Wednesday, June 26, 2013
1.15 (PC Hoofthuis)
From the 1950s until the early 1970s, Germany and the Netherlands recruited a large number of migrant workers from the Mediterranean. Their employment and stay was intended to be temporary. Many of them prolonged their stay however and brought their families over, especially after the economic crisis of 1973 and the recruitment stop which followed soon after. Thus, in the second half of the 1970s and early 1980s, German and Dutch policymakers had to cope with a migration that was supposed to be temporary turning into permanent settlement migration coupled to continuous chain migration. However, the political response on both sides of the borders was markedly different. Based on research in the archives of parliaments and the relevant ministries, this paper seeks to understand this different policy response. Should we explain it as a consequence of ‘national models’ of nationhood and citizenship? Or were other factors – party political dynamics, judicial constraints, welfare state ideologies, federal-centralist state structures – equally or more important?
Comparison is not a self-evident method in historical analysis. As Kocka (2003) put it, while comparison is ‘indispensable’ for historians asking causal questions, there is a tension between ‘comparison [which] implies selection, abstraction, and de-contextualization to some degree’ and ‘the emphasis on context, on embeddedness, on Zusammenhang [which] is dear and central to history as a discipline’. In this paper, I shall reflect on the strengths and limitations of the comparative approach in my historical analysis.
