Abstract
The Netherlands is a small Western European nation of 15 million inhabitants that covers an area of 41,000 square kilometers (16,000 square miles). Such a small nation generally lacks the power resources to bring pressure to bear on other states. Whatever influence it may have in international relations must therefore be based on persuasion rather than power.2
Parts of this chapter have been published earlier, in David P. Forsythe (ed.), Human Rights and Development: International Views, London: Macmillan, 1989, pp. 154–70.
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Notes
Cf. Philip P. Everts and Guido Walraven (eds), The Politics of Persuasion: Implementation of Foreign Policy by the Netherlands, Aldershot: Avebury, 1989.
Cf. Peter R. Baehr and Monique C. CastermansHolleman (eds), The Netherlands and the United Nations: Selected Issues, The Hague: T.M.C. Asser Instituut, 1990, P. 1.
Joris J.C. Voorhoeve, Peace, Profits and Principles: A Study of Dutch Foreign Policy, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979, p. 42.
Jan Egeland, ‘Focus on: Human Rights — Ineffective Big States, Potent Small States’, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 21, no. 3, 1984, p. 210.
See Jan Egeland, Impotent Superpower — Potent Small State: Potentials and Limitations of Human Rights Objectives in the Foreign Policies of the United States and Norway, Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, 1985, p. 9. He refers to Om Norge og Internasjonale Menneskerettsvern, Stortingsmelding no. 93 (1976–1977). The German Government published in 1992 a comprehensive booklet, Menschenrechtsbericht der Bundesregierung (’Human Rights Report by the Federal Government’), Reihe: Berichte und Dokumentationen, Bonn: Auswärtiges Amt, 1992.
For a recent account, see C. Flinterman and Y.S. Klerk, ‘The Advisory Committee on Human Rights and Foreign Policy in the Netherlands’, Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, vol. 11, no. 3, (1993), pp. 283–92.
Ph.P. Everts (ed.), Controversies at Home: Domestic Factors in the Foreign Policy of the Netherlands, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985.
Ph.P. Everts and Guido Walraven (eds), The Politics of Persuasion: Implementation of Foreign Policy by the Netherlands, Aldershot: Avebury, 1989.
M.C. Castermans-Holleman, Het Nederlands Mensenrechtenbeleid in de Verenigde Naties (Dutch Human Rights Policy at the United Nations’), The Hague: T.M.C. Asser Instituut, 1992. See also Peter R. Baehr and Monique C. Castermans-Holleman, ‘The Promotion of Human Rights—The Netherlands at the UN’, in Baehr and Castermans-Holleman, The Netherlands (note 3 above), pp. 23–34.
Marcel Zwamborn, ‘Suriname’, in Bârd-Anders Andreassen and Theresa Swinehart (eds), Human Rights in Developing Countries Yearbook 1991, Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1992, p. 291. Former US Secretary of State George Shultz has written in his memoirs, Turmoil and Triumph (1993) that the Netherlands rejected at the time a personal request from President Reagan to inter-vene militarily in Suriname (De Volkskrant, 7 September 1993 ).
See Amnesty International, Report 1992, London, 1992, pp. 141–4
Hans Goderbauer, ‘Indonesia and East Timor’, in: Mrd-Anders Andreassen and Theresa Swinehart (eds), Human Rights in Developing Countries, Yearbook 1993, Oslo: Nordic Human Rights Publications, 1993, p. 137.
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© 1994 Peter R. Baehr
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Baehr, P.R. (1994). The Netherlands. In: The Role of Human Rights in Foreign Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23480-6_11
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