Gideon Strauss writes:

I would love to hear a conversation between Koyzis, Jonathan Chaplin, and John Hiemstra on the political-historical development of Dutch neocalvinism between the death of Kuyper (1920) and the end of verzuiling (in the early 1970s) -- and on what that history has to teach us.

Of the three of us, I am quite certain that John knows the most, since he's written on the topic of the impact of the Dutch confessional system on broadcasting, which would bring him into this era. But my colleague Harry Van Dyke probably knows more than anyone else, since he lived through the collapse of this "regime" in the mid-1960s.

I will do no more than to venture an educated guess as to what happened in the Netherlands. I suppose I would say that, if a particular confessional community loses the will to maintain itself, no amount of consociational politics will serve to preserve it.

Lijphart and other scholars note that consociationalism tends to be a temporary phenomenon, existing in the Netherlands between 1917 and 1966, in Austria from 1946 to 1966, and in Lebanon from 1943 to 1975. While the French polity was too highly centralized to be anything close to consociational, it is interesting to note that stability came to that country only with the institution of the Fifth Republic in 1958, i.e., at the very moment when the traditional Catholic subculture ceased to be much of a force. (The christian democratic Popular Republican Movement did not survive the end of the Fourth Republic.) Post-war secularization in western Europe made redundant such power-sharing arrangements as had been embodied in consociationalism, sad to say.

In short, I think one would have to look within the Dutch confessional communities themselves for an answer to Gideon's query. There are lessons for such organizations as the Christian Labour Association of Canada, for which Gideon works.