Pillarization — how the Dutch organised society into separate columns, and what it meant for immigration
Part of: Dutch History, Dutch Culture
Verzuiling means "pillarization" — the organisation of Dutch society into separate, parallel columns (zuilen) based on religion or ideology. From roughly 1900 to the 1960s, the Netherlands was divided into distinct pillars: Catholic, Protestant, Socialist, and Liberal. Each pillar had its own institutions: schools, hospitals, trade unions, newspapers, broadcasters, sports clubs. A Catholic lived, worked, was educated, read the news, and organised politically almost entirely within the Catholic pillar. A Socialist did the same within theirs.
The pillars didn't integrate — they coexisted. Political stability came not from shared values but from elite negotiation at the top: pillar leaders bargaining with each other in what is sometimes called the Poldermodel.
When large-scale immigration came to the Netherlands — first from Suriname and the Dutch Antilles in the 1970s, then from Turkey and Morocco as guest workers — the Dutch applied the same institutional logic. Rather than pushing immigrants to assimilate, the state funded mosques, Islamic schools, Turkish and Moroccan broadcasters, and cultural organisations. The idea was that cultural preservation and integration were not in conflict: if minorities could live fully within their own institutions, they would feel secure enough to participate in Dutch society more broadly.
As Jan Willem Duyvendak and Peter Scholten put it:
"A key trait of this multicultural model would be that the Dutch tend to institutionalize cultural pluralism in the belief that cultural emancipation of immigrant minorities is the key to their integration into Dutch society."
This logic has a clear intellectual parallel. Amin Maalouf, in On Identity, wrote:
"The more an immigrant feels his own culture is respected, the more open he will be to the culture of the host country."
The Dutch multicultural model was, in effect, a policy bet on exactly that proposition.
By the late 1990s and especially after 2001–2002, the consensus broke down. Critics — most visibly Pim Fortuyn, then Ayaan Hirsi Ali — argued that the multicultural model had produced parallel societies rather than integration: communities that lived alongside the Netherlands without becoming part of it. The institutions had preserved culture without building a bridge out.
Fortuyn's assassination in 2002 (by an animal rights activist, not an Islamist), followed by the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, accelerated a hard pivot. The Netherlands shifted from a multicultural model toward civic integration (inburgering): immigrants were now expected to learn Dutch, pass civic knowledge tests, and orient themselves toward Dutch norms — not maintain a separate institutional pillar.
The debate about whether the multicultural model failed, or was never given enough time and resources to work, continues. The Duyvendak/Scholten framing suggests the model was coherent — it just collided with political reality.
The legacy of verzuiling still shapes Dutch institutions. The constitution guarantees the right to found schools on religious or ideological grounds — hence the continued existence of Islamic schools, Protestant schools, and Catholic schools alongside public ones. The pillars have weakened but the architecture remains.
Migration policy remains one of the most contested areas in Dutch politics, with PVV and the current Schoof cabinet pushing hard toward restriction and assimilation requirements, while Progressief Nederland (PRO) and D66 defend a more pluralist approach — an echo, in different language, of the same underlying argument.
These guides are written to help you understand the Netherlands — not to replace professional advice. We do our best to be accurate but we make mistakes and information goes out of date. For anything that affects your legal status, taxes, finances, or health, verify with an official source or a qualified advisor.