Old and New Nationalisms, Pre-migration Political Legacies

Abstract

In 2009, Hero Brinkman, a member of a Dutch parliamentary delegation to the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba and a member of Gert Wilders far right PVV (Partij voor de Vrijheid) (Party for Freedom), inflamed passions by suggesting that the Dutch islands be auctioned on eBay (Expatica, 2009). Over the last ten years, for the first time in Dutch history, the islands of the Antilles have become a focus of Dutch parliamentary debate (Oostindie, 2011:38). This suggests a rather tenuous attachment to and inclusion of the Dutch islands in constructions of Dutch nationalism and national identity. The attenuated connection is partially explained by the political development of Dutch nationhood and expansion in the Dutch Caribbean and now finds itself expressed in island-based nationalisms as well as new assertions of Dutch nationhood.

We are one [Dutch] kingdom. But the concept of the kingdom is maybe a concept that we, coming from the Caribbean have, but people that live here [in the Netherlands] don’t have.¹

With kind permission from Springer Science+Business Media: Sharpe, Michael. September 2005. ‘Globalization and migration: Post-colonial Dutch Antillean and Aruban immigrant political incorporation in the Netherlands’, Dialectical Anthropology 29: 3–4. This chapter is based in part on this article.