Suchergebnisse

Article in: Timo Myllyntaus, Economic Crises and Restructuring History. Experiences of Small Countries (St. Katharinen 1998). ; For countries like Belgium or the Netherlands it was impossible to formulate a foreign policy that guaranteed freedom and independence during the interwar period. It was also impossible to realise an independent monetary or trade policy. The economic problem of such highly developed, small countries was that their economies were dependent of trade with number of countries, which during these years became members, sometimes the centre of separated economic blocks. Participating in one of these blocks would not only be disastrous for the relations with vital partners outside it, but also would threaten the political independence.

Based on a study of three Belgian and Dutch government formations, this article examines the relationship between the formation of government coalition's and the formulation of public policy. The government formation process is disaggregated into three stages : the selection of participants in the bargaining process, the negotiation of the governmental agreement and the allocation of portfolios. These stages are then discussed in the context of a schema which focusses on the effects of contextual, relational and outcome components. By modifying assumptions made in traditional coalition studies, the government formation process is seen as involving the transferof issues from institutional arenas to a non-institutional arena in which bargaining processes are used to map and develop issue specific areas of consensus.

Children were central to Dutch and Belgian colonial projects. Children and youth were the objects of colonial interventions issued by missionaries and officials. However, children could also become actors who produced change in a colonial context. Crucial in colonial policies towards children was the separation of children from their parents, communities and/or culture ('child separation') in all kinds of forms - temporary or permanent, far from home or close by, in contact with their own community or cut off from it - and to various degrees of coercion (voluntary, from a situation of dependence, enforced with punishment or violence). Child separation projects could involve adoption, foster parenting, 'apprenticeships' serving a household, boarding schools or day schools. It could concern children from the local elite, but also children who ended up on the margins of their own communities or were even bought out of slavery. Child separation was never about education only, but always imposed specific morals and life styles on its subjects as well. It caused profound fault lines in colonised families and communities. For colonial politics, it was key to controlling, influencing and disciplining the colonised population ('governmentality'). In the case of children of ethnically mixed descent, child separation often involved policing hierarchical racialised boundaries in the colony; in the case of indigenous children, it aimed at transforming the colonised population. Christian missions were pivotal in child separation projects. This special issue, therefore, pleads for a more central place of Catholic and Protestant missions in the analysis of Dutch colonial history, comparable to Belgian historiography. Finally, it is precisely these (missionary) colonial projects, often labeled as 'soft' or 'civilising', that have passed unnoticed into post-colonial discourses, organisations and practices, such as transnational adoption or surrogacy, and countless development projects in which children, detached from their own ...