Samenvatting

The central question in this article is whether the relationship between the current citizen’s initiatives and government in the Netherlands shows similarities to the relationship between their predecessors (usually denoted as ‘private initiatives’) and government in the past, and more specifically in the time of pillarization. In the article it is claimed that in the time of pillarization – the period between around 1900 and 1970, when Dutch society was characterized by vertical social divisions along denominational (religious) and ideological lines – private initiatives and Dutch government developed a peculiar symbiotic relationship. In this period, on the one hand the pillarized private initiatives, as a matter of course, expected a large degree of autonomy but at the same time all sorts of support from Dutch government when administering various public tasks. On the other hand, Dutch government took for granted that the pillarized private initiatives highly contributed to the initiation and administration of these public tasks. Since the disintegration of the pillars in 1970s Dutch government has been searching for new ways to relate to the old and new private initiatives, and vice versa. Yet in this search both government and private initiatives still seem driven by the old ‘reflexes’ of pillarization.