Opposing the veil in the name of liberalism: popular attitudes to liberalism and Muslim veiling in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

Is popular antagonism towards Muslim veils in Europe rooted in an exclusionary ‘enlightenment liberalism’? By examining different conceptions of liberalism and readings of veiling in a Dutch survey from 2014, we present the first study that investigates this question empirically. We thus bring together two hitherto largely unconnected literatures. The first is the work on immigration and ethnicity, which has shown the centrality of enlightenment liberalism in anti-Muslim media and policy discourses. The second is the literature on anti-Muslim attitudes in public opinion, which explains support for veil bans as the result of perceiving veils as threatening the respondent's own, supposedly liberal, values – but has failed to distinguish between different conceptions of liberalism and thus reached inconclusive results. This, we show, can be remedied by distinguishing between ‘enlightenment liberals’, who hold negative attitudes, and ‘reformation liberals’, who hold positive attitudes towards Muslim veils.

KEYWORDS:

• Enlightenment
• liberalism
• veils
• anti-Muslim
• headscarves
• attitudes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Jolanda van der Noll http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7929-466X

Notes

1. In a study of liberty in mass values, Gustavsson (2012) showed that we should distinguish between popular attitudes to what Isaiah Berlin called positive and negative liberty, and that these have divergent associations with moral permissiveness and freeriding. More recently, Gustavsson (2014c, 2015) has also argued that this might be especially relevant for attitudes to veiling.

2. In addition to reformation and enlightenment liberalism, we also included four items to measure the new concept of romantic liberalism developed by Gustavsson (2014a, 2014b, 2015), but we leave this notion aside in the following, since our theoretical expectations here concern only enlightenment and reformation liberalism, respectively.

3. Separate regression models for the two types of liberalism also show a significant impact of enlightenment liberalism on negative perceptions of the headscarf.