Author: standplaatswereld

By guest author Martijn de Koning Rather than a strong sense of national pride, the idea of the moral community seems to be central in opting into the Dutch national project. At the heart of the idea of Dutch nation-state was the notion that every member of society, irrespective of background and religious affiliation, should subscribe to an imagined moral community – an imagined community based upon shared ideas about what constitutes a good and virtuous life. Since the 19th century most of the Protestant groups in the Netherlands (with the exception of a few orthodox Calvinist dissenters between 1830 and 1860 who rejected state interference with church matters) acknowledged the Dutch nation-state as their moral community, linking nation, religion and virtue. The secular regimes of that time promoted the idea of virtuous citizens realizing their moral selves by conforming to prevailing ideas of what constituted a good life and doing good acts on behalf of the welfare of the nation-state.

After the secession of Belgium in 1830, the Dutch nation-state became a Protestant nation-state. The threat to the unity of this religious-nationalist community was perceived to come from the Catholics in the south, who were assumed to be more loyal to the Pope in Rome than to the Dutch nation-state (Van Rooden 1996). A new relationship between the nation-state and virtue emerged after the pacification of 1917 that produced the pillar system. The pillar system divided Dutch society into separate groups but also united them in one moral community, effectively replacing the notion of the Netherlands as a ‘Protestant nation’ with the concept of four groups (Catholics, Protestants, Socialists and Liberal-humanists) constituting one moral community. At the end of the 1960s the system collapsed as a result of secularization and individualization rendering the power of churches to mobilize people ineffective and obsolete.