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The Death of Dutch?
| Article
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18537 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1991 |
2,488 Words |
| Author
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Radboud Engbersen and Godfried Engbersen
Radboud Engbersen teaches at the University of Utrecht and has
written books on rhetoric and culture, including Armoede in de
Maatschappelijke Verbeelding (The social imagination of
poverty). Godfried Engbersen, an associate professor at the
University of Utrecht, has written about the Dutch welfare
state in Een Tijd zonder Werk (A time without work) and
Publieke Bijstandsgeheimen (public welfare secrets). |
On the night of January 31, 1953, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which had imagined itself safe behind its massive dikes, was surprised by the sea. A spring tide, combined with a heavy storm, crushed the dikes and flooded a large area of the southwest Netherlands. No flooding disaster of such magnitude had occurred since the Saint Elizabeth tide in the fifteenth century. The calamity led to the most ambitious flood control project in the history of the Low Countries, the Delta project. Completed in the mid-eighties, it was a belt of defensive water works that shut off the tidal inlets of the province of Zeeland and closed off Holland from the sea.
That fateful January night of 1953 revived the Dutchman's primordial experience: his battle against rising water. Subsequently, the Delta project has come to symbolize the Dutchman's willpower and decisiveness when the water has risen to his ankles.
Now, shortly after its completion, the Netherlands again feels threatened. But this time the fear is not of having to surrender its territory to the ocean, but of being engulfed by foreign cultures. With the approach of "Europe 1992," many Dutch people are apprehensive of the Anglicizing, Frenchifying, or Germanizing of their culture. Indeed, in September 1990, at the first session of the parliamentary year, Queen Beatrix announced that the government had plans to devise a new "Delta Project" in order to protect the Dutch culture.
This cultural "Delta project" is, in part, the Dutch government's answer to the national uproar caused when Education Minister Jo Ritzen made a plea in favor of giving the English language a more prominent place within Dutch universities. Ritzen suggested that some courses should be taught in English. "Ritzen kills Dutch Language" the Dutch newspaper Trouw howled, its headline written in English. Questions were raised in parliament, debates raged, and newspaper editors were inundated by an incessant flood of letters. In the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, journalist Willem Kuypers wrote: "One can easily get the feeling that the dike of our fatherland's culture is about to burst without any Hans Brinker to stop the flow by putting his finger in the hole." What is the cause of this general concern for the Dutch language and culture? What are the threats that loom ahead, and how appropriate is the dike metaphor?
This controversy should be considered against the background of integration of the European community. It has been agreed that by 1992 the European Economic Community (EEC) will be a single market. Presumably, the
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