CIAO DATE: 01/2012
Volume: 27, Issue: 1
Fall 2011
Cover Verso (PDF)
Inside Title (PDF)
Table of Contents (PDF)
About the Authors (PDF)
Marlies Glasius
In the last few years, the literature on international criminal courts has shifted from legal enthusiasm over the exciting new frontiers in legal and institutional development to a more critical debate in which anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and many interdisciplinary scholars also participate. There are three interrelated lines of critique, pursued to different degrees by different authors. The first is a general questioning of whether the exclusive focus on punitive “trial” justice is in fact helpful for the victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity and the wider societies that have suffered from such atrocities. The second points out that in ongoing conflicts, the pursuit of such justice may get in the way of the pursuit of peace through negotiations. The third concerns the “remoteness” of these courts from the lived realities of the populations affected by the crimes they prosecute. On the first two points, the arguments on both sides are well rehearsed. Indeed, in relation to the first point it could be argued that a consensus is emerging in the scholarly literature, although certainly not yet in policy practice, that international criminal courts ought to be part of a wider package of transitional justice instruments at the various policy levels.
Queers and Muslims: The Dutch Case (PDF)
Gert Hekma
For about a decade, antagonisms have been mounting between Muslim and gay men. In particular, when El Moumni spoke out against homosexuality in 2001, many politicians and gays reacted angrily. White Dutch got the feeling that Muslims did not respect or accept gays, lesbians, and women in general because of their supposedly homophobic and sexist views.1 That a disproportional part of the anti-gay violence can be attributed to male Moroccan youngsters has become another ground upon which to attack Muslims. Pim Fortuyn, the right- wing leader who was murdered in 2002, exploited the anti-homosexuality stance of a large portion of the Muslim religious leaders and the queer bashing attributed to ethnic minority youth, using it as a stick to beat the Muslims for their backwardness. They should not be able to sufficiently integrate in a Dutch society that is defined, in the eyes of the right wing, by its longstanding support for the emancipation of women, gays, and lesbians. Although the issue of gay-Muslim relations is continuously discussed in Dutch society and politics, the political answers have been unconvincing up until now. Rhetoric has been more important than doing something. In this article, I will first discuss the early history of the gay-Muslim debate, then the subsequent rise of antagonism since the interventions by El Moumni and Fortuyn, and finally the contemporary social and political answers on the issue. The focus regarding Muslims will be on Moroccans. Although the number of people of Turkish descent is higher than that of Moroccan descent (380,000 versus 340,000) and there are substantial numbers of Muslims of other ethnicities (a third of the 340,000 Surinamese, for example),2 male youth of Moroccan origin are most often seen as the troublemakers. Of course, not all Moroccans or Turks are Muslim, and there also are differences in religious beliefs between and inside ethnicities. The Turkish Alevites, for example, have less strict views on gender and sexual relations than other groups that sometimes reject them for their religious liberalism. Most of the Moroccans came from the northern Rif area and are Berbers, not urban Arabs. Likewise, most Turks arrived from conservative Anatolia, not from modern cities. Notwithstanding their traditional background, the first generation of immigrants was rather lax in its practice of religion. It was the second generation that could be said to be more modern, for example, because of higher levels of education, but they also became more strict and orthodox in terms of religion. As elsewhere, the number of women wearing scarves has grown significantly since the early 1990s.
The Dutch Golden Age and Globalization: History and Heritage, Legacies and Contestations (PDF)
Joop de Jong
In 1579, seven of the seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands unenthusiastically declared their independence from the Habsburg King of Spain, to form the United Provinces, also known as the Union or the Dutch Republic. The new country achieved full international recognition in 1648, even though many states recognized its sovereignty much earlier. The Dutch Republic was small in both size and population. It covered more or less the same territory as the present Dutch state, and had approximately 1.5 million inhabitants in 1600, and about 1.9 million by 1700.1 In 1600, France had 18 million inhabitants, Spain (including Portugal) 11 million, and Great Britain 7 million.2 The province of Holland contributed some 45 percent of the country’s total population. Two most striking demographic features of the Dutch Republic were its high population density and in particular its early and high level of urbanization, especially in Holland and Zeeland. In the early sixteenth century as much as forty percent of the population in these provinces was already living in cities. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the twenty or so major cities in Holland were home to some sixty percent of the total population of this province, while nearly half of all residents of Zeeland lived in towns. The large number of towns and high degree of urbanization were unique in Europe. As such, the Dutch Republic can justifiably be labeled a “city-rich” society. If Amsterdam was by far the biggest city, albeit more so in the late seventeenth century than in the early decades of the Golden Age, many other Dutch cities equally rose to greater prominence in this era. Another interesting demographic feature of the Dutch Republic was the large number of residents who had their roots outside the seven provinces, an issue I will return to below.
Global Citizenship and the European Milieu: Contested and Considered (PDF)
Frank J. Lechner
The Dutch have long thought that they are an exemplary nation, a guide and a beacon to the world, or as they used to put it, a “gidsland” for others to follow.1 As early as the 1600s, they vaunted their commitment to freedom and tolerance; later, they displayed a special zeal for peace, especially international peace. Since the 1960s, they have claimed a place in the front ranks of progressive nations, building a caring welfare state and expanding the rights of citizens—including the right to shop for things other than coffee at numerous “coffee shops.” Of course, they were not always consistent in acting out these virtues, as the Dutch themselves are well aware, which is one reason why most would now use the term gidsland with a healthy sense of irony, as a way to skewer pretensions to moral superiority. These days, in fact, the Dutch have a relative low opinion of their influence.2 They may be right: the outside world has not necessarily taken much notice of the stellar example set in the low countries—and when outsiders paid attention at all, they did not always like what they saw. To Dutch regret, the City in the Polder was not quite as visible or inspiring as the City on a Hill. Even if their claim to moral leadership is open to question, the Dutch today are in the forefront of many global issues, including a potential push toward “global citizenship,” the topic of this essay. Their long-standing commitment to international law and human rights is reflected in the many legal institutions they host in The Hague. The Dutch have been very active in global civil society as well, playing a leading role in environmental organizations and supporting NGO work on development. At least for a while, they welcomed immigrants in a multicultural spirit, downplaying the need for integration into a national culture. In fact, focusing publicly on nation and national identity was not quite politically correct until recently. For a long time the Dutch have also been committed Europeans, actively contributing to expansion of the European Union (EU). In all these ways, and in keeping with an older tradition, they have looked beyond state boundaries and committed themselves to transnational causes. To some extent that applies even to soccer coaches, stars, and fans, intensely involved in the “global game.” If we characterize global citizens as people who identify with the world as a whole, aim to play an active role in it, and develop a “significant identity, loyalty or commitment beyond the nation-state,”3 we should find them in the Netherlands.
Ernesto Capello
One of the most exciting areas in the cultural study of globalization concerns heritage preservation and heritage tourism. This subfield has grown out of the studies of collective memory by sociologists, historians, and art historians attentive to the relationship between capital, spectacle, and place. Whereas traditional studies of collective memory by figures like Maurice Halbwachs emphasized group social interaction, contemporary scholars have underscored the produced nature of what Pierre Nora terms “sites of memory.”1 Christine Boyer, for example, distinguishes between what she terms “vernacular topoi,” or sites tied to memory due to repeated use, and “rhetorical topoi,” sites intended to instruct, often at the behest of the state, a local elite, and, increasingly, global financial concerns.2 These latter sites tend to demarcate not only official narratives of local history but also cater to visitors seeking to encounter pasts both nostalgic and contested. As such, they lay at the intersection of heritage, preservation, and tourism. The obsession with heritage emerged across the Western world in concert with what Walter Benjamin has termed a memory crisis brought on by the dislocation of modern urban dwellers from the locations of production and the cyclical continuity of traditional life.3 One of the first cities to take advantage of this nostalgic impulse was New Orleans, where a declining industrial and shipping economy has been propped up by nostalgia tourism for almost a century.4 Other cities followed New Orleans’ lead, receiving the support of local officials to preserve particularly significant sites that were then recognized by regional or national governments as contributing to national development. In the aftermath of the Second World War, UNESCO began to codify similar sites with importance to international history through its world heritage program. Though these originally emphasized isolated buildings, natural wonders, or technological marvels, beginning with the colonial center of Quito, Ecuador in 1978, the possibility of applying world heritage status to an entire urban district accelerated the program’s ties to urban rehabilitation and the fostering of international tourism. Today, heritage tourism represents not only a celebration of an autochthonous past but also decided entrepreneurial opportunities often intertwined with sociopolitical conflicts. The contemporary struggles regarding the precarious status of Istanbul’s UNESCO world heritage site epitomize the resources at stake in heritage status.
Immigration Status (Art Print) (PDF)
Ruthann Godollei
While on our faculty seminar in the Netherlands we studied issues of immigration and human rights. Prior to our return to the United States, the Netherlands held general elections in which right-wing politicians, running on an anti-immigrant platform, gained additional seats in government. In our own country, anti-immigrant sentiments are again on the rise. A northern suburb of the Twin Cities passed an “English Only” ordinance that is not only unwelcoming, but anti-immigrant and racist at its core. Ignoring the First Amendment Right to Freedom of Religion, the former governor of our state has joined other right-wing pundits in declaring where mosques shall and shall not be built. Clearly some people are freer to practice their language, culture, and religion than others. While traveling in Europe, it became obvious that the people cleaning my hotel rooms, changing my sheets, sweeping the sidewalks, and tending the bathrooms were mostly non-white and non-European. In the Netherlands, many workers at low-level jobs came from former Dutch colonies. Fleeing war zones, natural disasters, and worldwide recession, “guest worker” programs have provided a large, willing workforce for the least desirable job
Spinoza, Locke, and the Limits of Dutch Toleration (PDF)
Geoffrey A. Gorham
The Netherlands’ reputation as a bastion of religious and political toleration has been tested in the last decade by the rise of indigenous anti-immigrant political movements. These movements are fueled not only by simple xenophobia and racism, amplified in the wake of September 11, but also by the seemingly sincere sentiment that the Netherlands, the most densely populated nation in Europe, cannot sustain historical immigration levels: “Holland is full.” But another important component of anti-immigrant rhetoric is conceptual or ideological rather than practical, and trades on the tolerant self-image of the Dutch: toleration does not extend to the intolerant. 1 Muslim immigrants are the usual target of this argument, who are accused of harboring theocratic, patriarchal, homophobic, and anti-Christian or anti-Jewish convictions and designs. Such rhetoric raises important and complex questions about how social and political ideals like toleration, freedom, and equality—as much as idolatry, infidelity, and heresy—are conditioned by the structures of social and economic power in which they historically emerge. That is to say, does the ideal of “toleration” in practice merely reinforce the boundaries of what is “tolerable” within the dominant culture? I will here be concerned with a somewhat simpler, though related and no less important question: how have the most influential supporters of toleration, especially Dutch toleration, attempted to identify its limits? More specifically, how have the philosophers of toleration approached the issue of tolerating attitudes or behaviors that seem in themselves inconsistent with the strictest ideals of toleration? These questions were at least as pressing in the Golden Age of the seventeenth century Low Countries, the birthplace of the modern philosophy of toleration, 2 as they are in contemporary Holland. I will emphasize the figures Baruch de Spinoza and John Locke, not only for their enormous influence, but also because each had first-hand experience, on the receiving end as it were, of Dutch toleration. Spinoza was born into an Amsterdam Jewish (Portuguese “Marrano”) community of refugees from the Iberian persecutions and expulsions of the sixteenth century. He was eventually alienated from his own community and excommunicated from his Temple at the age of 23 for religious heresy. 3 Locke spent a long sojourn in Holland as a political refugee during the restoration of monarchical rule in England.
Nongovernmental Organizations and Muslim Queer Communities in the Netherlands (PDF)
James Hoppe
The Netherlands offers a particularly interesting case study of what it means to incorporate a changing sense of values toward sexual freedom while maintaining a strong sense of national culture and context. During the height of the Dutch system known as “Pillarization,” daily life was defined by religion. Every town and village not only consisted of Protestant and Catholic churches, but also separate schools, butchers, grocers, doctors, and shops, in a sort of “separate but equal” society that did not require much interaction between people perceived as different. The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s had a significant effect on Dutch society, resulting in a retreat from the domination of religion and a rethinking of various societal norms. Gay and lesbian Dutch in particular benefited as Dutch society became more accepting of different expressions of sexuality, and in 2001, the Netherlands became the first country to allow same-gender marriage. The introduction of a significant Muslim community to the Netherlands has once again challenged the status quo and caused many Dutch to rethink their commitment to the concept of multiculturalism. Muslim immigrant communities have grown significantly in size. More than one million of the twelve million Dutch identify as Muslim, but have remained largely isolated from their white Dutch neighbors. Instead of becoming increasingly influenced by the Dutch way of life, most Muslim communities have become more conservative with each succeeding generation. The political and cultural reactions that have followed question the often-touted notion of Dutch tolerance for difference. As gay and lesbian communities emerge within the transplanted Muslim communities, it remains to be seen if existing organizational structures will be adequate to support their growth and development. Finally, in a world where we all just want to get along, it begs the question of what makes us the same and different. Is a shared sexual orientation enough to forge bonds of community
Bioracism, or, Spiritual Evolutionism (PDF)
A. Kiarina Kordela
On November 10, 2004, eight days after the murder of the film director Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam, Etienne Balibar was invited to Radboud University in Nijmegen, the oldest city in the Netherlands, to offer that year’s Alexander von Humboldt Lecture in Human Geography. The title of his talk, which was subsequently translated and published in several European languages, was “Europe as Borderland,” indicating that far from “being a solution or a prospect,” “the issue of citizenship and cosmopolitanism” in Europe must be based on the fact that “Europe currently exists as a borderland.” 1 By this, Balibar means that “the question of ‘borders’…is central when we reflect about citizenship and, more generally, political association”; and the question of borders itself in turn presupposes “address[ing] the issue of political spaces” as a means of representing specifically “European borders” (194). Balibar classifies the approaches to this latter question under “four conflicting patterns of ‘political spaces’”: “the clash-of-civilizations pattern; the global network pattern; the center-periphery pattern; and, finally, the crossover pattern, corresponding to a representation of Europe as ‘borderland’” (194). These patterns “seem to be largely incompatible,” tending to “be associated with opposite policies concerning nationality and citizenship, residence and mobility, activity and security” (194
Dominicus as Global Citizen: An Oral History of the Journey of a Dutch Resister (PDF)
Erik Larson
The end of the Second World War witnessed the growth of enduring, formal international institutions as well as the intensification of decolonization. Together these events shaped the contemporary nation-state system and the concomitant rise of the ethos of global citizenship. The rapidity of these changes speaks to the profound effect of the lived experience of the Second World War on global leaders. The experience of the populace during the Second World War, however, also offers insight into the emergence of a philosophy of global citizenship. In the Netherlands, as with many other occupied countries, a portion of the populace engaged in actions to resist the Nazi occupation. Amsterdam’s Verzetsmuseum provides insight into the larger historical context and the extent and limitations of the resistance, as elements of the previously pillarized population were brought together during the occupation. Despite the country’s reputation as a tolerant haven for exiles—notably Jewish populations displaced from other European countries—the registration system established after occupation resulted in a larger percentage of Jewish people from the Netherlands being sent to death in concentration camps than in most other occupied countries. As the war continued and the Dutch populace was subjected to greater deprivation, the resistance grew. During the last year of the war, Nazi Germany desperately tried to hold on to Amsterdam, using it as a source of food and other material for its troops, and thus reducing the Dutch population to survive on whatever it could, including eating tulip bulbs, during the Hunger Winter of 1944–45.
Erik Larson, Patrick Schmidt
For centuries, the Netherlands, seen by many as an island of toleration and liberal values, has drawn those escaping intolerance and repression. It remains as attractive a destination today as it was (at least initially) for the Puritans fleeing England. Recognizing the differences among nations, the abiding questions of political life search for normative prescriptions: What obligations do governments have toward individuals and what limitations to their authority must governments observe? The idiosyncrasies of the Dutch case provide well-trodden ground for the study of civil liberties and rights, most famously the libertarian approaches to drugs and prostitution. However, those arrangements, inflected with a voyeurism for cultural understandings of deviance, tell us relatively little about the most important development in the debate about government over the past century, namely, the problem that any attempt to answer fundamental political questions cannot reside solely within the Netherlands or the boundaries of any nation, but is shared across national boundaries in the search for unifying values and settlements. This article explores how the quest for global citizenship occurs in the dialogue between the European Court of Human Rights—the most important locus of European dialogue on the obligations of states—and the Netherlands, considered by many (and many Dutch especially) as one of the exemplars of just government. We consider the position of the Netherlands in implementing European human rights norms as a probing example of the outer limits of a global human rights vision. In particular, we focus not on the traditional core of civil liberties and rights, such as religion and speech, but on one of the most vital areas of contemporary human rights law to a world marked by the transformations of globalization: immigration, which includes those seeking asylum from inhuman treatment and the unification of families across national borders. In a climate still clouded by prejudice and fear, and with resistance to the religious, ethnic, and racial diversity that immigrants bring, what is the potential for human rights to unite nations around core values, to make global citizens out of both immigrants and host nations
Law, Anthropology, and the Global Village (PDF)
Dianna Shandy
Globalization is characterized by crosscutting flows and networks of people, goods, ideas, and capital across the globe. These processes are both facilitated and constrained by yet emerging infrastructures and institutions. Within this shifting context, it has been observed that while we live in a global village, there is no rule of law. Here, I reflect upon this observation in relation to the unfolding development of the International Criminal Court (ICC), with particular consideration of African contexts. This reflective essay is situated at the crosscurrents of recent developments in theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of the anthropology of crime, the anthropology of international law, and the anthropology of Africa. The ideas and questions advanced here build on work by anthropologists Kamari Maxine Clarke and Mahmood Mamdani in contributing to a critical approach to the intertwined growth of the rule of law and the human rights movements, particularly as applied to Africa. 1 With respect to the topic at hand, anthropologist Sally Engle Merry observes, “Law’s internationalization is a product of transnational movements such as colonialism, contemporary transnational activism, the creation of a new world order of negotiated contracts and agreements linking together diverse states, the expansion of human rights activism and institutions, and the transplanting of legal institutions themselves.” 2 She goes on to point out, “Given the ambiguity and novelty of these developments, anthropological research plays a critical role in examining how international law works in practice, mapping the circulation of ideas and procedures as well as examining the array of small sites in which international law operates, whether in Geneva, a local office of a human rights NGO, or the International Criminal Court.”