Van der Tol looked at four case studies of constitutional intolerance - two from “liberal” states, France and the Netherlands, and two from “illiberal” states, Hungary and Poland. She pointed out that liberal states tend to target religious minorities, especially Muslim ones, over a perceived threat to Western values. In contrast, illiberal states tend to target LGBTQ minorities that they, in turn, see as “Western values taking over”.
She explained that in France, the principle of “laïcité” was not as old as one thinks, stemming from 1905. It was originally meant to curtail the power of the catholic church, but is now used to discriminate against Muslims under the argument of “threats to the public order”, which is mostly contrived to appeal to right-wing voters.
The next case study was the Netherlands - “I figured, if I am going to be so critical of these countries, then I also have to be critical of my own country” van der Tol said, who grew up in the Netherlands: “The Netherlands spent twelve years talking about a prohibition of the Burqa - twelve years! Can you imagine how much money was wasted on this debate?”. In the end, the exclusion of the Muslim face veil was mostly symbolic, since it only affected about 50.000 people.
The first example of an illiberal-leaning state was Hungary, which passed a new constitution in 2011 that bound financial support and legal recognition for churches to their agreement to work with Orban, effectively forcing them into cooperation.
Lastly, van der Tol talked about Poland’s “LGTB free zones”, which were meant to look like a local, Polish backlash against the „extreme Liberalism of the West taking over Polish identity“, but were, in reality, contrived by the central PiS government.
Van der Tol then opened the space for a discussion round. Questions spanned from the place of “political minorities” in the discussion (what to do with the far right - should they be prohibited or not?), over the conceptual definition of liberal vs illiberal states towards the question of whether you could use historical indicators to understand why a state becomes more or less tolerant. “You know, people say about the Netherlands that they are so tolerant because of its position as a trading nation” a student said, to which van der Tol responded that it is not always this black and white. “While Amsterdam is typically seen as very tolerant, there were lots of places in the Netherlands that were not as tolerant. And the other way around, the Polish Lithuanian empire was highly tolerant towards religious minorities, and now Poland is not any more”.
All in all, it was a very informative event with a lively discussion. At the end, some first year students who did not take a politics course yet said their head was „swirling from all the new terminology“.