Making contact. Generating interethnic contact for multicultural integration and tolerance in Amsterdam

Abstract

Interethnic contact is considered a potent tool for the generation of interethnic understanding and tolerance. This faith has engendered countless social projects that seek to stimulate contact between members of different ethnic groups under ‘optimal conditions’. However, the academic literature does not stipulate how, if at all, these optimal conditions can be realized in real world interventions. This article investigates how the organizers of a number of Dutch projects for ‘contact under optimal conditions’ conceived of such contact and how these conceptualisations informed how projects were set up, executed and experienced. The analysis demonstrates that organizers conceived of ‘interethnic contact under optimal conditions’ as a natural autonomous process. Optimal conditions for this natural process were assumed to be guaranteed when project workers interfered as little as possible with the contact between participants. The ‘natural’ processes thus engendered were assumed to lead to the recognition of fundamental sameness between two ethnic groups and/or the recognition of the superficiality of their differences. In practice, however, projects were set up in ways that privileged the exchange of uncontroversial information on personal tastes and ethnic differences. Moreover, the emphasis on the dual recognition of fundamental sameness and superficial difference produced a discursive context in which the exploration of conflicts of interest was foreclosed. These results suggest that the notion of ‘interethnic contact under optimal conditions’ may in practice have connotations that lead to practices that reinforce, rather than challenge, existing prejudices and misunderstandings.

Keywords:

• contact hypothesis
• interethnic communication
• multiculturalism

Notes

1. Interpersonal contact is understood here as (non-)verbal exchanges between individuals that are in each others’ physical presence.

2. Similar campaigns have been launched in London after terrorist attacks. A comparison between the Amsterdam campaign and the London campaign, is part of a follow up study on this paper (Müller 2011).

3. Participatory observations also confirmed that especially among organizers and volunteers, ethnic minorities were strongly in the minority, to the point of complete absence in many of the weekly editions of the Speakerstone project.

4. Geert Wilders is a Dutch extreme right politician who is mainly concerned with the perceived threat of Islam to the Dutch nation. After the murder of Theo van Gogh he received extensive police protection because it was feared would be assassinated. He has recently commented that the Netherlands is under threat from a ‘Tsunami of Islamization.’

5. Only the official discourse of the ‘Spreeksteen’ deviated from these accounts by emphasizing the role of the project in the promotion of the freedom of expression and debate. However, in interviews with the volunteers working at the project, it became clear that they too subscribed to the belief that interpersonal contact and dialogue would improve understanding between different groups.