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41. Can Europe's Divided House Stand?

Author:
Hugo Nixon
Publication Date:
11-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
Conventional wisdom has it that the eurozone cannot have a monetary union without also having a fiscal union. Euro-enthusiasts see the single currency as the first steppingstone toward a broader economic union, which is their dream. Euroskeptics do, too, but they see that endgame as hell -- and would prefer the single currency to be dismantled. The euro crisis has, for many observers, validated these notions. Both camps argue that the eurozone countries' lopsided efforts to construct a monetary union without a fiscal counterpart explain why the union has become such a mess. Many of the enthusiasts say that the way forward is for the 17 eurozone countries to issue euro bonds, which they would all guarantee (one of several variations on the fiscal-union theme). Even the German government, which is reluctant to bail out economies weaker than its own, thinks that some sort of pooling of budgets may be needed once the current debt problems have been solved. A fiscal union would not come anytime soon, and certainly not soon enough to solve the current crisis. It would require a new treaty, and that would require unanimous approval. It is difficult to imagine how such an agreement could be reached quickly given the fierce opposition from politicians and the public in the eurozone's relatively healthy economies (led by Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands) to repeated bailouts of their weaker brethren (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain). Moreover, once the crisis is solved, the enthusiasm for a fiscal union may wane. Even if Germany is still prepared to pool some budgetary functions, it will insist on imposing strict discipline on what other countries can spend and borrow. The weaker countries, meanwhile, may not wish to submit to a Teutonic straitjacket once the immediate fear of going bust has passed.
Topic:
Economics and Government
Political Geography:
Europe, Finland, Greece, Germany, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, and Ireland

42. Queers and Muslims: The Dutch Case

Author:
Gert Hekma
Publication Date:
11-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
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. 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.
Topic:
Islam
Political Geography:
Algeria, Netherlands, and Tunisia

43. The Dutch Golden Age and Globalization: History and Heritage, Legacies and Contestations

Author:
Joop de Jong
Publication Date:
11-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
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.
Topic:
History
Political Geography:
Spain, Netherlands, and Dutch

44. Immigration Status (Art Print)

Author:
Ruthann Godollei
Publication Date:
11-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
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.
Topic:
Immigration
Political Geography:
United States and Netherlands

45. Spinoza, Locke, and the Limits of Dutch Toleration

Author:
Geoffrey A. Gorham
Publication Date:
11-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
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. 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?
Topic:
Islam
Political Geography:
Europe, Netherlands, and Holland

46. Nongovernmental Organizations and Muslim Queer Communities in the Netherlands

Author:
James Hoppe
Publication Date:
11-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
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.
Topic:
Culture
Political Geography:
Netherlands and Dutch

47. Bioracism, or, Spiritual Evolutionism

Author:
A. Kiarina Kordela
Publication Date:
11-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
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.” 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).
Topic:
International Security
Political Geography:
Europe and Netherlands

48. The Dutch Connection: The European Court of Human Rights and the Pursuit of Global Citizenship in the Netherlands

Author:
Erik Larson and Patrick Schmidt
Publication Date:
11-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
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.
Political Geography:
England, Netherlands, Island, and Dutch

49. At the Intersection of Domestic Acts and Globalization: The Case of Irregular Migrants15

Author:
Federico Daniel Burlon
Publication Date:
03-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
Sixty-five percent of the Netherlands is below sea level: ten thousand miles of dykes, gates, and dams hold back the sea. As the water besieges the land, some politicians and scholars claim that immigrants are doing the same to the country. On the other side of the Atlantic, immigration to the United States also has been compared to a tide that must be contained. The fears surrounding immigration have been one of the focal points raised by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and by his successor, Ban Ki-moon. As a result of the dramatic increase of migration flows and the large number of irregular migrants worldwide, immigration has moved from low to high politics. Fuelled by a mentality that sees domestic security as threatened, the salience of irregular immigration is grounded in parallels drawn between the control of illegal immigration and the control of crime. According to Adam Crawford, the conflation of illegal immigration with crime has led Western governments to rule through the politics of fear of crime and insecurity. The impact of these policies on irregular immigrants illustrates what John Tomlinson calls the reflexive nature of globalization. An insightful avenue to take in order to explore globalization is the study of human mobility. Globalization has placed immigrants at the nexus of the increase in migration due to lower transportation costs, the development of the international human rights regime, and the enactment of increasingly restrictive immigration policies by developed countries. The interplay between these processes crystallizes in detention centers, and renders immigrants vulnerable to human rights violations. Studying globalization from a comparative perspective, this essay analyzes the impact of the International Human Rights Regime (IHRR) on American and Dutch immigration detention policies. In the last decades, detention has become the established way of dealing with irregular migrants. It lamentably obscures various essential examples of alternative legislation.
Topic:
Globalization, Human Rights, and United Nations
Political Geography:
United States, America, and Netherlands

50. Globalization and the Politicization of Muslim Women: Consequences for Domestic Violence in the Netherlands and the United States19

Author:
Mishal Khan
Publication Date:
03-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
Globalization as a theoretical lens guides us toward a greater understanding of some of the most turbulent transformations that are taking place in the world today. Anthony Giddens provides a compelling definition of this phenomenon, framing it as―the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa. Nothing demonstrates this more sharply than the impact of global events on those Muslim populations residing in what can be broadly defined as the―Western‖ world. This ironically termed―reverse colonization entails an unprecedented number of people from Muslim countries migrating to the Global North, laying the foundation for a myriad of challenging negotiations and novel circumstances. However, there are a number of concurrent transformations that are taking place within Muslim populations that have become the subject of increased scrutiny. The rise of radical Islam, the enhanced religiosity of Muslim youth, and the increased wearing of headscarves by women are all aspects of a global Islam that has attracted the widespread attention of policymakers, scholars, and ordinary citizens alike.
Topic:
Debt
Political Geography:
United States and Netherlands