| dc.description.abstract | "The period leading up to the parliamentary elections in the Netherlands on March 15, 2017
was tense. Would the Netherlands also follow the shift towards nationalism? In 2016 the United
States elected Donald Trump and the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. With
other elections following in Europe in 2017, the world looked at the Dutch elections to see if the
right-wing nationalist Freedom Party (PVV) of Geert Wilders would win or if it could be stopped .
When the first results came in, some international press was quick to report that Wilders far right
was beaten 2. The election results are more complex, though. They mostly show that the country is
divided. The ruling coalition has gotten a historic beating, losing half of their seats. In general the
country made a shift to the right, with other right parties also taking over some of Wilders rhetoric3.
On the other side of the political spectrum, there are parties that strongly oppose nationalist
sentiment and also won seats. The Green Left party (GroenLinks) reached its highest seat count in
the party s history, going from 4 to 14 seats. As did the Party for the Animals (Partij voor de Dieren,
PvdD), going from 2 to 5 seats.
The Dutch political situation is not unique. Many European countries have influential rightwing
nationalist parties. These movements can be seen as reactions to increased insecurities and the
loss of a sense of community, which Bauman (2001a) describes in his work. These insecurities are a
result of the processes of economic globalization, or neoliberalism, and increased migration
(Bauman 2001a, 4). These processes have undermined the nation-state and one way of dealing with
that is trying to take back control , which was the slogan for Brexit.
In my opinion, Both the PVV, GroenLinks and PvdD are the responses of the same
globalization process and the associated insecurities (such as the loss of (the feeling of) community).
However, the way of responding, is very different, whereas the PVV focusses at the national borders,
both physically and socially, GroenLinks and the PvdD take a more transnational or even
cosmopolitan approach.
GroenLinks and PvdD seek to oppose economic globalization, but also go against nationalist
sentiment. Especially GroenLinks leader Jesse Klaver has declared his party as an alternative for
right-wing populism. In a speech prepared for the GroenLinks congress on December 16, 2016 Klaver
stated: The insecurity and anger of people is a direct consequence of the continual increasing
social-economic inequality. 4 For Klaver this inequality is the result of thirty years of economic
globalization and neoliberal policy. PvdD leader Marianne Thieme has recently published a book how
the political focus on market liberalization and economic growth has led to the climate change
problems of today.5
Although being a national party, active within the Dutch political system, GroenLinks is part
of the European Green Party, supports European integration and is active in action against global
climate change. Climate change is one of the most important issues for the PvdD as well. The party
states that it does not just represent Westerners and their money , but that everything it does has
a planet-wide focus .6
It is not surprising that the members of these parties, the participants of this research, do
not have a strong feeling of nationalist sentiment comparable to that of right-wing nationalists, most
participants do not feel national identity to be of great importance and when they do, they define it
in inclusive terms. More important are cosmopolitan ideals that are more about solidarity across
national borders. This view is complementary to the work of political and social scientists such as
Beck (2006) and Held (1995). They argue that today s issues like economic globalization, but also
climate change and migration, cannot be dealt with by nation-states. They call for a move towards a
more cosmopolitan way to organize society. Can cosmopolitanism return a sense of community as
nationalism does, though? For this I also draw on the work of Anderson (2006) and Gellner (1983).
The PvdD and GroenLinks both were rewarded for their explicit cosmopolitan manifestos as
they both won seats in the elections. For my participants, the cosmopolitan ideals of the parties were important in the choice for the party. Some of them explicitly became involved with the party
as a statement against rising nationalist sentiment. One of my participants, for example, confessed
to me that she was one of the many people that signed up to become a member of GroenLinks after
Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States. This research gives an insight into a
growing group of supporters of cosmopolitan politics opposed to growing nationalist sentiment.
Central to this group is the question of how to create or return a sense of community within
the group and on a broader, societal level. The right-wing nationalists strive towards a strict national
identity in exclusive, ethnic terms, but how does the other side of the political spectrum find a
solution to the lost sense of community in society? GroenLinks executed an election campaign with
the primary goal of creating a movement . With the use of activist terms and methods the party
managed to get many supporters out of their homes, away from their computers and into massive
political gatherings and onto the streets. These methods were new in the Dutch political context and
it was interesting to see how the campaign worked. GroenLinks campaign was successful in that it
managed to win the party s largest election result. In my opinion, looking at my participants, it was
also successful in creating a sense of community among its supporters, although maybe not as much
as the party would have liked.
The PvdD, as a smaller party, did not have such a campaign, but the members of the party
still do have a strong sense of a community. This comes from a strong shared ideology of
consumption behavior. Talking about being vegan, sharing recipes and sharing tips to reduce ones
ecological footprint help in creating a community, because there is a shared sense of risk of climate
change and a shared idea about the measures that need to be taken.
On a broader, societal, level especially GroenLinks sees the need to return a lost sense of
community, although the party made this turn in policy recently. GroenLinks is struggling to lose a
reputation of being a left-elitist party of well-off highly educated people. This struggle is visible, for
example, in the party s internal discussion on holding referendums: a recent vote of GroenLinks
members against the use of referendums shows that there can be a distrust of the general public by
members. Nonetheless, GroenLinks has experimented, and has vouched to experiment in the future,
with a new form of democracy, deliberative democracy. The goal of such new ways of democracy is
to strengthen citizenship and citizenship strengthens community, a community that is based on a
common vision of governing together. In a community of citizens there is more place for
cosmopolitanism, because nationality and ethnicity are of less importance. The discussion on
deliberative democracy is mostly theoretical, because GroenLinks only recently has begun to
experiment with it and only a few of my participants actually had heard of it.
10
The buildup of my thesis is as follows: first I explain the methods I used during my research
period, the chapter after that gives more context on the political and societal situation in the West,
but specifically the Netherlands, then I describe the history and ideology of the Dutch Green parties.
After these first chapters my participants take on a more central role: first I will describe and explain
the way my participants experience national identity and how they combine this with their
cosmopolitan ideals. Part of that chapter is a more in-depth discussion of the future of the nationstate.
The longest chapter, Green Communities , shows how the two parties and their members are
creating a community among their own supporters. In my final chapter, I shortly summarize my
findings and I discuss deliberative democracy." | |
