An extremely well-ordered mud-puddle.

Join us for the 2025 Dutch Studies annual lecture, followed by a reception.

When W.E.B. Du Bois first visited the Netherlands in August 1892 on his way to his studies in Germany, he noted in his travel diary that it was “an extremely well-ordered mud-puddle.” No doubt many self-declared Dutch would take that as a compliment, but perhaps it was saying a bit too much. Certainly today, the order whose inflation is called ‘the Netherlands’ is tenuous, and cannot exist nor be understood without taking into account both the fascist horizon of Western politics, and ‘migration’ as the related mode in which ‘race’ is performed in contemporary Europe. Thus, in this lecture we outline why we deem it pertinent to conceive of contemporary European fascism as a dynamic internal to liberal democracy. And why we believe ‘migration’ is the operating ground upon which both liberal democracy and fascism achieve ever new and tenuous, but ever entangled articulations.

Willem Schinkel is professor of social theory at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His work is currently focused on the genealogy of migration and the genealogy of property.

Rogier van Reekum is an assistant professor in sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His work is concerned with the politics of borders, migration, knowledge controversies and fascism. He recently published Out of Character: Debating Dutchness, narrating citizenship (2024, Palgrave).

Schinkel and Van Reekum co-published in Dutch Theory of the Enclosure: Capital, Race, Fascism (2019)

With thanks to the generous support by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the UK