The Netherlands is a special country:it is built on pillars. Protestants, Catholics, liberals and socialists lived isolated from each other in their own ideological world or pillar. At least, that's how it's often presented. However, according to a recent study, this never existed. Historian Peter van Dam argues that the pillarization is nothing less than a myth.
Pillarization is one of the most abused terms in the Dutch dictionary. For example, the word has recently surfaced in the discussion about the broadcasting system. That would be outdated, because it is a remnant of the pillarized society.
However, the current broadcasting system builds on the media legislation of the sixties, the era in which pillarization was supposed to have been dealt with. Since 1930, four associations AVRO, KRO, NCRV and VARA had simply each been allocated 20% of the broadcasting time. New media legislation from 1965 laid the foundation for the current system, in which broadcasting associations were given broadcasting time on the basis of membership numbers.
As a result of this law, for example, two of the now most important broadcasting associations took office, the Tros and the Evangelische Omroep.
Anyone who describes the broadcasting system as pillarized is probably not about an adequate analysis of the situation, but about polemics. Pillarization stands for 'old-fashioned'; if one detects signs of the compartmentalized past somewhere, then it is right on his side if one wants to tackle them.
The pillarization thus functions as a crowbar. However, it is highly questionable whether the pillarization really existed if one has to assume on the basis of these kinds of arguments.
Not unique
According to the common story, Dutch society could roughly be divided into four pillars from the end of the 19th century until the 1960s:a Catholic, a Protestant, a socialist and a general pillar, which was sometimes referred to as a liberal pillar.
Each pillar was in fact an assembly of church, political party, trade union, newspaper and many other associations of the same ideological colour. Within such pillars, citizens lived quietly and docilely, while their leaders at the highest level collaborated in business.
This collaboration ensured that the division did not become a problem, but in turn it also maintained that division.
The term 'pillars' evokes the image of a Greek temple, in which strictly separated population groups, vertically organized and about the same width and height, together bear a roof, which should symbolize the Dutch state or government.
Government officials used the term 'pillar' from the mid-thirties to designate and stimulate organizations of different religious groups. In 1940, for example, Defense Minister Adriaan Dijxhoorn encouraged the Social Democrats to use themselves as a 'fourth pillar' alongside Catholics, Protestants and neutrals for mobilized soldiers from their own circle, by organizing leisure activities for them.
However, the Netherlands could not be neatly divided into four pillars. The 'pillars' were by no means practically the same:the various organizational networks did not resemble each other and the Protestants were so strongly divided among themselves that you cannot even speak of a Protestant column.
Liberals and social democrats (who were often also Catholic or Protestant) even actively opposed the existence of close-knit networks based on philosophy. Furthermore, all kinds of groups fall completely outside this picture, such as Jewish, communist and interdenominational organizations.
This is not to say that closely organized networks based on philosophy of life played no role in the Netherlands in the 20th century. They did, but they were not as supreme as is commonly believed.
Moreover, their existence was not a uniquely Dutch phenomenon, as historian Ivo Schöffer claimed when he wrote about pillarization in 1956 in the Sociological guide. as a ‘specific Dutch problem’. Historian Hans Righart described in The Catholic Pillar in Europe (1986) for example, the development of Catholic pillars not only in the Netherlands, but also in Belgium, Switzerland and Austria.
He could have easily added Germany. The Belgian sociologist Staf Hellemans has also repeatedly pointed out that the way of organizing that can be seen in the Netherlands from the end of the 19th century among some population groups, occurred all over Europe around that time.
Hotel Pays-Bas
Sociologists have also previously shown that the phenomenon of pillarization could not capture the entire Dutch society. What is striking, however, is their double agenda. From the 1950s onwards, Jakob Kruijt and Jacques van Doorn, for example, analyzed the pillarization in many publications in the hope of being able to say goodbye to it as soon as possible.
For example, in an essay from 1956, Van Doorn compared pillarization with an authoritarian system. Kruijt had it in an article for Socialism &Democracy from 1957 about 'Hotel Pays-Bas, under whose roof we live together, but well insulated in separate rooms'.
He was in line with a sentiment that was already heard before the war:that the pillars kept the Dutch people divided unnecessarily. After the war, this analysis was regularly heard, for example from the Prime Minister of Education, Arts and Sciences Gerard van der Leeuw, who wrote in 1945:'We have had more than enough of the 'pillars'.
Because those beautiful columns hardly supported a common roof anymore. It had become an administrative people unit and only the Mof taught us that we are a real people.'
The polemical use of the term 'pillarization' to emphasize the need for innovation therefore dates back to this time. Even then it was not a question of giving the most accurate description of society. People who were critical of networks of ideological organizations drew a caricature of the situation, in order to attack it as sharply as possible.
Proponents of such networks, on the other hand, picked up their terms to underline their own unity, closeness and steadfastness. In this way, from the 1950s onwards, the Dutch created a distorted image of their own society. It was clear to both groups that there were pillars:proponents cherished them, critics wanted to get rid of them.
Pacification Politics
With this exaggerated picture of Dutch society and history, it is only logical that there was also an exaggerated expectation of the 'depillarization', when the world seemed to be changing strongly in the 1960s. The most influential study in this area to date, Arend Lijpharts Pillarization, pacification and change in Dutch politics (1968), is a good example of this.
In the first part of his study, Lijphart draws the contours of the pillarized society. Central to his view is that the society divided into pillars was held together by a specific strategy of the political elites of those pillars.
This “policy of pacification” is said to have been put into practice for the first time in 1917, when, after skillful negotiation at the top, constitutional amendments sealed the school struggle and the suffrage issue. This was made possible by business partnerships between the elites, which built on pragmatic forbearance, secrecy of what was discussed and a deft game of give and take. Subsequently, the elites would have used this strategy again and again as a blueprint for solving problems.
According to Lijphart, the pillar elites had taken it upon themselves that their supporters had to remain as passive as possible in this system. While he was writing his book, however, he thought he noticed a change in the situation. Citizens became less docile, political conflicts less and less easily resolved. The elites could no longer naturally count on voters from their own circle. The pillarized order began to crumble.
In the wake of Lijphart, other scientists also noted politicization in Dutch politics in the 1970s, a declining importance of religion due to secularization and a diminishing significance of the early close-knit communities as a result of individualization. At the end of the sixties, they ushered in the era of depillarization.
However, politicians, publicists and scientists made just as exaggerated an idea of this de-pillarization as they had previously fabricated of de-pillarization. They expected a radical break with the past as they saw it:a society characterized by several strictly segregated groups, founded on obedient voting cattle that loyally left the important decisions to the chiefs and did not interfere with dissenters. A clear, safe society.
But there was no complete and sudden complete reversal. Individualization, secularization and politicization did occur, but caused only gradual shifts. Communities did not completely disintegrate, but only became less close. The choice for a political party or a broadcaster became less predictable, but certainly not arbitrary. Religion did not disappear from society, but it did play a less prominent role in public life.
Nor was it over with business politics. In fact, in 1984 Hans Daalder observed a well-known pattern in the Netherlands at that time during a lecture:'It is as if a number of the old rules of the game that Lijphart once thought he distinguished for Dutch politics have returned, albeit in a different guise. .'
Seductive
Pillarization is actually a myth, a common story about our society that we should question. Historians have been doing this since the 1980s. They not only questioned its uniquely Dutch character, but have often become skeptical about the usefulness of this concept in describing the earlier social order.
This happened, among other things, after a large-scale study in the 1990s into pillarization at a local level at the University of Amsterdam, led by Hans Blom and Piet de Rooy. Where Blom cautiously warned that a meaningful discussion can only take place if everyone clarifies again and again what exactly he meant by pillarization, De Rooy even preferred to abolish the term altogether.
However, this has not prevented people outside this circle of insider experts from eagerly speaking over the past thirty years about pillarization and depillarization to interpret the present. The feeling for the complexity of the pillarized society was largely lost. 'Depillarization' is an even emptier shell.
The term suggests that a farewell to the compartmentalized past has been said. With the help of depillarization we make clear how society should not be in our eyes, but not what it should look like or should look like.
Due to this interplay of caricature and vagueness, the pillarization myth obscures the public debate. The fact that, for example in the debate on public broadcasting, is still always referred to, has in the first place to do with the need for a stick to beat the dog:whoever labels something as compartmentalised makes it obsolete and is allowed to attack it. .
Secondly, we find it difficult to resist the temptingly simple image of the columns and the roof, because we like to present the past in a clear and harmonious way. Thirdly, the pillarization myth has become closely intertwined with descriptions of what would make the Netherlands unique.
Finally, there are hardly any descriptions of Dutch history in other terms. In view of the negative influence of the pillarization myth, it is high time that this changed.