This book is the the first study to offer an extensive engagement with the ideas beind the Dutch swing to the right in the context of the wave of right wing populist movemements that have swept over Europe in the past twenty years.
In the past 20 years, a wave of right-wing populist movements has swept over Europe, changing the face of European politics. The Netherlands has been one of the more iconic countries to partake in this shift. Known internationally as an emblem of progressivism and tolerance, the country soon became a frontrunner in the revival of nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiment. This is the first study to offer an extensive engagement with the ideas behind the Dutch swing to the right.
The emergence of Dutch populism, this book shows, formed an integral part of a broader conservative tendency, identified as the Dutch New Right. In the US and the UK, the term New Right has been used to describe conservative backlash movements that arose in opposition to the progressive movements of the 1960s. The Dutch swing to the right, this book argues, formed a belated iteration of the New Right backlash that occurred overseas.
This text will be essential reading for students and scholars in the fields of European Studies and Political Science, and Dutch politics and society more specifically.
"I've rarely read so rich and acute a study of a national culture, and the successive political metamorphoses within it, that puts it in so trenchant a comparative perspective. It's an education, methodologically and substantively, for any Anglophone reader."
Perry Anderson, Professor of History and Sociology at the University of California, USA.
"An exceptionally important contribution to a deeper understanding of Dutch politics."
Ernst Hirsch Ballin, Law Professor at Tilburg University, Special Professor of Human Rights at Amsterdam University, Dutch Minister of Justice (1989-1994, 2010-2016)
"An outstanding example of scientific practice."
Jan Willem Duyvendak, Rector of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS-KNAW) and Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA)
"The best book on the rise of the Dutch right in the last twenty years."
Bart Jan Spruyt, author of In Praise of Conservatism (2003), former director of the Edmund Burke Foundation.
