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Abstract
As part of the debate in the Netherlands centring on national identity in the wake of the assassination of Pim Fortuyn (2002) and Theo van Gogh (2004), an attempt is made to tackle the topic of unworldly cosmopolitanism versus remerging nationalism. The focus is on the way the arty yet popular Dutch rock band ‘Nits’ (1974–present) dealt with these issues in their song lyrics, how Nits construct both their international and Dutch identity, and how their evolution in this respect mirrors or nuances current debates about the elite’s position vis-à-vis national character.
Notes
1 All translations in this text are my own. Lipnitsky quoted in Evers, Corné, ‘The Nits In Moskou’, Oor, 18:7 (April 8, 1989), 23. Remarkably, this particular troubadours and minstrels reference is presented as a fact in Zdravko Blažekovíc & Mel van Elteren (Citation1997): Dutch Youth and Rock Music in the Fin de Siècle Era, The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 2:1, 133−142 (137): ‘It is truly European music, in a direct line with the performances of the troubadours and minstrels’. Other contributions on Nits in English: Lutgard Mutsaers, ‘Mountaineers of Dutch Pop. (The) Nits: Thirty Years of a Unique Sound’, The Low Countries. Vol. 13. Rekkem: Stichting Ons Erfdeel, 2005, 283−285. Online at: http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_low001200501_01/_low001200501_01_0053.php [accessed 15 July 2012] and a substantial profile of the band and reviews of a number of albums: http://www.allmusic.com/artist/nits-mn0000355554 [accessed 15 July 2012]. The band’s official website also includes most of their lyrics: http://www.nits.nl/nits/discography.html [accessed 15 July 2012].
2 Visser, Griselda-Edwien, ‘The Nits in Moskou’, in Alfred Bos & Tom Engelshoven, ed., Popjaar 89−90 (Utrecht: Luitingh-Sijthoff, 1989), 131−132.
3 About the interventions of Heijne as a public intellectual, see Heynders 2013.
4 In October 2011 a new selection of articles from the same magazine was published about the state of the Netherlands in the 21st century; the title Nooit meer nuchter (Never Again Sober) summarizes the new atmosphere: apparently the Dutch are ‘ontnuchterd’, they have woken up to reality. Interestingly, this new selection also includes two articles from the 1990s (‘De volksopstand’ [The People’s Uprising] from 1996 and ‘Het isolement van de gewone Nederlander’ [The Common Dutchman/Woman’s Feeling of Isolation]) from 1998 that, in retrospect, seem to have prophesied Elsevier’s current position (Van Schoonhoven, Nooit meer nuchter. Nederland en Nederlanders in de nieuwe eeuw, Amsterdam: Elsevier Boeken, 2011).
5 Scheffer, Paul, Immigrant Nations, trans. by Liz Waters (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity, 2011).
6 Jan Willem Duyvendak, Ewald Engelen & Ido de Haan, Het bange Nederland. Pleidooi voor een open samenleving (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2008, 9−10). Another non-believer is Willem Schinkel, De gedroomde samenleving (Kampen: Klement, 2008). Schinkel coins the term ‘multiculturealism’ to describe the consensus ‘that finally we have become realists […]. That we know what the deal is with integration and what can be done about it’ (108). Throughout the book Schinkel puts the word integration between brackets (‘[integratie]’) to point out that he considers it a symbol, locked up in our current discourses, without any referent in reality (12). It should be clear that the author himself considers ‘multiculturealism’ a new form of political correctness that should be criticized.
7 Duyvendak et al., 32.
8 The band’s profile on the authoritative AllMusicwebsite opens with: ‘There seems little doubt that, were they not so geographically challenged, the Nits would be one of the most widely respected bands in the world today’. An early sign of international success: ‘the British pop magazine NME named the album Tent as runner-up in the category Best Foreign Album’ (Mutsaers 283).
9 About the label ‘art-pop’ in reference to The Human League, see Reynolds, Simon, Rip it up and start again: post-punk 1978−84 (London: Faber, 2005, 163).
10 Hofstede wrote most of the lyrics for this album in this very hotel in Paris (Cramer Citation1989, 61). Hofstede, commenting on the title of the album, gladly reinforced his band’s cosmopolitan reputation: ‘de titel komt voor in een gedicht van Wilfred Smit, een redelijk onbekende dichter, en geeft goed weer dat wij onze invloeden van het hele continent hebben. We zijn niet bang om in de Europese cultuur te duiken. Die Nederlandstalige periode in de popmuziek vond ik heel benauwend. Het is een soort opsluiten in je eigen land. Als ik de kans krijg om in Berlijn of Parijs te spelen, dan ga ik ook. We zitten niet met de geur van spruitjes in onze neus’. (idem) [‘[The album’s] title is taken from a poem by Wilfred Smit, a rather unknown poet, and it clearly makes the points that our influences are taken from all over the continent. We are not afraid to delve into European culture. That Dutch language-era in pop music I found really suffocating. If I get a chance to play in Berlin or Paris I go. We don’t have the smell of sprouts in our noses’. — ‘Spruitjeslucht’, the smell of sprouts, epitomizes parochialism in Dutch. See also Mutsaers on the language of Nits: ‘it comes out as a sort of euro-Esperanto, a jumble of words from many languages’. (283)
11 The song is not mentioned in Rosemarie Buikema & Maaike Meijer (ed.), Cultuur en migratie in Nederland. Kunsten in beweging 1980−2000. The Hague: SDU Uitgevers, 2004, nor in Liesbeth Minnaard, New Germans, new Dutch. Literary interventions (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008).
12 For German and English translations of the Turkish lyrics, see: http://www.nitsfans.org/n_lang.html#Turkish [accessed 15 July 2012]
13 The album was recorded at Soundpush Studio, Blaricum (NL) between March and September 1984. European elections were held in June.
14 Lucardie, P., ‘Right-Wing Extremism in the Netherlands: Why It Is Still a Marginal Phenomenon’ http://dnpp.eldoc.ub.rug.nl.proxy.library.uu.nl/FILES/root/publicatieLucardie/right-wing/rightextrem00.pdf, p. 3 [accessed 8 July 2012].
15 Brants, Kees, and Willem Hogendoorn, Van vreemde smetten vrij. Opkomst van de Centrumpartij (Bussum: De Haan, 1983), 11, 15 & 22−23.
16 See Bruyn, Willem Johannes, and A. J. C. Vierling, Nederland voor de Nederlanders. Een vergeten hoofdstuk uit de mensenrechten ([S.l.]: Stichting Wetenschappelijk Bureau Centrumpartij, 1983), co-edited by Vierling. About the party’s platform, early history and Vierling’s dealings within it: Brants & Hogendoorn 1983, esp. 22−36. Buis quotes Vierling as claiming that CDA (Christen Democratisch Appèl, the Dutch Christian-Democrat Party) is actually short for ‘Christenen Dienen Allah’ (‘Christians Serve Allah’) — a provocative reframing of a debate worthy of Geert Wilders (Buis, Nils, Kijk maar: Er staat niet wat er staat. Een verkenning van het taalgebruik in publikaties van de Centrumpartij (Utrecht: s. n., 1985), 4). A 1983 poll among Centrumpartij-voters showed that 76% wanted unemployed foreigners to leave the country and 57% wanted the Dutch unemployed to take the migrants’ jobs; only 29% and 15% of the general Dutch voters held these opinions. See: Maurice de Hond, De opkomst van de Centrumpartij: een onderzoek onder de aanhang van de Centrumpartij in het najaar van 1983. Projekt 1977 (Amsterdam: Inter View, 1983), 9.
17 Two decades later Geert Wilders would make ‘Henk’ (and his wife ‘Ingrid’) the proverbial Dutch couple, rhetorically representing the silent majority abandoned by the cultural elites and traditional political parties alike and adopted by his PVV.
18 I want to thank the students of Ankara University who, after a presentation of this paper in May 2013, identified these shots of the plastic bags in the video as Turkish.
19 Interview in Rijven, Stan, ‘Witte plekken op de kaart’, Trouw, 27 October 1987.
20 About Dutch nostalgia in this context, see Duyvendak, Jan Willem, The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Western Europe and the United States (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 84−105 (quote on 84). The author notes that his analysis of parliamentary debates shows that after 2002 and even more after 2004 the crisis in feeling at home became primarily a problem for the ‘native Dutch, whom politicians increasingly paint as ‘foreigners’ in their own country, cities and neighborhoods’ (95). Of course, this does not imply that native-born Dutch did not have these feelings before the assassination of Fortuyn and Van Gogh. The national debate today suggests incorrectly that it took mainstream politicians decades to realize how controversial the issue of mass migration was. About the political debate since 1970 see Brants & Hogendoorn, 67−84 and Brug, W. van der, M. Fennema, S. van Heerden, and S. L. de Lange, ‘Hoe heeft het integratiedebat zich in Nederland ontwikkeld?’, Migrantenstudies, 25 (2009), 198–220.
21 In De Jonge’s Dutch version: ‘Toen kwam op een nacht/De storm en de vloed/Die verpulverde/Dat vertrouwen voorgoed/Ondanks de beloften/Wij zullen niet wijken/Braken de dijken//De natuur is een monster/De mens is een dwerg/Een dijk blijft een dijk/Een Hollandse berg’.
22 Nits have been touring in both countries since 1982; Finland is also present in many of their songs. See: http://www.nits.nl/worldmap/helsinifrmst.html [accessed 15 July 2012].
23 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, Critical Inquiry, 23 (1997), 617–639; see also his Cosmopolitanism. Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Penguin, 2007) & J. Habermas, The Postnational Constellation (Cambridge: Polity, 2001). For a general survey: Delanty, Gerard, ed., Routledge handbook of cosmopolitanism studies (New York: Routledge, 2012).
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Geert Buelens
Geert Buelens is Professor of Modern Dutch Literature at Utrecht University and Guest Professor at Stellenbosch University. His research deals primarily with the intersections between literature and society. He has published widely on the Flemish avant-garde writer Paul van Ostaijen and on 20th century avant-garde poetry, nationalist literature and European poetry of the First World War. His current research is on the writing of national and international literary histories, neutrality and the First World War and the interplay between poetry and song writing since the Romantic Era.