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In Defence of Gender Equality?
Comparing the Political Debates about
Headscarves and Honour-Related
Crimes in France and the Netherlands
Conny Roggeband1,* and Doutje Lettinga1,2
In this paper, we analyze political debates about headscarves and honour-related
crimes in France and the Netherlands. We seek to explain why and how France and
the Netherlands have come to unevenly politicize headscarves and honour crimes.
Moreover, we try to understand how the argument of gender equality is increasingly
used by different actors in these policy debates and the gendered implications
thereof. We argue that the agenda and demands of (ethnic minority) women0sorga-
nizations are selectively included and bent to serve other, non-feminist agendas.
Ethnic minority women0s organizations and female ethnic minority politicians have
acted as agenda-setters, asking attention for their marginalized position, discrimin-
ation against them and experiences of violence, yet these issues were co-opted by
(mainly) right-wing politicians to problematize the “deviant” culture of minorities
and propose policies that further exclude them and paternalize them instead of
improving their situation.
Introduction
Headscarves, female genital mutilation, honour crimes, and forced
marriages recently became major issues on the political agenda in many
European countries. These debates and policies all function according to the
logics of cultural otherness and put the body of women central in the contro-
versy over clashing cultures of the modern, liberal society versus traditional,
non-western illiberal cultures (Phillips 2009, 25). The question emerges when
and how strongly these issues become politicized in different contexts. In this
paper, we compare two of these emblematic policy issues: female Islamic head
and body covering and “honour-related” crimes in two countries that have
different institutional legacies in dealing with ethnic, gender, and religious
differences: the Netherlands and France. We address four main puzzles. First,
1
Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2
Amnesty International, The Netherlands
*c.m.roggeband@uva.nl
socpol: Social Politics, pp. 1–24
doi: 10.1093/sp/jxu024
#The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
Social Politics 2014 Volume 0 Number 0
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we seek to explain why and how France and the Netherlands have come to un-
evenly politicize headscarves and honour crimes, second, we try to understand
how the argument of gender equality is increasingly used by different actors in
these policy debates and the gendered implications thereof, third, we examine
the (limited) influence of women organizations and feminist actors on the
framing and policy outcomes and fourth, we look at the interplay between
institutional settings, actors and framing and discuss the (potential)
consequences of these processes in both countries.
Our analysis demonstrates that while head and body covering of Muslim
women is a highly contentious political issue in France, the level of politiciza-
tion of this issue in the Netherlands has been much lower and later. The issue
of honour-related violence became a major issue on the Dutch political agenda
in 2006, but only received scant attention in the French political debate. We
show these differences are path-dependent effects of historical institutions and
traditions. Yet, there is also some remarkable convergence between France and
the Netherlands. Over time, both issues received increasing attention in the
two countries and more importantly, in the parliamentary debates on both
topics, gender equality has become a central argument, representing gender
equality as a core value of national culture (Ticktin 2008). Much of this
gender-equality discourse has come from politicians who by linking arguments
on gender equality to issues like public order, security and national identity
police the boundaries of the imagined national community. Ferguson and
Marso (2007) label this connection between gender equality and security strat-
egy as a “new politics of gender” that supports particular interpretations of
“women’s rights”, but is far from feminist
1
in that it is grounded in a conserva-
tive gender ideology, which characterizes women as submissive, vulnerable,
and therefore in need of rescue (Ahmed 1992;Abu-Lughod 2002).
The gendered effects of this discourse are paradoxical, because as a result
(some) gender issues have been taken up, sometimes after years of struggle and
non-response (Coene and Longman 2008;Dustin and Phillips 2008). Also, it
has contributed to an increasing visibility of minority women and some recog-
nition of their interests on the political agenda. Yet, our analysis makes clear
that in the political debates on head and body covering and honour-related
violence, the voices and frames of (minority) women’s organizations are stra-
tegically and/or selectively used by politicians, in particular right-wing and
populist politicians, without adopting the larger agenda of these groups. While
gender equality is promoted, other feminist claims to address problems of
socio-economic marginalization and discrimination of minority women or to
strengthen their legal position are not adopted. This indicates that political
actors co-opt rather than act upon feminist frames.
2
The article is divided into four parts, addressing our four main puzzles. First,
we show why a comparison of debates in France and the Netherlands is useful.
Second, we explain our data and methodology. Third, we compare political
debates on head and body covering of Muslim women and honour-related
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violence in France and the Netherlands. We will explain the differences and
similarities in salience and framing of these two issues, in particular paying
attention to the use of gendered frames in policy debates. In the conclusion, we
look at the interplay between institutional settings, actors and framing and
discuss the (potential) consequences of the new politics of gendering in both
countries.
Comparing France and the Netherlands: Beyond
Institutions, The Nation, and Gender
Various sociologists have focussed on the question why European nation-
states have responded differently to the increasing cultural and religious plural-
ism resulting from immigration. In this “institutionalist” literature, different
policies of citizenship and immigrant integration, which are often related to
historical paths of state-formation and nation building, are seen as determining
policy responses regarding immigrants (Brubaker 1992;Favell 1998;Joppke
1998;Koopmans et al. 2005). France and the Netherlands are often presented
as ideal-typical examples of two different citizenship and integration “models”
and therefore make an interesting comparison. France is considered as the
proto-typical example of a republican model in which immigrants can easily
become French citizens, yet are asked, in order to secure common citizenship,
to assimilate and to exist in the public sphere as citizens only. Republican uni-
versalism has been analyzed as a recurrent discursive obstacle to women’s
demands for inclusion. The Netherlands, in contrast, is often labelled as a
multicultural model, which combines easy access to citizenship with tolerance
of cultural and religious diversity in public life (Koopmans et al. 2005). The
basic assumption of institutional approaches is that these models present a set
of immutable norms, informing legitimate political discourses and practices.
Public policies thus develop according to a “logic of path-dependence” or
“logic of appropriateness”, defined as socially constituted and culturally
framed rules and norms embedded in political institutions (Schmidt 2010).
Following this logic, we would expect the issues at stake to be treated very
differently in France and The Netherlands.
Yet, institutional approaches have a number of limitations. First, institutional
models are better at explaining continuity than political and policy change.
Second, an emphasis on path-dependency of historical policy legacies cannot
well account for similarities between countries in the saliency of these issues or
in the gendering of policy debates. Third, the emphasis on structural elements
overlooks the role of agency and framing. Institutional approaches have difficulty
in properly conceptualizing and accounting for political conflict and contest-
ation. The contestation of dominant models and policy logics of actors within
and outside state institutions may result in institutional change when a dominant
perception or model is successfully substituted by an alternative frame.
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We therefore propose a more dynamic explanation that also pays attention
to the actors involved in the policy-making processes on the veil
3
and honour-
related violence and the competing meanings they give to these issues and their
institutional surroundings. We use the notion of hegemonic state projects
of Kantola and Dahl (2005) to describe institutional patterns that shape the
framing contest in important, historically and contextually specific ways.
“However”, as Kantola and Dahl rightly argue, “the hegemonic projects are
created in potential spaces of struggle and resistance, where an on-going war of
positions takes place” (2005, 62). In order to understand the outcome of these
framing struggles, we therefore consider the impact of not only (internally
heterogeneous and contested) institutional policy legacies, but also power
constellations, discourse coalitions—in particular between women’s groups
and politicians—and crucial events. We particularly pay attention to what
extent women’s organizations managed to gender the parliamentary debates in
ways that are empowering or disempowering for women.
Methodology and Data
We use a critical frame analysis approach (Verloo 2005) to reconstruct the
framing of veiling and honour-based violence in policy making. According to
this approach, two key dimensions of a policy frame are the diagnosis (what is
constituted as the problem by the political actor, what is seen as the cause of
the problem and what as the effect) and the prognosis (what solution to that
problem is proposed). Policy actors do not always articulate a fully elaborated
policy frame and may use certain elements of one diagnostic frame without
supporting its direction or, conversely, they may reach the same conclusion on
the prognosis but from different problem representations. In the paper, we will
describe which actors used which frames in the debates on headscarves and
honour-related crimes.
Our data consist of political debates about female Islamic head and body
covering from 1989 until 2007. Although the headscarf in France was a political
issue long before 1989, it only became a domestic question in the late 1980s
with the struggles of postcolonial migrants claiming full citizenship, the
emergence of far right-wing parties and international rise of Political Islam
(Scott 2007). The debates about honour-related crimes stretch a much shorter
period, since this issue did not enter the political agenda until the year 2000 in
the Netherlands and 2002 in France. Our source materials are primarily parlia-
mentary debates since we are interested in explaining differences in the politi-
cization and regulation of the issues. The political documents were found in
the parliamentary databases or archives of each country by means of keywords
and thematic searches. The attention for the two issues in each country was
measured by counting the number of parliamentary debates devoted to the
issue, together with written and oral questions, motions, and law proposals.
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In order to present a balanced portrayal of the way feminist arguments were
articulated in the discussions, we analyzed positions taken by feminist actors
and (migrant) women’s organizations in reaction to the political and media
debate. To this end, we used Lexis-Nexis searches to find the keywords femin-
ist, feminism, headscarf, burqa, honour-related violence, honour-revenge in
mainstream French and Dutch media in the period 1989– 2009.
Debates on Female Islamic Head and Body Covering
All over Europe, heated debates have emerged about Islamic head and body
covering in the public sphere, particularly in institutions like the judiciary, the
police, the state administration and public schools. In both the French and
Dutch political arena, the veil has been an issue of contestation, but as figure 1
makes clear, the French parliamentary debate was more intense and started
almost a decade earlier compared with the Netherlands. Yet, in both countries
attention to this issue increased after the turn of the millennium.
If we look at the actors that politicized the issue in the two countries
(figures 2and 3), we see continuity in France and a shift in the Netherlands.
Whereas in France right-wing dominated the debate throughout the whole
period we studied, in the Netherlands it was mostly left-wing parties that placed
the issue on the political agenda in the 1980s and 1990s, and after 2003 populist
right-wing parties took over. This shift can be directly related to important
Figure 1. Number of parliamentary documents concerning Islamic head and body
covering in France and the Netherlands (1989– 2007).
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changes in the Dutch political landscape following the September 11 events.
Right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn with his anti-Islam discourse gained popular-
ity. Fortuyn was murdered in May 2002, a few days before the national elections,
but his party won a landslide victory on May 15 (26 seats in Parliament,
corresponding to 17 percent of the electorate) (Doomernik 2005;Van der Veer
2006). While the Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF) soon lost its strong position due to
internal disagreements, the influence of Fortuyn’s anti-immigration rhetoric
lasted and the LPF was succeeded by new populist anti-immigration parties.
Next we examine the content of the headscarf debates in both countries,
to see how each issue has been framed over time.
Figure 2. French actors politicizing the veil (1985– 2007).
Figure 3. Dutch actors politicizing the veil (1985– 2007).
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France
As Figure 1shows, the headscarf was a contentious issue in France from
1989 onwards, with a sharp rise in political attention in 2003. The issue of the
headscarf entered the political debate in 1989 when three Muslim schoolgirls
who refused to remove their head scarves were expelled from a public school.
The case attracted a lot of attention in the media and political realm. The
Socialist Minister of Education Lionel Jospin referred the case to the highest
administrative court, the State Council (“Conseil d’Etat”). It ruled that the
wearing of signs of religious affiliation by students in public schools was not
necessarily incompatible with the principle of laı
¨cite
´, as long as these signs
were not ostentatious, or acts of proselytism.
4
The decision underscored
students’ rights to freedom of religion and religious expression. Based on the
council’s ruling, Jospin left it to local school authorities to decide, on a
case-by-case basis, whether head scarves (and other signs of religious convic-
tion) were admissible or not (JO no., 25 October, 1989, 4113 – 4115).
This decision received criticism within his own party and a considerable
group of parti socialiste members pleaded in favour of a general ban on the head-
scarf, yet others opposed such a drastic measure for being counterproductive.
Also, right- and left-wing opposition parties criticized the accommodative stance
of Jospin. Deputies of the right-wing Rassemblant pour la Republique (RPR) in
particular framed the headscarf as an act of provocation that attacked French
Republican citizenship, a visual sign of collective or individual segregation (a
“repli communautaire”) that rejected “French” values and principles of liberal in-
dividualism and secularism (JO no. 15577, October 25, 1989). Equating the
headscarf with the chador (a veil covering the full body) and making references
to Islamic theocracies like Iran, deputies of the RPR framed the headscarf as an
Islamist threat to the secular and democratic foundations of the state. Both left-
and right-wing parties agreed that the headscarf conflicted with the principles of
gender equality and argued that Republican schools functioned as a motor for
girls’ emancipation by providing them with the tools to break with their patri-
archal community and to integrate in “French” society. The issue remained con-
tentious and resurfaced on the political agenda throughout the 1990s.
Women’s organizations were similarly divided about the issue from the
outset of the debate. Traditional leftist feminist organizations affiliated to the
National Council for Women’s Rights (CNDF) expressed their concerns about
the sexist nature of the headscarf, but advocated the inclusion of girls in schools
to enable them to increase their autonomy. A few other organizations, including
the abortion-rights Choisir, the Women’s Rights League (LdF) and the French
Movement for Family Planning (MFPF), already came out in favour of a ban
(Rochefort 2002,153).
In 2003, political controversy over the headscarf intensified when the
Minister of the Interior and of Cults, Nicolas Sarkozy [Union pour un
Mouvement Populaire (UMP)], announced that Muslim women had to take
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of their veil off for official identity photographs. This announcement was fol-
lowed by a series of law proposals to call for a headscarf ban in public schools
and fierce political debate. This time, a gender frame that represented the head-
scarf as a symbol of oppression became much more prevalent, together with
arguments about security and public order. In June 2003, Parliament installed
a commission to study the issue (Debre
´Commission), and President Chirac
appointed a commission to study the application of the laı
¨cite
´principle (Stasi
Commission). Both Commissions argued in favour of a ban, despite the differ-
ent content of their proposals. The Stasi Commission concluded that “a great
silent majority of young girls of immigrant origin need protection against
Islamist groups forcing them to cover”,
5
which had been a central argument of
a highly visible new feminist group called Ni Putes Ni Soumises (NPNS). This
organization started to mobilize in 2003 to denounce violence against girls in
the migrant-populated poorer suburbs of Paris (the “banlieues”). Fadela
Amara, chair of NPNS who later became Secretary of State for Urban Policies
under the second UMP government, eventually came out in favour of a ban,
suggesting that the headscarf promotes violence, sexism and patriarchy. In line
with this, the Stasi Report stressed violence as an important argument in
favour of a ban. In February 2004, Prime Minister Raffarin (UMP) introduced
a legislative project to ban ostensible religious symbols in the public school,
stating that this marked “a fundamental stage in the political project of ‘living
together’ that serves national cohesion”.
6
The proposed ban implied a clear de-
parture from the existing accommodative case-by-case approach to the head-
scarves issue. Laı
¨cite
´was presented as a central element of the French national
identity, together with gender equality. President Chirac stated that “our
combat for Republican values must go hand in hand with the struggle for
women’s rights and their equality to men [....] The degree of a society’s civil-
ization is measured, in the first place, by the status of women in that society”.
7
On February 10, 2004, a large majority in parliament voted in favour of a ban.
Opposition was voiced by some members of the Communist party who argued
it would fuel fundamentalism and communalism.
Feminist supporters of a ban,
8
despite their heterogeneity, voiced the same
type of discourse as the political arena, interpreting the headscarf as a symbol
of women’s oppression. They argued that the state should protect young girls
from Islamists and from the men of their community, viewing the secular
Republican state as the only assurance for women’s rights (Ezekiel 2006).
Other feminist groups opposed a ban and argued that it might isolate girls in
their stigmatized immigrant communities and render invisible socio-economic
inequalities that intersect with gender inequality. While the Stasi Commission
invited both feminists in favour and opposed to a ban, the arguments about
discrimination were set aside rather than integrated into analyses of the head-
scarf (Bassel and Emejulu 2010, 527).
In June 2008, the debate shifted to the Islamic face-veil, after the State
Council declared that a Moroccan-born woman had legitimately been refused
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French citizenship due to her wearing a niqab. The argument was that she
adhered to “a radical religious practice that conflicted with the values of the
Republic”, notably the equality of the sexes (JO 286798, June 27,2008). One
year later, President Nicolas Sarkozy installed a parliamentary inquiry commis-
sion to study the possibilities of a law banning the public use of burqas.
9
The
Commission, in its 2010 report, proposed a ban on all face covers in certain
public institutions and in public transportation, but considered a full ban un-
lawful. The State Council also opposed a general ban. Against these advices,
the government launched a legislative project to prohibit all types of face cover-
ing in public spaces (including the street), which was adopted by a majority of
Parliament in July, 2010. The project framed face covers in terms of public
order and “French” values.
The Netherlands
As Figure 1indicates, in the Netherlands the veil only became salient after
2003, with the rise of populist right-wing parties that politicized the headscarf
and face-veil. In contrast to France, the headscarf was almost a non-politicized
issue during the 1980s and 1990s. There were some minor political debates, all
initiated by left-wing parties, in which headscarves were framed in terms of
(gender) discrimination as well as religious freedom. There was a strong social
and political consensus in which the headscarf was framed as a religious right
that was beyond the scope of state intervention.
Female MPs of the Green party (Groen Links) argued that any restrictions
to wear a headscarf at the work floor were discriminatory and urged the gov-
ernment to enable Muslim women’s own emancipation strategies and remove
all obstacles that hindered their participation.
10
In 1999, the Dutch Equal
Treatment Commission (ETC) confirmed that prohibitions on religious dress
for public school teachers constituted a form of discrimination on grounds of
religion (ETC 1999–18). Muslim and migrant women’s organizations did not
mobilize on the headscarf issue and it was almost absent in feminist debates,
except for some anti-headscarf columns in Dutch feminist magazine Opzij.
11
Yet, after the turn of the millennium, veiling became a more controversial
issue in the political debate when it focussed on the right of court personnel
and police officers to express their religious affiliations, and when the face-veil
became the centre of attention. Central actors in the politicization were newly
emerging anti-immigrant parties, LPF and PVV, who successfully linked the
issue to the growing Islamophobia after 9/11. In 2004, the LPF requested a
parliamentary debate on religious symbolism in the public service. In its
framing, it drew clear boundaries between “our Dutch, modern values” such
as gender equality and sexual tolerance and “their” Muslim culture or Islamic
ideology, to argue for a headscarf ban in representative public functions (e.g.
TK 59, March 17, 2004, 3880). This framing was not supported by MPs of
other parties, who viewed veiling as a right to religious freedom that also
extended to public functionaries. Yet, a majority in parliament argued that
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state officials working in “authoritative” public functions—like the police
force, prison guards or people working in the judiciary—should refrain from
displaying their religion. This position became Dutch policy.
In 2005, the political debate shifted to face covers, mainly referred to as the
burqa.
12
Right-wing MP Geert Wilders, who had left the Liberal Party
(Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie [VVD]) to have an independent seat
in Parliament, raised the issue during a debate about terrorism in 2005. Two
frames dominated these debates: a frame that emphasized security and public
order and a second frame about gender equality. Wilders introduced a reso-
lution requesting the government to take steps to prohibit the public use of the
burqa in the Netherlands arguing that “as a symbol of women’s submission it
is undesirable and it is unacceptable that people cannot be identified” (TK
29754, no. 53, October 13, 2005). All right-wing parties, including the
Christian Democrat party (Christen Democratisch Appel) and Liberal Party
(VVD), supported the resolution. Both conservative Liberal and populist
right-wing MPs used gender-equality arguments, stating that “the burqa is a
symbol of submission that does not fit into our value-system” (jVVD, 1073) or
“the worst kind of women-unfriendly clothing” (Groep Eerdmans, TK 15,
October 19, 2006, 1074). They claimed that women donning face covers
excluded themselves from mainstream society and the labour market, because
face-veils hinder face-to-face communication and social interaction (TK 15,
October 19, 2006, 1073). The Labour Party, Green Party, and the Liberal
Democrats (D’66) agreed that face covers are incompatible with an “open and
emancipated society” but opposed a ban (TK 31 700 VII, December 25, 2008).
The Dutch-Turkish MP Fatma Kaya (D’66) said she preferred to “emancipate
the burqa away” (TK 16, October 24, 2006).
In August 2006, the Minister for Alien Affairs and Integration, Rita Verdonk
(VVD) appointed a commission of experts to examine the legal options available
for prohibiting wearing the burqa and other face coverings in public space (Moors
2009). This committee argued that a full ban on burqas infringed upon the non-
discrimination principle and the rights to freedom of religion and freedom of
choice that liberal democracies should foster (Vermeulen et al. 2006). The State
Council expressed a similar view (No. 03.07.0219/II, September 2, 2007). Yet,
despite these objections a majority in Parliament expressed its support for ban
on face covering in public in April 2008 (TK 31331, no. 2–3, January 24, 2008).
Unlike the French case, Muslim women’s dress did not generate any major
debate among feminists. Some controversy arose in 2001, when Cisca
Dresselhuys, the editor-in-chief of feminist magazine Opzij publicly declared she
would not hire a journalist wearing a headscarf because it would tap into oppres-
sive religious doctrine.
13
Yet, in 2003 she opposed the French ban stating it
would isolate Muslim girls and women in need of emancipation. Feminist
journal Opzij changed its position in 2008, when a new editor-in-chief appointed
a veiled columnist. Even with regard to the face-veil, which was more disputed,
14
Dutch feminists never mobilized for a ban. Veiled Muslim women gained little
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access to the public and political debates. Recently, there have been some mobili-
zations of veiled (young) women contesting the opposition between the head-
scarf and emancipation.
15
While some women in Parliament and legal bodies as
the Commission Vermeulen defended the individual right to cover and to par-
ticipate without discrimination, veiled women had little influence on actual
policy decisions.
So far, however, no full burqa ban has come into effect. Also still pending is
a government proposal of February 2012 to prohibit all kinds of face covers in
public and other public institutions such as schools or public transportation,
except in houses of worship and airports. While the regulation on veiling in
the Netherlands has thus remained largely accommodative, there has been a
clear discursive shift in how veiling is framed within the political realm in
which gendering has become a strategy to argue against Muslim veiling and to
mark differences between an “emancipated” us and a “backward” them (see
also Sauer 2009, 89).
Debates about Honour-Related Violence
In the literature and public debate, the term honour-related violence has
been widely adopted to describe a range of different forms of violence against
women said to be rooted in community perceptions of honour.
16
While
migrant women’s organizations had been asking attention for this issue for
some time, most European governments have been slow to take up this issue
(Dustin and Phillips 2008). As figure 4indicates, the issue is almost absent
from the French political agenda, but became a highly salient issue in the
Netherlands in 2004.
In both countries, the issue of honour-related violence is put on the polit-
ical agenda by right-wing parties, but gets support of left-wing parties as well.
In the Netherlands, two conservative Liberal (VVD) MPs, first Geert Wilders
and later Ayaan Hirsi Ali, politicized the issue. Yet, the Labour Party (PvdA)
supported Hirsi Ali’s petition to turn honour-related violence into a priority
policy project, which is illustrative of the changed party position after the rise
of anti-immigrant parties. The Labour Party increasingly defended a tougher
stance on integration issues to “protect” minority women and to draw bound-
aries to “tolerance” to protect some core Dutch values and norms. A focus on
gender inequalities has enabled a respectable shift away from multiculturalism
for left-wing parties (Siim and Skeje 2008). In France, the UMP played a
central role in the recent politicization of the issue of violence in minority
communities. The mobilizations of the aforementioned NPNS and their cul-
turalist framing of the problem, linking gender oppression to the rise of
Islamic radicalism in the French banlieues well fitted the UMP government’s
larger security agenda and had a broad resonance in French parliament. Yet,
remarkably NPNS gained much more voice and standing in the headscarf
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debate and was less successful to politicize the issue of violence, which only
figured as an additional argument to illustrate that Muslim girls were in need
of state protection.
France
Until 2000, discussions of violence against women were remarkably absent
from the French public and political agenda. Women’s organizations that tried
to draw attention to the issue had gained little public visibility (Ticktin 2008).
Yet, in 2000 there was a sudden media boom on the issue of “gang rapes” (les
tournantes) in the migrant-populated suburbs (“banlieues”) of Paris. A film
called La Squale (2000) first told the story of such collective rapes by boys of
North African descent. Another tragic incident that sparked attention was the
brutal murder of a girl of Moroccan descent in October 2002. This incident
inspired a group of young women of migrant origin to start the before men-
tioned NPNS. The group organized a march on March 8, 2003 that attracted
about 30,000 participants, among them anti-racist and feminist organizations,
but also politicians from almost all major political parties. The message of
NPNS women that sexist and violent practices targeting women in the
Figure 4. Number of parliamentary documents concerning issue of honour-related
violence in France and the Netherlands (1989– 2007).
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banlieues should be countered by the principle of laı
¨cite
´made the organization
appealing to the French state and a great ally in the defence of Republican
values. This resonance was especially clear when NPNSs message was incorpo-
rated in the celebration of the Bastille Day in 2003. Photographs of NPNS
members dressed as La Marianne, the feminine symbol of the French
Republic, were exhibited on the front columns of the French National
Assembly.
The NPNS thus rapidly gained political support, but not so much for their ori-
ginal goal to improve the living situations of women in the banlieues and fight
violence against women. Instead, the group became mainly instrumental in the
political controversy about the veil as discussed before. The NPNS slogan Ni
voile, ni viol (Neither veil nor rape) that hinted at cultural or religious explana-
tions for violence was particularly visible as an argument in favour of the veil ban.
From 2003 onwards, some minor political actions to develop policies to
combat violence against ethnic minority women were taken, most of them
firmly anchored in the project of affirming French Republican values (Ticktin
2008). In 2003, the newly established anti-discrimination body “Le Haut
Conseil a
`l’inte
´gration” (2003) published a non-binding advice to the prime
minister, in which it encouraged the government to pay more attention to the
integration of migrant women, situating issues such as polygamy, forced mar-
riages, parental authority and female circumcision as problems imported by
migrants’ foreign culture. In 2005, the government launched a national plan to
fight violence against women in which some attention was paid to violence
within migrant communities, in particular forced marriages.
17
That same year,
a new parliamentary working group on women’s rights, headed by Marie-Jo
Zimmerman of the right-wing UMP, issued a report on the position of
migrant women in France that also paid some attention to gender-based vio-
lence (Assamble
´e Nationale 2005). Referring to the writings of Dutch MP
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it explained that the curtailment of immigrant women’s free-
doms and sexuality are related to particular gender relations and roles within
(Islamic) migrant cultures that force minority women to protect the family or
community’s honour by adhering to certain religious and cultural community
norms such as virginity (p. 23). The commission observed a growing “inte
´g-
rism” (religious fundamentalism) and a tendency among migrants to isolate
themselves (p. 29). Even though the report hinted at the persistent marginal-
ization and socio-economic discrimination of migrant minorities in France as
underlying problems (p. 7), the proposed solution was not a revision of the
Republican project of integration but rather its revitalization. The commission
argued that reinforcing the national identity and enlightenment values through
the Republican school would be the best solution to tackle the problem of
gender-based violence in the banlieues (p. 40, 65). This policy framing
enabled the promotion of state policies that emphasized migrants’ assimilation
to Republican values, notably gender equality. Although the report paid some
attention to the issue of honour-related violence, it was not articulated as a
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policy problem, nor were any specific measures taken to combat violence
against ethnic minority women. While NPNS managed to attract a lot of polit-
ical attention for the situation of (Muslim) migrant women and girls and got
access to the political realm, their political success to influence actual policy
decisions has remained very limited. Most of the solutions that NPNS recom-
mended
18
such as support networks and shelter services for victims, awareness
campaigns in schools and special services within the quartiers’ police stations
were not adopted (Amara 2003, 116). NPNS, along with other associations like
the Collectif National Pour Les Droits des Femmes (CNPDF), campaigned for
legislation against sexual and domestic violence that Segolene Royal adopted in
her presidential campaign of 2007, but that was shelved after her defeat
(Fayard and Rocheron 2009, 7). In 2010, after continuing feminist lobbying
and pressure, Prime Minister Franc¸ois Fillon set up a parliamentary commis-
sion on violence against women that discussed the proposal for a loi cadre and
made 2010 the year when the issue of violence against women would be a
“grande cause nationale”. That same year, Parliament adopted the “Loi du 9
juillet 2010 relative aux violences faites spe
´cifiquement aux femmes, aux vio-
lences au sein des couples et aux incidences de ces dernie
`res sur les enfants”.
The new legislation also focuses on forced marriage, authorizes the electronic
tagging of violent partners, and provides help to alleged victims well before
their case goes to court. Yet, the law is merely focussed on conjugal violence
and does not protect women against other forms of violence (Fayard and
Rocheron 2009).
The Netherlands
In the Netherlands, the issue of honour-related violence was originally put on
the public agenda by Kezban, an organization founded by ethnic minority
women after the murder of Kezban Vural in 1999. The group labelled Kezban’s
murder as an honour killing. Also, they argued that violence against minority
women was being overlooked and that Kezban had not received the police pro-
tection she had asked for. Their public cry received no attention in national pol-
itics. Yet, from 2000 onwards, some MPs, both right- and left-wing, started to
call political attention to the issue of gender-based violence in ethnic minority
communities. They referred to practices of honour-based violence, female
genital mutilation, or forced marriages and labelled these as either “harmful
traditional practices” or “cultural practices” to distinguish them from “regular”
domestic violence. In these debates, patriarchal violence was turned into an es-
sential property of minority cultures, passed on to future generations, and a
threat to the Dutch value of gender equality. Key political actors in this politi-
cization were Geert Wilders and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, at that time both MPs of the
Liberal Party (VVD).
In 2003 and 2004, several incidences that were labelled honour violence in
the media attracted political attention. In September 2003, MPs Lambregts
(D’66), Hirsi Ali (VVD), and Eerdmans (LPF) asked the government to take
14 C. Roggeband and D. Lettinga
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measures as to prevent future acts of “honour violence”. MP Eerdmans (LPF)
stated that “honour violence apparently still is part and parcel of some ethnic
minority groups’ cultural habits, which is morally unacceptable and does not
fit Dutch norms and values” and argued that this kind of violence should be
more severely punished than other forms of violence.
19
While most MPs that
participated in the debate situated this problem within the Dutch-Turkish
community, MP Albayrak of the Labour Party, herself of Turkish origin,
pointed out that she perceived similar patterns in other minority groups, in
particular within the Surinamese “Hindu” community (TK 7 – 256, September
30, 2003). A few weeks later, honour-related violence became a central issue in
the deliberations about the 2004 Budget for Integration (TK 58, March 16,
2004, 58– 3840). In the debate, MP Nawijn (LPF) and MP Hirsi Ali (VVD)
started a discussion about Dutch culture and identity. Hirsi Ali pointed out
that Dutch integration policies had failed to assimilate ethnic minorities to
central Dutch values such as individual freedom, gender equality, non-
discrimination, the separation of church and state, and freedom of expression.
One proof of this failed integration, she argued, was the high incidence of “cul-
tural forms” of violence among ethnic minorities. Hirsi Ali pointed to the so-
cialization of Dutch norms and values through education, as an important
means to end these practices. This civilization mission she argued, might also
reach beyond the Dutch borders: “in the longer term non-western migrants
can export our liberal values to their countries of origin.” A few months later,
Hirsi Ali petitioned the government to take actions against honour-related vio-
lence. She stated that “when ethnic minority women and girls start to make
their own independent and emancipated choices, they are often confronted
with (the threat of) violence by their family and peers” and that “as long as
these women are threatened they will not succeed to integrate and emancipate”
(TK 29203, nr. 5).
In April 2005, Hirsi Ali together with the MP Nebahat Albayrak (PvdA)
requested the government to turn the issue of honour-based violence into a
priority project.
20
All parties in parliament, with the exception of the ruling
Christian Democratic Party, supported the petition (HTK, 30 388, nr. 6). Hirsi
Ali framed the problem as an expression of traditional and women unfriendly
values in Islam
honour killing is a component of something bigger. It has to do with
sexual morality within Islam, the desire to control women’s sexuality. A
woman who does not abide by the rules is allowed to be expelled, hit,
murdered (TK 28345, 29203, nr. 40: 1).
Yet, most parties, with the exception of the Freedom Party (PVV), distanced
themselves from this explicit link to Islam as an underlying cause, although a
majority agreed in their framing of honour-based violence as an ethnic or cul-
tural issue present in some specific ethnic communities, drawing a clear line
between “regular” domestic violence and honour-based violence. MP Henk
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Kamp of the Liberal Conservative party (VVD) claimed: “honour killing is an
excess of other cultures and will not be accepted under any condition in the
Netherlands” (TK 2007– 2008, 30388, nr. 27: 2).
In response, the government developed a priority project to combat
honour-related violence (2006–2010). The programme’s special status, prior-
ity, and large budget not only suggested that honour-related violence is very
different from “normal” domestic violence, but also that it is a much bigger
and more urgent problem, adding to the feeling of “threat” associated with mi-
norities. The programme targeted Turkish, Moroccan, and refugee organiza-
tions, as central “problem owners” (Brenninkmeijer, Geerse, and Roggeband
2009) and involved them in the sensitization of the problem within their com-
munities, as well as in the training of service providers. Yet, minority organiza-
tions criticized the strong culturalization of the problem that according to
them added to the stigmatization of the minority population. They opposed
the mobilization of the issue by right-wing politicians to represent minority
groups as inherently violent or oppressive. Organizations that had struggled to
get the issue of violence against minority women on the agenda, including
foundation Kezban were unhappy about the sharp distinctions drawn between
violence in ethnic minority groups and “non-cultural” domestic violence,
21
which they saw as obstructing coalition building with other organizations
addressing the issue of violence against women. Also, they argued that the
hypervisibility of the problem had made it difficult to name and confront
violent practices within their communities without being accused of buying
into the culturalist and stigmatizing dominant discourse.
Comparison
When comparing the debates on the veil and honour-related violence in
France and the Netherlands, we see some differences in the timing and level of
politicization of both issues and the policy solutions that are proposed. While
France prohibits religious dress in public schools and the public sector and re-
cently passed a ban on face-veils in public space, the Netherlands largely toler-
ates the display of religious dress and symbols in public institutions. The issue
of honour-related violence became a major issue on the Dutch political agenda
in 2006, but only received scant attention in the French political debate. France
has addressed the issue within larger gender-equality agendas, which contrasts
with the Dutch policy approach that focuses on honour-related violence as a
particular form of violence that stems from culturally specific gender relations
within communities of immigrant origin (Roggeband and Verloo 2007;
Korteweg and Yurdakul 2010). The different policy outcomes reflect institutio-
nalized histories of interpreting and governing ethnic, religious (when the issue
is framed in religious terms) and gender differences, which together shaped
the political debates in intersecting ways (Ferree 2009, 86).
The headscarf was hard to reconcile with the French notion of universal
citizenship and the principle of laı
¨cite
´. The laı
¨cite
´concept played a central role
16 C. Roggeband and D. Lettinga
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in the political debates, although its meaning was contested (Scott 2007).
Many politicians presented laı
¨cite
´as a tool to promote social and national co-
hesion by integrating citizens into a public realm where they were to share the
same universal values of equality, freedom, and solidarity (Bowen 2007;Scott
2007). In contrast, in the Dutch debates in the 1980s and 1990s, policy actors
made reference to the principle of secularism to protect the freedom of reli-
gious minorities from the liberal state. The Dutch national tradition of estab-
lishing institutions for the recognition of cultural, ethnic, and religious
difference and regulating state– church relations explains the accommodative
stance towards headscarves that prevailed during the 1990s. Yet, after the turn
of the century on Islamic head and body covering became a controversial
subject and the Dutch debate started to converge with the French debate. In
both countries, veiling was increasingly framed as “women-unfriendly”, a
threat to national identity and as a sign of religious fundamentalism.
While existing state– church traditions played a major role in the framing of
head and body covering, the issue of religion was virtually absent in the
debates in honour-related violence, despite the attempts of Ayaan Hirsi Ali in
the Netherlands to frame honour-related violence as a problem originating in
Islam. Instead, traditions of dealing with ethnic and gender differences provide
some explanation as to why honour-related violence became a major political
issue in the Netherlands and remained marginal—despite some feminist
attempts—in France. The French universal citizenship model prevents the rec-
ognition of group differences, impeding claims of recognition by ethnic and re-
ligious minorities or women as a distinct status group. This made it
particularly difficult for French feminists to get the issue of violence against
women on the political agenda, let alone the issue of violence against migrant
or ethnic minority women (Mazur 2007, 120). Instead, the issue was much
easier to politicize in the Netherlands, where a strong tradition in gender-
equality policies already had placed the issue of violence against women on the
political agenda since the late 1970s. Moreover, the framing of honour-related
violence as a particular kind of violence originating in the culture of migrants,
“fitted” the Dutch policy legacy that institutionalizes and naturalizes ethnic dif-
ferences and targeted ethnic minorities as a specific policy category. Policy leg-
acies thus interact differently in each debate, resulting in country-specific
approaches to each issue.
Yet, our empirical data also make clear that after initial differences in policy
responses towards the veil and honour-related violence in both countries,
framing of these issues started to converge after the turn of the millennium and
in both France and the Netherlands, actors struggled to (re)define the nation,
secularism, and (gendered and racialized) modes of citizenship and so challenge
hegemonic discourses and dominant institutional models and traditions. In par-
ticular in both countries, politicians started to promote cultural assimilation as a
precondition for integration and citizenship. In the Netherlands, new right-wing
parties contested the dominant idea that the state has no right to interfere with
In Defence of Gender Equality? 17
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the religion of its subjects and argued that a neutral state implied that public
functionaries should not display any religious symbols. In France, the Stasi
Commission took departure from the earlier accommodative French policy and
presented the principle of laı
¨cite
´as grounds for setting limits to citizens’ expres-
sion of “difference”, and even to cultural and religious identification (Thomas
2006, 241). This dynamic framing contest resulted in policy responses that
changed over time. The analysis of the debates also shows changes in framing
positions of the actors involved in the debate. Shifts in power configurations
created (new) discourse coalitions between politicians and affected the salience
of the issues in the political realm. In France, the peaks in politicization of the
veil coincide with electoral gains of the extreme right Front Nationale (FN).
22
As
Ezekiel argues, since the mid-1980s, the FN discourse has spread far beyond the
limits of that party, to the centre right, but also into the Left. The Socialist party,
including members of the government, began speaking of the “problem” of
immigration and “thresholds of tolerance” (Ezekiel 2006, 262). Since the turn of
the century, the French integration “model” has changed, and issues like ethnic
monitoring, affirmative action, and minority representation are no longer taboo
subjects in French official discourse and actions (Bleich 2008). In the
Netherlands, new right-wing political players like Pim Fortuyn and Geert
Wilders made their appearance on the Dutch scene only after the turn of the
century, but as in the case of France their anti-immigrant discourse had a strong
impact on the discourses of other parties as we have seen.
23
The rise of new
radical right parties also created competition between right-wing parties who
lost voters to these new emerging parties. In the Netherlands, VVD started
profiling itself as an anti-immigration party committed to uniculturalism and
nationalist forms of citizenship and Ayaan Hirsi Ali has played an important role
in the VVD’s competition with the LPF (Akkerman and Hagelund 2007).
In both countries, right-wing and anti-immigrant parties helped to build
and then capitalized on a new selective gender-equality agenda (Akkerman and
Hagelund 2007) in which gender-equality arguments, together with other
liberal values, were employed to demonstrate the incompatibility of migrant
culture and religion with majority culture. The hijab/burqa and honour-
related violence were strategically framed as problems that demonstrate these
incompatibilities, enabling more restrictive demands upon immigrants and
Muslim minorities that simultaneously deny women’s agency and feminist
value of autonomy. In this discourse, the state should protect women and girls
against abuse and violence that mark immigrant communities.
The politicization of these issues by right-wing actors created new discourse
coalitions with left-wing parliamentary representatives and women’s organiza-
tions that—with some success—had earlier tried to draw attention to the pre-
carious position of immigrant women (Roggeband 2010). For instance, in the
Netherlands Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s agenda for the emancipation of Islamic women
opened some space for an alliance between the VVD and the left (Akkerman
and Hagelund 2007), as became visible in the debate on honour-related
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violence where PvdA and VVD together requested the government to turn the
topic into a priority policy problem. In France, the Parti Socialiste changed its
position in the headscarf debate to launch a law proposal to ban religious sym-
bolism in public schools that earlier had been promoted by RPR/UMF.
Right-wing politicians also sought the support of—preferably ethnic minor-
ity—feminist activists and women’s organizations. In France, Raffarin symbol-
ically invited NPNS on International Women’s day 2003. Also, the Stasi
Commission summoned NPNS and other mainly secular migrant women that
stressed that non-veiled women in French suburbs were in need of protection
from Islamic fundamentalists. In the Netherlands, both Hirsi Ali and Minister
of Justice Verdonk actively sought the support of migrant women’s organiza-
tions for their claims and tried to assign to migrant women’s organizations a
central role in the execution of governmental policies directed at migrant
women (Roggeband 2010). Yet, the selective inclusion of feminists and ethnic
minority women was largely symbolic, and their arguments were only partly
adopted. While NPNS initially managed to draw attention to the issue of vio-
lence against women in the banlieues, which they related to Islamic macho
culture and patterns of Islamization, their arguments were mainly instrumen-
talized to press for a headscarf ban. Through their framing that linked violence
to Muslim migrants’ culture, they managed to link the issue to the larger secur-
ity agenda of the UMP government in the French banlieues, which were
framed as the “lost territories of the Republic”. But the right-wing government
paid only lip service to other demands, like the need for shelters or structural
policies to tackle poverty and discrimination that intersect with patterns of
gender inequality. In the Netherlands, the efforts of politicians to involve
migrant women’s organizations in carrying out its policy agenda to combat
honour-related violence were less successful, since most organizations criti-
cized the culturalization of the problem.
Conclusions and Discussion
Our analysis shows that despite the different institutional legacies in France
and the Netherlands, debates on the headscarf and honour-related violence
have increasingly converged, notably in the use of gender-equality arguments
to (re)draw the borders of the nation state. In the dominant frames regarding
the headscarf and honour-related violence, migrant cultures are represented as
a threat to national values—among which gender-equality—and the coherence
of the nation state. The surveillance and rescuing of the female body serves to
legitimate certain policy interventions, such as the banning of Islamic veils in
public space or the disciplining of Muslim men and helps to redraw public/
private boundaries (Razack 2004;Rottmann and Ferree 2008;Bilge 2010). In
France, politicians argue that public sphere is to remain culture-free, neutral,
universal, and in the Netherlands right-wing politicians argue that the Dutch
In Defence of Gender Equality? 19
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do not want to be confronted with symbols they perceive as women unfriendly.
The private sphere of ethnic minorities is increasingly scrutinized, questioned,
and interpreted. Our analysis illustrates that this gendering of the nation works
differently and unevenly across countries, and even within countries for differ-
ent issues. Country-specific institutionalized policy legacies not only shape the
particular gendering of policy discourses, actors themselves also help to sustain
or change hegemonic state projects by invoking different elements of their in-
stitutional environment in their framing of the issue.
While gender-equality arguments figure centrally in the political debates on
the headscarf and honour-related violence, the arguments of (ethnic minority)
women’s organizations are selectively included and bent to serve other, non-
feminist agendas. Ethnic minority women’s organizations and female ethnic
minority politicians have acted as agenda-setters, asking attention for their
marginalized position, discrimination against them and experiences of vio-
lence, yet these issues were co-opted by right-wing politicians to problematize
the “deviant” culture of minorities and propose policies that further exclude
them and paternalize them instead of improving their situation. As a result,
even if women’s organizations manage to gender political debates, they are not
always successful in steering the direction of the debate and their agendas are
only very partially adopted. Moreover, within the political game, figures such
as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and NPNS activists are symbolically included as speakers for
minority women and knowers of Islam. They are represented as models of “in-
tegration” and—in the French case—a paradigmatic republican citizen who
has cast aside her particular identity to embody the abstract universalism of re-
publican citizenship. Yet, at the same time they are demarcated as different
immigrants or immigrant daughters giving them an outsider status that they
can never overcome, regardless of their level of assimilation. Ethnic and reli-
gious minorities have to deal with what Dhamoon (2013) calls a “dual tactics
of regulated inclusion and exclusion” in which they may be formally included
in as “equal citizens”, while at the same time excluded discursively and cultur-
ally. Intersecting gendered, ethnic, cultural, and religious norms determine the
in- and outsider status of minority groups (Dhamoon 2013). As our cases
show, we need to look at the interaction between institutional settings, actors
and framing to understand how and when these terms of in- and exclusion are
negotiated and become subject to change.
Notes
1. We use Connell’s (2002) definition that feminism is about steering the
gender order in directions that are empowering for women.
2. Maria Stratigaki (2004) explains: “The meanings of key concepts initially
introduced by feminists and originally grounded in feminist ideas [may be] con-
ceptually transformed . . . resulting in the loss of their potential for changing
gender relations” (p. 31). Co-optation occurs when “the concept itself is not
20 C. Roggeband and D. Lettinga
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rejected, but its initial meaning is transformed and used in the policy discourse for
a different purpose than the original one” (Stratigaki 2004, 36).
3. We will use “the veil” as a shorthand to refer to all forms of Muslim women’s
head and body covering together. When we want to refer to a specific form of
veiling, such as the headscarf or the burqa, this will be mentioned as such.
4. Conseil d’Etat, No. 346 893 (November 27, 1989).
5. Commission de reflexion sur l’application du principe de laı
¨cite
´dans la
Republique. 2003 ‘Rapport au President de la Republique’, Paris: La Documentation
franc¸aise, p. 58.
6. Assamblee Nationale, plenary debate February 3, 2004.
7. Senate speech Chirac, December 17, 2003.
8. Among them the Women’s Rights League (co-founded by Simone de
Beauvoir and chaired by Anne Zelensky), Choisir, the French coordination of the
European Women’s Lobby (CLEF) and the earlier mentioned NPNS, as well as the
feminist of Iranian origin Chahdortt Djavann who was invited to testify to the Stasi
Commission and former Minister of Emancipation Yvette Roudy.
9. De
´claration du Pre
´sident de la Re
´publique devant le Parlement re
´uni en
Congre
`s, http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/histoire/messages-et-declarations-
du-president-de-la-republique/sarkozy-declaration-22juin2009.asp, juin 25, 2009.
10. TK26200 VII, no. 44 (December 16, 1998): 8 –9 and 24 – 5.
11. Columnist Jolande Withuis pleaded in favour of a headscarf ban for person-
nel in pharmacies in 1996 and for public school teachers (1998), arguing that the
veil was symbol of women’s (sexual) submission to men (Opzij, May 1996;
November 1998). Another editor of Opzij, Pauline Sinnema, compared a woman’s
choice to veil with a slave’s voluntarily submission to serfdom (May, 2001).
12. Moors (2009) shows that the use of the word burqa was preferred by politi-
cians and the media and was conflated with the niqaab. She argues that this is
because the word burqa resonates with a particularly sensitive recent history, that is
the rise of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
13. Dresselhuys, C. ‘Van die dingen dus’, Opzij (April 1, 2001).
14. See for instance: Kraus, S. (2003), Verbod niqaab laat vraag onbeantwoord,
Volkskrant (March 24).
15. In January 2004, two hundred people, predominantly Muslim women,
demonstrated in The Hague against the French ban on headscarves, using the
slogan ‘boss over one’s own head’: ‘Demonstratie tegen Frans hoofddoekverbod’,
Volkskrant (January 26, 2004). In December 2006, a group of headscarf and niqab-
wearing women went demonstrating in The Hague and offered a petition against
the burqa ban to the Social Democrat party: ‘Moslima’s betogen voor recht op
Boerka’, Volkskrant (November 25, 2006); ‘Boerkadraagsters in actie tegen verbod’,
Reformatorisch Dagblad (December 1, 2006).
16. While the concept of honour-related or honour-based crimes is often used
both in policy texts, but also in academic writings, it is a contested concept since it
suggests that violence can be “honourable”.
17. Plan Global de lutte contre les violences faites aux femmes 2005 – 2007: 10
mesures pour l’autonomie des femmes, http:// www.sante.gouv.fr/fichiers/bo/2005/
05-04/a0040049.htm (retrieved October 15, 2013).
In Defence of Gender Equality? 21
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18. After the 2003 March, they had been invited by Prime Minister Raffarin
and handed him a list of recommendations.
19. Motion nr. 220, October 3, 2003.
20. TK, 30388, nr. 1. The Dutch parliament may decide that a specific policy
issue or project is so important that extensive reporting on the issue of a minister
to parliament is required. The issue or project can be given the status of “large or
priority” project. To obtain this special status, either the financial or social implica-
tions of the project need be large. Mostly this means is used for large infrastructural
projects.
21. The culturalization of the issue was also condemned by the UN Special
Rapporteur Violence against Women, Yakin Erturk, in her visit to the Netherlands
in 2006 (Report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes
and consequences, Yakin Ertu
¨rk. Addendum, Mission to the Netherlands, March
15, 2006).
22. Just before the first headscarf debate, in 1988 Jean-Marie Le Pen had gained
14 percent of the presidential elections. In 1994, just before the second peak of the
discussions, the FN gained 11 seats in the European Parliament (10.5 percent). In
2002, the year before the law project started, Le Pen came second with almost five
million votes, more than the Socialist Prime Minister Jospin and only 3 percentage
points behind right-wing Jacques Chirac.
23. Van Kersbergen and Krouwel (2008) also show how new right-wing parties
influenced the discourses and position of the Dutch centre-right parties.
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