The politics of alienation

NO CITY in the Netherlands is so quintessentially Dutch as The Hague. The Binnenhof, the seat of government, is a quaint Gothic fortress straight out of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. A mile to the west stands the beaux-arts Peace Palace, headquarters of the World Court; to the north is the glass-walled finance ministry, a temple of Calvinist fiscal transparency. But walk—or, rather, bicycle—just a mile eastwards, and a less traditional Netherlands comes into view, one of Ghanaian barber shops and Turkish tea houses. Women wear headscarves; men in djellabas duck into a storefront mosque for evening prayers.

Across from the mosque is Amin’s Moroccan butcher’s shop, where on a recent afternoon, behind a refrigerated counter full of shawarma, Jamal, the owner’s 31-year-old son, was installing a computer. Jamal is just the sort of person who could bridge the gap between the country’s traditional identity and its new immigrant communities. He came to the Netherlands with his family at age two, earned a business degree from Erasmus University, and worked in data analysis for several mid-sized companies. But last year he gave up on the corporate world and went back to his father’s shop. In Dutch society “racial profiling is everywhere,” he says; at his last company, he watched in dismay as white colleagues invented reasons to reject ethnic job applicants.