Imperatives of national imagination: debate, dissensus and reiteration in Dutch elite discourses after 1989.

As elsewhere, 'national identity' became a prominent public issue at the end of the 1980's in the Netherlands. Particularly after 1989 – following the Rushdie affair, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing wars in former Yugoslavia, the Maastricht treaty – a series of public debates took place that problematized Dutch national identity. These discussions, mainly performed by prominent intellectuals, politicians and academics, framed national identity in a particular way: it was in need of explication. The critical re-evaluation of nations and nationalism in the 1960s fundamentally re-shaped public discussions. Interlocutors began to perform as the voices of public opinion, speaking out or those who still anachronistically understand themselves in nationalist terms. They also began to focus on a particular kind of problem: imagination.

Almost all participants in these debates are ostensibly aware of the imaginary aspect of national identity - its practical and discursive constructedness -, yet this does not at all lead to a relativizing tendency. Instead, national identity is imagined to be increasingly troubled. Interestingly, the on-going performance of public dissensus only further affirms and reiterates the imaginative disarray in which national identity is said to exist. The advent of reflexive constructivism in debates on national identity do not lead to relativizing, but to an ever more strongly articulated failure to represent an agreeable image. These publically articulated doubts and anxieties laid the discursive ground work for the post-2000 turn towards cultural assimilationism in Dutch politics.