"The End of Tolerance"

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full article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11569485/site/newsweek/

The End of Tolerance
Farewell, multiculturalism. A cartoon backlash is pushing Europe to insist upon its values.
 

By Stefan Theil
Newsweek International
March 6, 2006 issue - The world has long looked upon the Dutch as the very model of a modern, multicultural society. Open and liberal, the tiny seagoing nation that invented the globalized economy in the 1600s prided itself on a history of taking in all comers, be they Indonesian or Turkish, African or Chinese.

How different things look today. Dutch borders have been virtually shut. New immigration is down to a trickle. The great cosmopolitan port city of Rotterdam just published a code of conduct requiring Dutch be spoken in public. Parliament recently legislated a countrywide ban on wearing the burqa in public. And listen to a prominent Dutch establishment figure describe the new Dutch Way with immigrants. "We demand a new social contract," says Jan Wolter Wabeke, High Court Judge in The Hague. "We no longer accept that people don't learn our language, we require that they send their daughters to school, and we demand they stop bringing in young brides from the desert and locking them up in third-floor apartments."

What's going on here? Weren't the Dutch supposed to be the nicest people on earth, the most tolerant nation in Europe, a melting pot for minorities and immigrants since the Renaissance? No longer, and in this the Dutch are once again at the forefront of changes in Europe. This time, the Dutch model for Europe is one of multiculturalism besieged, if not plain defunct.

This helps explain Europe's unusually robust reaction to the cartoon crisis, which continued last week with riots in Nigeria and Pakistan that have left over 100 dead. There were apologies, to be sure, for causing offense after a small Danish paper published a dozen cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. But on one point European leaders were united and bluntly clear: they would not tolerate any limits on European newspapers' rights to publish. "Freedom of speech is not up for negotiation," declared Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, summing up a consensus that has only grown stronger as the cries of outrage from the Muslim world grow louder.

Welcome to the end of tolerance, or at least to the nonnegotiable limits to what Europeans will tolerate. Whether it's the Netherlands' rediscovery of Dutch communal values, or the universal affirmations of free speech (to mock religion, or anything else), Europe is everywhere on the defensive. After decades of relatively unfettered immigration and cultural laissez faire when it came to accepting people of differing values and social mores, there are signs that a potentially ugly backlash is setting in. Even before Jyllands Posten published the cartoons last fall, Denmark's Minister of Cultural Affairs Brian Mikkelsen said, "We have gone to war against the multicultural ideology that says that everything is equally valid." These days, he speaks for most Europeans. Danes, and Dutch, and a few other countries might be well on their way to creating multiethnic societies. But make no mistake: they're no longer willing to tolerate a European melting pot—a broadly multicultural society—where different cultures live by widely different norms.

full article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11569485/site/newsweek/

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"The world has long looked upon the Dutch as the very model of a modern, multicultural society. Open and liberal, the tiny seagoing nation that invented the globalized economy in the 1600s prided itself on a history of taking in all comers, be they Indonesian or Turkish, African or Chinese."

"Weren't the Dutch supposed to be the nicest people on earth, the most tolerant nation in Europe"

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Rise of the Dutch Slave Trade:
Before the 1630s, Dutch participation in the Caribbean slave trade "was sporadic, if not ambivalent."[43] <http://www.caribseek.com/cgi-bin/go?URL=http://books.caribseek.com/Curacao/Commercial_History_of_Curacao/notes7.shtml&title=CaribSeek+Books+Curacao+Roots+Of+Our+Future> The first Dutch slaving expedition arrived in the Caribbean as early as 1606; in 1619 a Dutch ship delivered the first cargo of enslaved Africans to the British colony in Virginia.[44] <http://www.caribseek.com/cgi-bin/go?URL=http://books.caribseek.com/Curacao/Commercial_History_of_Curacao/notes7.shtml&title=CaribSeek+Books+Curacao+Roots+Of+Our+Future> The first WIC was formed in 1621 in part to control the African slave trade, giving the Dutch "a twenty-four year monopoly over trade with America and Africa from the Tropic of Cancer to the Cape of Good Hope,"[45] <http://www.caribseek.com/cgi-bin/go?URL=http://books.caribseek.com/Curacao/Commercial_History_of_Curacao/notes7.shtml&title=CaribSeek+Books+Curacao+Roots+Of+Our+Future> with military and naval backing from the Dutch States General.

Serious Dutch involvement in the slave trade began as the Dutch attempted to wrest the valuable sugar plantations along the Brazilian coast from the Portuguese between 1624 and 1654. WIC vessels seized several Portuguese outposts on Africa's Atlantic coast in the 1630s; they scored a major coup in 1637 when they took the largest Portuguese base and slave market, Ft. Elmira. This marked the beginning of the brief Dutch dominance of the international slave trade. The large amount of capital which Dutch merchants possessed, along with their strong fleet, allowed them to penetrate Africa "on a scale not yet achieved by the English or the French."[46] <http://www.caribseek.com/cgi-bin/go?URL=http://books.caribseek.com/Curacao/Commercial_History_of_Curacao/notes7.shtml&title=CaribSeek+Books+Curacao+Roots+Of+Our+Future> Expeditions into the interior were initially launched by small companies organized by traders who were looking for a quick return on their investments (as opposed to Dutch forays into the East Indies, which were organized by major capitalists who could sustain higher investment risks for longer periods). Soon the first WIC was organizing these expeditions and coordinating the shipments across the Atlantic.

If the groundwork for Dutch involvement in the slave trade was already laid in Africa well before the Peace of Westphalia, the 1648 cessation of hostilities between the Netherlands and Spain expanded opportunities. Between 1640 and 1662 Spain granted no asiento contracts, relying entirely on privateers to supply its American plantations. The Dutch consolidated their role in this period. The financial transactions of slaving were complex and required a heavy capital outlay that Spain did not have; private financiers in Amsterdam eagerly stepped in to provide the necessary financial backing. The extensive WIC fleet was used to transport the human cargo.

In principle, the Spanish Crown was opposed to doing business with foreign heretics; the Dutch, however, proved to be able negotiators and were not averse to greasing palms. They also skillfully played the Spanish off their rivals, threatening to sell slaves to the French, for example, and so increase the latter's economic power, if Spain did not purchase them. Many Dutch merchants already had representatives in Spanish ports to trade linens and other manufactured goods; soon human beings were added to the list of profitable commodities they were brokering, and the Dutch had become the main suppliers of slaves to the plantations of Spanish America. "The Dutch carried a high proportion of the seventeenth-century slave trade, and they remained an important source of supply into the eighteenth."[47] <http://www.caribseek.com/cgi-bin/go?URL=http://books.caribseek.com/Curacao/Commercial_History_of_Curacao/notes7.shtml&title=CaribSeek+Books+Curacao+Roots+Of+Our+Future>

Even after Spain began granting asiento contracts again in 1662 WIC ships continued to transport the human cargo. Although the WIC itself never actually held an asiento, several Dutch merchants and financiers that were closely affiliated with the Company did, and others played a major role in the trade. By 1670 the Amsterdam trading house of Balthazar & Joseph Coymans & Sons, who were WIC agents, were supplying a high percentage of the slaves to asiento holders via Curaçao under a subsidiary contract, a fact of which the Spanish Crown was well aware. Coymans had a particularly close working relationship with the WIC; some of its partners were also executive directors of the Company. Eager to eliminate the middleman, the WIC and Coymans engineered a series of maneuvers and the latter briefly obtained the asiento in 1685.[48] <http://www.caribseek.com/cgi-bin/go?URL=http://books.caribseek.com/Curacao/Commercial_History_of_Curacao/notes7.shtml&title=CaribSeek+Books+Curacao+Roots+Of+Our+Future> Coymans used also Curaçao as a base from which to deal in a wide variety of contraband merchandise with the Spanish American mainland; this close relationship between the two types of trade was common.

The Dutch slave trade was a vital support for the emerging Caribbean plantation economies that supplied Europe with valued agricultural commodities such as sugar, cotton and tobacco. "Instead of carrying on primary production of sugar themselves, the Dutch turned to supplying Caribbean sugar producers with capital and skills, and to trading in slaves."[49] <http://www.caribseek.com/cgi-bin/go?URL=http://books.caribseek.com/Curacao/Commercial_History_of_Curacao/notes7.shtml&title=CaribSeek+Books+Curacao+Roots+Of+Our+Future> Their role in the extremely profitable slave trade helped make the 1600s the "Golden Century" for the Netherlands. But Dutch financial participation in slaving was not limited to the WIC."Financiers in Amsterdam, Zeeland and elsewhere underwrote the slave trading ventures of other nations as well. The Danish West India Company, the Swedish African Company and the Brandenburg African Company all depended upon Dutch capital for their existence."[50] <http://www.caribseek.com/cgi-bin/go?URL=http://books.caribseek.com/Curacao/Commercial_History_of_Curacao/notes7.shtml&title=CaribSeek+Books+Curacao+Roots+Of+Our+Future> The Dutch mills in Amsterdam also processed most of the sugar from Portuguese colonies.

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source: http://books.caribseek.com/Curacao/Commercial_History_of_Curacao/rise-of-the-dutch-slave-trade.shtml

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The Dutch consolidated their role in this period. The financial transactions of slaving were complex and required a heavy capital outlay that Spain did not have; private financiers in Amsterdam eagerly stepped in to provide the necessary financial backing.

The Dutch carried a high proportion of the seventeenth-century slave trade, and they remained an important source of supply into the eighteenth.

The Dutch slave trade was a vital support for the emerging Caribbean plantation economies that supplied Europe with valued agricultural commodities such as sugar, cotton and tobacco. "Instead of carrying on primary production of sugar themselves, the Dutch turned to supplying Caribbean sugar producers with capital and skills, and to trading in slaves.

Their role in the extremely profitable slave trade helped make the 1600s the "Golden Century" for the Netherlands. But Dutch financial participation in slaving was not limited to the WIC."Financiers in Amsterdam, Zeeland and elsewhere underwrote the slave trading ventures of other nations as well. The Danish West India Company, the Swedish African Company and the Brandenburg African Company all depended upon Dutch capital for their existence.