Tim Brinkhof is a Dutch journalist based in Atlanta. He studied comparative literature at New York University and has written for Vulture, JSTOR Daily, and New Lines.
For decades, the Netherlands’ “no-nonsense” model of neoliberalism has been the poster child for free-market reforms. Yet for all the rhetoric of national unity, this model has forced long periods of austerity and the organized looting of public services.
NATO chief Mark Rutte this week praised Donald Trump for talking tough to Iran and Israel, publicly commenting, “Daddy sometimes has to use strong language.” Rutte’s fawning is a cringeworthy display of European subservience to Trump.
Carnivals in Germany have long satirized the powerful. Calls to keep politics out of the festivities are now being used to silence dissent.
Germany’s Christian Democrat leader Friedrich Merz has broken a long-established “firewall” isolating the far right. A vote on hardening the borders has given Alternative für Deutschland a leg up just ahead of the federal election.
In 1901, the Amsterdam city government started to replace privately owned slums with cooperatively run housing. The project attracted many innovative designers, but its aesthetic function didn’t always suit the needs of the new homes’ inhabitants.
Removing border checks between many European states, the Schengen Area is often hailed as an internationalist triumph. Yet its creation went hand in hand with the tightening of Europe’s external borders — a contradiction that is hardening today.
Eva Vlaardingerbroek is not only pushing Holland rightward. She’s capturing the imagination of reactionaries around the world.
Mexico is overhauling its justice system by having voters elect Supreme Court judges, but Washington has criticized the move. US allegations of authoritarianism fit into a long history of meddling — and ignore the need to make justices more accountable.
Efteling is a popular fairy-tale-based theme park in the Netherlands that is now at the center of a heated culture war. The conflict centers on the park’s blatantly racist caricatures — but right-wingers claim Dutch culture itself is under attack.
After the French Revolution, the architect Étienne-Louis Boullée produced wildly ambitious building designs that were never realized. His ideas influenced both the Right and the Left — and raised the question of whether a revolutionary architecture is possible.
Liberals often equate populism with the politics of Donald Trump. But during the Gilded Age, when massive inequality led to poverty and exploitation, populism meant working-class resistance to the power of corporations.
Conservatives cast Chile as a success story in which the neoliberal economists known as the “Chicago Boys” reversed reckless socialist experimentation. This whitewashes the horrific crimes of Augusto Pinochet and the precarity his policies normalized.