- Theses and placement reports Faculty of Arts

Master of Arts Thesis
Euroculture
University of Groningen
Universidad de Deusto
March 2011
Caribbean Identities and Transatlantic Representation
a case study on the Dutch Caribbean
Submitted by:
Lara Woest
S1469290
Mutua Fidesstraat 8
9741 CA Groningen
The Netherlands
0031 (0)643895044
[email protected]
Supervised by:
Dr. Janny de Jong
Dr. María Luisa Sánchez Barrueco
Groningen, 15 March 2011
Signature
MA Programme Euroculture
Declaration
I, Lara Woest hereby declare that this thesis, entitled “Caribbean Identities and
Transatlantic Representation: a case study on the Dutch Caribbean”, submitted
as partial requirement for the MA Programme Euroculture, is my own original
work and expressed in my own words. Any use made within it of works of other
authors in any form (e.g. ideas, figures, texts, tables, etc.) are properly
acknowledged in the text as well as in the List of References.
I hereby also acknowledge that I was informed about the regulations pertaining
to the assessment of the MA thesis Euroculture and about the general completion
rules for the Master of Arts Programme Euroculture.
Signed
………………………………………………………….....
Date
………………………………………………………………..
2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 4
CHAPTER 1 ............................................................................................................................. 9
CARIBBEAN IDENTITIES: A SEARCH FOR SELFHOOD ............................................ 9
A SEARCH FOR SELFHOOD: COLLECTIVITY AND IN-BETWEEN-NESS ................................ 11
Collectivity ........................................................................................................................ 11
In-between-ness ................................................................................................................. 13
A SEARCH FOR SELFHOOD: STEREOTYPES AND COUNTER-IDENTITIES ............................ 14
Stereotypes ........................................................................................................................ 15
Counter-Identities ............................................................................................................. 17
WHAT IS CARIBBEANNESS? ................................................................................................. 18
CHAPTER 2 ........................................................................................................................... 22
A CASE STUDY ON THE DUTCH CARIBBEAN ............................................................ 22
THE COMPLEXITY OF DUTCH CARIBBEAN IDENTITIES IN A HISTORICAL CONTEXT .......... 23
A Historical Introduction on the Dutch Caribbean within the Kingdom of the....................
Netherlands ....................................................................................................................... 23
Cultural Identity as an early Colonial Construct: Mixtures of Peoples .......................... 26
Cultural Identity as an early Colonial Construct: Religions and Languages .................. 27
Stuart Hall’s ‘identity through collectivity’ ...................................................................... 34
THE COMPLEXITY OF CARIBBEAN IDENTITIES IN A POSTCOLONIAL CONTEXT ................. 35
Oil and Disappointing Expectations ................................................................................. 36
Transatlantic migration and transnational identities ....................................................... 40
Stuart Hall’s ‘ identity shaped trough differences’ ........................................................... 43
CHAPTER 3 ........................................................................................................................... 45
THE DUTCH CARIBBEAN AND THE ROAD TO NEW STATUSES IN THE 21ST
CENTURY: CHANGING (POLITICAL) ATTITUDES AND ITS IMPACT ON
TRANSATLANTIC PERSPECTIVES ................................................................................ 45
CHANGING POLITICAL ATTITUDES: DECOLONISATION AND EUROPEAN INTEGRATION .... 48
Careless Postcolonialism and the Queen as a unifying symbol ....................................... 50
Political Discourses on the Dutch Caribbean .................................................................. 53
Mutual trust? – A changing political approach in the 1990s ........................................... 55
Changing attitudes in the Caribbean parts of the Kingdom ............................................. 57
Changing attitudes in the European part of the Kingdom ................................................ 58
THE ROAD TO THE NEW STATUSES AND EUROPEAN PRIORITIES ........................................ 61
The road to new statuses ................................................................................................... 62
Dutch Caribbeans and the European Union .................................................................... 64
CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................... 69
BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................. 72
3
INTRODUCTION
―A paradox underlies Dutch colonial history‖ states Oostindie1 when exploring the Dutch
colonial expansion in the Caribbean compared to their expansion in Asia.2 Dutch colonialism
in the Indonesian archipelago – run by the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) – was of great
importance; economically, geopolitically and culturally. The VOC was a successful trading
company, which knew how to handle its monopoly and trade luxurious goods, and operated in
strong, developed states. On the contrary, the Dutch West Indies Company (WIC) is often
regarded as a fatal economic combination of a war driven, colonizing trade company, that was
not capable of maintaining its most profitable possessions. The Dutch islands in the Caribbean
have never been as economically fruitful as the Dutch possessions in the East or in Suriname,
and were therefore often seen as useless and costly burdens for the Netherlands. However, the
Dutch legacy in Indonesia did not last and only left limited traces in what is now the Republic
of Indonesia. In the less successful territories in the West the reverse applies. The Dutch are
still present today and have left a lasting impact on the Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba, St
Maarten, Curacao, Bonaire, St Eustatius, and Saba.3
The significant ‗success‘ of the VOC caused that all attention got placed upon the
Eastern possessions, showing that the colonies in the West were of little importance. This
approach would even last until after the Second World War, which can easily explain why it
was mainly Indonesia that attracted a lot of awareness among Dutch citizens and left a
remarkable impact on the national memory. For centuries the West have been regarded as
‗that insignificant area in the shadow of the East‘ – an almost unknown region which the
Dutch felt little emotional attachment for. In the mid 1970s, however, a shift can be found in
the perceptions and level of awareness of the West. At the eve of Suriname‘s independence
almost half of its population migrated to the Netherlands, which resulted in an unexpected
contact between the Dutch and postcolonial4 migrants from the West. This event marked a
1
Gert Oostindie is the director of Caribbean Studies for the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en
Volkenkunde (KITLV), an institute at the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Leiden and professor at the
University of Utrecht and Leiden. Oostindie has published an extensive range of Caribbean (post)colonial
research.
2
Gert Oostindie, Dutch Colonialism, Migration and Cultural Heritage (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008), 3.
3
Ibid., 3
4
To classify the Dutch Caribbean as ‗postcolonial‘ is sometimes criticized because the Dutch Caribbean are still
constitutionally tied to the mother country, for which the contemporary context could be called colonial or
neocolonial. This work will make use of the term ‗postcolonial‘, however, as with the proclamation of the
Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1954 the colonial period was formally closed down. Furthermore,
as Oostindie explains in Postkoloniaal Nederland as well, it were mainly the Caribbean politicians that over the
4
turning point in (post)colonial awareness towards Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean in the
metropolis, as Van Goor states: ―it seems that these regions have only been discovered after
Suriname got independent and an immigration movement to the Netherlands had started.‖5
This path to independence – not only for Suriname, but for the Dutch Caribbean as
well – began in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. A plan for European
integration was developed in order to overcome the devastations left by the War. As much as
this process was deeply conditioned by the German question and the establishment of the
Cold War‘s bi-polar world order, the early stages of European integration would also coincide
with the dismantling of another world order; that of European colonialism and imperialism. 6
Empires came undone in the two decades after the War, and most of the Caribbean region
became sovereign; today some 85 percent of the 37 million Caribbean people live in
independent countries.7 The decolonisation process in the Dutch Caribbean, however, did not
coincide with those of other European imperial powers. Overshadowed by the importance of
Indonesia and the reconstruction of the devastated homeland, post-war negotiations in the
Caribbean only developed very slowly. Partly due to international pressure as the United
Nations held a close watch on decolonisation policies, the Charter for the Kingdom of the
Netherlands was promulgated in 1954. Although the Charter divided the Kingdom of the
Netherlands into three equal partners, the intended ‗equality‘ ―had to be fictitious from the
start‖: equality within the Charter was a notion originally devised in the hope to keep
Indonesia within the Kingdom, but regarding the large differences in scale, power and
development within the transatlantic relations, ‗equality‘ could only be a an idealised
concept.8
Initially, this ‗new start‘ was based again on uneven relations which would strengthen
rather than overcome the scars which were left behind by colonialism. At the same time – and
very much related to the colonial question – a growing tendency towards finding a Caribbean
identity emerged throughout the entire Caribbean region. The course of slavery, the struggles
last decades were continuously rejecting the Dutch proposed transfer of sovereignty with the argument that
decolonisation had come to an end already in 1954. (from: Gert Oostindie, Postkoloniaal Nederland: Vijfenzestig
Jaar Vergeten, Herdenken, Verdringen (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, 2010), 37. )
5
J. van Goor is a retired associate professor in the history of colonialism and decolonisation at the University of
Utrecht. He has published several studies on Dutch colonialism. This quote is from: J. van Goor, De Nederlandse
Koloniën : Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Expansie, 1600-1975 (Den Haag: SDU
UitgeverijKoninginnegracht, 1993), voorwoord.
6
Peo Hansen, "European Integration, European Identity, and the Colonial Connection," European Journal of
Social Theory 5, no. 4 (2002), 484.
7
Gert Oostindie and Inge Klinkers, Decolonising the Caribbean: Dutch Policies in a Comparative Perspective
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 9.
8
Ibid., 85
5
for freedom and the paths to independence all rose awareness to the meaning of being. A
blend of people with different cultures, skin-colours, languages, and religions: could they be
called ‗Caribbean‘? A significant gap between rich and poor, between dependence and
independence, both continuously reflected upon the burden of an almost fixed identifier of the
coloniser versus colonised. Could a Caribbean identity ever be found? This regional search
for selfhood, combined with a growing worldwide social unrest resulted in several movements
and protests at the end of the 1960s; black power movements in the United States also
inspired social movements in the Caribbean area, and the riots of 1969 in Willemstad proved
that workers‘ movements in the Caribbean started to aim for equality as well.
Social unrest in the Dutch Caribbean, however, was not primarily focused on
independence, but rather on internal inequalities. The longing for independence was gradually
diminishing when economic situations of neighbouring independent islands and later the
casualties around Suriname‘s independence, proved that remaining ties with the mother
country would perhaps be the most prudent solution for the (near) future. Moreover, a
growing awareness of the impact of globalisation – a process in which nation states get more
and more mutually dependent on other nation states – turned the discussion on sovereignty
and independence towards a different direction. This again marks a paradoxical situation, as it
was no longer the colonised state aiming for independence, but the mother country that would
keep its thoughts on granting autonomy towards its overseas territories.
The Dutch approach towards the Caribbean partners drastically changed context in the
1990s. On the European side of the transatlantic Kingdom it became clear as well that
independence was no longer the best solution, and even more importantly, was no longer
desired in the Dutch Caribbean. As established in the Charter, constitutional changes could
only be made with the approval of all partners involved, a case not likely to happen in the near
future. For that matter, a fundamental re-orientation of the Kingdom relations needed to be
considered; one which would be suitable for a long-term cooperation. As will be discussed
throughout this work, the process towards a renewed approach of Kingdom relations did not
go without any drawbacks. A multitude of events on both sides of the Atlantic significantly
contributed to the ‗Knellende Koninkrijksbanden‘ – ‗restrictive kingdom ties‘ – that were
already so deeply rooted.9
9
‘Knellende Koninkrijksbanden’ is a 1700-page study by Gert Oostindie and Inge Klinkers that presents a
concise history of Dutch colonisation policies since 1940: Gert Oostindie and Inge Klinkers, Knellende
Koninkrijksbanden: Het Nederlandse Dekolonisatiebeleid in De Caraïben, 1940-2000. Vol. III 1975-2000
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001).
6
However, there were two elements in this postcolonial course of history that stand out
as crucial elements for the ties between the Kingdom-partners: the process of European
integration and the influence of the emerging multicultural societies on questions of identity.
Both processes have deeply impacted the debate on national identity over the last decades as
to whether they are negatively transforming or positively contributing to national cultures, and
whether they should be stopped or supported. The confrontation with postcolonial migrants in
the metropole society was not initially perceived as a problem – perhaps apologetic
sentiments played a role. Moreover, migrants from the Caribbean were perceived as return
migrants and therefore not seen as a problematic issue. However, when it gradually became
clear that the postcolonial migrants from the West preferred to stay, issues changed. Since the
1990s, relations between the kingdom partners have become increasingly overshadowed by
negative political discourses, which have impeded any initiative to improve the kingdom-ties
and would only strengthening the ambivalent perceptions on both sides of the Atlantic.
Contemporary debates on national and European identity paradoxically influence the
postcolonial Caribbean communities as well; Dutch Caribbeans hold the Dutch citizenship,
and are therefore indirectly European citizens. With their status of Overseas Countries and
Territories (OCT‘s), the islands are not considered part of the European Union, but their
inhabitants, holding a Dutch (and thus European) passport, have been allowed to vote for the
European Parliament since 2009. A complex legal construction, in which citizenship forms on
the one hand the most highly valued kingdom-advantage for Dutch Caribbeans, but on the
other hand does not seem to impress European politics much. It adds another layer of
complexity to Caribbean identities, in which once more, unequal relations are accentuated.
It is this complexity of (transnational) Caribbean identities that will be studied in this work.
Why the issue of Caribbean identity is problematical, is not unknown; many studies of
(post)colonial criticism and other cultural studies have extensively focused on black diaspora,
the Emancipation, decolonisation, race relations, and the position of colonised societies in the
modern world. The course of identity formation of these groups of peoples from a colonised
to a decolonised perspective, poses an interesting concept to examine. Therefore, this work
will compare the way Dutch Caribbean identity was influenced by European culture from the
colonial context to contemporary relationships: In what ways was the Dutch colonial presence
in the Caribbean influential for identities in the Dutch overseas, and how does the Netherlands
continue to contribute to this process in a postcolonial world? How does the development of
7
further integration within the European Union affects the transatlantic ties within the
Kingdom of the Netherlands?
The first chapter will study the concept of Caribbeanness; the search for selfhood and
Caribbean identity. Concepts which are hard to define considering they were, and often still
are continuously influenced by ‗Self- and Other-ing‘; by alienation and feelings of ‗inbetween-ness‘, by stereotyping and counter-identities. Although Caribbean identities never
seem to settle, the chapter will give a theoretical framework on how to understand and use the
concept in particular contexts.
Chapter two will apply the theoretical framework on Caribbean identities with a case
study on the Dutch Caribbean. Dutch colonial and postcolonial history will be studied
according to several important aspects that have been significant for Dutch Caribbean
identities; the mixtures of peoples, religions and languages, postcolonial expectations and
transatlantic migration. The chapter will aim to provide a better understanding of how Dutch
Caribbean identities have been shaped from the past to the present.
The final chapter will put the topic in a contemporary context, in particular on the
political migration debate in the Netherlands and in the broader context to how European
integration has also led to new perspectives on the concept of identity. Eventually the overall
aim is to show how it was Dutch colonialism that has resulted in a myriad of cultural overlays
in the Dutch Caribbean, and that contemporary globalizing processes keep contributing to this
cultural blend.
8
CHAPTER 1
CARIBBEAN IDENTITIES: A SEARCH FOR
SELFHOOD
Sintimentu di Kòrsou10
Di kon bo n’ sa, ku ami sa
ku den mi wowonan mi tin
un spil manchá ku awa klá
tapá pa miedo di mi mes?
Why don‘t you know, that I know
that my eyes conceal
a mirror stained with clear water
covered from fear of myself?
Pasikiko para mira’tras?
Si ta dilanti mi ke bai,
di kon mi ta yor’un biaha mas
pa loke mi alma lo ke tin?
And why am I looking back?
If I really want to move on,
why do I cry once again
for what my soul desires?
Un kurpa port a fingi un kos
ma kurp’i alma nan ta dos,
i dos mes lo mi ta.
[Papiamento]
The body can pretend
but body and soul are two
and I must be both
Caribbean nations and cultures were heavily influenced by and even partly created by many
centuries of colonial rule of European empires; by the course of slavery, the struggles for
freedom, and a continuing postcolonial discourse and interaction. Histories of consequent
interchange between the European invaders of the various local territories and indigenous
peoples they claimed to control have produced a myriad of cultural overlays in the
Americas.11 The mixtures of peoples, languages, religions, and many other aspects of human
culture in the Caribbean have made the issue of Caribbean identities complex and
problematical; today many peoples of the Caribbean still struggle with the search for a
cultural identity and historical identity.
A simple observation of contemporary social and cultural life in the Dutch Caribbean
reminds of diasporas from different parts of the world which have resulted in several sorts of
10
Chal Corsen and Brenda F. Hasham-Hopson, "Sintimentu Di Kòrsou / Curaçao Feeling," Callaloo 21, no. 3,
Carribean Literature from Suriname, The Netherlands Antilles, Aruba, and The Netherlands: A Special Issue
(Summer, 1998), p. 675.
11
Allison Blakely, "Historical Ties among Surinam, the Netherlands Antilles, Aruba, and the Netherlands,"
Callaloo 21, no. 3 (Summer98, 1998), 472,
9
racial fusions: today the Dutch islands in the Caribbean host an extensive multicultural blend
of people coming from Surinam, Portugal, Lebanon, Dominican Republic, the Netherlands,
Venezuela, Columbia, China, and India. Just as elsewhere in the Caribbean region, none of
the people living on the Dutch Caribbean islands today originally ‗belonged‘ there; as Stuart
Hall12 states: ―it is the space where the Creolisations and assimilations and syncretisms were
negotiated‖.13
This chapter will analyze the course of identity formation of these groups of peoples
from a colonised to a decolonised perspective. Therefore, comparisons will be made of the
way Dutch Caribbean identity was influenced by European culture from the colonial context
to contemporary relationships. In order to examine this process, it is first important to see
what we can understand as Caribbean identity, what Caribbeanness means. To study the
meaning of Caribbeannes, this work will introduce Frederick Cooper‘s understandings of
‗identity‘.14 Although there are numerous different meanings of identity, Cooper‘s
explanation of identity as a collective phenomenon and identity as the core aspect of selfhood
will be worked on.15 To apply and strengthen these theories to the case of Caribbean
identities, this chapter will discuss concepts of Caribbean in-betweenn-ness (a term used by
Homi K. Bhabha16), the formation of counter-identities, and stereotyping. Once a better
understanding of Caribbeanness is given, it will be applied to a case study on the Dutch
Caribbean in which the historical context and modern context of identity shaping will be
discussed.
12
Stuart Hall is a Jamaican cultural theorist and sociologist who had made profound contributions to the field of
cultural studies at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. Besides important
works on hegemony, discourse and cultural identity, Hall has written important works – relevant for this study –
on the creation of politics of Black diasporic identities.
13
Stuart Hall, qtd. in H. Adlai Murdoch, ""Al Skin' Teeth is Not Grin": Performing Caribbean Diasporic Identity
in a Postcolonial Metropolitan Frame," Callaloo 30, no. 2 (2007), 575.
14
Frederick Cooper is a professor of history at New York University, and is specialized in African history,
colonisation and decolonisation, social sciences and the colonial world. Cooper is currently teaching in the field
of empires, states, and political imagination for which he published Empires in World History, Power, and the
Politics of Difference. This work, however, will be mainly focused on his book Colonialism in Question: Theory,
Knowledge, History, which was published in 2005.
15
Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkely: University of California
Press, 205), 65.
16
Homi K. Bhabha is an Indian-American postcolonial theorist, who currently teaches at Harvard
University where he is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language and
Director of the Humanities Center. Bhabha is an important figure in post-colonial studies, introducing terms and
concepts as hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence and in-between-ness.
10
A Search for Selfhood: Collectivity and In-Between-ness
―It is not the Colonialist Self or the Colonised Other, but the
disturbing distance in-between that constitutes the figure of
colonial otherness‖
– Homi K. Bhabha17
When Frederick Cooper discusses the uses of identity and what the term is supposed to do, he
explains that ―this depends on the context of its use and the theoretical tradition from which
the use in question derives‖.18 It is important to keep that in mind, as the concept of identity is
simply too complicated and indefinite to briefly explain. Therefore, it should rather be
described here how to interpret the term in the particular context of the Caribbean; more
specifically to find tools to explain identity, which can later be applied and elaborated on in
the case of the Dutch Caribbean.
Collectivity
In an attempt to frame concepts of identity applicable to the Caribbean, a first understanding
of the term is based specifically as a ―collective phenomenon‖ which ―denotes a fundamental
and consequential sameness among members of a group or category‖. 19 Any attempt to speak
of ‗a – or a single Caribbean identity‘ must be rejected here; although there might be a shared
feeling of sameness or a shared feeling of belonging to a Caribbean culture in some sense, not
a single Caribbean island looks like any other in terms of its ethnic composition.20 Therefore
we cannot speak of ‗the‘ Caribbeans; the term should be pinned down further. For that reason,
according to Cooper, one must consider the senses of identity in relation to not only race, but
also to ethnicity and nationalism.21
Cooper identifies various key uses of the term identity. When it comes to race,
ethnicity, and nationalism, he shows that identity can also be understood as ―a core aspect of
selfhood or as a fundamental condition of social being [...] invoked to point to something
17
Homi K. Bhabha ―Forword: Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition‖ in Frantz Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986), xvi.
18
Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, 64.
19
Ibid., 65
20
Stuart Hall, "Negotiating Caribbean Identities," New Left Review, no. 209 (1995), 5.
21
Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 65.
11
allegedly deep, basic, abiding, or foundational‖.22 Although this understanding is closely
interrelated with the former, it goes deeper into recognizing and preserving the roots, in the
context mainly to Africa and slave trade. In Negotiating Caribbean Identities, Stuart Hall also
makes clear that the question of roots is very much at issue for Caribbean identities when
perceiving it as ground for identities. The question of roots and the search for a historical
identity, is about essence and the fundamentals of a culture; ―histories can come and go,
peoples come and go, situations change, but somewhere down there is throbbing the culture to
which we all belong […] something to which we can return […] around which we can
organize our identities and our sense of belongingness‖.23 At the same time, this is where the
problem starts when discussing identities of peoples who were in the course of colonisation
disrupted from their culture and roots, to live in an unknown world which culturally depends
on an even more unknown country or imperial centre outside of that place. Later in this work
it will be elaborated on how problematic it is for Caribbean peoples to locate their origin: that
finding and creating a sense of commonality not only gets puzzled by the extensive mixture of
cultures in the Caribbean, but that problems also arise when referring back to ‗the‘ roots. In
the next chapter, it will be explained how several Caribbean movements emerged in the midtwentieth century in order to find a meaning of their roots, or even to return to ‗their‘ roots.
Next to these two explanations, identity can also be seen as the ―evanescent product of
multiple and competing discourses [...] invoked to highlight the unstable, multiple,
fluctuating, and fragmented nature of the contemporary ‗self‘‖.24 Although this usage is
mainly applicable to postmodernist theories and will be discussed later when transatlantic
perspectives in contemporary situations will be explored, a theoretic understanding of identity
as a product of representation must be provided at first. It is important to note here, that
although questions about identity are always questions about representation, representations
are always ―storied‖.25 This means that influences of social life, categorizations into groups or
organizations, or simply the stories told about self and others are subjective and thus cannot
be considered without this knowledge.
22
23
24
25
Ibid., 65
Hall, Negotiating Caribbean Identities, 4.
Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 65.
Ibid., 69
12
In-between-ness
Another complicated element of identity can be found in the issue whether identity is the basis
or product for specific action or thought. Both ways are closely related to self- understanding
and finding sameness in groups; as it will determine individual- or group action. That is what
makes identity such a complicated issue for the Caribbean: many ethnic groups who
involuntarily or voluntarily moved to that region, have been dislocated in the struggle to find
an identity, just as later generations many times found themselves lost in the search for selfunderstanding. Right from the beginning of the colonisation era, the quest for a Caribbean
identity can be placed in a situated ―in between-ness‖, a metaphor used by Bhabha to explain
identity in the present cultural blend as a result of colonialism.26 ‗In between-ness‘ can be
interpreted as in the ethnical background of the roughly 34 million people living in the
Caribbean, who are mainly mixtures of African and European influences. 27 At the same time,
―in between-ness‖ can also refer to the location of the Caribbean islands: in between North
America –of which a significant market dominance is felt—, South America – to which there
is more connection considering language and social position—and Europe to which many are
still directly or indirectly tied to their former colonisers.
The ―in between-ness‖ on the subject of geographical position dates back to European
discoveries of the islands. The Caribbean were usefully located next to the big important
colonies on the mainland and became vulnerable stopping points on the routes to the New
World, especially for slave trade. But today the islands‘ location in between North and South
America carries loaded metaphors:
At the most extreme, the south is identified with poverty, sociocultural adolescence, and technological sophistication. The islands‘ in
between-ness, then, takes on implications of political, economic, and
cultural oppression; racial domination; and geo-political isolation […]
Because the islands are largely dependent on the United States (and to
some extent on Western Europe) for tourism, they market themselves
as pre-modern, the antithesis of the industrialized West…28
These aspects undoubtedly have an impact on Caribbean identity, and how the relations of
colonised versus coloniser, the powerful versus the powerless, have been viewed in the past
and the present. In earlier times, the relations between the white elite and the black slave
26
A term used by Bhabha, quoted in: M. L. Hall, "The Postcolonial Caribbean as a Liminal Space: Authoring
Other Modes of Contestation and Affirmation," Howard Journal of Communications 18, no. 1 (2007, 2007), 2.
27
Ibid., 5
28
Ibid.
13
population were creating new sorts of identities which were neither European nor African, but
a combination of these – often to be substituted by other cultural backgrounds. This social
process, which can also be called ‗Creolisation‘, marks a certain crossroads of many cultures
in which almost every aspect of cultural life such as food, music, religion, and clothing has
been impacted.29 Creolisation will be further elaborated on at in the end of this chapter, when
its relation to the concept of Caribbeanness will be discussed. First, it is necessary to involve
more signifying practices for Caribbean identity; the influences of stereotyping and the
formation of counter-identities.
A Search for Selfhood: Stereotypes and Counter-Identities
―Look at the nigger! ... Mama, a Negro!‖
– Frantz Fanon30
―Communities are to be distinguished not by their falsity or genuineness,
but by the style in which they are imagined‖
– Benedict Anderson31
That Caribbean cultural hybridity is mainly a product of slave-trade, colonial settlement, and
Creolisation is widely known. But as earlier mentioned, it is not only the blend of different
races, religions, or languages that can define Caribbean identities: colonialism has been much
more than the simple domination of one group by another. Very important identity-shaping
factors are those determined by multiple and competing discourses over Caribbean identity;
how the peoples of the Caribbean have been viewed by the Other, and how this affected the
sense of being; the Self.
This chapter is working towards an understanding of what Caribbeanness means. To
gain an understanding as such, it is essential to study how the Caribbean are perceived from
both sides of the Atlantic, as identities are never products of one-way representations and
perceptions. In the historical context of the Caribbean, representation can be categorized in
29
Ibid., 6
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a French-Martiniqan who earned fame for his influential statements of anticolonial revolutionary thought. Fanon‘s works mainly elaborate the ways in which the coloniser/colonised
relationship is normalized as psychology, largely based on his own encounters of French racism. This quote is
one of his experiences of being stereotyped by skin-colour, in: Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 113.
31
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso, 2006), 15.
30
14
the way the colonised was portrayed by the coloniser and vice versa. Caribbeans were in this
sense not only differentiated by distance, as a group of people living somewhere at the other
side of the Atlantic, but also by physical appearance such as skin colour and different cultural
behaviour. In the early centuries of the colonial era, physical appearances and slave-statuses
enormously affected the sense of being for those who were inferior to their masters. Slaves, as
generally known, were often seen as non-human, as closer to bewildered animals. In the later
search for Caribbean identity this inferiority feeling has been, and perhaps still is, one of the
main markers to understand Caribbean identities; whether it inspired the Haitian Revolution
of 1791-1804, post-colonial theorists as Homi K. Bhabha or Frantz Fanon, or black
consciousness movements in general; the struggle to find Caribbean identities is one of
finding recognition, by the Self and by the Other.
Stereotypes
The interaction between both coloniser and colonised is another one of Bhabha‘s approaches
on colonial studies: to stress the (unexpected) forms of resistance that can be found in the
history of the colonised, and the often (unexpected) anxious reactions to that by the
coloniser.32 One essential aspect of this interaction is the circulation of (colonial) stereotypes,
on both sides of the Atlantic, as stereotyping is an important element for colonial discourse. In
The Location of Culture, Bhabha talks about theories based on ambivalence, an aspect he
finds central to the colonial discourses of stereotyping. Feelings of ambivalence can clearly be
products of stereotyping when individuals or groups are continuously put into fixed places,
and by which the true sense of identity of that individual or group is denied.33 These fixed
forms of representation are usually simplifications based on plain observations, and that is
exactly where the problem of the stereotype lays:
The stereotype is not a simplification because it is a false
representation of a given reality. It is a simplification because it is an
arrested, fixated form of representation that, in denying the play of
difference (which the negation of the Other permits), constitutes a
problem for the representation of the subject in significations of
psychic and social relations. 34
32
33
34
David Huddart, Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 2006), 8.
Ibid., 37
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 75.
15
An important aspect of simplified representation in colonial stereotyping is a representation
based on visibility. In the Caribbean area, this was undoubtedly about the distinction between
black and white skin colour. Whiteness stood for authority and mastery, whereas blackness
stood for slavery, inferiority and stupidity. Based on this kind of stereotyping on skin colour,
stereotypes could ―function to enable colonial authority, providing the justification that the
coloniser rules the colonised due to innate superiority‖.35 Again, it should be repeated here,
that identifications are never based on one-way representations, and that therefore the
assumption that black-white stereotyping and discourse was exclusively produced by the
coloniser is too simple. What further needs to be underlined, as earlier noted, is the fixated
form of representation and the acceptance of it. Through the course of colonialism, some of
its practices recognizes differences in race and culture, and crucially, as Bhabha states ―are
recognized as being so‖.36 This process of identification should neither be seen as exclusively
recognized by the coloniser, but also – as can be concluded by the following quote of Fanon –
something that results in a self-imposition as well:
When the black man, who has never felt as much a ‗Negro‘ as he has
under white domination, decides to prove his culture and act as a
cultivated person, he realizes that history imposes on him a terrain
already mapped out, that history sets him along a very precise path
and that he is expected to demonstrate the existence of a ―Negro‖
culture. 37
Furthermore, stereotypes can shape or transform an ‗identity‘ based on multiple and
contradictory beliefs, on processes of ambivalence which in that sense gets so distorted that it
can produce an intense desire for originality.38 Because the more a certain group of people is
constantly been represented as a sort of misfit, as a simplified or false representation of
reality, the more the impact will be traumatic and will create a strong ambivalence of
distortion and fear. As a result, whether soon or eventually, the desire for a purely original
identity will grow. The development of cultural liberation movements in the mid-twentieth
century Caribbean are clear examples of Caribbean expressions and desires to find a stronger
self-identity. These reactionary movements to racial suppression will be discussed in the
following paragraph.
35
36
37
38
Huddart, Homi K. Bhabha, 55.
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 83.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 150.
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 107.
16
Counter-Identities
Related to the existence and development of perspectives between the coloniser and the
colonised, or in other words between the Self and Other, is the concept of creating ‗counteridentities‘. Stuart Hall speaks of counter-identities to show how these have been important for
the peoples of the Caribbeans in their search for selfhood to create a Self that is opposing the
Other. ―Counter-identities‖, Hall states, have been ―providing sources on which the important
movements of decolonisation, of independence, of nationalist consciousness in the region
have been founded‖.39 Thus, these counter-identities, embodying in this sense European
colonisers versus the African-Caribbean colonised, provided and still provide sources for
some in the search for a nationalist consciousness, or in the quest for an identity at all. In the
Caribbean, this aspect of using a counterculture or counter-identity in order to find a sense of
Caribbean identity, mainly developed in the twentieth century. Cultural liberation movements
such as the Garvey/Back to Africa, Rastafari and Black Power40 gained many followers
through envisioning a revitalization or reconstruction of an African-Caribbean ethno-racial
identity. It is not surprising that whenever ideas of ‗race‘ and representation become almost
recognized as internal to the structure of western civilization, counteractions will take place.41
Moreover, ―blacks‘ assertion of their own humanity against centuries of degradation and
dehumanization, and all the other maladies that were visited upon this group was
inevitable‖.42 The scars left behind by these ‗accepted‘ representations and the awareness of
shared histories of enslavement and racist subordination, often resulted in a desire to escape
the restrictive bonds of ethnicity, by – amongst others – creating counter-identities. For some
this desire to escape from the restrictive bonds of ethnicity resulted in a desire to actually
return to Africa. For the majority of Caribbeans who were active in cultural liberation
movements, however, held stronger ideas toward a symbolic return to Africa; they were
mainly seeking a more ‗localized African-centred identity‘. The issue whether these
movements, with their intentions to construct an ethnic identity exclusively focused on the
39
Hall, Negotiating Caribbean Identities, 4.
The Rastafari movement, Back to Africa/Garvey movement and the Black Power movement played out in the
Caribbean region during the 1930s and 1970s respectively. It was mainly during the 1970s, however, that these
movements got more popular and renowned, as highly influenced by the Black Power movement and the Black
Panther party in the United States during the late 1960s.
41
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1993), 9.
42
Simboonath Singh, "Resistance, Essentialism, and Empowerment in Black Nationalist Discourse in the
African Diaspora: A Comparison of the Back to Africa, Black Power, and Rastafari Movements," Journal of
African American Studies 8, no. 3 (Winter2004, 2004), 24.
40
17
concept of Negritude and African identity – and in its turn thus again shaping fixed
categories—, was actually shaping feelings of deliberation or further confusion and alienation,
should be left to Diaspora criticism scholars. To mention these movements, however, is
essential for this research as they were focusing on constructing a new identity based on a
shared historical/cultural experience; and to study historical memory is crucial for
understanding a group‘s (historical) position vis-à-vis the Other.43
Consequently, the constant interchange of perceiving Self and the Other; stereotypical
discourse, and the formation of counter-identities are crucial aspects in the search for
selfhood. In the case of Caribbean colonial stereotypes, the legends, stories, histories and
other forms of representation have been shaping colonial stereotypes from the very beginning
of European arrival in the New World and the course of slavery following.
What is Caribbeanness?
There are no people there in the true sense of the word,
with a character and purpose of their own.
- James Anthony Froude44
A fragile reality (the experience of Caribbeanness, woven together from one side
of the Caribbean to the other) negatively twisted together in its urgency
(Caribbeanness as a dream, forever denied, often deferred, yet a strange, stubborn
presence in our responses). This reality is there in essence: dense (inscribed in
fact) but threatened (not inscribed in consciousness). This dream is vital, but not
obvious.
- Édouard Glissant45
This chapter is trying to examine the ethnic and cultural complexities of the Caribbean region
in order to understand Caribbean identities. Explaining Caribbean identity would be a mission
hard to achieve, as only the term ‗identity‘ in general has been subject to broad academic
discussion without resulting in a true definition. Still, after having discussed the important
elements relevant for Caribbean identities such as collectivity and in-between-ness, counteridentities and stereotypes, this last section of this chapter will conclude an understanding of
43
Ibid., 24
James Anthony Froude, The English in the West Indies or the Bow of Ulysses (London: Longmans, Green and
Co., 1888).
45
Édouart Glissant qtd. in Shalini Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and
Cultural Hybridity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 44.
44
18
the term ―Caribbeanness‖ in order to be able to continue the rest of this work; which
comprises the case-study on the Dutch Caribbean and their place in contemporary (political)
discourse in the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
The Caribbean‘s history can undoubtedly be called a history of dislocation and cultural
alienation. The societies in the Caribbean, created by colonialism, slavery, and anti- and
postcolonial struggles, are strongly related to the concept of diaspora, which ―refers to the
forcible dispersion of a people‖.46 Caribbean Diaspora must mainly be related to the historical
concept in which forced migrations were bringing different races and cultures to the
Caribbean region, but is sometimes also referred to modern migration flows from the
Caribbean to the ‗mother countries‘ and other parts of the world.
Furthermore, a significant aspect of the Caribbean societies is the concept of
Creolisation. Creolisation can be seen as a new discourse of hybridity; an inter-racial and
cultural mixing rooted in the New World experience. When looking at the etymological
meaning of the word, however, it becomes clear that it is more than just inter-racial mixing:
―creole is a combination of two Spanish words, criar (to create, to imagine, to establish, to
found, to settle) and colono (a colonist, a founder, a settler) into criollo: a committed settler,
one identified with the area of settlement, one native to the settlement though not ancestrally
indigenous to it‖.47 The term thus signifies a cross-cultural experience, that has resulted into
wholly new cultures; the African slaves who were taken to the Caribbean region, who were
forced to settle together although they came from different countries, who were forced to
work and live under the rule of white plantation-holders, and who after the Emancipation
experienced new transitions in which they gradually became citizens of societies that would
become their own nation states in a postcolonial world.
Diaspora and Creolisation have been producing cultural societies that were neither
European nor African, but innovative mixtures of the two.48 Fanon and Bhabha, amongst
others, are linking these social processes to mimicry; by which the colonial confrontation has
made ―Caribbean hybridity as a composite that cannot be synthesized into anything new‖.49 In
The Location of Culture Bhabha speaks ‗Of Mimicry and Man‘ to explain that in colonial
46
Ruben Gowricharn, ed., Caribbean Transnationalism: Migration, Pluralization, and Social Cohesion
(Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006), 3.
47
Edward Brathwaite, qtd. in Lorna Burns, "Becoming-Postcolonial, Becoming-Caribbean: Edouard Glissant
and the Poetics of Creolization," Textual Practice 23, no. 1 (02, 2009), 99.
48
Hall, The Postcolonial Caribbean as a Liminal Space: Authoring Other Modes of Contestation and
Affirmation, 6.
49
Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity, 44.
19
discourses ―colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other‖ as a ―sign of a
double articulation‖.50 What Bhabha means is that colonial discourses are often discursive
processes dealing with a colonial subject as something which is incomplete and always
dependent on a representation based on limitation. The term mimicry is used by Bhabha to
symbolize a certain camouflage for an unknown, unfound identity. The institutionalization of
slavery and the suppression of black peoples on the Caribbean has constructed a colonial
Caribbean subjectivity to which Bhabha‘s theory of mimicry can be applied to illustrate an
―almost the same, but not quite‖ or ―almost the same, but not white‖ representation.51
Mimicry, therefore, constitutes another important element of Caribbean identity. The
feelings it creates of subjectivity and ambivalence, have been one of the most important
aspects for (post)colonial discourse. The copying of language, cultures, manners, and ideas,
are of course no voluntary repetitions, and are moreover of a different kind. Furthermore,
mimicry denotes something of a sceptical idea; something that is a fixed copy without a
developing move forward. Caribbean hybridity in a modern sense, signifies more of a path
towards modernity; a ―move away from a fixed identity towards identities always in flux,
always becoming‖.52 To get a better insight in the development of a fixed Caribbean identity
to Caribbean identities as a matter of ‗becoming‘, the concepts of Creolisation and
Caribbeanness should be now compared.
Creolisation and Caribbeanness must not be interpreted as one and the same. Both
concepts are again, like identity and culture, concepts on which a definition is hard to agree
on. Yet, for this work, Caribbeanness can be interpreted according to the following ideas. Jean
Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant53 are discussing in their essay In Praise
of Creoleness their perception of Creoleness and Caribbeanness through their own feelings
and experiences. Caribbeanness is according to them ―more a matter of vision
than a
concept‖ in which Creoleness needs to be accepted in order to reach Caribbeanness.54 In this
sense, Creoleness must then rather be interpreted as a stage where Creole societies were
created in history, and by which Caribbeanness signifies the road to a ‗true‘ Caribbean
50
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 122.
Ibid., 128
52
Burns, Becoming-Postcolonial, Becoming-Caribbean, 100.
53
Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant are the French-Caribbean writers of the essay ―In
Praise of Creoleness‖ (original title: ―Éloge de la Créolité‖). It is an essay merely focused on their own feelings
and experiences, praising Aimé Césaire‘s introduction of the term Negritude and Edouard Glissant for using
Caribbeannes as a term that moves away from Negritude, as a term with a future perspective.
54
Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, "In Praise of Creoleness," Callaloo 13, no. 4
(1990), 889-890.
51
20
identity; a process of ‗becoming‘. This interpretation of Caribbeanness can be strengthened by
the idea that when ‗Caribbean‘ is taken as a root word, and the suffix ‗-ness‘ is added, ―the
resultant word is one that compels you to confront a condition of being – that condition or
quality of ‗being Caribbean‘‖.55
To conclude this chapter, Caribbeanness can be defined as a process in which
Caribbean identities are moving away from a fixed identity which was based on old colonial
perceptions, towards the formation of new Caribbean identities. Although Creolisation can
already be defined as wholly new, as a process of becoming in which a previous culture was
lost and a transition took place to another culture, this work rather states that Caribbeanness is
the next step in the search for selfhood after Creolisation. Creoleness itself does not imply a
fixed condition, but rather is a ―becoming that refuses to settle‖.56 Therefore, in the process of
Caribbeanness, Creole identities are still the overall signifier, but are moving towards a new
identity in which the Self as Caribbean is (collectively) accepted.
Fanon states in Black Skin, White Masks that ―the question of identification is never
the affirmation of a pre-given identity, never a self-fulfilling prophecy‖57 which can be linked
to the idea that Creoleness is not fixed (although it contains many fixed stereotypes, but one
must ask himself whether a culture could ever reach a position without fixed stereotypes) and
at the same time will always be in change. Therefore, Caribbeanness will never be a finished
product; and will always be a problematic process searching for ―access to an image of
totality‖.58 At the same time, this constantly moving condition of being constitutes an
interesting field to contest to a smaller area; the next chapter will put the question of
Caribbeanness to the Dutch Caribbean islands.
55
Marsha Pearce, "Ruminations on the Concept of Caribbeanness,"
http://www.caribbeanculturalstudies.com/marshapearce.html (accessed April, 22, 2010).
56
Burns, Becoming-Postcolonial, Becoming-Caribbean, 102.
57
Homi K. Bhabha ―Forword: Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition‖ in Fanon, Black
Skin, White Masks, xvi.
58
Ibid., xvii.
21
CHAPTER 2
A CASE STUDY ON THE DUTCH
CARIBBEAN
The first chapter of this work has shown that a final definition cannot be given to the concept
of Caribbeanness. However, a theoretical framework is given to provide a better
understanding of Caribbean cultural identity and has explained that Caribbeanness must be
interpreted as a process that moves away from a fixed (colonial based) identity to self-defined
and accepted Caribbean identities. This chapter will further elaborate on that, by providing a
case study on identity issues in the Dutch Caribbean, namely in the islands of Aruba, and the
six former Dutch Antilles Curaçao, St Maarten, St Eustatius, Saba and Bonaire. The Republic
of Suriname will be sometimes referred to as well, as it has played a profound role in Dutch
colonial history and slavery, and with it in the development of transatlantic perspectives.
This chapter will also discuss the multitude of cultural overlays in the Dutch
Caribbean in the sense of mixtures of peoples, languages, and religions in both a historical
and contemporary context. Identities are shaped both by past and future, and according to
Stuart Hall are a ―matter of ‗becoming‘ as well as of ‗being‘‖. 59 Therefore, this case study
will be built on two of Stuart Hall‘s positions on cultural identity which separately can be
used to study the Dutch Caribbean in both a historical and contemporary context. These two
positions are similar to Cooper‘s ideas introduced in the former chapter, but will elaborate
more on the specific subject of the (Dutch) Caribbean region. In Hall‘s work Cultural Identity
and Diaspora, the first position is a cultural identity in terms of ―one shared culture, a sort of
collective ‗one true self‘‖ based on historical experience.60 Although each of the islands in the
Caribbean are too culturally divided to speak of ‗one group‘, many aspects of their historical
experiences bind them. What counts for the whole Caribbean area, common identities can be
found in the relationship between similarity and continuity in the sense of their colonial past
marked by slavery. Although slaves were bought in different African countries, and did they
come from different tribal communities and villages and held different languages, it still was
the uprooting of slave trade and slavery in general that unified these peoples across their
59
Hall, in: Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader
(New York: Colombia University Press, 1994), 394.
60
Ibid., 393
22
differences.61 Furthermore, when looking at the historical context, social positions of the
Caribbean Dutch can be studied in relation to the immediate aftermath of slavery; when freed
slaves where having hard times to find their position in society and at the same when ‗white‘
peoples in the Caribbean were dealing with this process.
Hall‘s second position recognizes that identity is not only shaped by collectivity, but
by differences as well.62 This view on identity, in contrast to the former based on a shared
culture, is very well applicable to the second part of this chapter, namely when this case study
on the Dutch Caribbean will be put into a postcolonial perspective. Although it were
colonialism and diaspora that has produced so many cultural overlays in the Caribbean, it is
the contemporary course of globalizing processes that keep contributing to this cultural
hybridity. To contest Hall‘s second position, therefore, special attention will be paid on the
second half of the twentieth century, in which the position of the Dutch Caribbean islands
have been constantly debated: whether to become independent, or to stay within the Kingdom
of the Netherlands. In this sense, this chapter will provide the basis for the third chapter in
which the road to new, contemporary, statuses over the past years will be discussed.
The complexity of Dutch Caribbean identities in a historical context
A Historical Introduction on the Dutch Caribbean within the Kingdom of the
Netherlands
The Dutch presence in the Caribbean is the result of a long colonial past. The United
Provinces States General granted the East India Company, a trading company which was
founded in the 1602, a subsidy and a monopoly for Dutch trading in the world from the Cape
of Good Hope through the Pacific. Not long after, in 1621, the West India Company was
founded which gained a trade monopoly in the Americas and West Africa. It was not until the
eighteenth century, partly due to the Dutch being mainly focused on the East, and partly due
to Spanish superiority in the West, that the Dutch colonial domain widely extended from Asia
to the Americas with Suriname and its neighbouring colonies of Berbice, Demerara and
Essequibo and the six Antillean islands of Curaçao, Bonaire, Aruba, St. Martin, St. Eustatius
and Saba. Although Dutch colonialism was merely focused on the East, the Dutch had
previously conquered some
61
62
important colonies in the Americas during the seventeenth
Ibid., 395
Ibid., 394
23
century, such as New Netherlands and Brazil. These colonies, however, were soon lost to
England and Portugal respectively.63
The myriad of cultural overlays in the Dutch Caribbean is partly a result of the early
colonial era. Although slave trade in this part of the world can undoubtedly be perceived as
the main determining aspect for the contemporary Dutch Caribbean population, the
employment of many non-Dutch officials by the West India Company made a significant
contribution as well. The West India Company employed soldiers and clergy from amongst
others Belgium, Germany, Brittany, France, and Poland. The societies which were evolved in
the Dutch colonies were ―characteristically multi-national, multi-racial, multi-religious, and
guided primarily by the same overriding commercial imperatives which governed in the
Netherlands.‖64 The character of (Dutch) life and attitudes in the colonies was in this sense
mainly determined by the commercial nexus of the Empire and the cultural influences from
many different nationalities. The role of the native population has been of little significance,
as it did not take long before both in Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean the native people had
almost completely died out or had been driven out to other places.65
Although Suriname quickly developed into a plantation colony, the natural
environment of the Dutch Caribbean islands was not profitable for plantations. Instead, these
islands became major connection points for trade. It was especially Curaçao that turned out to
be a conquest of high value for the Netherlands. Being one of the most appreciated trading
partners of the Spanish in the Caribbean area, the Dutch trade in sugar, tobacco, cacao and
coffee from South American colonies soon flourished. Now functioning as commercial and
stable trading points, the Dutch Caribbean islands were able to profit of the neighbouring
areas‘ instabilities during the course of the following centuries. For example, during the
second half of the eighteenth century both England and France struggled with their colonial
rule in the Caribbean, by which neutral Curaçao could partly take over their trade. At the
same time, the Dutch islands, mainly St. Eustatius, became important places for smuggling
weapons to the American independence fighters.66
Until the end of the eighteenth century, colonial policy in the West was fully
coordinated by the WIC, and each territory had its own administrative relationship with the
63
Gert Oostindie and Inge Klinkers, Decolonising the Caribbean: Dutch Policies in a Comparative Perspective
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 57.
64
Blakely, Historical Ties among Surinam, the Netherlands Antilles, Aruba, and the Netherlands, 472.
65
Oostindie and Klinkers, Decolonising the Caribbean, 58.
66
John Jansen van Galen, De Toekomst van het Koninkrijk: Over de Dekolonisatie van de Nederlandse Antillen
(Amsterdam: Contact, 2004), 23.
24
metropolis. The Republic of the Netherlands held in this sense no metropolitan vision of
colonial rule upon the West Indies until 1815, when the end of the Napoleonic wars and the
French occupation resulted in a transformation from the Republic of the Netherlands into a
Kingdom. The first King, Willem I, made attempts at a more effectual colonial policy, by
splitting up the Caribbean possessions into two colonies: Suriname and the Netherlands
Antilles – referred to as ‗Curaçao and dependencies‘. At the same time, colonial policy
became increasingly institutionalized when in 1834 a Ministry of Colonial affairs was
founded.67 Although this ministry consisted of both a department for the East Indies as for the
West Indies – a political situation that would last until the Second World War – the East
Indies formed by far the major colonial possession. As the territories in the Caribbean were
smaller, less populated and the least economic potential, colonial policies regarding the Dutch
Caribbean were, according to Oostindie and Klinkers,68 ―rather uninspired and fairly
inactive‖.69 For that reason, Dutch rule in the Caribbean until 1940 can be called ―careless
colonialism‖.70
This so-called careless colonialism, in which the Netherlands never expressed a
promising and visionary approach, has had a profound impact on Dutch Caribbean culture and
identities. In the next paragraph it will be discussed that it was unquestionably the course of
slavery that created inequality between the different groups of peoples in the Caribbean, and
how that would finally result in a collective trauma amongst the Caribbean population. First,
it is sufficient to say that the Dutch policies regarding the West Indies – which were mainly
seen as a ‗poor cousin‘ of the East Indies, and constantly been put in a state of minor
importance – fed the counter-perspectives in a negative way. Later, it will be explained what
kind of influence this conduct had on later identity-issues, when the question of complexities
regarding to contemporary identities will come up. It is important to focus first on how the
European colonial empires produced many cultural overlays in the Caribbean resulting in a
mixture of peoples, languages and religions. When discussing cultural hybridity in the sense
of a mixture of peoples, the main emphasis will be put on the absolute downside of colonial
history which was crucial for identity construction and deconstruction in the Dutch
Caribbean: the slave trade and slavery.
67
Oostindie and Klinkers, Decolonising the Caribbean, 58.
Inge Klinkers is, like Gert Oostindie, a researcher for the KITLV. Together Oostindie and Klinkers published
in 2001 the tripartite book Knellende Koninkrijksbanden, and two years later Decolonising the Dutch Caribbean.
69
Ibid., 57
70
Ibid., 57
68
25
Cultural Identity as an early Colonial Construct: Mixtures of Peoples
In contrast to the Eastern VOC territory, where Europeans found developed cultures and
where mixed Eurasian races gradually emerged, the Dutch West Indies were basically created
anew by the colonisers and their imported slaves. When the Dutch arrived in the Caribbean in
the early 1600s, the region‘s indigenous population – as stated before – had suffered from
partly conscious and partly unconscious genocide of the Spanish conquistadores. Roughly
estimated, between 400.000 and one million Amerindians were living on the Caribbean
islands by Columbus‘ arrival in 1492. Around 1600 only a couple of thousand Amerindians
were left.71 In analyzing Dutch Caribbean cultures it is a fundamental assumption that there
is no indigenous culture worthy of mention under Dutch colonial rule.72 As the indigenous
population had almost died out by the time of Dutch arrival, the colonisers did not have to
deal with issues such as acknowledging indigenous cultures or respecting local elites
whatsoever; the missing aspect of an indigenous population is in that sense a fundamental
aspect in the search for selfhood and for roots of the peoples of the Caribbean.73
The Dutch traded roughly half a million of slaves from Africa to America, of whom
they brought almost 80,000 slaves to their own overseas territories.74 Most slaves were taken
from the Gold Coast (which is now Ghana) and Angola and were first brought to Brazil.
When the Dutch lost their part of Brazil in 1654, however, they also had lost their complete
‗market‘ in the New World.75 Nevertheless, the Dutch had achieved stable and important
trade-points on the West African coast and started to look for new places to sell their slaves. It
did not take long to discover the slave demand on the French and British Caribbean islands
and the North- and Spanish Americas, which soon transformed the Dutch Caribbean in
significant slave trading points. This work will not give an extended elaboration of the Dutch
slave trade in the West Indies, as research has been done by many others. This work will
rather focus now on the scars caused by slavery, the traumas it has left on the Caribbean
71
Gert Oostindie, Het Paradijs Overzee: De Nederlandse Caraïben En Nederland (Leiden: KITLV Uitgeverij,
2000), 11.
72
It has to be mentioned here that this did not count for the Dutch West Indies in general, but only for the Dutch
Caribbean islands. In Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo violent Amerindian resistance took place. In Suriname,
there were small numbers of Amerindians living in the inlands.
73
Gert Oostindie and Bert Paasman, "Dutch Attitudes Towards Colonial Empires, Indigenous Cultures, and
Slaves," Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 3, Americas (Spring, 1998), 352,
74
Jansen van Galen, De Toekomst van het Koninkrijk, 23.
75
P. C. Emmer, De Nederlandse Slavenhandel 1500-1850 (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij de Arbeiderspers, 2000), 43.
26
peoples, and what kind of consequences it has on identity questions regarding this shared
history among the Dutch Caribbeans.
Slavery in the West Indies was only abolished by the Dutch in 1863, long after
England (1834) and France (1848) had taken this step. But the so-called ‗Emancipation‘ did
not bring much of a change of view on the Caribbean colonies, neither on its peoples. At the
end of the nineteenth century, the Dutch Caribbean was rather seen as a heavy burden.
Moreover the perceptions on ‗negroes‘ and their ‗barbaric‘ characteristics, which were main
points in the discussion on the abolition of slavery, lived forth on the European side of the
Atlantic long after. In the immediate aftermath of the Emancipation of 1863, opinions on the
position of the free black man were divided; the European idea of enlightenment and free
citizen clashed in every sense of the word with the concept of slavery or suppression of black
men, which fed the Dutch debate about the concept of ‗freedom‘. Although some members of
Parliament proposed full freedom for the former slaves in the Dutch colonies, others – by far
the majority – were in principle not against Emancipation, but did not agree on total freedom
either. Most members of the Dutch Staten-Generaal believed the process of preparing black
peoples in the colonies for civilized freedom was almost impossible, not only because of the
costs of the project, but more in the sense that the ‗nature of the black man‘ would never
become able to do so.76 The common ideas that black people were lazy, in demand of little
needs, and would not be able to control freedom, would have an inconceivable impact on the
search for selfhood amongst freed slaves, and the transatlantic perceptions on later
generations. Therefore, the Emancipation should always be studied in a critical way; what did
it meant to be free? One of the popular expressions from former slaves in Suriname from the
late nineteenth century goes ―si boen anga fri a no wan‖ – ―a good life and freedom are not
the same‖.77
Cultural Identity as an early Colonial Construct: Religions and Languages
Language and religion are in general closely linked to identity issues – in particular group
identities – and therefore have played important roles in the Dutch Caribbean. The spread of
religions belongs to one of the main complex subjects when studying group identities, and
often have resulted in complicated clashes and struggles in (colonial) societies. The Dutch
76
Glenn Willemsen, Dagen van Gejuich en Gejubel: Viering en Herdenking van de Afschaffing van de Slavernij
in Nederland, Suriname en de Nederlandse Antillen (Den Haag: Amrit/Ninsee, 2006), 90.
77
Ibid., 123
27
authorities on the whole, however, have failed to spread their religion – that is, the Dutch
Reformed religion and after 1848 also other Christian denominations, including the Catholic –
in the Dutch colonies.78 Although Dutch colonialism is thus hardly ever associated with
religious indoctrination, the Catholic church started to play quite an important role in the
‗civilization process‘ of the former slaves and in this sense found its way into the Dutch
Caribbean. This is an interesting point, as for a long time the Dutch (colonial) state was
merely linked to the Protestant Church; the Catholic church did therefore not operate in order
of the Dutch state. There are two elements that can clearly explain how the Catholic church
came to dominate in the Dutch Caribbean. First, the small community of the native Indian
community that was still present at Curaçao were baptised in the fifteenth century by the
Spaniards, and held three Catholic Churches when the Dutch arrived.79
This impact was not as big, however, as the second explanation; the Catholic attitude
towards the slaves on the islands, which was ―more definitely meliorist than was that of the
Protestants‖.80 Because Curaçao had become an important trade centre at the turn of the
seventeenth century, the colonial government took a tolerant stand towards Catholicism, as it
valued its trade with the Spanish and French more than religion. As a result, there was no
official resistance towards the arrival of Catholic Archbishops either. The Catholics in the
Dutch Caribbean had from the very beginning started to integrate slaves into the Catholic
Church, through which soon ―Catholicism had become the religion of the oppressed‖.81
Although the West Indian Company requested the Protestant pastors to carry out mission
work as well, this never became reality, as ―mission was impossible from the social point of
view. The powerful members of the Reformed Church were slave owners and they knew that
there was a total contradiction between slave trade and the Gospel‖.82
Although Catholicism had become the religion of the oppressed, it did not necessarily
contribute in the early stages of the abolition of slavery. The Catholic Church was convincing
slaves that their position was God‘s will and that they were not yet ready to face freedom.
Still, the Catholic Church started to play in several ways an important tool for ‗socializing and
disciplining‘ the former slaves during and after the Emancipation, as the Catholic church
78
Gijs Kruijtzer ―European Migration in the Dutch Sphere‖ in: Gert Oostindie, Dutch Colonialism, Migration
and Cultural Heritage (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008), 141.
79
Armando Lampe, Mission Or Submission? : Moravian and Catholic Missionaries in the Dutch Caribbean
during the 19th Century (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 108.
80
Elsa V. Goveia, "Influence of Religion in the West Indies," The Americas 14, no. 4 (1958), 512.
81
Lampe, Mission Or Submission?, 110.
82
Ibid., 111
28
granted a monopoly on education. This indoctrination was mainly meant to delay the
Emancipation process as it had a goal of first converting blacks into Christianity, and only in
the second place to emancipate them. At the same time, however, Christianity was accepted
by the majority of the (former) slaves as it helped them to get educated and get into more
prestigious jobs, to finally get somehow more equal to the white population.83
Other religions had found its way to the Dutch Caribbean already in earlier days. More
than most other colonial powers, the Dutch encouraged Europeans of other nationalities and
even religions to establish themselves in its colonies. Not only did many ‗Dutch‘ sailors and
colonist often come from other European countries –as many Germans, Belgians, and Poles
for example were contracted by Dutch ships—there were other groups such as European Jews
who migrated to the Dutch Caribbean in order to escape religious oppression.84 Most of these
European Jews settled in the Caribbean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and
were ‗Western‘ or ‗Portuguese‘ Sephardi from Iberia, who had earlier fled to the Netherlands.
Although nowadays Jews are only a small minority of the peoples in the Caribbean, they have
played a significant role in earlier centuries when they often have subsisted through trading
activities that neither slaves nor plantation owners were in a position to perform. Furthermore,
Jews were welcomed by European colonisers on some of the Caribbean islands because of
their experience in growing sugar cane in Brazil. Others, especially on Curaçao, were shipowning traders who were risking their lives against Spanish Inquisitors to protect mercantilist
trading monopolies.85 Until the early 19th century, this was the largest and most vibrant Jewish
community in the New World – according to some estimates ―they accounted for over onehalf of the island‘s 4,000 whites‖ in the eighteenth century – and was providing financial
support to other Jewish communities in the region including the United States.86
Languages
In addition to the important economic influence the Sephardic Jewish community had in the
Dutch Caribbean, they also significantly influenced the evolution of Papiamento – the
language spoken on the islands of Curaçao, Bonaire and Aruba. When talking about hybridity
83
Willemsen, Dagen van Gejuich en Gejubel, 218.
Oostindie, Dutch Colonialism, Migration and Cultural Heritage, 4-5.
85
Alan F. Benjamin, Jews of the Dutch Caribbean: Exploring Ethnic Identity on Curaçao (London: Routledge,
2002), 19.
86
Gary C. Fouce, The Story of Papiamentu: A Study in Slavery and Language (Oxford: University Press of
America, 2002), 113.
84
29
of cultures, with its mixtures of peoples, religions, common habits and so on, the aspect of
language cannot be left out as it perhaps is one of the most important identity signifiers.
Especially in the Caribbean, Creolisation – the development of a Creole language – plays a
significant role in the question of ‗being‘ and ‗belonging‘ as Fanon states that ―to speak is to
exist absolutely for the other‖.87 In the second part of this chapter, some elements of
contemporary language ‗policies‘ and linguistic barriers on the Dutch Caribbean will be
discussed, as it forms a sensitive issue in present-day politics. In this first part an elaboration
will be given on where the different Creole languages in the Dutch Caribbean come from and
how it influenced identity formation in the historical context.
The Dutch Caribbean islands each differ significantly in use and variation of
languages. In general, it may be said that the Dutch language had little impact; when the
Dutch arrived in the West, there were already languages in place that could function in the
colonial societies. Furthermore, the Dutch made in general – in the East and West Indies –
little effort to change the existing lingua franca‘s, at least not before the Dutch state got
involved in colonial matters.88 Although the Dutch language did gain foothold in Suriname, in
the Dutch Caribbean islands Dutch did not become more than an official language of
government.89 When studying the existing languages on the Dutch Caribbean, a clear
distinction can be made first on the aspect of geographical location: the Windward Antilles
and the Leeward Antilles. On the Windward islands – Saba, St Maarten and St Eustatius – an
English-derived variety of language emerged during the colonial period. European
competition over the Caribbean necessitated that the Dutch welcomed colonists, settlers and
merchants from many ethnicities and nations who spoke several different languages.
Although Dutch, French, Portuguese, Hebrew and presumably several African languages were
spoken, the majority of the community living on the Windward Islands was composed of
English speakers (of both European and African descent). This development was mainly due
to the island‘s period of great commerce in which English appeared as the ―lingua franca in
which commerce was facilitated by the use of this language in a multilingual context‖. 90 Even
though today the official language is Dutch, English still is the language spoken by the
87
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 17.
Kees Groeneboer, Weg tot het Westen (Leiden: KITLV Uitgeverij, 1993), 16.
89
Gijs Kruijtzer, ―European Migration in the Dutch Sphere‖ in: Oostindie, Dutch Colonialism, Migration and
Cultural Heritage, 139.
90
Michael Aceto, "Statian Creole English: An English-derived Language emerges in the Dutch Antilles," World
Englishes 25, no. 3 (Aug, 2006), 431.
88
30
majority of the peoples living in Saba, St Maarten and St Eustatius, which is highly influenced
by the islands‘ geographical position close to the United States of America.
In the Leeward Antilles – Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao – predominantly Papiamento is
spoken; a Creole mixture of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English which emerged at the
second half of the 17th century. Although several theories argue for different origins, it is most
likely that the Sephardic Jews who arrived in Curaçao from 1659 and who mainly spoke
Spanish and Portuguese, highly influenced if not laid the basis for Papiamento. 91 When
studying a brief outline of the early history on this Creole language, the main languages
contributing to the formation of Papiamento ought to have been Dutch and Portuguese. Later
contact with Spanish, however, has obscured this contribution.92 In the first decennia of the
nineteenth century, when English, Dutch, French and increasingly Papiamento was spoken on
the Leeward Islands, contradictory developments on the issue of language emerged. On the
one hand, the Dutch tried to reconstruct their authority (after the English had taken over the
islands between 1807 and 1816) by taking measures in institutionalizing education in Dutch.93
On the other hand, the Church started to make a move towards the promotion of Papiamento:
When the young pastor Martinus Johannes Niewindt arrived in Curaçao in 1824, he noticed
that Papiamento was the most spoken and understood language and soon began to translate
religious texts into this language.94 Papiamento, in this sense formed a strong missionary tool,
and started to support the use of the language in the daily life of citizen in all layers of society.
The use of Papiamento was further strengthened by the influence of another Jewish
flow of immigrants from Venezuela in 1855. These Jewish ‗exilados‘ became significant for
Dutch Caribbean culture by establishing Spanish speaking elite schools (which gained
international high-quality prestige), which were of considerable importance for the Spanish
influence on Papiamento.95 In this way, Dutch lost prestige to the dominating Spanish
influence on the Creole languages.
What makes Papiamento so interesting compared to other Creole languages, is that it
has achieved a status on the islands of Curaçao, Bonaire, and Aruba that not many other
Creoles can claim; although Dutch is the official language on these islands, Papiamento is
91
Fouce, The Story of Papiamentu: A Study in Slavery and Language, 2.
Jacques Arends, Pieter Muysken and Norval Smith, eds., Pidgins and Creoles: An Introduction (Amsterdam:
John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1994), 205.
93
Wim Rutgers, Schrijven is Zilver, Spreken is Goud: Oratuur, Auratuur En Literatuur Van De Nederlandse
Antillen En Aruba (Utrecht: s.n., 1994), 68.
94
Fouce, The Story of Papiamentu, 128.
95
Rutgers, Schrijven is Zilver, Spreken is Goud, 93.
92
31
spoken by all levels of society and has a literary function as most of the local newspapers for
example are written in Papiamento.96 It is necessary to look now at how this blend of
languages and different uses of it have influenced Dutch Caribbean identities. How does it
affect a collective feeling of ‗being and belonging‘?
The variation and mixtures of languages on the Dutch Caribbean, as elsewhere in
historically colonised communities, can be both a unifying and a confusing aspect. As Fanon
describes in Black Skin, White Masks, language is ―one of man‘s attitudes face to face with
being‖ and that is why ―the Negro of the Antilles, whoever he is, has always to face the
problem of language‖.97 Fanon‘s argument very much applies to the title of his work Black
Skin, White Masks: the title implies how blacks need to behave according to white standards,
how they always needed to mimic and hide behind a mask, by never be able to act truly like
themselves. Therefore, the way languages have developed in different directions in the
Caribbean islands, by which a multitude of (mixed) languages came into being, is
undoubtedly the result of struggles with it; by on the one hand holding on to mother tongues,
and on the other hand getting influenced voluntarily or involuntarily by the languages of the
colonisers and nearby regions.
To understand the complexity of languages in the Dutch Caribbean, an explanation of
the terms ‗pidgin‘ and ‗Creole‘ languages is needed as these have been and still are vitally
important for communication in the newly developed regions. Pidgin languages in essence
―represent speech-forms which do not have native speakers, and are therefore primarily used
as a means of communication among people who do not share a common language‖. 98 Creole
languages, on the other hand, do have native speakers, as they often ―arise when a pidgin
becomes the native language of a speech-community‖.99 It often happened that when slaves
arrived in the Caribbean, their new masters deliberately separated those who came from the
same African region or tribe, in order to lessen the danger of revolt amongst those speaking a
common language. As a result, the only language slaves had in common was a ‗pidginized‘
variety of their masters‘ tongue: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch. Children
born into slavery grew up with the pidgin that their parents and the other slaves spoke
96
97
98
99
Fouce, The Story of Papiamentu, 2.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 18.
Arends, Muysken and Smith, Pidgins and Creoles, 3.
Robert A. JR Hall, Pidgin and Creole Languages (London: Cornell University Press, 1966), xii.
32
together, and as time passed these later generations re-expanded these languages into a Creole
language.100
A last note about the issue of language must be made here about education in colonial
politics in the West. During the early stages of Dutch presence in the Caribbean, the language
of education was primarily Dutch, which can easily explained by the fact that education was
only accessible for white children of the colonial elite. From the 1820s onwards, education for
non-white children was made possible by the Catholic missionaries, who were teaching in
Spanish on Aruba and in Papiamentu on Curaçao. An extremely important turning took place,
however, when from 1865 the colonial administration started to focus more on a cultural
assimilation policy in which schools could apply for state-subsidies only when Dutch was the
first language. In 1935, a new Onderwijsverordening (education regulation) was established
when it appeared that when holding on to merely Papiamento in education would eliminate
future prospects for the students. The Onderwijsverordening now introduced Dutch as first
language into the education system and laid down the same principles as education in the
Netherlands was based on. Although today there is more space to focus on English,
Papiamento and Spanish as well, Dutch is still the first language in Dutch Caribbean
schools.101
Cultural implications of the use of language in schools comprises crucial aspects for
identity, and the topic could consist of a full research on itself. Therefore, it will not be further
elaborated on in this work, but some last words need to be mentioned here before moving on
to the conclusion on Dutch Caribbean identities in a historical context. On the one hand, the
(forced) use of language in education other than the mother tongue, can undoubtedly create
confusion and a feeling of in-between-ness. At the same time it can contribute strongly to the
creation of counter-identities and the feeling of collectivity. On the other hand, holding on to
Dutch education today prepares Dutch Caribbean students for the possibility to study in the
Netherlands. In this sense, the use of language in Dutch Caribbean education remains a
complex issue, which contradicts between sensitivity and rationality.
100
Ibid., xiii
Willem Koot, Emigratie op de Nederlandse Antillen: een sociaal-wetenschappelijk onderzoek naar omvang
en achtergronden van de emigratie, in het bijzonder op Aruba en Curaçao (Rijksuniversiteit Leiden: Odijk: the
author, 1979), 145.
101
33
Stuart Hall’s ‘identity through collectivity’
In order to understand Stuart Hall‘s idea of a cultural identity in terms of ‗one shared culture‘
based on historical experience, the most important foundations of a collective cultural identity
have been explained at first. Colonialism, slavery, diaspora and their cultural influences
resulting in a range of religions and languages have shown that especially in a historical
perspective there is a common ground that could stand for ‗Caribbeanness‘ in the Dutch
Caribbean. Thus, when looking at collectiveness amongst these peoples, it is a good deal to
look at their shared history, and the distributed cultural codes that people started to share as a
result of that shared history. At the same time, however, it is important to keep in mind that
these shared cultural codes are always ‗positioned‘ in a particular context, and that this can
result in strengthened or weakened cultural behaviour. For example, Hall is apologizing in his
essay on Cultural Identity and Diaspora on how his work might be ‗positioned‘ and
‗enunciated‘ by his personal experience:
I was born into and spent my childhood and adolescence in a lowermiddle-class family in Jamaica. I have lived all my adult life in
England, in the shadow of the black diaspora – ‗in the belly of the
beast‘. I write against the background of a lifetime‘s work in cultural
studies. If the paper seems preoccupied with the diaspora experience
and its narratives of displacement, it is worth remembering that all
discourse is ‗placed‘, and the heart has its reasons. 102
Therefore, once cultural codes are imposed on a group of people it can create counter-effects.
Not only does it create counter-identities as discussed in the first chapter – behaviour based on
everything that is not ‗the Other‘ – but is it possible that strengthened cultural codes are being
produced as operating next to ‗the Other‘. It is this Black Skin, White Masks-effect that Hall
explains as ― a sort of collective ‗one true self‘, hiding inside the many other, more superficial
or artificially imposed ‗selves‘, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in
common‖.103
Hall‘s first position, in this part related to the historical context of the Dutch
Caribbean, hence explains the collective, overall experience of the Dutch Caribbeans;
transportation, slavery, and colonialism. It might be especially the silenced part of this
experience, however, that is most signifying for this shared experience; the artificial,
102
Stuart Hall, ―Cultural Identity and Diaspora‖ in Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader, 392.
103
Ibid., 393
34
constructed Self, hiding or pushing away the original roots. But, as mentioned before, this was
merely a mimic; as Africa was in fact everywhere in daily life on the slave plantations, in
their languages, in their names, in the stories and tales about ‗home‘, in religious beliefs and
in their arts and music.104
The complexity of Caribbean identities in a postcolonial context
The course of colonial history of the Dutch Caribbean has provided in several ways the basis
for a cultural identity in terms of one, shared culture. This does not mean, however, that
specific shared historical experiences automatically result in equal identities. Processes of
identification with one another are never static or definite, and therefore these theories must
be rather read as processes that imply feelings of connectedness and which are only affecting
some layers of Dutch Caribbean identity. Through this same approach, a shift can now be
made towards the postcolonial situation and how this affects Dutch Caribbean identities.
When studying the postcolonial era of the Dutch Caribbean islands, Hall‘s second
position – identity formation not through collectivity but through differences – can be applied.
Again, this does not mean that it is only this position that is defining identity formation in the
postcolonial era. As explained before, identity formation is never dependent on one process:
however, the emphasis will be on the differentiating elements of identity shaping as some
interesting and contradictory processes took place in the twentieth- and the twenty-first
century. In times when there is a clear divide between coloniser and colonised, distinctions of
Self and Other are clear: in that sense it is rather easy to explain how collectivity and
differences shape identity.
In the post-Emancipation and post-colonial years several developments have
contributed to the interchanging perceptions of Self and Other. The effects of the discovery of
oil at the beginning of the twentieth century on the Venezuelan coast led to the establishment
of refineries at Curaçao and Aruba, which radically changed demographics and the economy.
Other significant events, such as the temporary cutting off of the Netherlands from its island
possessions during the Second World War and the riots of 1969 in Willemstad (the capital of
Curaçao) led to a ―growth in self-identity on the islands that impacted writing, culture, and the
104
Ibid., 398
35
status of the language as well‖.105 These specific events and their impact on identity will
emerge more fully as this chapter develops.
In 1954, the Dutch government designed the Charter for the Kingdom of the
Netherlands, which was mainly planned to decolonize their overseas territories. In an
increasingly
globalizing
world
with
developing
international
relations,
however,
independence for the Dutch Caribbean is no longer the highest ideal; this has been proven
once more when in October 2010 new statuses for the islands within the Kingdom were
signed. This development will be commented upon in chapter three, let us first turn to the
important events in the last century which have been significantly important for notifying
differences, what Hall sees as constituting ― ‗what we really are‘, or rather […] ‗what we
have become‘‖.106
Oil and Disappointing Expectations
Next to the renewed attention towards language and education in the first half of the twentieth
century, another important event of reviving Dutch impact on its Caribbean islands emerged:
the oil refining industry which revolutionized the Curaçaoan and Aruban economies in the
early 1920s. Lago Oil Company (Esso/Exxon) on Aruba and Isla Oil Company (Royal Dutch
Shell) on Curaçao were profoundly changing social life and political structures as a result of
the economic boost for the economy of these two islands; infrastructure could be improved
and the airport had to be expanded. At the same time, oil brought more middle-class and elite
Dutch to operate the refineries which brought contemporary Western culture along; the oil
refinery became the economic ―monoculture‖.107 The social structure of both Curaçao and
Aruba deeply changed through the oil refining: in Aruba the refinery mainly attracted Latin
Americans and immigrants from the Spanish speaking Caribbeans. On Curaçao, however, it
resulted in a large influx of English speaking Afro-Caribbeans, followed by people from the
Middle East and Asia. In recent decades this trend had slowed down, except for some
immigrants from India or Taiwan. In short, the prominent social groupings of the colonial
period had been broken up; industrialization had fragmented the previous social system. And
a change of population undoubtedly produces new social imperatives, for example in
Curaçao:
105
Fouce, The Story of Papiamentu, 3.
Stuart Hall, ―Cultural Identity and Diaspora‖ in Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse, 394.
107
Benjamin, Jews of the Dutch Caribbean, 59.
106
36
New ―maps‖ of social difference have been brought to the island […]
education, travel, tourism, and international business operations have
brought native Curaçoans in contact with additional ethnic
hermeneutics. The tri-partite colonial system has passed. In general,
one now may be Dutch (Makamba), yu‘i Kòrsou (native), or a
member of one of a variety of other groups known to be present. 108
The 1950s marked the glory days of oil refinery on the islands; one out of three labourers on
Curaçao was contracted by Shell, and most others were working at Shell-related
companies.109 These developments had consequences for the Dutch language; especially the
Dutch elite that had come to Curaçao was aiming for education in Dutch. In 1936 Dutch
became the official language for education, not only on Curaçao, but also on Aruba (where
oil-business was mainly done in English) and on the Windward islands (where everyone
spoke English). Next to the issue of language – which will be elaborated on later – there were
still vivid race issues between the citizens of the islands and the white elite. When during the
Second World War Lago on Aruba became a primary source for fuel (and eventually the
world‘s largest oil refinery) it wielded enormous economic and political influence. 110 And
although financially the oil refinery contributed highly to the national income (which in 1958
was four times higher than other islands in the Caribbean, and fifty percent higher than in the
Netherlands), most of working class citizens still lived in poverty.111
Moreover, the oil success developed the islands of Aruba and Curaçao into
―pigmentocracies where power and status became merged with gradations of skin colour‖.112
One the one hand, there was the white elite which had come to the islands especially to fulfil
the high-positioned jobs in management, and on the other hand the lower class immigrants,
from neighbouring areas who were mainly attracted for utilitarian reasons and not to become
incorporated into the local society and polity.113 The white elite held more possibilities for
higher rankings in jobs and politics. Their children were often in favour at schools - which
were predominantly instructed by white teachers – and were in spare time mainly related to
other white children, living in white neighbourhoods where blacks were often rejected. This
racial and ethnic diversity in Curaçao and Aruba caused suspicion and feelings of hatred
amongst the population.
108
Ibid., 64
Jansen van Galen, De Toekomst Van Het Koninkrijk, 53.
110
Michael Sharpe, "Globalisation and Migration: Post-Colonial Dutch Antillean and Aruban Immigrant
Political Incorporation in the Netherlands," Dialectical Anthropology 29, no. 3 (09, 2005), 298.
111
Jansen van Galen, De Toekomst Van Het Koninkrijk, 56.
112
Sharpe, Globalisation and Migration, 298.
113
Ibid., 299
109
37
Next to these colour prejudices in Dutch Caribbean society, to make matters worse, a
growing mechanization process within the oil refinery caused an increase of unemployment in
the 1960s – up to twenty percent on Curaçao.114 Not surprisingly, these social inequalities
were feeding the will to protest against the white, Protestant led Democratic Party. As
anywhere else in the world in the 1960s, young people started to reject and protest the
authorities, which on the Dutch Caribbean was soon seen as anti-Netherlands. The riots in
Curaçao‘s capital Willemstad in 1969, was one of the most dramatic examples of unrest and
disruption in the Dutch Caribbean. The event claimed two lives and erupted into widespread
plunder and burnings. This uprising was seen by some as just an ―escalated labour-dispute‖,
an eruption of anger against the racial discrimination in wages. 115 Others linked the rebellion
with a direct revolt ―against racism‖ and oppression ―that ultimately resulted in Curaçao
having a black Mayor and governor‖.116
Whether it was a collective anger against the old-fashioned way of ‗governance‘ on
Curaçao or a labour cry for better social standards, it was the time being where protests were
influenced by socialistic movements from all over the world and socio-cultural thoughts taken
back by young Caribbean intellectuals who had studied in Europe. As a result, several
movements striving for modernity emerged, such as the ‗Stichting ter Promoveren en
Propageren van de eigen Identiteit en de Antilliaanse Solidariteit‘ (‗Organization for
Improvement and Propagation of the own Identity and the Antillean Solidarity‘).117
What was ‗the‘ identity these movements were looking for? What did ‗Antillean
solidarity‘ mean? Even after the Dutch government in 1954 had ended the colonial status of
the islands, and made the Antilles and Suriname two autonomous countries within the
Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Netherlands Antilles by that time developed little sense of
regional identity beyond each separate island.118 It was obvious, however, that with the
growing unrest in the late 1960s, Dutch Caribbean were indeed looking for an own identity,
an identity separated from the mother-country and more focused on their own nation. As there
was already little regional identity, relations between and among the islands also started to
change. Ever since autonomy was signed, Aruba had been expressing a bitterness over
114
Jansen van Galen, De Toekomst Van Het Koninkrijk, 63.
Blakely, Historical Ties among Surinam, the Netherlands Antilles, Aruba, and the Netherlands, 476.
116
Hulst, Halst van. ―A Continuing Construction of Crisis. Antilleans, especially Curacaoans, in the
Netherlands,‖ in: Hans Vermeulen and Rinus Penninx, eds., Immigrant Integration: The Dutch Case
(Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2000), 98.
117
Jansen van Galen, De Toekomst Van Het Koninkrijk, 65.
118
Blakely, Historical Ties among Surinam, the Netherlands Antilles, Aruba, and the Netherlands, 476.
115
38
Curaçao‘s dominance in the region, and demanded its own direct relationship with the
Netherlands. Ethnic tensions supposedly played a role as well; the Arubans were mainly of
Latino origins and did not always find common ground with the Afro-Curaçaoans.119 The
Curaçaoan revolt of 1969 was in this sense looked at suspiciously by Aruban political elites,
who interpreted the association with Black Power movements as ―opposed to the projected
Euro-mestizo identity of Aruba‖.120 The Arubaanse Volkspartij, (Aruba‘s pro-Dutch right
wing party) grabbed the events in Willemstad to intensify its campaign for separation from
the Netherlands Antilles and with it from Curaçao‘s administrative centralism.
Another element which shows the search for an own identity, was the growing
popularity of the Curaçaoan political party Frente Obrero y Liberashon 30 di Mei right after
the Willemstad-riots.121 Frente‘s unique rhetoric was the aim for stronger nationalism, and in
the long term for independence. At the same time, the early 1970s marked the beginning of a
rise of black-Caribbean representation in prominent and leading positions; it was the time of
‗black is beautiful‘. Black politicians on Curaçao were adjusting their slogans to the time
being where blacks all over the Caribbean and the United States were standing up for their
rights. ‗Awor ta nos ta manda‘ (‗power is ours now‘) and ‗Di nos e ta‘ (‗It is ours, this
cultural heritage belongs to us‘) were slogans used by black Curaçaoan politicians in their cry
for an Afro-Curaçaon identity.122 These events were happening in the course of black civil
movements all in nearby areas, as Stuart Hall states about Jamaica as well:
It was in the early 1970s that this Afro-Caribbean identity became
historically available to the great majority […]In this historic moment,
the great majority of Jamaicans discovered themselves to be ‗black‘—
just as they discovered themselves to be the sons and daughters of
‗slavery.‘ This profound cultural discovery, however, […] could only
be made through the impact on popular life of the post colonial
revolution, the civil rights struggles, the cultures of Rastafarianism,
and the music of reggae—the metaphors, the figures, or signifiers of a
new construction of ‗Jamaican-ness‘. 123
A crucial point has to be made here. Jamaica – just as many other colonised countries all over
the world – became independent in the years following the Second World War. The Charter
119
Rosemarijn Hoefte, "Thrust Together: The Netherlands Relationship with its Caribbean Partners," Journal of
Interamerican Studies & World Affairs 38, no. 4 (Winter96, 1996), 39.
120
Sharpe, Globalisation and Migration, 300.
121
Jansen van Galen, De Toekomst Van Het Koninkrijk, 66.
122
Ibid., 67
123
Stuart Hall, ―Cultural Identity and Diaspora‖ in Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader, 398.
39
for the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which was designed in 1954, was mainly drafted in order
to eventually decolonize the overseas territories. However, only Suriname became
independent, whereas the Dutch islands in the Caribbean stayed within the Kingdom. This
development undoubtedly brought identity-related consequences along.
Transatlantic migration and transnational identities
When studying decolonisation and emerging post-colonial societies, migration between the
postcolonial societies and the metropolis is an important aspect to deal with. Consequences
regarding cultural and identity issues in the postcolonial era have been very much related to
the Caribbean migrant experience; not only did the Caribbean region encompass a rich
cultural variety because of its historical diaspora, but its peoples are exporting their multitude
of cultures abroad through post-colonial migration as well. In this postcolonial sense, the
Caribbean region has even more ―become a prime location for the emergence of
transnationalism‖.124 Transnationalism can be interpreted as ―a combination of civic political
memberships, economic involvements, social networks and cultural identities that links
people and institutions in two or more nation-states in diverse, multilayered patterns‖.125 An
important aspect of transnationalism is that ―migrants continue their cultural link with the
society of departure while transporting their cultural traditions and expressions to the host
society‖, which is mainly possible through ―modern transportation links, telecommunication
systems, and nostalgic trade‖.126
This section will deal with the concepts of transnationalism and the Caribbean migrant
experience: postcolonial (circular) migrations to the metropolis play an important role in
transatlantic perspectives, and in that sense for contemporary identities as well. The diaspora
of the Caribbean peoples can therefore be discussed according to Hall‘s idea of ‗becoming‘
and ‗being‘, as it were not only diaspora from the past, but also diaspora that are expanding in
the present. Therefore, a study upon transnationalisms will be done to explain how Dutch
Caribbeans develop multilayered identities through their linkage to societies on both sides of
the Atlantic.
124
Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (London: Routledge, 2003), 174.
Ewa Morowska, ―Immigrants, Transnationalism, and Ethnicization: A Comparison of This Great Wave and
the Last,‖ in Gary Gerstle and John Mollenkopf, eds., E Pluribus Unum: Contemporary and Historical
Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), 175-176.
126
Rose Mary Allen, ―Regionalization of Identity in Curaçao: Migration and Diaspora,‖ in Gowricharn,
Caribbean Transnationalism: Migration, Pluralization, and Social Cohesion, 84.
125
40
After the Willemstad riots of 1969, relations between the Dutch Caribbean islands and
the Netherlands developed quite gradually. These relations, however, also marked a paradox
in the sense that on the one hand the Dutch Caribbean and Suriname became more dependent
on the Netherlands when it comes to aid, which stimulated Dutch desires to loosen the tights
with the overseas territories. On the other hand, the educational and cultural fields became
more oriented towards the Netherlands, which fuelled resentment in the overseas areas, and
eventually to a certain extent resulted in the independence of Suriname in 1975.127
Surinam‘s independence became a significant factor in the debate on decolonizing the
Dutch Caribbean islands. During the 1980s, alarming events in Surinam such as the military
coupe overthrowing the new government, dictatorship, terrorism and a civil war, were
disturbing the Dutch intentions to decolonize the Caribbean. Furthermore, the Status Aparte
of Aruba in 1986 and increasing corruption and criminality in the following decades made the
problematic future of the overseas kingdom-parts even more visible. As a result, (socialistic)
views on decolonisation got more focused on a gradual process in which the Antilles would
get more support to stabilize their economy and social justice prior to eventual
independence.128 But due to unrest in the overseas Dutch territories at the end of the 1980s, a
new point of discussion in the Netherlands arose: the issue of immigration.
Caribbean migration to the French and British metropolis started in close aftermath of
the Second World War, when their overseas territories of France and Britain became
independent. Although the 1954 Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands marked the
official end of Dutch formal ‗colonial relations‘, Caribbean mass migration to the Netherlands
started relatively late due to an entirely different decolonisation process compared to those of
France and Britain. Before the 1960s, only the bursalen – children of the white elite in the
Caribbean who went to study at Dutch universities – constituted the most significant wave of
immigration from the Dutch Caribbean. The bursalen were a particular kind of immigrants as
―they had excellent command of the Dutch language and were also considerably familiar with
Dutch culture‖.129 In the early 1960s a shift in migration from the Dutch Caribbean to the
Netherlands can be found from this small elite student migration to groups of lower class
workers recruited by Dutch business.130 As the expansion of the oil sector had come to an end
and unemployment rose in the overseas, the Dutch recruitment policies were attractive for
127
Oostindie and Klinkers, Decolonising the Caribbean, 91.
Jansen van Galen, De Toekomst Van Het Koninkrijk, 113.
129
Hans van Hulst, ―A continuing Construction of Crisis: Antilleans, especially Curaçaoans, in the Netherlands‖
in Vermeulen and Penninx, Immigrant Integration: The Dutch Case, 99.
130
Sharpe, Globalisation and Migration, 291.
128
41
labour migrants. Still, the Netherlands experienced little contacts with migrants from its
Caribbean overseas territories until the mid 1970s when Surinam became independent. The
25th of November 1975, Surinam‘s independence ―sparked an exodus involving colonial
citizens of all classes, ethnicities and generations‖ as Oostindie states: ―on the eve of the
internally highly contested independence, 100,000 Surinamese out of a total population of less
than 400,000 voted with their feet‖.131 As mentioned before, this trend had highly influenced
the debate over the path to dependency for the Dutch Antilles; fears for mass immigration
flows from these areas increased.
In the late 1980s this large-scale Antillean migration emerged indeed. When in 1985
the oil refineries in Aruba and Curacao closed and in 1986 Aruba was granted the Status
Aparte a mass migration of poor and working class people moved to the Netherlands in the
pursuit of a better living standard.132 Oostindie mentions about this mass-migration movement
that ―colonialism has literally come home to the metropolis‖; aiming at a ‗we are here because
you were there‘-approach.133 But due to the development of new concepts of migration,
Dutch Caribbeans are now often involved in circular migration, in which frequent visits to the
country of origin is more prevalent than a desire to emigrate for good.134 The group of Dutch
Caribbean migrants, who mainly used to come from Curaçao (some 125,000 out of a total
population of 280,000), were however showing significant remigration figures and can be
therefore classified as ‗circular migrants‘.135 As a result of circular migration between the
Netherlands and the overseas Caribbean, cultural interaction and transnationality grows.
Oostindie and Verton136 have shown in a research about Aruban and Antillean perspectives on
the Kingdom of the Netherlands that around 1998 approximately 40 percent of all Antilleans
and Arubans has at least one sibling living in the Netherlands, and of this same group another
40 percent has been living in the Netherlands for over two years.137
As a result of (circular) migration, profound cultural implications have emerged on
both sides of the Atlantic. In some cases, migrants can develop different practical and
131
Oostindie, Dutch Colonialism, Migration and Cultural Heritage, 18.
Sharpe, Globalisation and Migration, 291.
133
Oostindie, Dutch Colonialism, Migration and Cultural Heritage, 19.
134
Hirsch Ballin, Ernst M.H., ―Introduction‖ in Lammert de Jong and Douwe Boersema, eds., The Kingdom of
the Netherlands in the Caribbean: 1945-2004: What Next? (Amsterdam: Rozenberg, 2005), 11.
135
Oostindie, Dutch Colonialism, Migration and Cultural Heritage, 18.
136
Peter Verton holds a Ph.D. in social sciences and has been amongst others professor at the University of
Curaçao and has been an advisor for several national policies for the Dutch Antilles. Today, he is an independent
consultant, focusing mainly on juridical aspects of privatisation, globalisation, e-trade and development.
137
Gert Oostindie and Peter Verton, Ki Sorto Di Reino?/What Kind of Kingdom?: Visies en Verwachtingen van
Antillianen en Arubanen Omtrent het Koninkrijk (Den Haag: SDU Uitgevers, 1998), 44.
132
42
emotional attachment to the country of origin than before. The other way around, a high
degree of transnational migration contributes to changing perspectives amongst the Dutch and
the Caribbean Dutch; Oostindie and Verton show that 75 percent of the Aruban and Antillean
respondents to their research said they feel more connected to the Netherlands. 138 Other
situations emerge, for example, in postcolonial communities in the Netherlands, where
Caribbeans coming from different Caribbean islands are now more likely to identify
themselves with each other and form Dutch Caribbean communities, whereas ‗back home‘
there is little shared identification between these particular groups.
Stuart Hall’s ‘ identity shaped trough differences’
These new forms of identifications through transatlantic (circular) migration can be linked
now to Hall‘s concept of ‗identities shaped through differences‘ and what postcolonial
Caribbeans ‗have become‘. As explained before, shaping counter-identities and creating
stereotypes have been important factors in the search for identity in Caribbean societies. This
were undoubtedly not only factors applicable to the historical context – in which early
perspectives between coloniser and colonised were discussed – but are identity signifiers still
present today. The prospects of a globalizing world make that perceptions of the Other have
in a figurative meaning become less ‗black and white‘; there are not many groups of peoples
in the world still unaware of different cultures and human races. Whether globalisation,
influences of telecommunication, the World Wide Web, and the rapid growth of social media
influence perceptions of Self and Other in a positive way can be questioned: higher intensive
contact can lead to easier and simplified creations of the Other as well.
The possibilities of transatlantic (circular) migration within the Netherlands and the
Dutch Caribbean have resulted in ups and downs when it comes to representations, as will
become more clear in the next chapter. Clearly, identities are not exclusively related to
nationality, but rather multiple and always changing. Still, it is often perceived as difficult to
distinguish between national and cultural identity: although these two senses are often related
and overlap, they are regularly perceived as one and the same.139 As Cooper states:
138
Ibid., 38
Vivienne Orchard, "Culture as Opposed to what? Cultural Belonging in the Context of National and
European Identity," European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 4 (2002), 420.
139
43
The problem is that nation, race, and identity are used analytical a
good deal of the time more or less as they are used in practice, in an
implicitly or reifying manner, in a manner that implies or asserts that
nations, races, and identities exist, and that people ‗have‘ a nationality,
a race, an identity. 140
Identity, therefore, is still often merely seen as stuck to nationality when it comes to
transatlantic perspectives within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This means nationality as
still divided between Dutch and Caribbean Dutch and clearly not as just having the Dutch
nationality. Because although Nederlanders and Dutch Caribbeans legally share the same
nationality, they often perceive each other as immigrant, foreigner, or the Other. Regularly,
Caribbeans migrating to the Netherlands are being perceived as ―foreigners with a Dutch
passport,‖141 whereas Nederlanders living in the Dutch (Leeward) Caribbean islands are often
called Makamba’s.142
This chapter has explained some main elements of Dutch Caribbean identities. Dutch
Caribbean identities are, just as any other cultural identity, in Stuart Hall‘s words ―far from
being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‗play‘ of
history, culture and power‖.143 Constant transformations within the Kingdom of the
Netherlands, ‗careless colonialism‘, the impact of the oil refineries, the Willemstad riots, the
impact of Suriname‘s independence and Aruba‘s Status Aparte on the decolonisation and
migration debate in the Netherlands, all affected the search for selfhood amongst de Dutch
Caribbeans. Of course, a definition of ‗what Dutch Caribbeans have become‘ cannot be given,
and maybe the ‗recovery of the past‘ Stuart Hall is talking about in Cultural Identity and
Diaspora has not taken place yet either.144 Aiming to give a better insight to the postcolonial
Dutch Caribbean situation, this work will now turn to how political attitudes towards the
Dutch Caribbean islands over the last decades have further influenced transatlantic
perspectives.
140
Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 63.
Sharpe, Globalisation and Migration, 292.
142
‗Macamba‘ means ‗Nederlander‘ in Papiamentu, but with a negative connotation, in: ―Verdieping of
Uiteindelijk Uiteengaan? De Relaties binnen het Koninkrijk en met de Europese Unie‖, Explanatory Report of 9
September 2003, ed. Council of State (The Hague, 2004).
143
Stuart Hall, ―Cultural Identity and Diaspora‖ in Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory, 394.
144
Ibid., 394
141
44
CHAPTER 3
THE DUTCH CARIBBEAN AND THE ROAD TO
NEW STATUSES IN THE 21ST CENTURY
CHANGING (POLITICAL) ATTITUDES AND ITS IMPACT ON
TRANSATLANTIC PERSPECTIVES
―De sfeer is verrot en het wordt alleen maar erger‖
(―the mental state of mind has perished and it will only get worse‖)
- Nelson Navarro145
―Een stem in ruil voor een BlackBerry of een laptop. Zo gaat dat hier nu eenmaal‖
(―A BlackBerry or laptop for a vote. That is just the way it goes in here‖)
- Errol Pantophlet146
―De Antillen zijn een boevennest dat we op marktplaats te koop moeten aanbieden‖
(―The Antilles are a robbers-nest that we need to sell on marktplaats.nl‖)
- Hero Brinkman147
―I have never been able to figure out what exactly keeps Holland hanging on.
The answer I have been able to distil from several Dutch authors is mostly
a colonial hangover that they do not know how to cure.‖
- Denicio Brison148
Rosemarijn Hoefte, Deputy Head of the Department of Caribbean Studies at the
KITLV/Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology in Leiden, questions in her article
‗Thrust Together: The Netherlands Relationship with its Caribbean Partners‘ whether an
actual relationship and mutual commitment between the Dutch and Antillean relationship
really exists. Hoefte refers with this question to the televised speech of Queen Beatrix which
was delivered at the 40th anniversary of the Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands, in
which the Queen talks about the relations between the Netherlands and its Caribbean partners
as one of ―een echte verwantschap en onderlinge betrokkenheid‖ (―a genuine relationship and
145
Nelson Navarro is a lawyer in Willemstad and the founder of the Forsa Korsou party. Qtd. in Jansen van
Galen, De Toekomst Van Het Koninkrijk: Over De Dekolonisatie Van De Nederlandse Antillen, 206.
146
Errol Pantophlet is an immigration officer in Philipsburg, the capital of Sint Maarten. In an interview he gives
his reflections on the alleged corruption during the election campaign on the eve of Sint Maarten‘s Status Aparte
at 10 October 2010. Qtd. in Floor Ligtvoet, "Antilliaanse Eilanden Op Eigen Benen," BN/DeStemOctober 9,
2010.
147
Hero Brinkman is member of the Dutch right-wing political Partij voor de Vrijheid. Qtd. in Meindert
Fennema, "Hero Zegt de Waarheid over de Antillen," De Volkskrant, sec. Opinie, January 15, 2009.
148
Denicio Brison, ‗The Kingdom Charter: Fifty years in the Wilderness‘. in Jong and Boersema, The Kingdom
of the Netherlands in the Caribbean: 1945-2004: What Next?, 40.
45
mutual commitment‖).149 This statement was one that could be interpreted in many ways as
during the 1990s several events contributed to rather more negative than positive perceptions
between the Kingdom partners. On the one hand, the Antilles were blaming the Netherlands
for playing power politics, not trying to understand the overseas partners and not putting any
effort to strengthen the islands‘ position as OCT within the European Union.150 Within the
Kingdom-relations the islands‘ governments were continuously feeling that they were treated
as inferior instead of ‗op voet van gelijkwaardigheid‘ (on an equal basis) as was stated in the
Charter.151 On the other side of the ocean, the Dutch Caribbean were increasingly portrayed in
a negative daylight. Willemstad became to be known a major traffic point for drugs, Antillean
politicians were increasingly associated with corruption, and a growing concern towards
Antillean ‗probleemjongeren‘ (juvenile delinquents) in Dutch cities as Dordrecht, Den Helder
and Tilburg became a hot political topic.152 These negative perceptions were of course not
feeding the political cooperation in a positive way, nor did it strengthen any mutual trust.
The former chapters of this work have tried to lay a framework for a better
understanding of Caribbean identity issues within the Kingdom of the Netherlands by
explaining colonial and post-colonial events and discourses in history. By studying the
complexity of Caribbean identities and the transformation of it through many historical
processes such as slavery and Emancipation, a changing course of ethical values, the rise and
fall of the oil refineries, the Charter of 1954 and emerging transnational Caribbean
communities in the Netherlands, this work is now at a point in which the current relationship
between the different partners within the Kingdom must be looked at. Does a ‗genuine
relationship and mutual commitment‘ really exist? What kind of influence does contemporary
149
Hoefte, Thrust Together, 96.
In 1991, a decision was made by the EU that OCT‘s could trade agrarian products into the EU free of charge.
As a result, the Dutch Caribbean were heavily profiting from the ‗Antillenroute‘ in which rice from Suriname
and Guyana was processed in the Dutch Caribbean after which it was transported to EU member states. Within a
couple of years, however, Italian, Spanish and French farmers objected against this success-story, and the
agreement was cancelled again. The Dutch Caribbean politicians were outraged about the little effort the Dutch
government had taken to fight the abolishment.
Another issue was the Koraal Specht (or today the Bon Futuro) prison on Curaçao. In the mid-1990s the
prison housed more prisoners than it could handle; in the Netherlands debates were running about the issue
whether two prisoners could be held in one cell, in Koraal Specht it was common that thirty prisoners were
sharing a cell. This formed a complex issue, as penitentiary matters were within the Antillean regulatory,
whereas human rights were issued in the Charter. For that matter, the Dutch government was issued by the
European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment to
improve the situation. From: Jansen van Galen, De Toekomst Van Het Koninkrijk: Over De Dekolonisatie Van
De Nederlandse Antillen, 154-156.
151
Overheid.nl, "Statuut Voor Het Koninkrijk Der Nederlanden,"
http://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0002154/geldigheidsdatum_20-03-2011 (accessed March, 19, 2011).
152
Ibid., 156
150
46
politics have on postcolonial identities, in both the Dutch society and in the Dutch Caribbean?
In order to provide a study as such, further elaboration on transatlantic perspectives must be
given, although this time no longer as merely a product of migration, but of political
discourses regarding migration and European integration as well.
Previous chapters have also shown that the Second World War signifies a major
turning point in the colonial relations of the Netherlands. Almost parallel to Europe‘s
decolonisation era emerged the process of globalisation and European integration. As earlier
noted when discussing Bhabha‘s ‗in-between-ness‘, the Dutch Caribbean islands find
themselves today literally in between Europeanisation and globalisation: on the one hand they
are constitutionally tied to the Netherlands which is fully integrated in the European Union,
on the other hand they are geographically located outside of Europe‘s borders and in between
integrating powers as Latin America and the United States of America. Furthermore,
globalisation is strengthening and supplementing Europeanisation in the sense that the
European Union is expanding its borders not only in geographical terms, but also regarding its
soft-power policies. At the same time, however, the EU has not shown any initiatives
considering a shared European cultural heritage of the colonial past.153 In this sense, it is very
interesting to look at how the processes of decolonisation and European integration developed
during the same time, and how the processes in some ways were related. But more important
for this work is to put these processes in the context of the changing transatlantic perspectives,
and how they have impacted identities.
Therefore, this chapter will apply the topic of Caribbean identities as discussed before
to two developments that have played a significant role in contemporary identity debates
within the Kingdom of the Netherlands; the process of European integration and the
development of a multicultural society in the Netherlands. These two processes are without
doubt very extensive and too broad to fully elaborate on. Therefore, this chapter will mainly
focus on the last two decades; especially since the 1990s new discussions came up about the
meaning of national identity. Partly due to European integration and multiculturalism, the
debate on European identity and – or versus – national identity emerged; the meanings of
these terms became increasingly discussed and questions arose about whether identities could
be preserved or rather extended. Consequently, this chapter will elaborate on how the political
153
Gert Oostindie, Postkoloniaal Nederland: Vijfenzestig Jaar Vergeten, Herdenken, Verdringen (Amsterdam:
Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, 2010), 268.
47
processes leading to the contemporary statuses of the Dutch Caribbean have been influencing
and impacting the relations between the different partners in the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
Changing political attitudes: Decolonisation and European integration
When the Second World War ended, the future of Europe was nothing but uncertain. Millions
of deaths, disoriented governments, and national- and international devastation in every sense
of the word was marking a Europe that was soon going to experience a significant change.
Not only did a process of European unification start with the European Coal and Steel
Community, in the immediate aftermath of the War another significant change in Europe took
place: the course of migration. Millions of people from West- and Southern Europe emigrated
to other continents, and millions of people from Eastern Europe left for Western European
countries.
In less than two decades after the Second World War, the majority of the West
European colonial empires had collapsed. In contradiction to a general expectation that this
would cause an economic disaster, a spectacular economic growth emerged in Western
Europe for which labour migrants were desperately needed.154 This last chapter will not
elaborate too much on the migration flows of labour migrants coming from Southern Europe,
Turkey, Maghreb, and from the former colonies, that emerged in the second half of the
twentieth century. Yet it needs to mention the shift that took place – not only in the
Netherlands, but in many other West-European countries as well – from being ethnic uniform
nations to emerging multicultural societies. When in the mid-1970s it became clear that the
majority of the labour-migrants were those to stay and the opposite situation emerged with
family reunification and chain migration, the new multicultural phenomenon gradually
became a topic of debate in national politics.155
More recently, multiculturalism became a hot topic in European politics as well. It is
necessary to keep in mind, however, that postcolonial migration is not the same as labour
migration, and the post-war overlap between the two vary in different countries. Oostindie
elaborates in Postkoloniaal Nederland on the different characters of postcolonial migration
between West European countries. He explains that the contexts of migration differed in
West-European countries, and that the ―West-European minority debate has increasingly
154
155
Oostindie, Postkoloniaal Nederland, 208.
Ibid., 209.
48
become a debate about the Islam‖, which is relevant for the overlap in the French migration
debate as the majority of France‘s postcolonial migrants is Muslim.156 In the Netherlands and
Portugal this overlap is very little, whereas the number of Muslims amongst British
postcolonial migrants can be placed between the two extremes. Furthermore, it is interesting
to look at the diversity of countries where migrants came from; most South European
migrants moved to France, whereas migrants from the former French colonial empire in the
Maghreb also settled in other West European countries. When looking at the Caribbean
migrants, it is interesting to see that migrants from the French and Dutch Caribbean
exclusively moved to the mother countries, whereas the majority of British Caribbean
migrants went to the United States instead of the United Kingdom.157
Decolonisation from Asian and Middle Eastern possessions resulted in relatively small
migration flows, with the exception of Dutch-Indonesia and the British colonies. Sub-Saharan
African migration mainly took place towards Portugal, Belgium and the United Kingdom.
Moreover, in the last two decades Eastern Europe has become a significant supplier of labour
migrants, whereas multiculturalism in that part of Europe takes on a very dissimilar shape
compared to Western Europe. Taken on all these different developments regarding migration
flows in a post-war Europe, it is not hard to understand how complex the European and
national identity debates are today. Important Western European countries as the United
Kingdom and France, but also the Netherlands and Portugal, are sharing profound historical
positions regarding postcolonial migration. Still, it does attract little attention today within
European politics on how to deal with a shared cultural approach towards these countries‘
shared colonial backgrounds. Today, the minority debate within the European Union is much
more focused on Islamic immigrants and the refugee problems at the South European borders.
Does this shift in the (European) minority debate affect political attitudes towards
postcolonial (Caribbean) migrants in the Netherlands as well? What kind of impacts do
contemporary political discourses have on postcolonial identity in the Kingdom of the
Netherlands?
156
157
Ibid., 210.
Ibid., 211.
49
Careless Postcolonialism and the Queen as a unifying symbol
The course of decolonisation and postcolonial migration in the second half of the twentieth
century urged Dutch politicians to intensify their reflections about the Dutch nation; no longer
could politics simply deal with Nederlanders on this side of the ocean, and with Caribbeans
on the other side: a renewed and intensified contact between the partners within the Kingdom
of the Netherlands took a different stand in the postcolonial reality.158 The proclamation of the
Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1954 marked the beginning of what Oostindie
calls ―a paradoxical course of history‖: a reversed decolonisation in which it was not the
(former) colony but the mother country that continuously urged for independence.159 The
following section will elaborate again on migration, but will be linked to the political debate
on migration issues and how this resulted in often frustrated politics and ambivalence on both
sides of the Atlantic. First, some study needs to be done on the attention paid to on the one
hand the communities in the West, and on the other hand to postcolonial migrants from the
West in the Netherlands.
As explained in the previous chapter, no vast migration flows had occurred from the
Dutch Caribbean to the Netherlands until the 1970s. For identity discourses in Dutch politics
this means that there are no significant affairs worthy of mention, or at least not as compared
to more recent identity-debates within the Dutch society. In the years following the
proclamation of the Charter, the little attention that was paid on the West merely focused on
the mutual bonds, the Dutch citizenship, and solidarity within the Kingdom. An important
factor in this process was the role of the Queen. From the following quote about the Queen‘s
visit to the West in 1955, it becomes clear that the tendency of Kingdom relations was a
positive one:
Ook ik wil beginnen met een woord van grote waardering voor de reis
[…] die, […] een ware triomftocht is geworden en waarbij ook de
West zich op zijn best heeft laten zien en een groots wederzijds
vertrouwen is ontwikkeld […] De koninkrijksgedachte is er; zij zal
steeds meer moeten groeien; zeker in Nederland.
I would like to start with my expression of great honor for the Queen‘s
visit […] which […] was a true triumphal procession in which the
West showed its best side and developed a strong mutual trust […]
158
159
Jones, Tussen Onderdanen, Rijksgenoten en Nederlanders, 17.
Gert Oostindie and Inge Klinkers, Knellende Koninkrijksbanden, 13.
50
The vision of a united Kingdom exists; it only needs to grow;
especially in the Netherlands. 160
After the ‗great success‘ of the Queen‘s visit, the royal family became a tool and living
symbol for the promotion of identification with the Netherlands amongst the citizens in the
overseas. Oostindie explains in his work De Parels en de Kroon that in the West ―a direct
relationship was made between the Royal Family and decolonisation‖. 161 It is remarkable to
stress this relation with the (former) colonies and the Queen, when considering the treatment
of colonised peoples in the centuries before. For example, French colonialism had been much
more focused on assimilation, whereas Dutch colonialism – at least in the West – was one
without a firm metropolitan vision of colonial rule. Dutch colonialism was what Oostindie
and Klinkers had called ―careless‖ and was merely focused on the elite, without any attention
paid to the (cultural) lives of ordinary citizens.162 It is in that sense not surprising that in the
twentieth century the Dutch tried to symbolically use the Queen to promote identification with
the metropolis; as there was little connection or affiliation with Dutch politics amongst the
Dutch Caribbean.
As a result, the Queen is still viewed today as in a protective role, a position that
increasingly seems to be applicable to the Queen‘s position in the Dutch multicultural debate
today as well. Queen Beatrix repeatedly expresses her feelings about the importance of the
relationship between the Monarch and new Nederlanders, and postcolonial migrants. For that
reason, as Oostindie states, ―they [Dutch Caribbean] expect more from the Queen than from
Dutch politicians. It is a sentimental issue.‖163 In practice, however, the symbolic value of the
Queen is not enough to propitiate the Kingdom ties. That the Queen had developed a ‗mutual
trust‘ was a misperception, based on the general assumption amongst the Dutch politicians
that the relationship between the Netherlands and the West was based on a true, positive
relationship. Once more a lack of interest in the Caribbean communities was painfully shown.
It was explained in earlier sections that Indonesia was the main reason for this lack of interest
in the West, but there are other – somehow – related factors that explain Dutch attitudes
towards its territories in the Caribbean.
160
Dutch Minister F.H. van de Wetering (Christelijk-Historische Unie) qtd. In Jones, Tussen Onderdanen,
Rijksgenoten en Nederlanders, 191.
161
Gert Oostindie, De Parels en de Kroon: Het Koningshuis en de Koloniën (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2006),
44.
162
Oostindie and Klinkers, Decolonising the Caribbean, 57.
163
Ibid., 128
51
In Terug uit de Koloniën Ulbe Bosma164 explains why the Dutch colonial debate
developed relatively slow, and this must be elaborated on in this paragraph on careless
postcolonialism. Bosma explains that Dutch multiculturalism merely derives from a
postindustrial instead of a postcolonial awareness; less than in France and Great Britain were
labour immigrants coming from the (former) colonies. 165 This chapter will later show what
kind of impact this has on contemporary migration and integration discussions, but will first
show why there is so little postcolonial awareness in the Netherlands.
After the dissolution of the colonial empire in the East, hardly any attention was paid
to the cultural and intellectual colonial heritage of the Kingdom, which is one of the reasons
why the Netherlands did not produce a remarkable postcolonial debate. Prominent figures
such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon significantly contributed
to postcolonial studies on a national and international level. In this international debate, we
cannot find any contribution from the Dutch colonial perspective, as Bosma states: ―Writers
as Multatuli, E. du Perron, to name the most famous ones, have next to writers from the West
as Albert Helman and Frank Martinus Arion earned a place in the Dutch canon. This is,
however, only due to their literary expertise, and not because of their political relevance‖. 166
This is a crucial aspect, because while in France and Britain colonialism became highly
questioned through these writers‘ works, hardly any awareness was raised in the Netherlands
on the relations between the colonial past and the contemporary postcolonial society. In that
sense, an intellectual insight in postcolonial Dutch relations is missing. In later sections of this
chapter it will become clear that a lack of interest and knowledge in the (post)colonial relation
with the Caribbean forms a crucial element in solving contemporary integration problems of
Dutch Caribbean migrants in Dutch society.
The absence of the postcolonial debate in the Netherlands had profound impacts on
current multicultural policies and the position of Dutch Caribbean communities in the
metropole society. Political interaction and cooperation on both sides of the ocean have been
working its ways through tough processes marked by ambivalence and conflicting approaches
combined with intentions of goodwill and persistency. But how did these political processes
and transatlantic perceptions affect identity issues over the last decades? How did approaches
164
Ulbe Bosma is a senior researcher at the International Institute of Social History (IISH). His mainly interests
are in colonial history and labour migration.
165
Ulbe Bosma, Terug Uit De Koloniën: Zestig Jaar Postkoloniale Migranten En Hun Organisaties
(Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, 2009), 32.
166
Ibid., 291
52
on migration change over time? To give an answer to these questions, an insight must be
given now on political discourses on the Dutch Caribbean and Dutch Caribbean migration.
Political Discourses on the Dutch Caribbean
When talking about political identity discourses on the Dutch Caribbean migrants in the
Netherlands, Jones167 explains the time period between the 1950s and 1960s as a time in
which Dutch Caribbean migrants were seen as ‗voorbeeldrijksgenoten‘ (―migrant role
models‖).168 Although not much attention was paid to the small group of migrants from the
West (approximately between 2,000 en 3,000 from the Dutch Caribbean in 1965), when
politicians did reflect on them, it was hardly in a negative way. Surinamese immigrants on the
other hand were often portrayed as tumultuous and were put in a much more negative
depiction at this early stage of migration to the Netherlands. One of the reasons for this rather
positive representation in the Netherlands towards the Dutch Caribbeans, was that their
migration had a more circular character than the immigrants from Suriname – as is explained
in the second chapter of this work as well. The migrants from the Dutch Caribbean were thus
better connecting with the Dutch politicians‘ ideas about return-migration, for which Dutch
Caribbean immigrants were not characterized as ―symbolische vreemdeling‖ (―symbolic
stranger‖), but rather seen as role model for other immigrants in Dutch society. 169 This
reputation, that Dutch Caribbean immigrants were ‗immigrants who would return after a
while‘, remained throughout the 1970s and 1980s.170 This positive image does unfortunately
not mean that the relationship between the partners within the Kingdom of the Netherlands
was an unproblematic one. Oostindie calls the transatlantic Kingdom politics during the 1970s
and 1980s ―gefrustreerd dekolonisatiebeleid‖ (‗frustrated decolonisation policy‘) in which
independence, Aruban separation and culture differences would run the debate.171
To come back at migration issues within the political debate in the Netherlands, a
different tendency can be found at the beginning of the 1970s with a significant peak of
political and media attention in 1975 when half of Suriname‘s population migrated to the
167
Guno Jones‘ dissertation ‘Tussen Onderdanen, Rijksgenoten en Nederlanders: Nederlandse politici over
burgers uit Oost en West en Nederland, 1945-2005’ is a research focused on the Dutch political discourses on
postcolonial citizens between 1945-2005, which is relevant for this chapter as Dutch politicians‘ debates on
integration, their (normative) instructions on citizenship, and the tone of their language in general is very
decisive for contemporary Dutch Caribbean identities.
168
Jones, Tussen Onderdanen, Rijksgenoten en Nederlanders: Nederlandse Politici over Burgers in Oost en
West en Nederland, 1945-2005, 270.
169
Ibid., 278
170
Oostindie and Klinkers, Knellende Koninkrijksbanden, 337.
171
Ibid., 27
53
Netherlands at the eve of independence. The media and politicians started to show more
interest in the issue of immigration; what were its main causes, which kind of people actually
migrate, will immigration continuously increase and what kind of consequences will it have
on social, political and economic matters? The immigration issue formed a new field of
interest, and only very general answers to these questions could be given. Researcher Willem
Koot mentions that at the start of his study on Antillean migration in 1973, ―the immigration
from the West was one of the most discussed topics in the Dutch media‖.172 Although it was
the least extensive one out of the three postcolonial migration flows, Antillean migration
would become the most controversial.
An important shift in the political discourses regarding the Dutch Caribbean migrants
which is relevant for this study on Caribbean identities, is that it started to deal more with
questions regarding the Dutch citizenship of the overseas citizens and increasingly started to
perceive their migration more as ―a movement from outside to within‖ rather than a
movement of citizens within one Kingdom.173 In 1976, member of Parliament Eef Verwoert
(Democratisch Socialisten ’70) advocated an admittance policy for immigrants, and stated
that ―Nederland mag geen immigratieland worden‖ (―the Netherlands should not become a
country of immigration‖).174 These early political discourses on migration were not
necessarily focused on the possible behaviour or integration of the Dutch Caribbean migrants
themselves, but much more on the scale of migration. In the case of Suriname, a real exodus
had emerged in which migration numbers were unexpectedly very high. Concerns towards the
Dutch Caribbean mainly dealt with the possibility of a similar exodus from that region to the
Netherlands.
Consequently, a gradual change took place in political distinctions between Dutch
citizens from the European mainland and from the Caribbean. In contrast to the postcolonial
migrants from Indonesia who were already declared as integrated in the late 1960s, and from
Suriname who integrated easier because of their affiliation with the Dutch language, Dutch
Caribbean migrants encountered more problems with integrating. A remarkable turn took
place when at the end of the 1970s the distinction between ‗Western‘ and ‗non-Western‘
immigrants appeared in the debate, and gradually the Antillean migrants became to be
categorized as non-Western.175 How intense must have been the impact of this classification
172
Koot, Emigratie op de Nederlandse Antillen, 2.
Jones, Tussen Onderdanen, Rijksgenoten en Nederlanders, 293.
174
Eef Verwoert qtd. in Ibid., 290
175
Ibid., 40-42
173
54
on Caribbean identities, both in the Netherlands as in the Caribbean. Where in the 1950s a
mutual trust and bonding and moreover equality between the rijksgenoten was stated in the
Charter, these same rijksgenoten were now distinctively split in ‗Western‘ and ‗non-Western‘.
The distinction between Self and the Other seemed to have never been eradicated.
Thus, as a result of this gradually changing approach of Dutch politicians towards
Dutch Caribbean migrants, identity issues started to play a more significant role in the lives of
Dutch Caribbeans. As has been expressed throughout this work, questions about identity are
always questions about representation, and on how groups or individuals represent
themselves, but just as important, how they are being represented by Others. An example of
another striking element is that in the 1960s and early 1970s Surinamese and Antillean
peoples were often generalised as one group; ‗the rijksgenoten from the West‘. This
generalisation of Antilleans and Surinamese peoples was, according to Koot, in some extent
understandable as ―both groups came from the West and both countries were still part of the
Kingdom of the Netherlands‖, and there was not much further knowledge about their cultural
differences.176 For Antillean and Surinamese peoples, however, this was a type of
identification that brought along frustration and aversion, as their (cultural) backgrounds were
completely different.
At the same time, Caribbean approaches towards the Netherlands were (in most cases
negatively) influenced by their first perceptions as well; it was mainly the impersonal and
business-like attitude of the Dutch that was complained about: ―Un florin tin e mes un balor
tur dos banda pero no Holanda si no – In Curaçao you‘re welcome, even if you don‘t have
money. In Holland it‘s not like that‖ or ―Bida aya tam as pisa. Nos ta biba trankil y sin
problema – Life over there is very tough. Here we live tranquil and without problems‖.177
Further elaboration on the impact of political discourses on identities in the Dutch Caribbean
will be given in the next sections, as there is more significant change since the 1990s and
moreover the impact of transnational communities was more noteworthy ever since.
Mutual trust? – A changing political approach in the 1990s
―We are all part of the Kingdom. To say it this way: the Queen
is of and for each one of us. Thus one Kingdom, in which we all
inhabit one room. Yet this creates obligations. I propose that
176
177
Koot, Emigratie op de Nederlandse Antillen, 2.
Ibid., 157
55
together we will deal with long overdue maintenance, with
respect to good governance, in the first place in one‘s own
backyard and from there on, of course, also communally‖
- Ruud Lubbers178
The 1990s mark a turning point for political attention towards the Dutch Caribbean and for its
migration in particular. Now that independence for the Dutch Caribbean was of the agenda,
the third Kabinet-Lubbers179 recognized at the beginning of that decade the will to stay
together and to give the transatlantic relationship a new impulse. This Lubbers cabinet, and
the following Kabinet-Kok180 were putting an emphasis on ‗good governance‘ and an
intensified strengthening of democracy and cooperation for further development of the Dutch
Caribbean, with amongst others the appointment of a Minister for Kingdom-affairs.181 In 1990
this new Dutch Minister, Ernst Hirsch Ballin of the Christian Democrats, introduced a new
policy – the ‗Schets van een Gemenebestconstitutie‘ (‗Sketch of a Commonwealth
Constitution‘) – in which the changing attitudes in the Netherlands towards the future
Kingdom ties were reflected. The 1990s became, according to Oostindie and Klinkers ―a
decade of revaluation and continuation of transatlantic Kingdom relations‖.182 But at the same
time less room was given to migrant-organisations in the 1990s. Now that the state was
redefining its role towards the Caribbean, these organization which had played profound roles
for Dutch Caribbean migrants in the Dutch society became of less importance for the
supposed new structure.183 It would not take long however, that politicians started to realise
the importance of cooperation with (local) organisations again. But what did the new
approach of revaluation mean, is anything done to develop a mutual trust between the
Kingdom partners? To what extent do the Antillean (migrant)organisations play a role in this
process?
178
Ruud Lubbers was Prime Minister of the Kingdom of the Netherlands from 1982 until 1994. Qtd. in
Oostindie and Klinkers, Decolonising the Caribbean: Dutch Policies in a Comparative Perspective, 136.
179
The third Lubbers cabinet existed from 1989 until 1994, and was formed by a coalition of the ChristianDemocrats (CDA) and the Labour Party (PvdA).
180
The first Kok cabinet existed from 1994-1998 and was a so-called ‗purple coalition‘ between the Labour
Party (PvdA), the Democrats (D66) and the conservative-liberals (VVD).
181
Oostindie and Klinkers, Knellende Koninkrijksbanden, 175.
182
Oostindie and Klinkers, Decolonising the Caribbean, 131.
183
Ibid., 334
56
Changing attitudes in the Caribbean parts of the Kingdom
New political arguments and policies to strengthen the Kingdom-ties were containing both
gestures of goodwill as more tough approaches; now that it was clear that the Dutch
Caribbean would stay within the Kingdom, stricter conditions could be claimed of the
overseas partners. Despite some encouraging intentions according to ‗good governance‘, in
which the main goals were to improve democracy by transparency and morality in public
affairs, and to pay more attention to efficiency in administrative and financial matters, it soon
became clear that relations would remain problematic. The Netherlands clearly had different
priorities to those of the Antillean and Aruban governments; new policies seemed in general
prepared to act upon them, regardless the opinion of the Caribbean partners. 184 Negative
reactions in the Caribbean islands grew. For the purpose of advising and instructing new
policies, many Dutch officials were sent over to the Dutch Caribbean. Unfortunately, this only
created ―dissensions between the Netherlands and its Caribbean partners and [became] a
major source of irritation‖.185 Therefore, grievances over the increased control of the Dutch
grew; the arrival of the Dutch officials wielded the general feeling amongst the Dutch
Caribbean that their autonomy was being undermined. It was by many perceived as a ―return
of the Makamba‘s‖ which would represent ―a brake on ‗Antilleanisation‘.‖186
Although Former Antillean Premier Suzy Römer was positive about the approach by
saying that ―with Hirsch Ballin a new type of Dutch politics began‖ and ―it is the
characteristic of a new era‖, the process of intensified transatlantic political relationships was
mostly viewed with suspicion.187 Oostindie states that by increasing administrative
consultations, ―political bickering‖ raises ―the Caribbean argument that ‗the Netherlands is
impeding [the] autonomy‘‖.188 This became especially a major concern for Caribbean
politicians, as the research What Kind of Kingdom? of 1998 shows that the majority of the
citizens held a different viewpoint: they seem willing to give up some autonomy for
protection, and therefore consider the political relationship with the Netherlands of uttermost
importance.189
184
Ibid., 134
Hoefte, Thrust Together, 41.
186
Ibid., 42
187
Qtd. in Oostindie and Klinkers, Decolonising the Caribbean, 139.
188
Ibid., 224
189
Oostindie and Verton, Ki Sorto Di Reino?, 52.
185
57
It is likely that these citizens‘ values are connected with their ―limited confidence in
the strength and sustainability of their island communities, and with their not quite high level
of confidence in their own politicians and administrators‖.190 On the other hand, it also
appears that when an intensified Dutch involvement actually becomes visible, opinions are
much more reserved. The supposed culture differences are then often to blame, as Oostindie
and Verton conclude that although ―the constitutional relation between the Netherlands and
the islands is highly valued by the Antilleans and Arubans, […] there is a strong sense on all
the islands that the Netherlands has insufficient understanding of and respect for the local
society and culture‖.191 This marks a crucial aspect for this work. Former chapters have
shown how deep inferior feelings are rooted within Caribbean identities; the fact that the
Netherlands is still tied to the islands, but overall not showing enough interest in their culture,
forms a sensitive issue. At the same time, the other side of this argument should not be
ignored: cultural differences are hard to define, but can be easily used as a (political) tool.
Compared to other Caribbean countries, the Dutch Caribbean know a relatively high standard
of living and civil rights and democracy are well secured. Dutch Caribbeans know that these
are mainly the results of their neo-colonial status, which is unquestionably the reason to reject
independence.192 Transatlantic conflicts are then from the Caribbean side often blamed on
cultural differences; on the Makamba’s lack of interest in their culture.
Changing attitudes in the European part of the Kingdom
In the decades before the 1990s, Antillean communities in the Netherlands received little
guidance and insertion in Dutch society. No significant problems with these communities
were perceived, but it was also due to a lack of sufficient data; there was no registration duty
for migrants from the Dutch Caribbean. Many migrants moved in with family or friends
without officially registering. It would later form one of the most difficult aspects of the
Antillean migration debate; how to register and keep control of people who are free to travel
within the Kingdom of the Netherlands? But it would also only become a difficult aspect
when the problems of Dutch Caribbean migration became a hot topic in Dutch politics.
During the 1990s, public and political opinion was gradually turning against the
presence of Antillean migrants in the Dutch society as significant integration problems
190
191
192
Ibid., 11
Ibid., 11
Oostindie, Postkoloniaal Nederland, 38.
58
occurred. A shift had taken place from mainly higher educated migrants to underprivileged
and uneducated teenagers who hardly spoke any of the Dutch language. A relatively high
number of these migrants moved to the Antillengemeenten which had emerged in the bigger
cities of the Netherlands, where integration was not much supported and which often resulted
in ―frustrations, drug-addiction, and criminality‖.193
A series of negative portrayals by the media on Dutch Caribbeans worsened the
perceptions on the Antillean communities. As a result of many new, tough policies the islands
had to implement in order to follow the rules of the Kingdom and to cooperate in the ‗mutual
assistance‘ clause, incompetent and corrupt images were spread in the Netherlands. For
example, a ‗constitutional hold‘ (in which a Dutch-appointed governor had to approve all
major decisions in advance) was put on St Maarten by Hirsch Ballin in order to fight the
island‘s problem of being a ―staging post for South American cocaine traffickers‖. 194 When
former leader of the conservative liberal VVD, Frits Bolkestein disqualified Aruba with
calling it a ―robber‘s nest‖195, corruption and criminality in the overseas became increasingly
discussed.
Consequently, a growing tendency towards negative representation began to play an
important factor in Dutch politics towards the Dutch Caribbean and its migrants. As a result,
a change took place in the representation of Dutch Caribbean migrants: ―in Dutch political
discourses, Antillean communities in the Netherlands evolved from a non-problematic ethnic
minority into a non-assimilated complicated ethnic minority‖.196 When in 1993 Chief
Commissioner of the police in Amsterdam, Mr. E. Nordholt had mentioned that the Antilles
were actively sending criminals to the Netherlands, another negative impulse was given to
transatlantic representation.197 Furthermore, it seems that with Nordholt‘s statement a limited
and prejudiced expression for Antillean migrants was introduced; ever since, media and
politics seemed exclusively focused on the ‗Antillean problem migrant‘.198 This is an
important change, as actually calling these ‗problems‘ by its name was not done by many
politicians before. The Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant would in 2008 – when Bolkestein‘s
term of the Antilles being a ‗robbers-nest‘ was mentioned again by a Dutch politician – note
that ―naming the Antillean problems inevitably leads to a mobilisation of the public
193
Oostindie and Klinkers, Knellende Koninkrijksbanden, 344.
Caribbean Update ―Dutch West Indies‖, qtd. in Hoefte, Thrust Together, 42.
195
Qtd. in Oostindie and Klinkers, Decolonising the Caribbean, 142.
196
Jones, Tussen Onderdanen, Rijksgenoten en Nederlanders, 299.
197
Oostindie and Klinkers, Knellende Koninkrijksbanden, 347.
198
Jones, Tussen Onderdanen, Rijksgenoten en Nederlanders, 301.
194
59
opinion‖.199 Thus, gradually throughout the 1990s, the emphasis on a shared nationality with
the rijksgenoten, which was so often used by politicians in earlier decades, disappeared. The
style of political language with its continuous use of ‗ethnic profiling‘ plays an important role
today in putting postcolonial migrants in a specific relation with the mother country.
As a result, a new focus of the Dutch government on migration from the Antilles and
Aruba was needed as there was a mutual interest in getting more grip on the problematic
situation; not only did the migration issue form a problem in the Netherlands, it also disturbed
the population composition in the Caribbean part of the Kingdom. Issues as stricter regulation,
admission, and suggestions for visa-requirements were opted by political parties such as the
VVD (Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie) and the Christian Democrats and gained in
the following years support from other political parties as well.200 However, in 2001 minister
R. van Boxtel of Grote Steden en Integratie-beleid informed the parliament that ―establishing
an admission policy for Antillean citizens is no real option‖.
201
The fact that there is no
general definition for an ‗Antilliaanse Nederlander‘ and that the freedom of movement within
the European Union also counts for Dutch Caribbeans holding a Dutch passport, were the
main arguments in van Boxtel‘s letter to the parliament.202 The Dutch Caribbean‘s position
regarding the EU will be studied later on, because first an elaboration should be made on an
alternative focus on the integration problem, now that limiting immigration is more or less
excluded from the debate.
An alternative and more realistic path must be made towards a better integration of
‗problem migrants‘ into the Dutch societies. Although since the 1990s the influence of
migrant-organizations in Dutch society decreased, several committees or organizations have
been appointed over the last years to pay attention to the migration problem, in which the
Dutch government in particular tries to involve Antillean organisations. Bosma had
formulated that ―a government that wants to integrate migrants, may not neglect their
organizations‖ because the Dutch society clearly had not sufficient knowledge about the real
nature of the problem.203 Also in Change the Mind-set, a report from the Stichting
Overlegorgaan Caribische Nederlanders (OCaN), the Dutch reluctant responsibility towards
199
Fennema, Hero Zegt de Waarheid over de Antillen
Oostindie and Klinkers, Knellende Koninkrijksbanden, 348.
201
van Boxtel, R. H. L. M., "Kamerstuk Tweede Kamer Der Staten Generaal, Brief Van De Minister Voor
Grote Steden En Integratie-Beleid: Bijlage 1. Overwegingen Inzake Een Toelatingsregeling Voor Antillianen,"
(11 June 2001).
202
Ibid.
203
Bosma, Terug Uit De Koloniën, 327.
200
60
the postcolonial reality was blamed: it would not pay enough attention to ―the deeper rooted
causes of the problem‖.204
Again,
integration
problems
were
thus
indirectly
products
of
careless
(post)colonialism, and could not be solved by Dutch politics alone. Organisations such as the
OCaN and the Team Ondersteuning Participatie in Antillianengemeenten (TOPA)205, but also
governmental committees such as the Taskforce Antilliaanse Nederlanders206 therefore need
to work now at bridging the Dutch and Antillean communities in order to prevent the negative
images to further generalise the Dutch Caribbean peoples. But a fact is that the ambivalent
relations, strengthened by continuous negative representations and ‗ethnic profiling‘ in
politics and the media have affected Caribbean identities in a way that will be hard to
overcome. The OCaN mentions that the problems of integration and negative ethnic profiling
are strongly related to a ―collective trauma‖ in which a negative self-perception had become
part of the Antillean identity.207 Furthermore, the language problem is also hard to solve, but
perhaps one of the most important aspects to focus on. As mentioned in the second chapter of
this work, language problems can have serious consequences for self-perceptions, and
therefore needs special attention. For that reason, these organizations mainly focus on an
improvement of education on the Dutch Caribbean, as that is where the overall problems are
rooted. In reality, however, the influence of the organizations are little. The problems are
clear, but the solutions are hard to realise. As Bosma states: ―on the one hand there is the
pressure to assimilate, which creates expectations, but on the other hand there is a continuous
rejection‖.208
The road to the new statuses and European priorities
As discussed above, post-war political processes often have been complicated by cultural
differences, and by a high degree of ambivalence and a complex intercourse of Self and
204
OCaN Adviesrapport, Change the Mind-Set. Advies ter Bestrijding van Armoede en Sociale Uitsluiting onder
Antillianen en Arubanen, (25 juni 2007).
205
The TOPA was installed in September 2006, in order to stimulate the cooperation between the so-called
‗Antillengemeenten‘ (which are Dutch municipalities housing a relatively high number of Antilleans) and the
Antillean communities.
206
The Taskforce Antilliaanse-Nederlanders was installed in January 2008 and mainly focuses on guidance on
housing, work-and education trajectories, instable family situations, etc. The Taskforce also needs to propose
long-term integral and operational programs.
207
OCaN Adviesrapport, Change the Mind-Set. Advies ter Bestrijding van Armoede en Sociale Uitsluiting onder
Antillianen en Arubanen, (25 juni 2007).
208
Bosma, Terug Uit De Koloniën, 329.
61
Other-ing. There is another issue that has played (and still plays) an important role for the
Dutch Caribbean in the last two centuries; the Netherlands‘ membership of the European
Union. As already noted at the beginning of this chapter, the relationship between colonialism
and European integration must not be seen as strongly connected. However, the early stages
of European integration developed along parallel lines with anti-colonial struggles and
decolonisation. This must of course by no means be interpreted as European integration being
the result of colonialism or the politics of decolonisation. Rather, it is important to understand
how through several aspects, such as colonialism being a shared (Western) European
experience and the emergence of postcolonial migration, have significantly contributed to the
question of national and European notions of identity. This section, however, will not go too
deep into whether the colonial connection could be linked to the larger historical picture of the
development of the European Union. It will rather focus on how, during the process towards
new statuses for the Dutch Caribbean, Dutch priorities are often somewhere else than its
overseas Kingdom-partners. In what extent does the change in statuses influences the Dutch
Caribbean identities? And how do Dutch attitudes towards European priorities play a role in
this?
The road to new statuses
During the Willemstad Toekomstconferentie (‗Conference on the Future‘) of 1993 it was the
first time that the present formation of the Caribbean islands was mentioned: a Status Aparte
not only for Aruba, but also for Curaçao and St. Maarten, and a separate arrangement for the
three smaller islands that would make them overseas municipalities of the Netherlands. 209
Although this conference turned out into a complete failure – as Curaçao demanded a Status
Aparte immediately and the Dutch insisted on an improvement of Curaçao‘s administrative
and financial affairs first – the constitutional proposal would in the following years prove
acceptable to all parties; finally, in 2010 it resulted in a constitutional reformation of the
islands.
In Knellende Koninkrijksbanden, Oostindie and Klinkers continued the debate on
whether the Charter of 1954 had become obsolete considering the development and the
continuously increasing international cooperation and integration.210 Since the proclamation
of the Charter, globalisation has enlarged markets, capital, movement of peoples, and
209
210
Hoefte, Thrust Together, 43.
Oostindie and Klinkers, Knellende Koninkrijksbanden, 429.
62
international crime. When in the 1990s a new path towards better cooperation within the
Kingdom came on the agenda, these international developments were playing an important
role in the debate. However, the path towards renewed cooperation proved not to be an easy
one. The Charter could only be revised when all involved parties would agree, and as
explained earlier, Caribbean politicians did not favour to easily give up any autonomy. More
than ten years of political bickering and disputes did not lead to any concrete step forward to a
revision of the Charter.
In 2004, however, when the Charter ‗celebrated‘ its fiftieth anniversary, again a
renewed focus towards a constitutional change emerged. Because of continuous frustration
and irritation on both sides of the Atlantic, this anniversary was not much of a positive
celebration; the Charter‘s anniversary could rather ―painfully highlight the instability of the
Kingdom for the Caribbean countries and thus mortgage any attempt to re-design the
relationship for years to come‖.211 Therefore, several committees – such as Comité 2004 and
Werkgroep Bestuurlijke en Financiële Verhoudingen Nederlandse Antillen were appointed to
write reports and bring out advice regarding the new statuses for the Dutch Caribbean. The
overall visions of these reports mainly focused on aspects such as the necessity to find a
solution for the burden of debt, the Antillean double governance, and structural changes.212
Cultural issues were hardly mentioned. Perhaps this is just a continuation of an approach that
was never focused on promoting language or culture. This was not the case in the old-colonial
days, but neither has the Netherlands been very ―persuasive in promoting a sense of a
common purpose of identity that unites its disparate parts‖ since the Charter of the 1954 was
inaugurated.213
After a few attempts to reset the formation of the Kingdom, on the 10th of October
2010 the new statuses would finally be implemented; the Dutch Antilles formally ceased to
exist, through which Curaçao and St Maarten received the Status Aparte and Bonaire, St
Eustatius and Saba became ‗special municipalities‘ within the Kingdom. Although the date
for this implementation was set, it was unclear until only weeks before whether it would
actually be realised in time, as many struggles and last-minute political disagreements kept
obstructing satisfaction amongst all parties. Moreover, 2010 was a tumultuous year regarding
the Dutch elections for which immigration and integration were the hot topics in the political
211
Lammert de Jong, ‗Repairing a not so united Kingdom. Can it be done?‘ in Jong and Boersema, The Kingdom
of the Netherlands in the Caribbean: 1945-2004: What Next?, 16.
212
E. A. V. Jesurun, Nu Kan Het… Nu Moet Het! the Time is Now, let’s do it! Awor Por, Ban p’e!Werkgroep
Bestuurlijke en Financiële Verhoudingen Nederlandse Antillen,(2004).
213
Lammert de Jong, in The Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Caribbean, 18.
63
campaigns. The focus on these topics was mainly the result of the popularity of the Partij
voor de Vrijheid (PVV) which was running for election.214 Although the PVV, which states
in its vision on the official website that ―the mass-immigration is a money-wasting leftist
hobby‖215, is mainly focused on Islamic immigrants, it plays an important role in
contemporary ‗Self‖- and ‗Othering‘-politics in general. The PVV opted in an initiatiefnota in
2008 for more political focus on the ‗mafia‘ activities amongst Antillean politicians, and has
ever since pleaded for abandoning the Dutch Caribbean.216 That the PVV plays a role in the
present minority-cabinet (in which it has a ‗confidence and supply‘ agreement with the VVD
and CDA) in the same year that renewed Kingdom ties should mark the beginning of a new
and strong cooperation between the Kingdom partners, indicates a paradoxical tendency. This
development also marks one of several bottlenecks in the contemporary transatlantic
relationship, that still lacks mutual trust and in which the future path to overcome
ambivalence will still be a long one. Whether the attempt to make the Kingdom work with the
new statuses will turn out positive shall remain open for future debate.
Dutch Caribbeans and the European Union
―The Netherlands is sailing today in formation with the EU. And
we in the Caribbean region, who want to preserve our freedom
and autonomy, are sailing further without any course, keep
looking back in our rear view mirror‖
- Mito Croes217
At the same time that new statuses for the Dutch Caribbean were studied, a committee
(‗Commissie ter bestudering van mogelijke toekomstige relaties van de Nederlandse Antillen en
Aruba met de Europese Unie‘) was appointed in January 2004 to investigate the future
possibilities for the islands within the European Union. The islands‘ position within the EU
214
The Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) is a Dutch political party which was founded in 2005, after leader Geert
Wilders had left the VVD. In 2006, the PVV became the fifth largest party in Parliament, and third largest
opposition party. In August 2010 the PVV emerged to be an important player in the formation of a new
government; today it forms a centre-right minority-government coalition with the VVD and CDA. The PVV
mainly holds a conservative vision on immigration and ‗Dutch culture‘. It believes that the JudeoChristian and humanist traditions should be taken as the dominant culture in the Netherlands, and therefore holds
strong anti-immigration and anti-Islam standpoints.
215
Partij voor de Vrijheid, "PVV Visie," http://www.pvv.nl/index.php/visie.html (accessed March, 10, 2011).
216
Partij voor de Vrijheid, "De Antillen Maffia Binnen Het Koninkrijk?"
http://www.pvv.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1123&Itemid=1 (accessed March, 10, 2011).
217
Mito Croes, ‗De ‗reinvention‘van het Koninkrijk‘ in Jong and Boersema, The Kingdom of the Netherlands in
the Caribbean: 1945-2004: What Next?, 77.
64
was by the time, and still is, one of Overseas Countries and Territories (OCT), which dated
back to the traditional EEC-Treaty of 1957. Meanwhile European integration had moved
forward. The newly appointed committee mainly focused its research on whether this OCT
status was still relevant in the twenty-first century, or whether an Outermost Region (OMR)
status – which means full integration in the EU – should be implemented. The present day
situation (the Dutch Caribbean being OCT‘s) shows that the studies did not result in any
change. When the Dutch Caribbean would have become Outermost Regions, full European
policy, rules and regulation would be applied to the Antillean public arena as well – with
perhaps some few exemptions made regarding some specific local conditions.218 An opposing
argument was that it would affect Antillean autonomy even more. It was also sincerely
questioned whether the application of the European rules and regulations was feasible for the
tiny Dutch islands in the Caribbean. For example, the Banden met Brussel report
(Connections with Brussels) highly questioned the possible demands of European
environmental regulation with regards to the oil refinery on Curaçao.219
To extend any further on the conditions of OCT‘s within in the EU would turn away
too much from the actual identity issues that this work is focusing on. Because even though
the association should in the first place ―create the possibility to improve prosperity and
interest, and finally bring economic, social and cultural development according to their
[Antillean] expectations‖, it is mainly the economic aspect (trade agreements and
development aid) that is playing a major role in the issue of OCT‘s.220 Instead, this section
will rather focus on the impact this tripartite relation of Europe, the Netherlands and the
Dutch Caribbean has on transatlantic perspectives and identities.
Dutch Caribbean citizens have a Dutch passport and are therefore free to migrate to
the Netherlands. Since 1 October 1964, the Dutch Caribbean are indirectly included into the
European Union as OCT‘s and do have access to freely move within the Union. Free
migration is seen as ―a lifeline on the Caribbean islands‖ and is therefore ―one of the
Kingdom‘s most valuable assets‖.221 It is, however, remarkable that Dutch Caribbean
migrants hardly ever migrate to other countries in the EU than the Netherlands. Being
218
Lammert de Jong, in Ibid., 24
Banden Met Brussel: De Betrekkingen Van De Nederlandse Antillen En Aruba Met De Europese
UnieRapport van de Commissie ter bestudering van mogelijke toekomstige relaties van de Nederlandse Antillen
en Aruba met de Europese Unie.,(2004).
220
Ibid.
221
Lammert de Jong, in The Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Caribbean, 16.
219
65
integrated within the Union seems – besides development funding – not to add much to the
transatlantic Kingdom relations.
Former Minister plenipotentiary of Aruba Mito Croes had stated differently by saying
that their ―contemporary relationship with the EU is based on a persistent, on fiction based,
perception. The general perception is that we, with our old-fashioned OCT-status, keep the
EU on a distance‖.222 Croes argues that integrating in the EU is an automatic process that
comes with being related to the Netherlands, not a process that the overseas parts can
independently make decisions on. In that sense, Croes gives an example about how EU
decisions on external relations can have crucial impacts on matters that the Caribbean like to
see as within their own autonomy: ―If the EU were to announce a boycott on Venezuela or
Cuba, we would no longer be able to import fish from Venezuela, and our ministers and
deputies could no longer travel to Cuba to do business‖.223 Croes‘ argument is a good
example of the earlier discussed aspect of Caribbean feeling of ‗in-between-ness‘ in both the
geographical and mental aspect of the term.
Furthermore, Croes argues that ―a fundamental change has appeared in the general
worldview [...] that we no longer live in a bipolar world [...] and that it is time to realise that
the idea of cooperation and integration does not contradict the idea of independence and
freedom‖.224 This vision complements a report of the Wetenschappelijk Instituut voor het
CDA that stated in 2007 that ―the Caribbean Kingdom partners need to realise that (also
bigger and formally sovereign) countries do not cooperate with strategic partners and even
integrate in supranational communities to dissipate their autonomy, but just to maintain it and
to get more grip on complicated international processes which in practice are determining for
their peoples‖.225 Croes also tries to emphasize the advantages the Dutch Caribbean can take
from their relation to the EU, but especially how with ―every change, new chances are
created‖ and how these changes need to be identified and used in the most positive way. 226 In
reality, however, these good intentions turn out much harder than they seem. This is still a
result of complex transatlantic relations: even though the Caribbean Kingdom partners would
like to make the best out of it, there will be continuously the perception that the other way
around there is not much to add to the transatlantic relation.
222
Mito Croes, ‗De ‗reinvention‘van het Koninkrijk‘ in Ibid., 68
Ibid., 69
224
Ibid., 70
225
N. J. P. A. Van Grieken and N. M. Köper, Naar Een Salsa Op Klompen: Over de Toekomst van het
Koninkrijk der Nederlanden. (Den Haag: Wetenschappelijk Instituut voor het CDA,(2007).
226
Mito Croes, in The Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Caribbean (Amsterdam: Rozenberg, 2005), 78.
223
66
That the Dutch Caribbean do not play an important role in and for the European Union
was made clear by former Minister of Foreign Affairs Ben Bot, who mentioned in a speech in
January 2005 that their chances for gaining an OMR status in Brussels should not be
calculated too optimistically. ―For the eventual consideration one should remember that
within the EU, and definitely within the EC, sympathy for the Overseas Countries and
Territories have declined.‖227 Europe‘s motto ‗unity in diversity‘ does not seem to apply for
the overseas bits of Europe. But to turn back to the issue of identity, how does this formal
relationship with the EU influence Caribbean identities?
Stuart Hall had mentioned in Negotiating Caribbean Identities that questions of
Caribbean culture and identity are always related to political mobilization, and cultural and
economic development. As shown before in this chapter, a renewed focus on identity has
appeared in the national and European debate. Hall states that:
the issue of cultural identity as a political quest now constitutes one of
the most serious global problems as we go into the twentieth-first
century. The re-emergence of questions of ethnicity, of nationalism –
the obduracy, the dangers and the pleasures of the rediscovery of
identity in the modern world, inside and outside of Europe – places
the question of cultural identity at the very centre of the contemporary
political agenda.228
As for Western Europe this question (re)emerged because of multiculturalism and further
integration within the European Union, for the Caribbean this was a process that had never
been absent. Because of its distance from the European mainland, the Dutch Caribbean are
less directly affected by these issues. But the European Union does raise questions about their
position in processes of globalisation and Europeanisation; on the one hand it might be more
efficient to better integrate in the American region, on the other hand free migration to the EU
is a significant advantage that makes the EU an attractive factor.
Contemporary politics show, however, that European integration is of major
importance for the Netherlands, but hardly affects the Dutch Caribbean. It once more is an
issue where the Dutch overseas are being overshadowed by other Dutch priorities. There is
then, after all, not much about the relationship with the EU that significantly impacts
Caribbean identities. Not yet. Because although it is of such minor importance today, new
227
Speech held by Minister Ben Bot (Foreign Affairs) at the Universiteit van de
Nederlandse Antillen in Willemstad, 20 January 2005. Qtd. Mito Croes, in The Kingdom of the Netherlands in
the Caribbean (Amsterdam: Rozenberg, 2005), 78.
228
Stuart Hall, "Negotiating Caribbean Identities," New Left Review, no. 209 (1995), 4.
67
generations might increasingly start to identify themselves as citizens of the European Union.
But for the short term, it is a relevant fact that European integration has deeply affected Dutch
policies, and therefore the option to restrict Antillean migration into the Netherlands has
become impossible.229 Perhaps this will lead eventually to Bosma‘s expectation that Antillean
migrants will ―most likely be characterized as integrated soon‖, just like the Indonesian
migrants were.230
229
230
Gert Oostindie, "Een Antwoord Op De Curaçaose Exodus?" Justitiële Verkenningen 28, no. 1 (2002), 17.
Bosma, Terug Uit De Koloniën, 42.
68
CONCLUSION
Fifty-six years after the Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands was signed, in which the
Netherlands Antilles and Surinam were given the status of ‗integral and equal partners‘ within
the Kingdom, the Dutch Antilles ceased to exist on the 10th of October 2010. The Kingdom of
the Netherlands henceforth would comprise four countries – the Netherlands, Aruba, Curaçao,
and St Maarten – and the three overseas special municipalities of Saba, St Eustatius and
Bonaire. A dismantling of the Kingdom by making the Dutch Caribbean independent, has
become a vision no longer aimed for – at least not for the near future. Many debates,
published proposals and round table conferences, characterised by both intentions of goodwill
and critical objections, were needed to design this new constitutional formation. But whether
it does envision a (renewed) ‗mutual trust and genuine relationship‘ as Queen Beatrix had
named it in 1994, can be doubted. A shared vision for future relations can only be build on
this mutual trust, and must be created by overcoming the problematic past, by rather looking
forward instead of looking back; and by showing sympathy for all parties involved.
This approach is more or less the idea and advice given in all official reports which
were written since the 1990s, such as Advies Werkgroep Bestuurlijke en Financiële
Verhoudingen Nederlandse Antillen, Comité Koninkrijksrelaties, and Commissie-Jesurun, but
is undoubtedly easier said than done. Mutual trust can hardly be found when the internal
relations are so unequally rooted. Already since the seventeenth century until the midtwentieth century, only limited attention was being paid to the Dutch Caribbean societies.
Europe, the eastern possessions and later the United States were considered to be far more
important than the Caribbean region. The fact that the Netherlands was relatively late in
abolishing slavery, proves even more a lack of interest in the western territories.231 When just
over a century later awareness on the overseas territories in the West finally increased, it was
nonetheless because of an ‗external‘ event: the exodus that took place at the eve of
Suriname‘s independence. The colonies ‗had literally come home‘ and together with the
emerging transnational communities, the Kingdom ties between the ‗mother-country‘ and its
overseas territories finally became ‗visible‘.
Contrary to the migrants from the East that had arrived two decades earlier, the
migrants from the West were soon to be perceived as ‗problem-migrants‘. These negative
231
Gert Oostindie, Het Paradijs Overzee: De Nederlandse Caraïben En Nederland (Leiden: KITLV Uitgeverij,
2000), 313.
69
representations can be linked in a twofold way to the complex identity issues discussed in this
work. The first and second chapter have examined aspects of Caribbean identities as shaped
by both the past and the future, as a matter of ‗becoming as well as of being‘. The search for
selfhood – for ‗a‘ Caribbean identity – went in a relatively short time through many stages;
from slavery and the Emancipation, to industrialization and decolonisation. As a result,
identities based on the Self and the Other have proved to be deeply rooted in Caribbean
societies. In the early days of Dutch colonial rule, the most agonizing example of
representations made by the Other were undoubtedly those between master and slave. The
physical appearance of the black man has – just as in many other countries in the world –
created an inferior representation that would even in the modern world prove difficult to
overcome. In the Dutch Caribbean segregated neighbourhoods were still existing long after
the colonisation era had formally ended, just as it was not until the 1970s that blacks were
making their way up into politics.
It was during that same time, in the second half of twentieth century, that peoples from
all over the Caribbean started to focus more on what it meant to be Caribbean; a very
confusing mission for societies that had always been shaped from the outside, which were
almost created anew by colonialism and the course of slavery. For the Dutch Caribbean this
process took another path as they remained tied to the mother country instead of getting
independent like the majority of the islands in the Caribbean did. The search for an identity or
selfhood remained in that sense a problematical search for the Dutch Caribbeans, one in
which the Kingdom-ties remain a factor of influence.
In other former colonial empires such as France and Great Britain awareness for the
racial problems and other (post)colonial struggles became clear through the works of
prominent writers such as Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon and Paul Gilory. In the Netherlands,
however, no intellectual postcolonial debate was produced, which is why even today there is a
significant lack of knowledge about the Dutch colonial relations. The integration debate today
shows the consequences caused by this lack of a postcolonial debate, as there is little
awareness of the Netherlands being a postcolonial society.232 Migrants from Suriname and
Indonesia integrated relatively easy, but only the contemporary problems with Antillean
integration in the Dutch society has raised awareness of the postcolonial issue.
For the new relations between the Kingdom-partners, the colonial past and cultural
differences are of major significance. The language issue forms a clear illustration of a
232
Bosma, Terug Uit De Koloniën, 29.
70
complex problem regarding the postcolonial relations in the Kingdom. The second chapter of
this work has amongst others elaborated on the relation between language and identity, and
how the Leeward islands have maintained to use Papiamento as their first language. The
Netherlands has been in that sense according to Oostindie ―a negligent coloniser, which has
left a persistent, beautiful, but also uneasy legacy‖.233 The usage of an own language is crucial
for one‘s perception of being, which is the main reason that people in the Leeward islands of
the Dutch Caribbean are firmly holding on to their language; it is ‗their‘ core of identity.
However, today the gap between the use of Papiamento and Dutch has proven to be a
complex dilemma: the majority of Antillean migrants is experiencing difficulties with
integrating in Dutch society, and that is mainly due to their insufficient knowledge of the
Dutch language.
Since the 1990s it has become the most important topic of debate on the Dutch
Caribbean: how to integrate the ‗problem migrants‘ who fail in society, and even how to limit
Antillean migration in general – as the two are often perceived as closely linked. Antillean
migrants are now being classified as non-Western migrants, whereas they are still the same
rijksgenoten. The group of successful Dutch Caribbeans in the Netherlands are hardly ever
portrayed; it seems that the circulation of stereotypes of Self and the Other have made its
return, or perhaps was only vanished for a while. The mutual ambivalent perceptions,
attitudes of disinterest, resignation, and rejection are often overshadowing the intentions of
goodwill and therefore still suit the statement former Prime Minister of the Netherlands Ruud
Lubbers once put forward: that it is difficult to ascertain whether the Kingdom partners are
living in different houses or just in different rooms in the same house.234
That complex situation will probably last for a long time as there will always be the
geographical and cultural distance between the partners. But the last decades have also shown
that the relationship is changing over the course of migration and European integration.
Renewed perceptions of identity have emerged, ideas about borders are being transformed.
Since identities are never fixed and always subject to cultural and power relations, and thus
transform over time, the future of the Kingdom of the Netherlands might hold a promising
vision for its citizens: one that will be based on an actual mutual trust.
233
Oostindie, Het Paradijs Overzee, 302.
Qtd in: Wim Rutgers, ‗De Postkoloniale Taalsituatie op de Nederlandse Antillen en Aruba‘ in Wim Rutgers,
Koloniale Taalpolitiek in Oost En West (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1997), 280.
234
71
BIBLIOGRAPHY
―Banden met Brussel: De Betrekkingen van de Nederlandse Antillen en Aruba met de
Europese Unie‖. Rapport van de Commissie ter bestudering van mogelijke toekomstige
relaties van de Nederlandse Antillen en Aruba met de Europese Unie, 2004.
http://www.eerstekamer.nl/eu.publicatie/20040701/betrekkingen_van_de_nederlandse/
document
Aceto, Michael. "Statian Creole English: An English-Derived Language Emerges in the
Dutch Antilles." World Englishes 25, no. 3 (Aug, 2006): 411-435.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006.
Arends, Jacques, Pieter Muysken, and Norval Smith, eds. Pidgins and Creoles: An
Introduction. edited by Silvia Kouwenberg and Pieter Muysken. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins Publishing Company, 1994.
Benjamin, Alan F. Jews of the Dutch Caribbean: Exploring Ethnic Identity on Curaçao.
London: Routledge, 2002.
Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. "In Praise of Creoleness."
Callaloo 13, no. 4 (1990): 886-909.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Blakely, Allison. "Historical Ties among Surinam, the Netherlands Antilles, Aruba, and the
Netherlands." Callaloo 21, no. 3 (Summer98, 1998): 472.
Bosma, Ulbe. Terug Uit De Koloniën: Zestig Jaar Postkoloniale Migranten En Hun
Organisaties. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, 2009.
Boxtel, R. H. L. M. van. "Kamerstuk Tweede Kamer Der Staten Generaal, Brief Van De
Minister Voor Grote Steden En Integratie-Beleid: Bijlage 1. Overwegingen Inzake Een
Toelatingsregeling Voor Antillianen." (11 June 2001).
Burns, Lorna. "Becoming-Postcolonial, Becoming-Caribbean: Edouard Glissant and the
Poetics of Creolization." Textual Practice 23, no. 1 (02, 2009): 99-117.
Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkely:
University of California Press, 205.
Corsen, Chal and Brenda F. Hasham-Hopson. "Sintimentu Di Kòrsou / Curaçao Feeling"
Callaloo 21, no. 3, Carribean Literature from Suriname, The Netherlands Antilles, Aruba,
and The Netherlands: A Special Issue (Summer, 1998): p. 675.
Emmer, P. C. De Nederlandse Slavenhandel 1500-1850. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij de
Arbeiderspers, 2000.
72
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press, 1986.
———. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 2004.
Fennema, Meindert. "Hero Zegt De Waarheid Over De Antillen." De Volkskrant, January 15,
2009, sec. Opinie.
Fouce, Gary C. The Story of Papiamentu: A Study in Slavery and Language. Oxford:
University Press of America, 2002.
Froude, James Anthony. The English in the West Indies Or the Bow of Ulysses. London:
Longmans, Green and Co., 1888.
Gerstle, Gary and John Mollenkopf, eds. E Pluribus Unum: Contemporary and Historical
Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation. New York: Russell Sage Foundation,
2001.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Goor, J. van. De Nederlandse Koloniën : Geschiedenis Van De Nederlandse Expansie, 16001975. Den Haag: SDU UitgeverijKoninginnegracht, 1993.
Goveia, Elsa V. "Influence of Religion in the West Indies." The Americas 14, no. 4 (1958):
510-516.
Gowricharn, Ruben, ed. Caribbean Transnationalism: Migration, Pluralization, and Social
Cohesion. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006.
Grieken, N. J. P. A. van, and N. M. Köper. ―Naar Een Salsa Op Klompen: Over De Toekomst
Van Het Koninkrijk Der Nederlanden‖. Den Haag: Wetenschappelijk Instituut voor het
CDA, 2007.
Groeneboer, Kees. Weg Tot Het Westen. Leiden: KITLV Uitgeverij, 1993.
Hall, Robert A. JR. Pidgin and Creole Languages. London: Cornell University Press, 1966.
Hall, M. L. "The Postcolonial Caribbean as a Liminal Space: Authoring Other Modes of
Contestation and Affirmation." Howard Journal of Communications 18, no. 1 (2007,
2007): 1-13.
Hall, Stuart. "Negotiating Caribbean Identities." New Left Review no. 209 (1995): 3-14.
Hansen, Peo. "European Integration, European Identity, and the Colonial Connection."
European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 4 (2002): 483-498.
Hoefte, Rosemarijn. "Thrust Together: The Netherlands Relationship with its Caribbean
Partners." Journal of Interamerican Studies & World Affairs 38, no. 4 (Winter96, 1996):
35-54.
73
Huddart, David. Homi K. Bhabha. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Jansen van Galen, John. De Toekomst Van Het Koninkrijk: Over De Dekolonisatie Van De
Nederlandse Antillen. Amsterdam: Contact, 2004.
Jesurun, E. A. V. ―Nu Kan Het… Nu Moet Het! the Time is Now, let‘s do it! Awor Por, Ban
p‘e!‖: Werkgroep Bestuurlijke en Financiële Verhoudingen Nederlandse Antillen, 2004.
Jones, Guno. Tussen Onderdanen, Rijksgenoten en Nederlanders: Nederlandse Politici Over
Burgers in Oost en West en Nederland, 1945-2005. Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers,
2007.
Jong, Lammert de and Douwe Boersema, eds. The Kingdom of the Netherlands in the
Caribbean: 1945-2004: What Next?. Amsterdam: Rozenberg, 2005.
Koot, Willem. Emigratie op de Nederlandse Antillen: een sociaal-wetenschappelijk
onderzoek naar omvang en achtergronden van de emigratie, in het bijzonder op Aruba en
Curaçao. Rijksuniversiteit Leiden: Odijk, 1979.
Lampe, Armando. Mission Or Submission?: Moravian and Catholic Missionaries in the
Dutch Caribbean during the 19th Century. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001.
Ligtvoet, Floor. "Antilliaanse Eilanden Op Eigen Benen." BN/DeStem,October 9, 2010.
Murdoch, H. Adlai. ""Al Skin' Teeth is Not Grin": Performing Caribbean Diasporic Identity
in a Postcolonial Metropolitan Frame." Callaloo 30, no. 2 (2007): 575.
OCaN Adviesrapport. “Change the Mind-Set. Advies ter Bestrijding van Armoede en Sociale
Uitsluiting onder Antillianen en Arubanen‖, 25 juni 2007.
Oostindie, Gert. Het Paradijs Overzee: De Nederlandse Caraïben En Nederland. Leiden:
KITLV Uitgeverij, 2000.
———. De Parels En De Kroon: Het Koningshuis En De Koloniën. Amsterdam: De Bezige
Bij, 2006.
———. Dutch Colonialism, Migration and Cultural Heritage. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008.
———. Postkoloniaal Nederland: Vijfenzestig Jaar Vergeten, Herdenken, Verdringen.
Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, 2010.
———."Een Antwoord Op De Curaçaose Exodus?" Justitiële Verkenningen 28, no. 1 (2002):
9-17.
Oostindie, Gert and Inge Klinkers. Decolonising the Caribbean: Dutch Policies in a
Comparative Perspective. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003.
———. Knellende Koninkrijksbanden: Het Nederlandse Dekolonisatiebeleid in De Caraïben,
1940-2000 Vol. III 1975-2000. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001.
74
Oostindie, Gert and Peter Verton. Ki Sorto Di Reino?/What Kind of Kingdom?: Visies en
Verwachtingen van Antillianen en Arubanen Omtrent het Koninkrijk. Den Haag: SDU
Uitgevers, 1998.
Oostindie, Gert and Bert Paasman. "Dutch Attitudes Towards Colonial Empires, Indigenous
Cultures, and Slaves." Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 3, Americas (Spring, 1998):
pp. 349-355.
Orchard, Vivienne. "Culture as Opposed to what? Cultural Belonging in the Context of
National and European Identity." European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 4 (2002):
419-433.
Overheid.nl. "Statuut Voor Het Koninkrijk Der Nederlanden."
http://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0002154/geldigheidsdatum_20-03-2011 (accessed
March, 19, 2011).
Partij voor de Vrijheid. "De Antillen Maffia Binnen Het Koninkrijk?"
http://www.pvv.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1123&Itemid=1
(accessed March, 10, 2011).
———. "PVV Visie." http://www.pvv.nl/index.php/visie.html (accessed March, 10, 2011).
Pearce, Marsha. "Ruminations on the Concept of Caribbeanness."
http://www.caribbeanculturalstudies.com/marshapearce.html (accessed April, 22, 2010).
Puri, Shalini. The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural
Hybridity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Rutgers, Wim. Koloniale Taalpolitiek in Oost En West. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1997.
———.Schrijven is Zilver, Spreken is Goud: Oratuur, Auratuur en Literatuur van de
Nederlandse Antillen en Aruba. Utrecht: s.n., 1994.
Sharpe, Michael. "Globalisation and Migration: Post-Colonial Dutch Antillean and Aruban
Immigrant Political Incorporation in the Netherlands." Dialectical Anthropology 29, no. 3
(09, 2005): 291-314.
Sheller, Mimi. Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. London: Routledge,
2003.
Singh, Simboonath. "Resistance, Essentialism, and Empowerment in Black Nationalist
Discourse in the African Diaspora: A Comparison of the Back to Africa, Black Power,
and Rastafari Movements." Journal of African American Studies 8, no. 3 (Winter2004,
2004): 18-36.
Vermeulen, Hans and Rinus Penninx, eds. Immigrant Integration: The Dutch Case.
Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2000.
75
Willemsen, Glenn. Dagen van Gejuich en Gejubel: Viering en Herdenking van de Afschaffing
van de Slavernij in Nederland, Suriname en de Nederlandse Antillen. Den Haag:
Amrit/Ninsee, 2006.
Williams, Patrick and Laura Chrisman. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A
Reader. New York: Colombia University Press, 1994.
76