and keep our national welfare states intact without reinventing citizenship. However change in that respect is imperative. Maybe we need something based on the American model. Take for example the state of California, which accepts people having separate identities at the same time, which we do not accept at this moment in Europe. People think of you only as a Dutchman, not as a European as well. And it is going to get more complicated every day. All the people that are now streaming into Europan countries, they are not even of European origins anymore, they are from wherever. And to accommodate we have to invent a new type of citizenship . . . which we have failed to do until now. It is remarkable that so many people from outside of Europe who are seeking asylum in the Netherlands and who, from a material perspective, are well treated, nevertheless long to leave Europe and like to come to the United States. Why?  Because here you can be yourself and you can be an American simultaneously. And in Europe it’s impossible to be a European, a Dutchman and an African at the same time.

KU: How do you think the Dutch are going to solve this problem?

WM: They are not, they are completely denying the problem. The interesting thing is that in the latest elections two weeks ago, the Dutch have—those were municipal elections, but if you just transform the municipal elections results into those of a national election which is going to happen in two months—30 percent of the electorate has voted for a Dutch professor who is saying that the Islam is the most dangerous creed of the world. And that’s not the way to do it.

KU: That seems to be a European trend in recent times.

WM: It’s a European trend.

KU: So the problem is being ignored or not perceived by a number of European nations?

WM: It would be very useful for them to look to the United States example. There are many things completely wrong in the United States, but many things are just perfectly organized out here. Not that there is an ideal model, but we just need something that works. And of course, if you take a look at New York—there are also parts of New York where people hate one another’s guts and where people don’t have two identities. But California is some sort of model, there is even intermarriage on a scale which has been unheard of before. Now that is something you need, but it has to do with different views of citizenship and the allowing of more identities at the same time. We have a history of very unsuccesfull dealing with immigrants. First we wanted them to Dutchify completely and fully. That turned out to be impossible. Then we thought up the model of the multicultural society, leave them on their own, which was a disaster as well. What we need is an approach in which immigrants have to develop a Dutch or even European identity but are allowed to keep their own identities as well. And that works out very fine here in California. Because you still have neighborhoods where all people are all Iranian Jews or all Armenians, but they still consider themselves Americans. And they even have a flag on their car, for whatever reason.

KU: So since there is this city culture in the Netherlands, why is there not the awareness to be more like the Californian model?

WM: That’s a very interesting question and I don’t have a real answer to it. If I would venture one and just look back to the historical experience, there were no rulings about how those 17th and early 18th century cities had to adapt themselves to the enormous amount of immigration that was happening there at the same time. Millions of people have immigrated into the Dutch Republic in the 17th century, so it was very much an immigration country. I think, and in a sense it might be treated as a paradox, there were no extended series of government rulings trying to organize the adapting process. Here in the United States there is no government system that’s organizing it. In the Netherlands, we have been trying to control the whole process of immigration from the top down and not just to give the people their own possibilities to adapt. But this is just a hypothesis, but one that’s worth testing. Let the people sort those things out for themselves. Don’t abandon them, that’s something different. But the problem of how you and I have got to live together, that’s something only you and I can find out together.

KU: Professor Mijnhardt, thank you so much for this conversation.