This book seeks to launch a new research agenda for the historiography of Dutch foreign relations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does so in two important ways. First, it broadens the analytical perspective to include a variety of non-state actors beyond politicians and diplomats. Second, it focuses on the transnational connections that shaped the foreign relations of the Netherlands, emphasizing the effects of (post-) colonialism and internationalism. Furthermore, this essay collection highlights not only the key roles played by Dutch actors on the international scene, but also serves as an important point of comparison for the activities of their counterparts in other small states.
The Cold War is conventionally regarded as a superpower conflict that dominated the shape of international relations between World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Smaller powers had to adapt to a role as pawns in a strategic game of the superpowers, its course beyond their control. This edited volume offers a fresh interpretation of twentieth-century smaller European powers – East–West, neutral and non-aligned – and argues that their position vis-à-vis the superpowers often provided them with an opportunity rather than merely representing a constraint. Analysing the margins for manoeuvre of these smaller powers, the volume covers a wide array of themes, ranging from cultural to economic issues, energy to diplomacy and Bulgaria to Belgium. Given its holistic and nuanced intervention in studies of the Cold War, this book will be instrumental for students of history, international relations and political science.
Rather than simply assuming that some states are small and others are big, The Politics of Smallness in Modern Europe delves deep into the construction of different size-based hierarchies in Europe and explores the way Europeans have thought about their own state's size and that of their continental neighbours since the early 19th century. By positing that ideas about size are intimately connected with both basic discourses about a state's identity and policy discourses about the range of options most appropriate to that state, this multi-contributor volume presents a novel way of thinking about what makes one state, in the eyes of both its own inhabitants and those of others, different from others, and what effects these perceived differences have had, and continue to have, on domestic, European, and global politics. Bringing together an international team of historians and political scientists, this nuanced and sophisticated study examines the connections between shifting ideas about a state's (relative) size, competing notions of national interest and mission, and international policy in modern Europe and beyond.
The Oxford Handbook of Dutch Politics provides a comprehensive longitudinal overview of the state of the art of academic research on the Dutch political system: its origins and historical development, its key institutions, main fault lines, pivotal processes, and key public policy dynamics. In each of the chapters, researchers take stock of what - if anything - has changed over time, how scholars have conceptualized and studied these dynamics, and what key factors can account for the developmental patterns found to be at play. Notwithstanding its considerable degree of constitutional and institutional stability, Dutch politics has seen considerable step changes and occasional upheavals across the last half century. Influenced by long-term demographic, socio-economic, and cultural shifts the old social cleavages have waned. New social identities and dividing lines - such as ethnicity, education, place, and gender - have influenced Dutch citizens' political attitudes and behaviours, including their voting patterns. The media landscape and the information environment have been altered by new technologies that politicians and citizens alike have to navigate. This has produced changes in such pivotal components as the party system, coalition formation and management process, and executive-legislative relations, and many others. Moreover, public policy paradigms and the political coalitions that sustained them have ascended and lost traction in most of the eleven policy domains discussed in the Handbook. In all, this volume provides unique and indispensable insights into stability and change in a political system that once gained notoriety as an archetype of a consensual or consociational democracy.
Although air transport is indispensable to modern society, we know little about the diplomatic efforts that establish airline services. Nonetheless, aviation features prominently in the spectrum of international relations: in conflicts between states, for example, the suspension of landing rights is one of the first acts to symbolize serious discord. In tracing the unique cooperation between government and industry, this historical study underscores aviation as a prominent, but understudied topic in Dutch foreign relations.
Throughout history rivers have always been a source of life and of conflict. This book investigates the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine’s (CCNR) efforts to secure the principle of freedom of navigation on Europe’s prime river. The book explores how the most fundamental change in the history of international river governance arose from European security concerns. It examines how the CCNR functioned as an ongoing experiment in reconciling national and common interests that contributed to the emergence of European prosperity in the course of the long nineteenth century. In so doing, it shows that modern conceptions and practices of security cannot be understood without accounting for prosperity considerations and prosperity policies. Incorporating research from archives in Great Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands, as well as the recently opened CCNR archives in France, this study operationalises a truly transnational perspective that effectively opens the black box of the oldest and still existing international organisation in the world in its first centenary. In showing how security-prosperity considerations were a driving force in the unfolding of Europe’s prime river in the nineteenth century, it is of interest to scholars of politics and history, including the history of international relations, European history, transnational history and the history of security, as well as those with an interest in current themes and debates about transboundary water governance. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
National competitiveness has become a misnomer, as competitiveness is increasingly understood as a regional phenomenon and regions are not confined to the boundaries of the nation state. This book focuses on the Port of Rotterdam and its hinterland – i.e. the Lower Rhine and the Ruhr area. A transnational perspective is imperative to understand the historical trajectories of the port, the hinterland and the region itself. This book brings geography and the transnational study of regions back into the historical discipline, linking places to larger geographical scales and to systems of production and consumption and the global chains in which they are organised. This book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in urban studies, urban planning, public policy, geography and political science.
The history of the world’s second international organisation, an innovative techno-political institution established by Europe’s Concert of Powers to remove insecurity from the Lower Danube.
During the 20th century, a variety of social movements and civil society groups stepped into the arena of international politics. This volume collects innovative research on international solidarity movements in Belgium and the Netherlands, and places these movements prominently in debates about the history of globalization, transnational activism, and international politics.
The 1949 Geneva Conventions are the most important rules for armed conflict ever formulated. To this day they continue to shape contemporary debates about regulating warfare, but their history is often misunderstood. For most observers, the drafters behind these treaties were primarily motivated by liberal humanitarian principles and the shock of the atrocities of the Second World War. This book tells a different story, showing how the final text of the Conventions, far from being an unabashedly liberal blueprint, was the outcome of a series of political struggles among the drafters. It also concerned a great deal more than simply recognizing the shortcomings of international law revealed by the experience of war. To understand the politics and ideas of the Conventions' drafters is to see them less as passive characters responding to past events than as active protagonists trying to shape the future of warfare. In many different ways, they tried to define the contours of future battlefields by deciding who deserved protection and what counted as a legitimate target. Outlawing illegal conduct in wartime did as much to outline the concept of humanized war as to establish the legality of waging war itself. Through extensive archival research and critical legal methodologies, Preparing for War establishes that although they did not seek war, the Conventions' drafters prepared for it by means of weaving a new legal safety net in the event that their worst fear should materialize, a spectre still haunting us today.
