Category: Think Piece

By Daniel Kent-Carrasco

In recent years, the story of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) has become well known. Constituted as a network of mostly male, upper class, elite intellectual circles of militant liberal persuasion, the CCF was a front for anticommunist cultural activism and a powerful vehicle for the cultural ideals associated with the Free World, liberal democracy and anti-totalitarianism promoted from the North Atlantic. In the Third World, a transcontinental arena that took shape at par with the Cold War, the CCF’s heritage was ambivalent. Between 1950 and 1967, it failed to establish itself beyond elite circles of capital cities like Beirut, Delhi, Mexico City or Cairo. However, as we will see below, it contributed to a more subtle and enduring feat: the establishment of a public sphere of debate defined by anti-utopian and “post-ideological” principles of the early Cold War, the coordinates of which continue to entrap the contours of intellectual debate in many Third World countries. In essence, these principles rejected the ideological enthusiasm of interwar intellectual debates in favor of a moderate sphere of discussion marked by the open dismissal of utopian ideals, now identified with the evils of authoritarianism.

From its moment of inception in June 1950, the CCF aimed at becoming a transcontinental organization. In November, James Burnham—member of the CCF’s US delegation and infamous promoter of Containment doctrine—announced that he had been contacted by an “Indian friend” who wished to help the Congress expand its activities in the recently created Republic of India. This “friend” was none other than Minoo Masani, an important socialist leader of anticommunist leanings who had been in communication with Burnham for some years. In that same meeting, Burnham also suggested the importance of celebrating “some kind of conference” in Latin America, “maybe in Mexico”, that could help advance the cause of the CCF in the region. Both suggestions were celebrated by the meeting’s attendants, all of whom were eager to contribute to the creation of a broad anticommunist intellectual front across the emerging arena of the Third World (“Congress Pour la Liberté de la Culture. Séance du 27 Novembre 1950”, International Association for Cultural Freedom Records [(IACFR), box 56, file 7].

Shortly after, the CCF consolidated its presence in both countries. In January 1951, Masani headed the creation of the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom (ICCF). Based in Bombay, the Committee soon set out to finance and organize a meeting of writers, artists and intellectuals from across the “free countries” of Asia, a label that spoke not of any postcolonial political reality, but rather of a stringent anticommunist paranoia (Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom, “A Working Paper prepared in connection with a preliminary meeting of writers and others from the countries of South, South-East and East Asia” IACFR, 173, 5). Fueled by the emerging international anti-totalitarian consensus of the day, along with the support of peers in the central office of the CCR in Paris, the event brought together intellectuals from the North Atlantic and important representatives of Indian public debate such as B. R. Ambedkar, Stephen Spender, Norman Thomas, Salvador de Madariaga, Asoka Mehta, and Jayaprakash Narayan. The Indian branch of the CCF grew considerably during the following years. It rallied the support of writers and scholars such as the poets Nissim Ezekiel and Buddhadeva Bose, and writers Eric Da Costa, Sachchidanand Vatsyayana, Rajni Kothari, and S. C. Dube. Its promoters also gained ground in the international arena: Masani was soon integrated to its international Executive Committee and Jayaprakash Narayan was included into the prestigious list of Présidents d’honneur of the Congress, along with stalwarts of western liberal culture such as John Dewey, Benedetto Croce and Karl Jaspers. In 1960 its Delhi office was recognized as the CCF’s Asia regional headquarters, turning the ICCF into a continental enterprise.

         During those same years, the CCF also secured its presence in Mexico City. Thanks to the joint effort of the Spanish writer Julián Gorkin and the Mexican editor Rodrigo García Treviño, the Mexican Association for Cultural Freedom (AMLC) was created in 1954. The group, initially focused on fighting the “dictatorship” led by communist artists like Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros in the realm of Mexican culture (“Activities of the Latin American Committees of the Congress for Cultural Freedom During the Last Six Months of 1954”, IACFR, 57a, 1), garnered support from important members of the country’s cosmopolitan intelligentsia, including figures such as Rufino Tamayo, Alfonso Reyes, Octavio Paz, Margarita Michelena and Daniel Cosío Villegas. The AMLC’s highpoint came in 1956 with the celebration of the CCF’s Interamerican Conference in Mexico City. One of the biggest events of the CCF outside European soil, the Conference brought together figures such as Germán Arciniegas, Benjamín Carrión, Rómulo Gallegos, John Dos Passos, Ralph Waldo Ellison, Frank Tannenbaum, Roger Baldwin and Luis Alberto Sánchez.

By the end of the 1950s, Burnham and his colleagues in Paris had ample motive to celebrate the growth of CCF branches in India and Mexico. In 1958, John Hunt, undercover CIA agent and CCF Secretary, acknowledged not only the local importance of both the ICCF and the AMLC, but also their relevance as platforms for the spread of the militant faith of Cold War liberalism in other countries like Ceylon, Burma, Brazil, and Colombia (Activities of the National Committees of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. 1957, and Comité Exécutif International, 18-19 Janvier, 1958. Brief by John C. Hunt, IACFR 58, 4).

            In both countries, the thrust and funds provided by the CCF strengthened the consolidation of a new front of elite cultural activism marked by a growing—and at times delusional—conviction of the political importance of the intellectual. In a text published in Foreign Affairs in 1955, Masani claimed that intellectuals in Asia held more power than the “landed aristocracy and the capitalist landowners” in “making and unmaking governments”. In virtue of their links with the West and their ability to represent the more modern and cosmopolitan sectors of their societies, Masani assured his western readers that elite intellectuals represented the true “ruling class” of Asia. This fantasy fed on the ideas of western authors interested in the “new countries” of Asia and Africa, such as Edward Shils, who saw intellectuals as the mediators between “tradition” and “modernity”. Echoing the defense of the liberal premise that promoted the autonomy of the intellectual regarding political power, rejecting “ideological possession”, Third World defendants of the CCF posed that the cultural arena should work as the bedrock for the creation of a truly free society. In the line of authors such as Daniel Bell, these men were fearful of the monster of “ideology”, which they saw as the greatest obstacle for the emergence of a rational public arena of debate and intellectual exchange.

On the other side of the world, defendants of the CCF in Mexico shared Masani’s faith in the crucial role intellectuals were destined to play in the defense of the Free World. For these Mexican intellectuals, this was a way of affirming their belonging in the flow of Western culture. They conceived their country, and its geopolitical region Latin America, as the “spiritual prolongation” of Europe. Mexican intellectuals, claimed Gorkin, acknowledged their debt to European culture and enthusiastically accepted the “defense of Europe and its freedoms” as a commonly shared mission (“Report by Julian Gorkin on the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Latin America”, IACFR, 57, 5). These claims echoed the longings of young cosmopolitan intellectuals like Octavio Paz, who in 1950 claimed triumphantly that Mexicans saw themselves “for the first time in history” as being “contemporary with all men”. Shedding the cloak of revolutionary nationalism defended by previous Mexican intellectuals, members of these younger elites fervently pursued the dream of becoming integrated in the mainstream of Western cultural production arbitrated from the capital cities of the North Atlantic.

During the 1960s, the CCF moved beyond the realm of literary and artistic culture and ushered a platform for the promotion of intellectual debates linked to the ideal of “modernization” among elite academic circles in India and Mexico. Central to the agenda of development promoted from the North Atlantic during the postwar years, “modernization” was seen by intellectuals and policymakers across the world as the recipe for overcoming “traditional” socioeconomic constraints and advancing along the road of industrial capitalism and liberal democracy. This theory cemented a new transcontinental ideology that justified North Atlantic intervention across the Third World in the name of progress and development, thus serving as the geopolitical complement to the “post-utopian” militant liberalism of the early Cold War. In India, the Congress funded the activities of authors such as Asoka Mehta and Rajni Kothari, both of whom participated actively in its activities and promoted links and exchanges with scholars in the North Atlantic such as Myron Weiner, Louis P. Hartz and Edward Shils (“Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom. Calcutta Centre. Report of Activities during 1966”, IACFR, 179, 1). The CCF took Mexico as a standpoint to rally scholars from Mexico—including Jaime García Terrés, Juan Marichal, Víctor Urquidi and Daniel Cosío Villegas—and colleagues from across Latin America—such as Orland Fals-Borda, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Peter Heintz  and Gino Germani—who became invested in the defense of values and ideas central to the geopolitical transcontinental project of development and modernization (“Planning Committee Latin America—Mexico, 28-31 Oct. 1964”, IACFR, 215, 9).

As is well known, the CCF swiftly collapsed in 1967 following a series of journalistic revelations that documented its links to the CIA. Its reputation was badly damaged and its standing across the world was greatly diminished. These revelations coincided with the heightening of international apprehensions regarding US cultural interventionism in the Third World. In Mexico, the thrust of the Cuban Revolution, and the growing awareness of the meeting points between US anticommunist agendas and the repressive stance of the national government, opened new spaces for the emergence of renewed leftist and anti-US positions among intellectuals, scholars, and artists. In India, the growth of communist and other left groups, combined with the alarm generated by the invasion of Vietnam, strengthened the rejection of cultural and political US presence across the country. The eclipse of the CCF thus coincided with the beginning of a new stage of the global Cold War, marked by the open rejection of supposedly “post-ideological” stances and the weakening of the transnational liberal cultural and intellectual activism of the early postwar era.

Despite its boisterous descent in the late 1960s, during nearly two decades, the CCF served as an important forum for debate and cultural activism in both Mexico and India, shaping posterior trajectories of intellectual and artistic debates in both countries. As Patrick Iber pointed out, the CCF facilitated the consolidation of a sphere of cultural activity on the margins of the state, headed by cultural entrepreneurs. Embodied by figures like Masani, Gorkin or García Treviño, this new cultural type served to promote ideological positions related to anticommunist consensus of North Atlantic intellectuals. These agendas, focused on the need to succeed in the “free market of ideas”, linked with the fear of “totalitarianism” and the ideal of “modernization”, contributed to the consolidation of a new liberal intellectual dogma that defined the contours of academic, cultural, and political debate in both countries following the 1970s. In a global arena marked by the impact of decolonization, and the militant assertion of diverse strands of anti-imperialism linked to the rejection of old European and new American forms of influence, the CCF acted as an international forum for the defense of this liberal dogma, which lured some of the most visible and celebrated cultural and intellectual figures of countries like Mexico and India. Clinging to the old modernist defense of the separation of the realms of culture and politics, its defendants contributed to the growth and global spread of a new cultural horizon focused on the ideals of freedom, individuality, and elite cosmopolitanism. In this sense, the history of the CCF in locations like India and Mexico sheds light upon the strong linkages and continuities between the militant faith of Cold War liberalism and the emergence, and global triumph, of neoliberalism in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

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Daniel Kent-Carrasco is a historian of Mexico, India and the reflected and interlinked histories of the Third World. He obtained a PhD degree at King’s College, London. He teaches at UNAM, in Mexico City, and is part of the editorial board of Revista Común. He is currently working on a biography of the itinerant scientist and revolutionary Pandurang Khankhoje.

Edited by Matias X. Gonzalez

Featured Image: Victoria Terminus in Bombay in late 1930’s, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

By Vigdis Andrea Evang

Who has not, at some point, been frustrated by a language barrier? An article with a tantalizing abstract in English but no translation; a Spanish book reviewed in Italian; a 19^th-century German-language tome hiding, somewhere within its vast bulk, just the one date you need… In moments of frustration like these, we often ask ourselves why anyone would publish a brilliant piece of scholarship in a language inaccessible to most of their colleagues. What use is an article in Bulgarian, say, to me? Why not just publish in English?

As I set out to write about idéhistorie, the Scandinavian cousin to English-language intellectual history, I will display works and publications ensconced behind a particular language barrier, one which allows for Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian to communicate while holding most other languages at bay. In doing so, I intend to familiarize the Anglophone reader with a field that has grown on the other side of that barrier, shielded there the way a wall may shield a garden from the wind. Today, the increased use of English opens breaches in that barrier, allowing more people access – but, perhaps, putting the garden at risk.

What, then, is idéhistorie? What is its relation to intellectual history? What the two disciplines share is a propensity to raise just that question, searching for a self-definition without necessarily arriving at a definitive answer. Idéhistorie has been used to refer to a vast vestige of the old university Bildung: a vibrant and venerable branch of the history of science, a critique of modernity, a high school subject, a student-led Marxist initiative in the spirit of ’68, a useful master’s degree for aspiring journalists and editors, and finally whatever one imagines Michel Foucault was doing, as the latter is frequently given the epithet idéhistoriker; one who practices idéhistorie (In fact, Foucault is technically a failed idéhistoriker, as his doctoral thesis at the University of Uppsala was rejected by professor of idéhistorie Sven Lindroth).

If the above description seems more eclectic than most, it is because it refers to not one scholarly tradition but several. Idéhistorie is practiced throughout the Nordic countries in related yet different ways. It emerged in Sweden first, then Norway, then Denmark (I regret I cannot discuss Finland here; the Scandinavian languages are mutually intelligible and form a language spectrum, whereas Finnish comes from a different language group). However eclectic, all forms of idéhistorie share an interest in past thought, in the ways how people have sought to understand the world. As a student, I learned that an idéhistoriker should make the unfamiliar familiar, seeking to understand past ways of thinking now foreign to us, and thereby make the familiar unfamiliar, denaturalizing the givens of the world of today.

To summarize the approach of idéhistorie, if we want to understand something, we should look less at how it is defined and more at how it has been and is currently being practiced. However, before we consider the paths idéhistorie took in the Scandinavian countries, it is necessary to clarify how similar and how different the three languages are.

By analogy, the relationship between Norwegian and Swedish can be compared to that between Scots and English. In this analogy, Norwegian would be Scots, as it is the smaller and historically the less institutionally grounded language. Norwegian and Danish have a relationship not unlike that of modern English to the way English was written in the 18^th century. Norwegians historically used Danish as a written language and, from the 19^th century onwards, instituted a series of language reforms. The speakers of each language can understand each other with relative ease. This intelligibility allows for the existence of a radio program likeNorsken, svensken og dansken, in which a Swedish, a Norwegian, and a Danish journalist discuss current events, each from their particular point of view, for a mixed Scandinavian audience. The boundaries between the three languages are fuzzy.

Regarding idéhistorie, when the journal Lychnos was first published in 1936, serving as a yearbook for the field of idéhistoria in Sweden, it was with clear inspiration from history of ideas as practiced in the US. Its reach surpassed national borders, as the Scandinavian language spectrum allows for a wider readership than the national one. However, despite this connection, the development of idéhistorie in Norway and Denmark would follow quite a different path from that of Sweden.

In Sweden, from its inception in the 1930s, idéhistoria was closely connected to the history of science. Anton Jansson writes of idéhistoria in its early period as “a relatively broadly conceived discipline, with connections to positivist history of science as well as hermeneutic historiography.” He adds that “a literary but accessible style was expected from a budding idéhistoriker” and that many found their place as public intellectuals. This type of idéhistoria was particularly representative of the University of Uppsala. In Lund, the professor of theoretical philosophy Gunnar Aspelin practiced a more historically grounded approach to his field than the analytical approach of most of his colleagues. Through him, Swedish idéhistoria gained a connection to the history of philosophy; an element, as we shall see, much more present in Norway and Denmark than in Sweden.

In Norway, the first professor of idéhistorie did not have a background in philosophy but in European literature. Andreas H. Winsnes became a professor of idéhistorie in 1946. His aim was to counter the positivist-adjacent turn taking place in the philosophy department and to preserve a classical European university education in which Christianity and Antiquity played a pivotal role. From this rather conservative starting point, idéhistorie in Norway later maintained its critique of modernity while changing its ideological tenor. By the time the journal Arr (“Scar”) was created in 1989, idéhistorie had become a place where students read Lyotard, Foucault, and McLuhan on the dissolution of modernity.

In its shift to the left among idéhistorikere, Denmark went further than Norway. The appointment of the theologian Johannes Sløk as professor of idéhistorie at the University of Aarhus in 1967 similarly took place against a backdrop of an analytical turn in the philosophy department, which intellectual history was meant to balance or counter. However, this kind of classical Bildung clashed with the spirit of 1968. By 1972, Marx was an obligatory reading, and Sløk took a leave of absence. When he returned in 1974, it was not to decide the ideological profile of his department but to teach Kierkegaard. In 1983, when idéhistorie struggled to stay afloat, the journal Slagmark (“Battlefield”) was created. There, Habermas and Lyotard first appeared in the Danish translation: a sign of changing times.

What does this short survey of the history of the discipline in the three countries tell us? First, there is a great deal of variety within this area of study; more, I believe, than many Scandinavian idéhistorikere are aware of. Second, idéhistorie is a field of long-standing and deep roots, one which is more frequently associated with philosophy than with history departments – even as it defines itself in opposition to the former. Consequently, in Scandinavia, it would not be unusual to invite “historikere og idéhistoriere” to attend a conference. In Anglophone academia, it would make less sense to invite “historians and intellectual historians.” Idéhistorie is very much its own discipline.

Another thread to pick out from this short history of idéhistorie is that which connects the journals Lychnos, Slagmark, and Arr. As language is much under consideration in this essay, and as much has been made of the linguistic overlap between the Scandinavian languages, the reader might wonder whether these journals live up to expectations and publish in their neighboring languages. Indeed, they do, though they could stand to do it more often. Yet that is not the most intriguing thing about them.

Lychnos, as a yearbook, is a useful window into the world of Swedish idéhistoria, as it includes not only articles and book reviews but also descriptions of PhD dissertations. One finds the most English here out of the three journals, including abstracts and some articles in the language. Lychnos is usually, but not always, themed. Last year’s issue was dedicated to the baroque, the one before that to Latin America and Europe, preceded by internationalization. The Danish journal Slagmark appears more frequently, always with a given theme. The last few issues have been dedicated to medievalism, the materiality of the life sciences, and Karl Marx. Norwegian Arr, too, has themed editions, offering its readers such diverse topics as education, travel, the countryside, emotions, and the pig.

While the reader will hopefully be able to discern something of the tone and tenor of these publications, this is not the most interesting thing about them either. Their most intriguing trait is that they are read by people who are not academics.

Let us return to the question that I opened this essay with: what use is an article most academics cannot read? While an article in Bulgarian may be of no use to me or one in Norwegian of no use to my Bulgarian colleague, this, I believe, is looking at the situation from the wrong angle. Rather than ask what use an article is to us, we should ask what use it is to readers of Norwegian and Bulgarian – most of whom are not academics. The humanities cannot thrive in a closed circuit, passing from one academic to the next. What good does it do society if a small, isolated group is highly knowledgeable about its past?

To fill their public function, humanists must be able and encouraged to make themselves accessible to the public. “The public” is not some nebulous mass but consists of many groups of people who read and listen to certain things through certain channels, in certain languages. This need not be prohibitive. Journals with a close connection to academic and non-academic audiences in a smaller language than English can allow English-speaking scholars, too, to reach those audiences through translation. When Lychnos functions as a nexus for idéhistoria in Sweden, or Arr receives an award for its style and accessibility, that is a potential boon for all who publish there, no matter what their first language might be.

Even if we were all to agree that it is best to write both in English and our many other languages, we should choose which language to use for each publication only after careful consideration of who will benefit the most from reading it. Even if we were all to pledge to translate more often and explore the many gardens half-hidden by language barriers, it is not enough to appeal to the virtue of individuals when larger forces are in play.

Nobody is calling for abolishing all languages but the lingua academica. Yet smaller languages may still lose ground as academics feel a growing pressure to publish in renowned international journals – that is, almost invariably in English. The ability to write academically in one’s first language is not inherent but a skill that must be cultivated and maintained. If academics become incapable of expressing themselves in a given language, that language will suffer the lack. No idéhistoriker is blind to the importance of concepts, nor are intellectual historians deaf to the relevance of language. Do we think it is unimportant whose words must be italicized?

The increased use of English in an era of digital connection means there are now many formerly secret gardens to explore. The precedents we set now, the practices we adopt, are likely to cast long shadows. There is a danger; that a future generation of English-speaking academics will find themselves cut off from many of the societies they are supposed to serve, unaware of the loss that has taken place just on the other side of the linguistic garden wall. The possibility is that of opening a door in that wall, connecting without destroying.

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Vigdis Andrea Evang is a PhD Researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

Edited by Artur Banaszewski

Featured Image: Geiranger in der Tiefe. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

By Lotte van Hasselt

In the spring of 1688, an important newspaper in the Dutch Republic reported that a group of six to eight men and women “who had impersonated French refugees” were sentenced to walk through the streets of The Hague until they were standing outside the city gates. The whole time, they were carrying a sheet of paper on the front and back of their body, reading: “valsche vluchtelingen” or “false refugees”.

Who were these ‘false’ refugees? And if these people were ‘false’ refugees, who were the ‘true’ refugees? I will try to answer these questions by examining events that took place in the years preceding 1688. During this tumultuous time, a large number of French Protestants, also known as Huguenots, fled France and settled in the Dutch Republic. In the process of deciding who deserved support and administering charity, a growing concern emerged around the idea of  the ‘true’ refugee. 

Since the 1660s, the Catholic king of France, Louis XIV (1643-1715) had increasingly aimed for unity in his realm, including religious unity. As a result, French Protestants, who had formed an important minority in France since the Reformation, were more and more constrained in their religious and public life. Their oppression culminated in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

The Revocation meant that Protestants could no longer attend Protestant services, their ministers had to leave France within fourteen days, all Protestants schools and churches were to be closed or destroyed, and emigration was prohibited for lay Protestants. Despite the prohibition on leaving, many Huguenots fled France to neighbouring Protestant countries, including the Dutch Republic. 

To begin with, towns and provinces in the Dutch Republic, as elsewhere in Europe, were interested in attracting uprooted French refugees. This hospitable attitude seems to have derived principally from the expectation that refugees would benefit the local economy. In the Dutch Republic, many towns, among them Rotterdam, Middelburg, Leiden, Groningen and Amsterdam promised extensive privileges to French refugees if they settled in their town.These privileges usually included free citizenship, free admission to the guilds or permission to work outside them, and exemption from certain city taxes. 

Many towns publicly advertised privileges they granted to the French refugees. Leiden and Middelburg, for example, announced them in the Gazette de Leyde. Newspapers in French published in the Dutch Republic were smuggled to France where they reached their intended audience. In 1686, the provincial authorities of Groningen also promoted the benefits of settling in the region by highlighting the healthy air, fertile soil and favourable location of the town near rivers.

To make sure that the French refugees knew about these benefits, the province printed five hundred copies in French and send them to Tjaert Gerlacius (1628-1694), deputy of Groningen at the Dutch States General (the States General was an assembly of delegates from the seven provincial states). Gerlacius was to distribute newspapers among French refugees who often arrived in the western provinces of the Dutch Republic. With these advertisements, towns hoped to attract French craftsmen who could boost local industries, such as textile manufacturing. 

The expected place of French Protestants in Dutch society was evaluated in terms of how they met economic needs of provincial and municipal governments. However, their economic value was not the sole motive for granting privileges to the Huguenots. In the announcements of extended privileges, town councils imposed specific criteria on who could claim these privileges. Most criteria did not reflect economic expectations about the Huguenots; instead, they were mostly concerned with the Huguenot’s predicament as persecuted, displaced, and Reformed. 

That the recipient should be Reformed is not surprising. Reformed Protestantism was the official public religion in the Dutch Republic at the time. Other confessions were tolerated as long as they did not worship publicly. The Reformed identity of the French refugees also related to other criteria for privileges. The Huguenots fled France because of religious persecutions and, in the eyes of the Reformed community in the Dutch Republic, had suffered for the “true” faith. According to town councils and provincial states, the persecution and subsequent displacement of the Huguenots was a sign of steadfastness and loyalty to the Reformed church, making privileges and charity a reasonable response. 

The criteria set by town councils reveal historical conceptions of what a ‘true’ refugee supposed to be. This definition is illustrated by a disagreement in Groningen between the surgeons’ guild and the town council regarding privileges for the French Protestants. In 1682, the guild complained to the council about the large number of surgeons present in Groningen, caused by the influx of French refugees who were able to practice without being a member of the guild. The town council argued that in this case it was not against regulations, because the “foreigners” were “persecuted because of their religion.” Thereby, the town council asserted that one of the reasons the Huguenots deserved and could claim support, was because they had been persecuted. 

In other meeting minutes, which record the decision-making process of town councils, as well as in requests for privileges by the Huguenots themselves, these criteria were further defined. Recurrent themes in discussions around privileges for the French refugees were the persecution in France, the hardships during their flight, the abandonment of all their possessions in France, and their loyalty to the Reformed Protestant faith.These descriptions of the Huguenots’ plight indicate who was eligible for these privileges and ‘deserved’ charity—and who did not. 

These considerations are further explicated in a pamphlet published by the town and province of Groningen in 1686. It is the same pamphlet in which the town promoted the benefits of settling in Groningen by describing the healthy air and fertile soil. It also outlined the privileges Groningen had granted to French refugees. The town council paid specific attention to those who, in their opinion, abused the charity extended to the Huguenots. They were especially concerned that Catholics would pose as Reformed refugees and would receive privileges they did not ‘deserve’. 

To be sure that no Roman-Catholics, under the pretense of being Reformed refugees, will receive any money, the States of Groningen have agreed / that the refugees who will come to Groningen / will be examined and interrogated, and if it is found that someone uses the name of the Reformed refugees unjustly / will be punished as an example, to which end the States of Groningen have agreed and resolved and will make this known through publication / in order to make it known to everyone [author’s translation].

This pamphlet also shows how the organization of charity and privileges, especially for displaced people, emphasized religious demarcation lines and identities. The conception of ‘true’ refugees did not include Catholics in the eyes of the Reformed community. Notions around the concept of refugee were hence confessionally determined. The fear that the privileges would fall into the hands of ‘false’ refugees was also prompted by disappointment about the economic contributions of the Huguenots.

David van der Linden has argued in his 2016 book Experiencing Exile that many French refugees had difficulty making ends meet and had to rely on local poor relief. This situation made town councils even more alert to individuals who, according to them, unjustly claimed the extended privileges. The town council of Groningen stated that incoming refugees would be examined and questioned to make sure that nobody could pose as a Reformed refugee. Whoever pretended to be a Reformed refugee would be punished. The pamphlet does not state what kind of punishment the ‘false’ refugee had to expect. However, my initial example of publicly shaming ‘false’ refugees in The Hague provides an illustration of the kinds of punishment that could be imposed. 

By combining the pamphlets, meeting minutes and correspondence of town councils and provincial states, a broader picture emerges of what was meant by ‘false’ refugees in the context of late seventeenth-century The Hague. The men and women who were led through the streets of this town, wearing a sign reading ‘false refugees’, did not meet the criteria set by town councils and provincial states, and were seen as having likely claimed charity unjustly. In the complex process of negotiating who deserved charity, a concept of ‘refugee’ was shaped. Discussions around privileges for the French Protestants in the Dutch Republic show that there was a relatively organized perception of religious persecution as a premise for helping displaced people. 

This  premise was the result of earlier migrations and refugee communities in the Dutch Republic, which shaped narratives around Reformed exile. Persecution and displacement triggered the need for asylum, protection and support. In the process of administering and negotiating who could claim these categories, concepts of ‘true’ or ‘deserving’ versus ‘false’ or ‘undeserving’ refugees materialized. As such, the ‘false’ refugees in Dutch Republic emerges as a complex case-study, which prefigures later international frameworks under which refugees could claim legal rights and protection, such as the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol.

Despite these continuities, however, the concept of the refugee is “never stable and ever changing.” As Peter Gatrell argues in his The Making of the Modern Refugee, “there has never been a ‘one size fits all’ definition of refugees” and many different people are excluded from this category at different times. Today, with violence and persecution continuing to displace millions of people, the long history of our discourse around the idea of the refugee remains as relevant as ever.

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Lotte van Hasselt holds a BA in History, a BA in Archaeology and Prehistory, and a RMA in History. She currently works as a PhD-candidate in the NWO VICI-project The Invention of the Refugee in Early Modern Europe. Her research focuses on the emergence of the concept of ‘refugee’ and refugee protection in the Dutch Republic.

Edited by Alexander Collin

Featured Image: Protestants fleeing from France after the Revocation of Nantes, 1685-1686. “Het weg vlugten der Gereformeerde uyt Vrankryk” (title on object), etching by Jan Luyken, 1696. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

By Maria Wiegel

When Betty Friedan gave ‘The Problem That Has No Name’ an actual name—in the Feminine Mystique (1963)—she wrote that “[o]f the growing thousands of women currently getting private psychiatric help in the United States, the married ones were reported dissatisfied with their marriages, the unmarried ones suffering from anxiety, and finally depression.” Little did she know that half a century later, another Betty would be illustrating those very same observations. Betty Draper, unlike Friedan a fictional character, performs the feminine mystique like no other.

One might wonder: what is the purpose of her performance as the housewife in Mad Men (2007-2015)? Is she merely a cliché the audience is supposed to be astonished by or to laugh at? Or is her character pointing at a more prevalent problem in contemporary American culture? Another late-50s, early-60s housewife prominently appearing on TV is Miriam Maisel from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-today). I argue that the depiction of housewives in both series, rather than merely reproducing stereotypes, reflects contemporary problems white middle class women are still facing in 21^st century America. 

First of all, the housewife is an American hero. After WWII women increasingly left the workforce to find their place in society as homemakers, who provided a peaceful and idyllic home for their freshly returned men. And so, by the 1950s, a myth was born. A myth that has been kept alive by, among others, actress Donna Reid with her The Donna Reid Show (1958-1966), First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, or Phyllis Schlafly. The latter’s STOP ERA movement was the countermovement to second wave feminism, which was associated with feminist such as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Bella Abzug. America’s obsession with housewives up until today is reflected in the production of TV shows centering around homemakers, such as The Desperate Housewives (2004-2012), but also the ongoing reality franchise The Real Housewives (first aired in 2006).

No wonder Betty Draper is such an important and interesting character in Mad Men, a show focusing on her husband Don who works at an ad agency. While most of the plot lines have to do with the agency’s working environment, another line focuses on Don’s past as Richard “Dick” Whitman. Don’s is a ‘from-rags-to-riches’-story which is also reflected in his professional relationship to his secretary Peggy Olson. Throughout the series, Peggy becomes a copywriter and has a success story of her own.

The female characters in Mad Men each reflect stereotypical female figures from the 60s, as Erika Engstrom observed drawing on Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s 1977 book Men and Women of the Corporation. Kanter assembles a number of archetypes in the workplace, among them the corporate wife who is ideally an asset to her husband’s image in the corporation. After all, women’s place in the early 1960s was still often enough assumed to be at home. They were wives, mothers, and most importantly homemakers. 

Yet Kanter’s inclusion of the housewife into the corporate milieu shows the housewife’s relevance for the workplace outside of the house, while emphasizing that women are reduced to stereotypes in the process. As an asset, housewives must be pretty and hospitable. We can see the former in Betty Draper, who was brought up to simply “be beautiful,” as Kimberly Wilmot Voss argues. Betty does not only learn this set of priorities from her mother, but she also passes on her knowledge about the value of beauty to her daughter Sally. In one episode she punishes her for cutting her own hair. This in turn raises the question if this is to be seen as a rebellious act on Sally’s behalf against her mother’s beauty standards (S4, Ep5). 

We gain even deeper insight into a woman’s maintenance of beauty from another fictional mid-twentieth-century character: Jewish-American housewife Miriam “Midge” Maisel, from Amy Sherman Palladino’s series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The end of Midge’s marriage marks the beginning of the show which tells her story of becoming a comedian. In the very first episode, Midge performs a detailed beauty routine which reminds of contemporary beauty tutorials on YouTube.

Like Betty, Midge submits herself to the beauty standards of an ideal woman as advertised on TV, in movies, and lifestyle guides, such as Helen Gurley Brown’s books Sex and the Single Girl (1962) and Sex and the Office (1964). Midge pursues this routine secretly at night so that her husband does not see how much effort she is putting into being a ‘natural beauty.’ As we learn later on, her mother does the same, suggesting that this behavior is modeled and passed on from generation to generation. TV shows like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel hence aim to demonstrate how engrained it is for women to merely serve the male gaze.

Further, a strong emphasis on women’s beauty produces a problematic power dynamic in which women are held responsible for making their marriages work. It creates what British feminist Florence Given calls the ‘normalization of abuse.’ In the Drapers’ marriage we see this normalized abuse, for instance, when Don accuses Betty of flirting with his boss, Roger, although he had approached her. After dinner, Don once more puts emphasis on his wife’s beauty while disregarding her integrity and morality (S1, Ep7).

Him patronizing his wife is a regular occurrence throughout their marriage. Midge, on the other hand, loses any chance of getting back with her husband, when she persuades a career as a stand-up comedian, since Joel refuses to be married to a woman who talks about him on stage. Since his own failure at stand-up comedy led to him leaving Midge in the first place, one cannot help but wonder if it is her having a career—and especially in a branch in which he failed—that keeps Joel from getting back together with his wife. 

Shows, like Mad Men and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, although at first sight reproducing those standards, rather deconstruct them. More than just showing us how absurd they are, they map those standards from the 1960s to contemporary America. (Sexual harassment did not only happen on screen, but also shaped Mad Men’s production conditions, since creator Mathew Weiner faced allegations of sexual harassment by one of his writers.)

Both shows reflect the desire for marriages in 1960s American society as a means of organization. They also show how deeply marriage is ingrained into contemporary American society, while postfeminists and neoliberals proclaims that there is already equality between genders and classes and that thus everyone has the same opportunities. Postfeminism, which started to dominate the Western media landscape in the 80s, suggests that women can achieve anything, if they want it enough and work hard for it. 

Although, at first sight, this view may sound empowering, it often ignores structural obstacles and blames women for not Having it All, as the title of Gurley Brown’s 1982 book suggests. What we learn from postfeminist depictions of romantic relationships, therefore, is that if women just work hard enough, they can make even the most stubborn man fall in love with and commit to them. When we look at current legislation, society still seeks for this kind of organization, when asking for the marital status on forms, but also when it comes to inheritance and adoption laws or the right to gain medical information concerning one’s partner.

Which brings us back to the question of why marriage, although frequently also expected from men, is still especially demanded from women? Women do have careers now—it is part of Gurley Brown’s postfeminist ‘having-it-all’-doctrine, after all (and by the 1980s apparently even more than marriage, as she claims in Having it All). Divorce ceased to be a taboo by the beginning of the new millennium, although and very interestingly, divorce rates have hit a 50-year-low in 2020 with only 14.9 divorces in 1000 marriages in the US. Even though women “are a rich man” now, as Cher would say, the narrative of having a happy life as a happy wife is still deeply engrained in women. 

Postfeminist media, such as Hollywood movies, but also reality TV, still mainly suggest that finding a man and having children is part of the achievement of ‘having it all’ (see, for instance, shows that have marriage at their center and a female audience as their target group, such as The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, and Married at First Sight). Looking at statistics, however, it is hardly imaginable that women can have it all. The Pew Research Center published D’Vera Cohn, Gretchen Livingston, and Wendy Wang’s research results on the rise of stay-at-home-mothers in 2014.

Especially striking is their discovery that finding a job is still challenging for mothers. And even if both parents are working, most tasks concerning family life and the household are performed by women, as a Pew Research Center Report from 2015 reveals. It seems that marriage remains a desired goal in today’s American society, and that, in those marriages, women are still most likely to be the homemakers—even if they have a full-time job.

Thinking about beauty standards, Given argues in her book of the same title, that women don’t owe you pretty (2020). Nevertheless, Given explains that women are still subjecting themselves to beauty standards and that, although this subjection is widely discouraged by feminists, life is easier when being “beautiful,” since this brings something Given calls ‘Pretty Privilege’ with it. (Again, this is not exclusively experienced by women, since there are also beauty standards for men. The extent to which the female body is subdued to the neoliberal gaze, however, is greater, if we think about e.g. the cosmetics industry).

Both, Betty and Midge, live off their pretty privilege, since they both find husbands that enable them to live an upper-middle class lifestyle, while less “beautiful” women in both shows, such as Peggy in Mad Men and Susie in Mrs. Maisel, have to work for and still can only afford to live in shared apartments. Centered around white upper-middle class characters, both series depict a rather limited image of the American housewife and only occasionally give glimpses of the lives of non-white American women. We do not get any insight into the lives of black women in America. Mrs. Maisel, however, with Susie as a main character and driving force, provides a queer character and thematizes non-heteronormative sexuality in the early 60s. The idea of intersectionality and inclusion of diversity of third wave feminism is not present in both series. 

Mrs. Maisel’s openly talking on stage about her life as a woman, however, I argue, contains elements of fourth wave feminism, with its idea of speaking up on the internet and on the streets (e.g. on Women’s Marches). This is a reaction to women not complaining and not making their needs clear (think about the depiction of Britney Spears’ breakdown in 2007, which Lena Dunham commented on in an Instagram Post in 2021).

This might be because they are constantly in a position between fearing to be not enough, if they don’t succeed in looking a certain way, or achieving certain goals, and being too much, when expressing needs and concerns (see, for instance, Marisa Melzer’s This is Big (2020), Lena Dunham’s Not that Kind of Girl (2014), Anne Helen Petersen’s Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud (2017), and Rachel Bloom’s I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are (2021)). 

The depiction of 1960s housewives, such as Betty Draper in Mad Men and Midge Maisel in Mrs. Maisel, are the result of the having-it-all-doctrine that millennial women have incorporated as a default setting (Meltzer, for instance, makes this visible at the example of the dieting industry, and Dunham, shows this relating to her very own upbringing). Viewers look at them in astonishment, for they believe they are an archaic picture of a certain kind of woman that has ceased to exist.

Yet, popular culture shows that ‘the feminine mystique’ still exists, after all, and is still part of the feminist struggle. It also tells us, however, to speak up and to make our needs clear. Women should keep in mind that they do not have to submit themselves to and thereby reproduce traditional standards and expectations. Instead, we should reshape them, and ideally get rid of them once and for all.

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Maria Wiegel is a PhD candidate in North American Studies at the University of Cologne and works at the intersection of history, fiction, and gender studies. Her current research focuses on the depiction of the 1960s in American literature published after 9/11. She is especially interested in paranoia, surveillance, cultural memory studies, and metamodernism. Her writings and reports have appeared in Critical Intertexts, Food, Fatness and Fitness and HSozKult, and are forthcoming in zeitgeschichteonline and the collective volume Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King’s IT.

Edited by Isabel Jacobs

Featured Image: Housewife shopping in supermarket (Gisella), 1957. Photographer: Thomas J. O’Halloran. Source: LOC. Public Domain.

By Nina Fouilloux

One of the most prevalent issues in Canada today, that has dominated media coverage, the Supreme Court, scholarship, and activism, is the concession of land in Canada to its Indigenous peoples. Countless court cases have been held over decades, where judges and Indigenous advocates are left to interpret the vague land claims in Canadian law. Although many successes have been achieved, notably the creation of section 35 in the Constitution Act which grants Indigenous peoples land claims, the more court cases arise, the more the court is left to interpret what exactly these land claims entail: R. v. Sioui (1990) left the court wondering whether or not land agreements made in the eighteenth century were still valid in contemporary times, Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (1997) left judges debating whether or not oral history could be used as evidence for a land claim, and Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia (2014) highlighted whether a land claim required regular occupation of the land in question. This large disconnect between what the law addresses and what cases are actually being brought forward is emblematic of the competing theories at stake when it comes to managing land in Canada: there is Indigenous land theory, which has been given little to no authority for centuries, and Euro-Canadian theory, which has dominated and structured all of Canada since its colonization period. Reconciling these theories has proven to be a highly emotional and contentious affair, worsening national division, and echoing issues of land, belonging and borders across Turtle Island and the world. What I propose in this study is a mediation to this debate, an encouragement to broaden our use of theory, and a uniquely Canadian solution: listening to geese.

We all have memories of them, whether it be getting pecked in the park or discovering a flock in a corner of the Earth you never thought possible, every Canadian remembers looking up at the sky in bewilderment at a large “V” formation, with its sporadic loud cackle drifting away in the wind. The beaver may be the national animal of Canada, and the polar bear may be its rarest sight, but the Canadian goose is truly Canada’s national symbol. My mother used to point to them in the sky when I was young and cup her hands to yell: “You’re flying the wrong way, Mexico is that way!”. Despite her comedic attempts, the geese were most likely flying the right way. In fact, geese have a strict migratory pattern determined by the seasons: in colder months, they fly down south to escape the chill and find food, and in warmer months, they fly back north to reproduce. Due to this, Canadian geese can be found in most parts of North America and have a unique reputation for not respecting boundaries: geese are often considered pests for nesting on private properties like golf courses and will even be culled in areas where they are deemed unwanted. Despite this, the geese do not cease; they are not interested in performing border politics, they cannot differentiate private property from public, and they interact differently with land than most humans do.

In response to the debate mentioned above and the theoretical limitations that exist, I will attempt to demonstrate how considering an undervalued theoretical angle: that of the non-human, can help broaden our use of theory to find solutions to global and complex issues. On top of this, I will vow for the use of creative art in helping provide theoretical framework in which to conceptualize global theory. In relying on the framework set out by researcher Thom van Dooren on human and non-human relationships, this study will find that theorizing the movement and behavior of Canadian geese allows for the exploration of concepts related to land, such as borders and private property, in a broader way that creates a dialectical process between the human and non-human, which in turn, participates in the creation of a more holistic approach to theory.

Known for his pioneering research on crows around the world, Professor Thom van Dooren is an advocate of “field philosophy”, a type of philosophy which emphasizes a hands-on approach to theorizing the world, a method which van Dooren utilizes heavily in his study of the non-human. It is out of this that van Dooren elaborates his theory on “multispecies ethics” which operates on the basis that it is possible to live in harmony with other species when considering different world views around an issue, for example, climate change and its effects on humans and crows. Therefore, in studying different crow groups around the world, van Dooren was able to create a “two-species ethics” for how crows and humans can interact with their environment; he does so by outlining how each group interacts differently or similarly with concepts such as hope, community, and sacrifice. The main aspect of van Dooren’s research that is relevant to us is his push to “think with others”, which he describes as a “philosophy that is engaged and committed, interdisciplinary and experimental, grounded in collaboratively imagining, understanding, and crafting better possibilities for life.” It is within this push to “think with others” that I propose to “listen to geese”. Listening to geese is similar to thinking with crows: it does not entail extracting how the non-human thinks about an issue and then attempting to respond in that exact same way, but rather it is about broadening our philosophical landscape, collecting data from different sources in order to find solutions that cater to a larger group. Therefore, the first concept Canadian geese and their interactions with land allows us to reflect on in that of borders.

For Canadian geese, borders are determined by physiological changes in their bodies, not by politics. Studies in goose migration find that there are several physiological reactions that make geese know when and where to migrate, including sun positioning, olfactory stimuli, and magnetoception. All of these methods give Canadian geese somewhat of an internal compass, but it remains difficult for scientists to explain exactly why geese know where to return to the same places every year. Nonetheless, since geese must travel and follow their internal signal to ensure their survival, they naturally cross borders without question: geese can be found all over Canada, the United States and in northern Mexico. Beyond North America, the geese have been introduced in Europe in countries such as the United Kingdom, Finland, and Sweden, but also in places such as New Zealand, Chile, and Japan. It is this seeming boundlessness and global citizenship that has made the goose a symbol of freedom and a sort of challenge to the idea of nationally constructed borders. Here, we see the idea of borders themselves as challenged by the goose’s movement: they cannot respect politically determined borders as they simply do not see them and cannot respect them at the risk of their livelihood. Thus, by considering that the non-human, in this case, geese, do not see borders and thus cannot follow border politics adequately, we are then capable of putting the notion of borders into question and considering their fluidity and potential to change, as well as the potential for territory to be shared throughout different seasons and between different species and people. However, goose theory can go much further.

Another concept that Canadian geese compel us to think about in relation to land is that of “private property”, notably due to the fact that geese are considered pests when they are on “human property”. In fact, in areas where they are considered pests, hunting will be increased. In New Zealand in 2011, farmers who deemed Canadian geese as damaging to their crops successfully lobbied the government in order to have the geese be considered as abundant hunting game, putting them on the same scale as sparrows and pigeons, considerably increasing their risk of being killed. On the other hand, in 2018, the West Essex Golf Club in England, employed hunters in order to control the number of Canadian geese on their courses which they deemed got in the way of player’s shot’s. If we consider the point made earlier, that geese do not perform borders like we do, it is easy to see how, when putting the non-human and human in relation to each other, some ideas, here, that of private property, simply cannot coexist, compelling us to remember that the concept itself is a Western European construct that is not necessarily incontestable.

On top of these lessons which rely mostly on the freedom of the goose’s movement, there are many we can learn from their compromise as well. In fact, despite its seaming boundlessness, the Canada goose does know the “here” from the “there”: even if it does not understand crossing borders in the way we do, it still physiologically recognizes when it is in breeding grounds versus its feeding grounds, in some way meaning it can conceptualize borders similarly to how humans do. Thus, the Canada goose’s unconditional defiance of borders might actually not be much to romanticize. In fact, it has been shown that border walls, such as the U.S. – Mexico border can confuse Canadian geese during their migration, due to things like noise and light pollution, making them unable to migrate adequately, therefore putting their populations at risk. Similarly, the Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl has actually been shown to not be able to cross the U.S. – Mexico border walls, thus affecting its livelihood. Here, we see the emergence of an interesting dialectic between the human and non-human: it is not just that we as humans must “listen to geese” in order to find inter-human solutions, but that we must also create interspecies dialogue in order to mediate the negative effects that inter-human debates have on animals. Essentially, this requires reflecting on the concept of coexistence, something van Dooren places at the center of his multispecies ethics. Thus, when considering land and borders, it is relevant to explore what these concepts mean to all species involved. In doing this, dialogue on the need to reevaluate the ethos of borders can be created to mediate land debates in Canada. Moreover, this type of dialogue can go beyond the idea of borders and private property but can perhaps also allow for the revaluation of concepts such as land value, tradition, and community, which affects Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians, but also the non-human.

When it comes to the land debate in Canada and similar debates around the world, there is no catch-all solution: Canadian geese themselves are not the answer, and exclusively theorizing the non-human is not the theoretical push needed to breach the limitations presented by the land debate. However, by listening to geese, we can remember to think, because in doing so, one can deconstruct ideas such as that of borders, challenge them, meditate on their meaning, which in turn, has the potential to change in order to promote harmony. It is this reevaluation of borders, through the lens of something that views them drastically differently than we do and is affected by them differently, that will help us enrich our global thought.  

Theorizing the non-human to discuss concepts of land may be novel, but in some ways, this theorization has already been occurring for decades in the works of Canadian artists, who’s creations are rarely ever considered as intellectual material with the potential to participate in the creation of theory. Part II will discuss how artists have been “listening to geese” for centuries and how art can pose as valued theoretical material.

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Nina Fouilloux is a MA student at the University of St Andrews in Global Social and Political Thought. Her primary research interests revolve around Canadian politics and Indigenous studies, specifically Indigenous political thought and intellectual history, reconciliation, and decolonization. She holds a BA from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, with a double major in Political Science and Art History.

Edited by Shuvatri Dasgupta

Featured Image: Geese Family in Dowtown Toronto, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.