From Clashing Civilizations to the Replacement of Populations The Transformation of Dutch Anti-Immigration Discourse

This chapter argues that the rise of replacement conspiracy theory can only be understood against the background of the decades-long development of the clash of civilizations discourse, which first rose to prominence in the 1990s. At the time, the end of the Cold War cleared the way for a new Western self-understanding: no longer in opposition to communism and the Soviet Union but, rather, to Islam and Muslim immigrants. Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory played an important role in establishing this worldview. In the Netherlands, right-wing politicians such as Frits Bolkestein, Pim Fortuyn, and Geert Wilders have built their political careers on a Dutch version of this theory. Dutch culture, they stated, was under threat by (fundamentalist) Islam. Western civilization needed to be defended by the right since progressive elites were plagued by cultural relativism. Gradually, the clash of civilizations evolved into a replacement conspiracy theory. The danger was no longer Islamic fundamentalism but Islam as such, while relativist elites were considered not merely incompetent but actively complicit.