The winding road past consociational democracy, multicultural society and populist rhetoric: the Dutch response to labor immigration and its consequences

The Netherlands long had the reputation of being very tolerant of diversity and many forms of societal deviance. This usually is explained by the long Dutch tradition of consociational democracy which
allowed the living together within a single nation of different and even hostile denominations. When immigrants arrived from the 1960s and onwards their integration seemed to fit the same mold. When tolerance of these new religions and cultures did not stop socio-economic marginalization, public policy focused on the educational system and the labor market. Moreover the country reinvented itself as having become multi-cultural. Even though integration gained clear momentum in the new millennium, populist politics find wide support with an opposite claim: immigrants fail to integrate and their religion―Islam―is to blame.