A citizenship festival to encourage integration

Since the debate on integration is pretty much deadlocked, he sees this as a way to break it open. As a humanities scholar, he also sees it as his job to kick-start the debate. How can we break new ground and look for solutions?

Interpersonal contact

In the Volkskrant and Villa VdB, Van den Heede argues for a duty to meet. Not necessarily by law or mandatory but based on a broader value of being open to each other. Van den Heede sees it as ‘part of a values-driven reorientation of the post-Ruttian Dutch system’. A broader interpretation of our ‘Dutchness’ is still needed, and ‘that can only be done by making the existing stratification of Dutch society concrete. You do that through interpersonal contact.’

But that doesn't happen automatically, Van den Heede knows. So, he envisions a social meeting festival, where we try to cultivate ‘meeting each other’ from a government perspective. This has to be directed, because people are mostly inclined to seek out like-minded people. ‘You could see it as a kind of ‘interpersonal market forces’,’ says Van den Heede. His idea is to randomly match people. You are sent a drawn number every year, where you are paired with a random other person you meet at the festival.

Skewed balance

Shouldn't migrants do better themselves then, is a familiar question and angle on integration. ‘This mainly refers to people with a Moroccan background, but who were born in the Netherlands. They are put away as a group. And then it's not about integrating as migrants, because they were born here,’ says van Den Heede.

In addition, he feels that the balance is skewed towards individual responsibility; migrants are now given almost all responsibility. In de Volkskrant, he says that this approach mainly concerns non-Western, non-white migrants, and there is an emphatic racist smell to this. Integration is now mainly understood as ‘implanting’ Dutchness: if you adopt this, this and this, you belong here. But that is not how culture works, nor is it made easy for you if you do not have a white skin colour.

Van den Heede thinks that facilitating encounters can also be drawn more broadly. If you organise encounters randomly, you also cross class boundaries, he says. That way, someone with a lot of money in the bank comes into contact with someone from a different social background. In this way, we talk to each other, instead of about each other.