History UsefulNotes / Pillarisation

A rather tragic aftereffect of pillarisation concerns immigration policy. From TheSixties to TheNineties, politicians still bearing the "pillarised mindset" encouraged immigrants to form their own little societies within the Netherlands, with their own cultural and social institutions - in other words, to set up their own pillars. Needless to say, this didn't help the integration of these people into the larger framework of Dutch society. This segregation-inducing policy at least partly explains the big problems with integration which suddenly surfaced in the early [[TheNoughties Noughties]].

Those same Enlightenment ideals also led to a small but significant number of Dutch Protestants to question the (Protestant) more-or-less official church, which they gradually but surely abandoned in all but name. These classical-liberal Dutch particularly targeted the role of the Church in providing education, arguing that both the Protestant Establishment and the Catholics were wrong and that the secular Dutch State should be the sole provider of education. Moreover, as the Industrial Revolution rolled along, working-class people of both Catholic and Protestant background began to decide that neither religion's leaders was really addressing their needs, and they began to turn to the newfangled ideology of socialism.

In short, pillarisation, at its worst, took away most choices you had in life, and severely limited your options in the choices it did leave you. On the plus side, it was a way for very different groups to coexist peacefully without one group being worse off than another - and as mentioned, the political leaders got along fine, which was necessary in order to run the country as no one pillar had anything approaching a majority. In less civilised places, these political and religious differences would probably have led to [[UsefulNotes/TheTroubles violence]].

The newly independent Netherlands was therefore dominated by Protestants, and particularly by Moderate Protestants. However, they were not the only game in town; large numbers of Dutch people across the country remained true to the Catholic Church, particularly near the southern border with the ten provinces of the Netherlands that did not win their independence from Spain (and were eventually handed off to Austria), i.e. Belgium. These Dutch Catholics remained an occasionally-persecuted minority well into the 19th century, and they were consistently denied access to real economic and political power.