By all means, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a triumph of democracy. After 1989, it was repeatedly confirmed that liberal democracy was 'the only game in town.' As argued in the first editorial of the Journal of Democracy, newly established in 1990: 'The resurgence of democracy may be attributed in part to the failure of its rivals.' 1 Not only were liberal democracy's ideological contenders-fascism and communism-defeated, but the bloodless revolution of 1989 demonstrated that 'the people' were able to take their fate into their own hands, and to claim popular sovereignty in the face of authoritarian leaders and repressive state power. Even more, the transitions from dictatorship to democracy in Eastern Europe witnessed the emergence (or re-emergence to some, after 1848, 1918, and 1968) of the powers of spontaneous self-organization in civil society. The experiments in democratic deliberation in the Polish Round Table Talks, the Czechoslovak Civic Forum, and other forms of direct democracy were proof that the revolution of 1989 was not just a 'gewissermaßen rückspulende Revolution […] die den Weg frei macht, um versaumte Entwicklungen nachzuholen,' as Jürgen Habermas had argued. The wave of democratization in Eastern Europe not only caught up with the development of democracy in the West, but actually contributed to the innovation of democracy beyond the confirmation of the uncontested dominance of liberal democracy. 2 By now, little of that optimism is left. In their introduction, Eleni Braat and Pepijn Corduwener reconfirm Habermas's conservative estimate, arguing that '1989 seemed not only the victory of democracy,' but that it cemented the reputation of a 'restrained' liberal democracy after decades in which this model of democracy had been subjected to severe criticism. 3 Yet they also observe that this particular type of democracy is currently challenged anew, because of its inherent limitations, and by the emergence of populism.These observations raise two sets of questions. The first concerns issues of historical analysis: how is the perceived crisis of democracy related to the demise of communism? Did 1989 demarcate not just a high point, but also a turning point in the triumphal march of democracy? If the crisis tendencies of Western democracy are the result of more enduring tensions, what then has been the impact of 1989 on Restrained democracy and its radical alternatives after 1989The threefold crisis of democracy in the 'Former West'
Fault Lines in the Historiography of the Holocaust. A Survey of the Recent Debate in the NetherlandsThe historiography of the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands is an excellent example of the dialectics of progress. Soon after 1945, and even sooner than in the surrounding countries, a series of studies on this subject was readily available in the Netherlands in the form of the monumental historiographies of Herzberg, Presser and De Jong. However, during the 1970s, the production of new studies that examined the persecution of the Jews practically ground to a halt. It was only after the 1980s that a new generation of historians emerged who no longer sketched an all-encompassing perspective for the general public but instead applied themselves to thorough empirical studies written in a detached style for a small specialised audience. As a result of this, the historiography of the Holocaust has radically altered in terms of perspective, methodology and function. This article examines what these recent studies of the Holocaust have accomplished. If scientific progress is defined in terms of increased accuracy, analytical thoroughness, and scientific and societal relevance then the study of the Holocaust has certainly achieved this with regard to the first two criteria. However, it is still the case that the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands is poorly represented at international debates and the implications of these studies of the Holocaust in the context of the history of Europe have hardly been examined at all. The relevance of a lot of the recent work is undisputed from a historiographical perspective. Yet, as a contribution to the image of the Holocaust outside the walls of Academia, the recent historiography has had less success.
During the past three decades, the historiography of the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands has been dominated by attempts to resolve ‘the Dutch paradox’: the contrast between the tolerant reputation of the Netherlands on the one hand, and the large numbers of Dutch Jews that perished on the other. Attempts to resolve this paradox often look for specifically Dutch characteristics, thereby neglecting factors of an international nature that had a particular impact in the Netherlands. Attention is devoted in these contribution to German imperialism, which had special ramifications for the persecution of Dutch Jews; to the implications for population policy of the colonial regime that arose in the Netherlands, and to the social compartmentalisation and propaganda that accompanied these genocidal policies. This international perspective leads to new questions for the Dutch case, while this case sheds new light on the international history of the persecution of the Jews. This article is part of the special issue 'The International Relevance of Dutch History'.
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