JUST days before the Dutch referendum on the proposed European constitution, a local political sociologist forecast a victory for the Noes. People were likely to reject Euro-initiatives, he argued, when they were angry about immigration, pessimistic about the economy, and hostile to the current government. All three factors were present in Holland. So ...

As it happened, the Noes did more than prevail; they won in a two-to-one landslide. It was a result that shocked the Dutch establishment, which had almost unanimously backed the constitution. The Euro-establishment across the continent, equally thunderstruck, has argued in mitigation that the Dutch voters did not really know what they were doing: They were not rejecting Europe but reacting to local political discontents.

At first glance the sociologist's prediction might seem to support this defense. A closer look, however, suggests that the Dutch were following a deep social instinct: They sensed that "Europe" was somehow connected to their other discontents, and were striking the only blow available to them. What links the EU constitution to anti-government sentiment, immigration, and economic pessimism is voter anger with elite-driven politics. European integration is generally admitted to be an elite project--the current cant phrase that it needs to be better "explained" to the masses makes that embarrassingly clear. High levels of (mainly Muslim) immigration and accompanying policies of multiculturalism are similarly regarded by elites as necessary steps towards a more diverse society.

Most ordinary Dutch people were either opposed to or apathetic towards these social experiments. But the major parties favored them and the media preached them. That left voters with no obvious avenues of protest. And the issues did not intrude on their lives to the extent of rousing them to rebellion--until two atrocities occurred. Pim Fortuyn, the gay libertarian leader of a quirky anti-immigration party, was murdered by an assailant who cited Fortuyn's opposition to large-scale Muslim immigration as his justification. Next, filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim extremist who objected to a film he had made attacking Islam for its hostility to women's rights. These two murders sharpened the sense of many Dutch people that their country was being transformed in ways they disliked--and also made them unsafe.

FINGERS IN THE DIKE

Not only conservatives and traditionalists felt these fears. Liberals, feminists, and libertarians like Fortuyn who prized the tolerance, sexual equality, and libertinism of Dutch society were also made nervous. Unpolitical Dutch people voted with their feet. There had long been a "white flight" from schools and urban neighborhoods with large numbers of immigrants; now the Dutch began to emigrate in large numbers abroad.

The political effects of this pessimism were dramatic. The Fortuyn party made major gains in successive elections; the establishment conservative and liberal parties adopted many of its policies; and when the Euro-referendum came along, the Dutch voted no. They were rejecting two things--a constitution that transferred many more powers, including immigration control, from the Dutch parliament to the impenetrable committees of the EU, and a style of bureaucratic politics that was haughtily undemocratic and deaf to their concerns. Those concerns can be very simply summarized: How do we deal with a large and growing Muslim minority that contains Islamists who hate Dutch society and are prepared to use violence against it--and therefore us? Dutch Muslims, for their part, have concerns rooted in the same situation: How do we deal with the fact that we are distrusted and discriminated against by our neighbors because of the actions of a minority of radical hotheads?

The facts underlying these questions are relatively straightforward. Holland's Muslims account for about 15 percent of its population. In cities such as Rotterdam, where immigrants have tended to congregate, the Muslim proportion is about one-third of the local population. And these percentages are rising. Estimates of the number of (generally young male) Muslims who are actively sympathetic to Islamism are inevitably more speculative. The usual guess is that 15 percent of the Muslim population is sympathetic to Islamism and a much smaller percentage, say 4 percent, actively so. In a growing immigrant population, however, these low percentages translate into quite large numbers of potential terrorists.

What makes these possibilities so unsettling to the law-abiding Dutch is that the law is ill-equipped to deal with the threat. In 2003, Dutch intelligence discovered ties between a group of 40 to 50 North African radicals in Holland and a terrorist network that had carried out the Casablanca bombings of that year. (Some were arrested, but because intelligence evidence is not permitted in Dutch courts, they had to be released.) One of the group was Mohammed Bouyeri, who subsequently murdered van Gogh.