ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 2007

Redistribution and Ethnic Diversity in

the Netherlands
Accommodation, Denial and Replacement

Frank De Zwart and Caelesta Poppelaars

Leiden University, The Netherlands

abstract: Redistributive policies concerning migrants in The Netherlands bear a

striking degree of ethnic specificity. This characteristic seems to follow from the
doctrine ‘integration with maintenance of own culture’ that has long informed
Dutch minority policies. However, both central and local governments stopped
subscribing to this doctrine at least a decade ago, while ethnically specific policy
arrangements have continued to grow. This article explains the anomaly from an
administrative mechanism: the logic of categorization for policy-making contradicts
the logic of policy implementation. The use of what we call ‘replacement categories’
creates an administrative opportunity structure that unintentionally promotes ethnic
fragmentation. We examine the workings of this mechanism in a case study of
minority policy in The Netherlands.

keywords: categories ◆ implementation ◆ multiculturalism ◆ recognition ◆

redistribution

Introduction
The Dutch government maintains an extensive network of subsidized organizations that
design and implement social work projects for ethnic minorities. Most towns and cities have
an array of projects for minorities, including: ‘multimedia instruction for education and raising
children’, ‘native language courses’, ‘broadcasting for radio and television’, ‘discussion groups’,
‘photography’ and ‘sewing and repairing’. This short selection from projects in Amsterdam,
The Hague, Rotterdam, Utrecht and Arnhem between 1999 and 2003 is illustrative of a common
pattern throughout the Netherlands.
Criteria for government subsidy for activities of this type derive from the overall objective
that projects should promote participation and integration of migrants in Dutch society (Brink
et al., 2003). Characteristically, these programmes target encompassing categories such as
ethnic minorities, immigrants or allochtonen (officially all people with at least one parent born
abroad, but used in everyday speech for non-Western immigrants only), while recent policy
documents either advocate the use of even broader categories or reject categorical policy alto-
gether. In the implementation of projects, however, encompassing categories and rejections of
categorical policy disappear to make room for a remarkably high degree of ethnic specificity.
To illustrate, Krosbe is an organization, subsidized by the provincial administration, that aims
at further integration of Surinamese in the larger Rotterdam area. To that end, Krosbe supports
a number of smaller organizations (all subsidized by local or provincial governments in their

Acta Sociologica ◆ December 2007 ◆ Vol 50(4): 387–399 ◆ DOI: 10.1177/0001699307083980

Copyright © 2007 Nordic Sociological Association and SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
www.sagepublications.com
Acta Sociologica 50(4)

turn) which specialize in social work: Meeting Centre Wi Masanga serves Afro-Surinamese
people, Setasan Foundation serves Javanese–Surinamese and Aona Bhavan is for the Hindu–
Surinamese. Moreover, there is a social–cultural association for Surinamese Indians and
separate women centres serve the various ethnic groups apart. A similar infrastructure exists
for the Antillean and Arubian communities – a regional organization serves all categories, but
locally each ethnic group has its own separate organization and within that a division of
genders. The same is true for Kaapverdians, Moroccans and Turks.
The Rotterdam example is illustrative of all cities and larger towns in the Netherlands. A
general rule applies: the closer you get to the actual implementation of activities and projects,
the more ethnic diversity in the population is reflected in the policy categories and organiz-
ation of government-sponsored activities. This generous regime of sponsoring ethnic identi-
ties is commonly presumed (in the literature and the press) to be the intended outcome of the
multicultural ideology that informs ethnic minority policy in The Netherlands. Multicultural-
ism had wide support in Dutch politics and society until recently. Indeed, minority policy in
the Netherlands has long been informed by the doctrine that integration is best served by
stimulating migrants to ‘maintain their own culture’ (Lucassen and Köbben, 1992; Soysal, 1994:
50; Penninx and Slijper, 1999: 16–18; Koopmans and Statham, 2000; Koenis, 2002; Koopmans,
2002). Clearly, the multicultural infrastructure sketched above makes perfect sense in the
context of this doctrine.
The problem with this reasoning, however, is that official policy doctrines concerning
minorities in the Netherlands have changed radically in the past 15 years. Like most other
governments in Europe in the 1990s, the Dutch government retreated from official multi-
culturalism and replaced it with policies of ‘civic integration’ (Joppke, 2004: 50). Starting from
the early 1990s, this change became apparent in national, provincial and local policy documents.
Increasingly, these documents reject ‘categorical policy’ and replace it with ‘general policy’.1
In practice, this change means that policies targeting ethnic or cultural groups were replaced
with policies targeting people who are economically, educationally or socially disadvantaged,
irrespective of ethnicity, race or culture (e.g. Fermin, 1997: 77–150; Sociaal-Cultureel Rapport,
1998; Berger et al., 2000; de Boer, 2001; Wetenschappelijke Raad voor Regeringsbeleid (WRR),
2001: 169–71, 179–80). This way of targeting policies leaves no room for ethnic particularism,
and thus it seems that the ethnically specific infrastructure sketched above persists not because
of the official policy doctrine but despite it.
To explain why this is so, this article concentrates on the implementation of minority policy
and especially on the process in which extant social structure is ‘translated’ into policy
categories. In this process, we identify a political–administrative mechanism which, we argue,
causes unintended fragmentation of policy and organization along ethnic lines. We call this
mechanism replacement, and analyse it as one of three possible strategies that governments can
follow to address the problem of inequality between social and cultural groups; the other
options are denial and accommodation. Replacement has not received much scholarly attention
(it did not even have a name),2 hence the first part of the article explains this mechanism and
sketches the situational logic in which it occurs: the ‘dilemma of recognition’.

The Dilemma of Recognition

Cultural diversity tends to be accompanied by durable inequality between the groups
concerned. Most governments fear such inequality as a potential source of conflict (and as an
embarrassment of liberal equality) and try to combat it by means of redistributive policies that
target specific groups. Targeting ethnic groups fits ill with universalistic principles, but it is
time and cost-efficient. It is, as Amartya Sen puts it, a matter of ‘maximizing the poverty
removal benefits accruing from a given burden of cost’ (1995: 12; cf. Starr, 1992). This suits the
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agenda of policy-makers who are usually on a budget and in a hurry (Rose and Davies, 1994:
31–2; Simon, 1997: 75–6), especially when it concerns the need to level inequality between
ethnic groups. Most politicians consider that an urgent matter.
Making and implementing targeted policies, however, requires definition, recognition and
often mobilization of the groups concerned, which accentuates and consolidates group defi-
nitions and boundaries. Some governments fear this side effect. They believe that targeted
redistribution creates vested interests in group distinctions, stigmatizes the beneficiaries and
promotes tensions between ethnic groups. Hence the dilemma of recognition: targeting is
considered necessary to combat inequality but may defeat the policy’s aim, which is to level
group distinctions not to accentuate them.
In the Netherlands, this dilemma became increasingly prominent during the 1990s. While
declining support for multiculturalism as a political agenda made ethnic targeting contro-
versial, inequality between ethnic groups remains an urgent problem. The Dutch government
maintains a detailed registration of ethnic identities and the National Bureau for Statistics
(CBS) frequently publishes figures that compare allochtone and autochtone citizens. A CBS
press release in January 2007, for instance, shows that unemployment among non-Western
allochtones was 15.5 per cent in 2006; for autochtones it was 4.3 per cent (CBS, 2007a: 1). Figures
on high school drop-out rates and ‘employment quality’ convey a similar message: In 2005–6,
6 per cent of autochtone students left high school without a diploma. For Surinamese, Antillean
and Turkish students the figure is 15 per cent, and for Moroccans 17 per cent (CBS, 2007b).
Moreover, another recent CBS publication shows that allochtone citizens are highly over-
represented in lower paid jobs (Langenberg and Lautenbach, 2007).
The traditional Dutch approach to integration and emancipation of minorities, with its
emphasis on recognition and support of cultural identities, is increasingly seen (by politicians
and the public) as a problem rather than as a solution. It has made ethnicity and ethnic identifi-
cation salient among ever more separate groups, ‘fuelling their segregation and separation
from mainstream society’ (Joppke, 2004: 247). Policy-makers increasingly turned away from
multiculturalism and embraced ‘civic integration’ (ibid.; see also Entzinger, 2003). Note,
however, that this change of mood concerns only one of the traditional aims of Dutch minority
policies, namely the ‘recognition’ of cultural identities.
The politics of recognition, to borrow Charles Taylor’s term (1994; see also Honneth, 1992), is
not salient any more. But ‘recognition’ never was the only aim of Dutch multiculturalism; it was
always combined with redistribution of resources and opportunities. In the literature, ‘recog-
nition’ and ‘redistribution’ are often separated for analytical reasons, but from the perspective
of policy-makers (and that of ethnic minorities) they are completely intertwined. Multicultural-
ism as a political agenda and a collection of policies aims at recognition and redistribution. It
has, as it were, a cultural dimension in the politics of equal recognition (Taylor, 1994), and an
economic one in policies that redistribute resources and opportunities (cf. Fraser, 2003). Stressing
civic integration instead of multiculturalism, as Dutch policy-makers do today, concerns the
cultural not the redistributive dimension. Civic integration does not make group inequality
disappear – at least not in the short run – and it does not diminish the urge to make policies that
mitigate it.3 A well-known sociologist, Paul Scheffer, triggered a heated public debate with a
newspaper article entitled ‘The Multicultural Disaster’ (2000).4 He argued that Dutch multi-
culturalism had promoted neither integration nor emancipation of migrants in Dutch society. It
had marginalized them instead. Scheffer sketches the multicultural approach with a character-
istic example of group-specific redistribution (of cultural rights in this case) and notes that appar-
ently no one in the Netherlands asks whether the official policy doctrine of ‘maintenance of own
identity’ can be combined with the aim of emancipation. This suggestion is not quite correct
because the minority debate in the Netherlands actually turns around exactly that question, but
the point is that the question poses a dilemma that Dutch governments have not yet resolved.
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A paper by the Dutch Cabinet (Kamerstukken, 2001, 2002) is illustrative: The Cabinet writes
that it underscores advice of the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) to end ‘cate-
gorical support’ for migrants (WRR, 2001: 179–80). However, as if to underline that the dilemma
of recognition is unresolved, it adds that the government shall nevertheless stick to the principle
‘general policy where possible; group-specific policy where necessary’ (Kamerstukken, TK
2001–2002, 29198, no. 2). Ministers repeatedly stress that the current line is ‘civic integration’,
not multiculturalism, but an official response to the evaluation of Dutch minority policies by
a parliamentary commission leaves ample room for ethnically specific policies (Parliamentary
Papers, TK 2003–2004, 28689, no. 17, 12). ‘Tailor-made policies are still necessary’, the Cabinet
notes here, ‘to guarantee unobstructed access of immigrants to the labor market’ (Parlia-
mentary Papers, 2003, TK 2006–2007, 30810, no. 1–2, 6).
This Cabinet stance followed advice that the Minister of Social Affairs requested from the
Social Economic Council (SER) in 1999. That request clearly demonstrates the dilemma of
recognition: First, the Minister sums up labour-market policies that were made under ‘civic
integration’ and thus target general economic categories not minorities. Then he formulates
concern about the actual position of minorities on the labour market and notes: ‘the key-
question is how to ensure that ethnic minorities benefit from the general policy’. ‘Moreover’,
the Minister adds, ‘the Cabinet wishes to book quicker results [than it has until now]’ (Ministry
of Social Affairs, 1999).
In their latest report (February 2007), subtitled ‘toward improvement of the labour market
position of allochtone youth’, the Social Economic Council addresses the same problem again.
The report confirms the official line of universalistic policy-making: ‘Explicit attention for
allochtone youth in education and labour policies has decreased. [Members of] minorities are
supposed to profit equally from the universalistic policies’ (SER, 2007: 23). This approach, the
report notes, ‘creates equal opportunity for all and prevents stigmatization’ (ibid.). There is,
however, ‘additional policy’ for allochtone groups which is ‘agenda setting, innovative, and
temporary’ (ibid.). A number of practices and best practices are mentioned that combat a long
list of problems characteristic for youth who belong to ethnic minorities in the Netherlands.
The report never ceases to stress the ‘general’ (universalistic) character of these policies,
however. Extra classes in primary schools, for instance, are ‘meant for autochtone and
allochtone students who work under their cognitive abilities because of insufficient command
of the language’ (ibid., p. 28). Or, educational institutions should ‘provide better and more
intensive guidance to (allochtone) youth and their parents’ (ibid., p. 33).
A controversy inside the public sector (in the legal sphere) gives us some idea of the general
social climate that accompanies the Dutch struggle with the dilemma of recognition. In
December 2006, the Netherlands Equal Treatment Commission5 ruled in favour of a teacher
who was dismissed because she refused to shake hands with men. Her religion, she said,
forbid her to do so. The school argued that teachers are role models and that shaking hands
(with parents, colleagues, students and others) is a necessary form of communication. The
Commission’s ruling in favour of the teacher caused a minor ‘culture war’ in the media: a
surprising number of opinion-makers, academics, letter writers and politicians (including
ministers who spoke on behalf of the Cabinet) protested against this ruling. It was called
‘unworldly’, ‘a step back into multiculturalism’, ‘cultural relativism’, and so on. A conserva-
tive minister of the Liberal Party even threatened to dismantle the Commission for Equal
Treatment altogether.
The commission’s chairman, A. G. Castermans, defended the ruling on principle. Equality
demands that people have a right to their identity, he argues, and forcing this teacher to shake
hands violates that right. Clearly, this ruling has a multicultural undertone6 and does not fit
the current stress on civic integration. However, as Castermans astutely points out, the
commission’s argument here follows from official government policy. To underline that point
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he quotes the 2005 Troonrede (the Dutch ‘State of the Union’), which reinvigorates this policy
by calling people’s right to their identity ‘the foundation of the Rechtsstaat’ (Castermans, 2006).
The Troonrede is a Cabinet statement; indeed, in this case, the same Cabinet that loudly
denounced the hand-shake ruling.
To sum up, the dilemma of recognition in the Netherlands looks as follows: Policy-makers
consider inequality between ethnic groups an urgent problem that needs targeted redistri-
bution to be solved within the foreseeable future. Targeting, however, accentuates group
boundaries, which is exactly what the recent turn to ‘civic integration’ is supposed to prevent.

Denial, Accommodation and Replacement

What can governments do to resolve the dilemma of recognition? There are three options:
‘denial’, ‘accommodation’ and ‘replacement’ (see De Zwart, 2005).
Denial is the ideal-typical liberal solution: the state refrains from group-specific redistri-
bution because it does not ‘recognize any pre-existing, organic, or transcendent structure to
society’ and stresses individual rights instead (Starr, 1992: 171). The philosophy of republican
citizenship that officially informs integration policy in France is a good example of denial. The
French government does not collect data on the ethnic or racial identity of its citizens, and
there is no special redistributive policy that targets ethnic or racial categories. ‘The French
model’, as Eric Bleich (2001) calls it, is rare, and although it is popular among the French
political elite (Brubaker, 1992: 159–64), it is an ideal-type rather than a description of reality
in policy-making, even in France (Saffran, 1985; Bleich, 2001: 275–7; Favell, 2001: 41–91;
Sabbagh, 2003: 30–45, 49–59).
Most governments try to resolve the dilemma of recognition with the second option:
accommodation. Accommodation means that the beneficiaries of redistributive policy are
defined according to pre-existing social structure or, more precisely, according to member-
ship in groups that state and society take for granted. Multiculturalism as pursued in the
Netherlands until the 1990s is a good example, and although the official line today is civic
integration, accommodative policy-making has not disappeared altogether. The Netherlands
Council for Academic Research (the national research funding organization NWO), for
instance, started a programme in 2006 that allocates part of its PhD grants exclusively to
allochtone students. The council favours diversity, the introductory brochure reads, but
academic institutes ‘are weak in tracking down and binding students from minority groups’,
hence this programme (NWO Brochure Mozaiek, 2006). The programme accommodates just
about everybody whose roots are not in Western Europe or the USA. To qualify, the
candidate, or one of his or her parents, should be born in one of 168 countries listed in the
brochure.
A textbook example of accommodation is affirmative action in the USA. This policy benefits
racial and ethnic minorities whose identity is established in the Census by means of self-
identification. Note, however, that self-identification means that people choose from a list of
racial and ethnic categories that is prefabricated and thus reflects ideas and social theory held
by its makers (see Skerry, 2000: 41–79; also Brubaker, 2002). The extent to which policy-makers’
views of social structure correspond to something real and pre-existing on the ground is an
empirical question. Rogers Brubaker argues that scholars and policy-makers alike tend to
overestimate the extent of ‘groupness’ in the social categories relevant to diversity politics. The
African Americans, Asian Americans, Whites, Native Americans and Latinos in US policy, for
instance, are often thought of and treated as groups, but according to Brubaker they are ‘not
groups at all but categories, backed by political entrepreneurs and entrenched in governmen-
tal and other organizational routines of social counting and accounting’ (2002: 177–8; see also
Brubaker and Cooper, 2000).
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The point is that accommodation makes the definitions of social structure that policy-makers
use real in their consequences. Accommodation entails rewards for those who identify with
the given categories, and political entrepreneurs use these rewards to mobilize people along
the categorical boundaries set in the policy (some classic studies elaborating on this mechan-
ism are Dirks, 1989; Inden, 1990; Mouffe, 1993; Scott, 1998; Young, 1990; Martin, 2001).
Accommodation thus supports the construction of social identities. It provides an incentive
for people to identify with a designated category, which consolidates group boundaries, and
thus, as we saw, poses the dilemma of recognition.
The third option for governments to resolve the dilemma of recognition is what we call
replacement. Replacement is a compromise between denial and accommodation. A government
does pursue group-specific redistribution, but purposively defines the beneficiaries in such a
way that accommodation and its unwelcome side effects are avoided. To do that, governments
construct their own, more convenient target categories. We call this type of constructed social
categories ‘replacement categories’.
The so-called ‘Socially and Educationally Backward Classes’ in India are a classic example.
This category is written into various articles of the Constitution of India as beneficiary of
affirmative action. The Indian government allocates quotas of government jobs and places in
institutes of higher education to various deprived categories such as untouchables and tribes.
The socially and educationally backward classes are the largest of these categories (today it
comprises about 45 per cent of the population). India’s Constituent Assembly, in the early
1950s, enacted affirmative action to combat group inequality. Since most parliamentarians
considered that inequality to be a result of the caste system, the lower castes were the
obvious beneficiaries of this scheme. But many also questioned the wisdom of designating
castes as beneficiaries. They feared that allocating job and educational quotas on the basis of
caste criteria would be self-defeating because it would increase the saliency of caste identifi-
cation, stimulate competition between castes and thus reinforce the caste system instead of
weakening it. To solve this dilemma the assembly decided not to target castes, but to construct
a replacement category: ‘the socially and educationally backward classes’.7
Policy-makers in The Netherlands follow the same strategy. With multiculturalism increas-
ingly criticized as ‘unworldly’ and self-defeating, and with denial (‘the French model’) being
hardly an option because group inequality is an urgent problem, replacement is in vogue, and
the government searches for replacement categories. Policies that used to be called minority
policies started to target socio-economic constructs such as ‘people who live in backward
areas’, or ‘people with insufficient command of the language’, ‘diversity’ and, increasingly,
‘neighbourhoods’. The government that came to power in February 2007, for instance, created
a new ministry called ‘Integration and Neighbourhood Improvement’.
The purpose is to avoid accommodating ethnic groups, without having to forgo group-
wise redistribution. The question is: does it work? Does replacement solve the dilemma of
recognition? The remainder of this article explores the dynamics of replacement in the
Netherlands.

Replacement in Dutch integration policies

The Sociaal-Cultureel Rapport, a government publication from 1998, acknowledges that the
Dutch government faces the dilemma of recognition and mentions two possible solutions:
‘Increasing social diversity within minorities confronts the government with an old policy
dilemma. Should facilities target specific ethnic groups or should they be open to all backward
groups?’ This question is rhetorical because in 1998 few policy-makers still subscribed to the
idea that policies should target specific ethnic groups; the latter were quickly replaced with
policies that target social, economic and educational backwardness (cf. Wolff and Tillie, 1995;
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Feenstra, 1997: 3; Tillie and Fennema, 1997). National minority policy became ‘diversity policy’
(see Verhaar, 2002) or ‘interculturalisation’, and local policies increasingly target neighbour-
hoods or living quarters instead of social categories. In short, the Netherlands has opted for
what we call replacement.
The reason for this change was that the government thought the old accommodative
tradition in redistributive policies obstructed integration because it had made ethnicity and
ethnic identification increasingly salient among ever more separate and competing groups.
The old policy, as De Boer (2001) depicts that process, often benefited one group more than
another. This caused inequality and grievances and motivated other groups to organize and
claim a share of their own. The result was increasing social and organizational fragmentation
along ethnic lines, ‘the logic of affirmative action’, as De Zwart calls this process (2000: 245–7).
To illustrate, the former Chairman of Amsterdam Southeast, an elected local council, evaluates
her administration’s policy in the previous decade as follows:
We now have an array of strictly ethnic organizations working to promote the interests of Ghanees,
Hindus, Creoles, Somalians, and so on. I have completely changed my mind about this approach.
Policies for specific ethnic groups should disappear, facilities should become ‘non-ethnic.’ We need
community centres open to all. (Belliot, 2002)

Belliot is not the only Dutch policy-maker who changed her mind about accommodation.
Today, many more search for a different ‘frame of integration’ (as the jargon goes) and turn to
the so-called ‘neighbourhood approach’. Policies that target neighbourhoods instead of ethnic
groups, it is now assumed, prevent inconvenient group formation (de Boer, 2001: 48; Zwaap,
2002) and have more support among voters (Fermin, 1997: 109–10). The ‘neighbourhood’ thus
became a popular alternative for accommodative policy categories. It is a typical replacement
category.8 Other replacement categories in Dutch redistributive policy are ‘backward areas’,
‘backward groups’, ‘diversity’ and ‘intercultural social structure’.
The Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) underscores the rationale
of replacement when it writes: ‘general [as opposed to categorical] policy will end up bene-
fiting ethnic minorities anyway’ (WRR, 2001: 179). A civil servant from the Amsterdam muni-
cipality proves this right when he explains:
Categorical [accommodative] policy isn’t allowed anymore. That is, organizing swimming lessons for
immigrant women is no longer possible. But we solved that: now we arrange swimming for over-
weight women which means we still reach immigrant women – they are practically the same group.
(Quoted in Leeuwis, 2004: 15)

Since the purpose of replacement categories is not to reflect social structure, their use
challenges the alleged ability of governments to construct social identities. Instead of repro-
ducing a lived-in social structure in policy categories, replacement categories require govern-
ments to turn administrative constructions into real social categories. Instead of ‘Turkish
community’, or ‘Surinamese Hindus’, categories that are based on social ties (if only because
of language), new constructs such as ‘disadvantaged people’ or ‘neighbourhood’ inform
policy-making. The problem is that these targets do not correspond to social groups or even
social ties and consequently make policy implementation depend on bottom-up input.
Replacement categories, in other words, form an administrative opportunity structure that can
be used by ethnic entrepreneurs whose aim often conflicts with that of strategic replacement
(Poppelaars, 2003).
In 1999, Amsterdam city councillor Van der Aa (who held the portfolio ‘diversity policy’)
introduced a policy document, The Power of a Diverse City,9 in which he argues that social
cleavages in Holland’s most multicultural city have to be overcome, and therefore ethnically
specific policies are replaced by ‘diversity policy’.10 ‘The old policy’, the document reads,
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with its mutually exclusive policy terms such as . . . autochtone versus allochtone, men versus women,
hetero versus homo, is no longer sufficient. To continue the old minority policies means to neglect a
development, namely that many people in Amsterdam with a non Dutch background . . . increasingly
wish to be seen as Dutch citizens, member of a neighbourhood, as inhabitant of Amsterdam.
(Gemeente Amsterdam, 1999: 11)

The same thought came up in an on-line discussion between then Minister of Urban Policy
Van Boxtel and Ahmed Aboutaleb, Chairman of Forum, the major national NGO specialized
in advice and representation concerning minorities and integration. The Minister writes that
the old categorical policy is increasingly becoming unworkable and acclaims: ‘As a Minister
I am supposed to be concerned about the faith of many people because they are Moroccan,
Italian, Chilean, Turkish, or Surinamese. I wonder whether those people welcome that’ (Van
Boxtel, 2002). Aboutaleb’s answer is illustrative of the function of replacement categories in
dealing with the dilemma of recognition. He writes:

Forum abolished categorical policy five years ago. But leaving a policy that addresses groups should
not mean that we give up combating backwardness and inequality. . . . I think that the central govern-
ment, instead of pursuing group-specific policy should opt for diversity-policy that leaves room for
a group-approach. (Ibid.; see also Forum, 2002: 12)

Difficulties with replacement arise in the implementation phase. Most Dutch municipalities
involve external organizations in the implementation of minority policy. Naturally, in the
project proposals these organizations produce, one finds ample use of the (replacement)
categories salient in official circles, but implementing policies on the basis of these categories
is a different matter. Replacement categories require evasive definitions. They serve policies
that address group differences but cannot name the groups concerned. Ethnic groups, in this
case, are subsumed under ‘diversity’, ‘interculturality’, ‘the neighbourhood’ or ‘the disadvan-
taged’. The point is that these replacement categories do not clearly define the intended bene-
ficiaries, and therefore pose a problem for implementers at ‘street-level’. The latter have to
approach people and involve them in their projects, and for that they need more precise
categories. Categories such as ‘the neighbourhood’ and ‘disadvantaged people’ require much
interpretation before they can be useful in policy implementation.
If there is no clear relation between these categories and the social categories relevant to
people’s daily lives, it is unclear who should be approached to implement policy. To pursue
the earlier example of India’s Socially and Educationally Backward Classes: when, in the early
1950s, this category was written into constitutional articles as beneficiary of affirmative action,
nobody knew who they were. The Constitution of India also provides for so-called backward
classes commissions whose task it is to find out and list who could qualify. A range of such
commissions has been active since then, and their reports show how much they depend on
the input of local leaders and representatives. The problem is that in India these representa-
tives are usually caste leaders. Local input in India means caste input – ‘Backward Classes’ is
a bureaucratic, not an extant social category (De Zwart, 2000: 240–3; 2005).
The neighbourhood strategy in the Netherlands, part of a national policy to combat the
cumulative problems of big cities, faces the same problem. Migrants are very difficult to
reach under this policy and the implementation of projects depends on local representatives
(Uitermark, 2003). The standard Dutch solution for this problem is to involve organizations
founded by migrants – ‘self-organizations’ in policy jargon – in the implementation process
(see Vermeulen, 2006: 73–7). As Minister Van Boxtel puts it: ‘The government needs represen-
tative organizations from the various ethnic communities to implement policy’ (Minister van
Grote Steden en Integratiebeleid, 2002: 56–7). Former Rotterdam Alderman Simons confirms
that when he writes: ‘according to my intuition we will increasingly become dependent on
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self-organizations if we want to promote and establish the new citizenship approach [in
immigrant integration]’ (Parliamentary Papers, 2004, TK 28689, no. 10: 495).
Replacement promotes the involvement of self-organizations in policy implementation and
thus unintentionally strengthens what it wants to replace. In Amsterdam, despite years of
targeting ‘diversity’ and ‘neighbourhood’, as the official line prescribes, the Federation of
Support Organizations for Minorities (an NGO that is subsidized to support street-level
implementation of integration policy) reports in 2003 that it involved the following list of self-
organizations in project implementation: Turkish (15 organizations among which sub-ethnic
groups such as Alevits), Moroccan (5 organizations), Surinamese (among which separate
organizations for Hindus, Javanese and Creoles) and Ghanese (4 organizations). Moreover,
under ‘others’, Koerdian, Somalian, Afghan and Kaapverdian organizations are named (FMS,
2003). The evaluation of a Municipal project in East-End Amsterdam, Political Participation for
Migrants 2000–2002, shows the same pattern. In line with the motive for a ‘diversity’ approach,
the project aims to promote migrant political participation on an individual basis. One of its
activities is a course that prepares politically interested migrants for membership in the
municipal council. But who should be approached for this? The evaluation of the project thanks
self-organizations with which the East-End Municipality maintains close contact, for their
support in mobilizing and contacting participants (Stadsdeel Oost and Watergraafsmeer, 2001).
Another activity in the same project is to promote turnout in municipal elections. Meetings
were organized for political parties to present themselves to migrants. But who are the
migrants? The solution is the same as above: the meetings were organized by a working group
of municipal staff and the ‘Administrative Council for Migrants’. The latter is a federation of
self-organizations – five Moroccan (among which a separate women’s organization), three
Turkish (among which a women’s and an organization for the elderly) and two Surinamese.
The Mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, aptly comments on the problem sketched above:
‘because we, as government, wanted contact we created the self-organizations ourselves, as it
were’ (2003: 16). A former Alderman of Tilburg, Mevis, highlights the same problem: ‘we want
to organize a meeting place for Somali people, not only because we want to provide them an
opportunity to meet people of their own kind, but also because we need spokesmen from that
community with whom we can arrange things’ (Parliamentary Papers, 2004, TK 28689, no. 10:
427). The government needs self-organizations to access the beneficiaries of its redistributive
policies (cf. Feenstra, 1997: 3; Poppelaars, 2003: 60) and in the process creates an administrative
opportunity structure that is used by political entrepreneurs to organize an ethnic following
and claim government support. This mechanism poses a familiar dilemma characteristic for
accommodative policies; the point here is that replacement does not resolve it.

Conclusions
Governments make replacement categories to avoid replicating taken-for-granted social
categories in policy design. Using these categories in redistributive policies, however, produces
a typical pattern of unintended consequences. Replacement leaves operators ill-equipped in
the implementation phase. It increases their dependence, in delivering policies, on ‘bottom-
up input’. Using replacement categories thus helps to create an administrative opportunity
structure used by ethnic and political entrepreneurs to mobilize and empower exactly those
social categories that strategic replacement aimed to suppress. This mechanism, we argued,
helps explain why, despite the seemingly radical retreat from multiculturalism, a high degree
of ethnic specificity is a persistent characteristic of Dutch integration policies and projects.
Replacement, then, does not solve the dilemma of recognition because it reinvigorates what
was to be replaced. We found similar results in other cases (see note 5) and suggest three
general conditions under which replacement is problematic: A highly diverse social structure
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with a potential for multiple divisions along ethnic and sub-ethnic lines; the opportunity and
means for organization and claim-making along these lines; and a government that pursues
fairly large-scale schemes to redistribute important scarce goods. In this context, there is a risk
that replacement becomes self-defeating.
Note, however, that some policy-makers in the Netherlands motivate the use of replacement
categories as an adaptation to extant social structure, rather than a substitute for it. Replacing
ethnic targeting with diversity policy in Amsterdam, for instance, is depicted, in Municipal
policy documents, as an ‘adaptation . . . to developments in current social life in Amsterdam’
(Gemeente, 1999: 17). And, to give another example, former Minister of Integration van Boxtel,
in a letter to Aboutaleb (pp. 16–17), suggests that people are not happy to be addressed as
Moroccan, Turkish or Surinamese, while the Utrecht Plan van Aanpak notes that accommoda-
tive categorization is ‘patronizing’ and ‘stigmatizing’ (Alons and Partners, 1996: 5–7).
The unintended consequence of replacement – ongoing fragmentation along ethnic lines –
suggests, however, that these motivations rest on either a too optimistic idea of the govern-
ment’s powers to reconstruct social structure or a too selective view of social reality. There
may be a growing number of migrants who prefer not to be addressed as Moroccan, Turkish,
etc., but officials involved in the implementation of redistributive schemes in Dutch ‘neigh-
bourhoods’ find that many people are quite happy to be addressed as such. The replacement
categories constructed to solve this problem provide ample opportunity to act upon that.

Notes
We thank Odile Verhaar and anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and very useful suggestions
leading to improvement of earlier versions of the manuscript.

1. These terms are literal translations of Dutch administrative jargon. They correspond with the
opposition between targeted and universalistic policies.
2. Replacement is by no means unique for the Netherlands though. Elsewhere we have explored its
working in different contexts and times – affirmative action in India and the creation of states in the
Federation of Nigeria (see De Zwart, 2005).
3. Even in France, where civic integration (Republicanism) never ceased to be the official line, targeting
ethnic groups with redistributive schemes is a ‘reflex’ when group inequality is seen as an urgent
problem. In November 2005, for instance, while the riots that raged in poor suburbs of major French
cities were still taking place, Minister of the Interior Sarkozy proposed a major affirmative action
programme to the benefit of migrant groups.
4. Het Multiculturele Drama (Scheffer, 2000).
5. The Equal Treatment Commission was installed in 1994 to advise the government on implementa-
tion of the Equal Treatment Act, and to rule cases outside the courts.
6. See, for instance, Brian Barry (2001), who explores similar cases in Great Britain. Barry argues that
multiculturalists tend to blur the crucial distinction between ‘limits to the range of opportunities open
to people and limits on the choices that they make from within a certain range of opportunities’ (ibid.,
p. 38). A multiculturalist taking of the ‘hand shake case’ would be that the school’s insistence on
shaking hands limits the range of opportunities open to the teacher, and thus violates equality of
opportunity. Barry’s ‘egalitarian liberalism’ (which is much closer to the official Dutch line of civic
integration), however, would argue that the opportunity to work in the school was open to this teacher,
but that she passed it up because she considered other things more important (ibid., pp. 36–9).
7. De Zwart (2000: 238–40) describes this process and its consequences in some detail.
8. Daniel Sabbagh studied a similar strategy in France. Science Po, a prestigious French University, has
an affirmative action programme that targets students from high schools in economically disadvan-
taged areas. The programme entails a more lenient admission procedure to the university. By
targeting neighbourhoods, this programme remains in line with the official ‘colour-blind’ approach
in France, but the targeted high schools are located, not coincidentally, in neighbourhoods with very
high percentages of migrants (Sabbagh, 2002: 56).
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9. De Kracht van een Diverse Stad (Amsterdam, 1999).

10. See Gemeente Arnhem (2002); Gemeente Den Haag (2003: 3); Gemeente Rotterdam (2003, 2004); and
Alons and Partners (1996: 11–13) for examples of the same process in other cities in the Netherlands.

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Biographical Note: Frank de Zwart works in the Department of Public Administration at Leiden
University. He teaches comparative social science and specializes in state formation, patronage and
bureaucracy, caste and ethnicity. Some recent publications are: ‘The Dilemma of Recognition: Adminis-
trative Categories and Cultural Diversity’ (Theory and Society) and ‘Targeted Policy in Multicultural
Societies: Accommodation, Denial, and Replacement’ (International Social Science Journal).
Address: Department of Public Administration, Faculty of Social Science, Leiden University, Wasse-
naarseweg 52, P.O. Box 9555, 2300 RB Leiden, the Netherlands. [email: zwart@fsw.leidenuniv.nl]

Biographical Note: Caelesta Poppelaars is a PhD candidate in the Department of Public Administration
at Leiden University. Her dissertation involves an international comparison of public bureaucracy–
interest group interactions. Her research interests include interest representation, bureaucratic politics,
decision-making analysis and urban governance. A recent paper she has written on urban governance
is entitled ‘Resource Exchange in Urban Governance. On the Means that Matter’ (Urban Affairs Review,
2007).
Address: Department of Public Administration, Faculty of Social Science, Leiden University, Wasse-
naarseweg 52, P.O. Box 9555, 2300 RB Leiden, the Netherlands. [email: cpoppelaars@fsw.leidenuniv.nl]

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