Book Review: "Why Don’t They Hate Us More? Book Review: Beyond Dutch Borders. Transnational Politics among Colonial Migrants, Guest Workers and the Second Generation" by Liza Mügge

Abstract

The book in question has been published within the series edited by the IMISCOE program (International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion in Europe), which had been established in 2004 as a Network of Excellence and became “an independent, self-funding endeavour open to qualified researchers and research institutes worldwide” in 2009. Liza Mügge is a political scientist from Amsterdam and she has focused on three groups of migrants in the contemporary Netherlands: the Surinamese, Turkish and Kurdish ones. Her research questions are concerned with the emergence of transnational migrant politics, the evolution of political participation of migrants over time (especially the “coming of age” of a second generation, which grew up entirely or almost entirely in the country of settlement and, well, the third question is unintelligible because of poor English and minimalist editing effort (see p. 22) third bulleted point, but we may guess that she is interested in cross-influences between the social response to migrants‟ political activism and their willingness to continue transnational politics. The author mentions all relevant literature, including Kearney, Vertovec, Granovetter and an Erasmus University colleague, Engbersen, or a Surinamese colleague of mine from Tilburg University, Gowricharn, but her strength is in empirical studies of three selected minorities in the contemporary Kingdom of the Netherlands. The topic is not entirely of a theoretical and methodological interest to me. I share some of the dilemmas with the subjects of her study. As a Polish migrant to the Netherlands, I participate in both Dutch and Polish national politics, by voting in respective national elections, though I have to choose between the two on those days when elections to the European Parliament are held (I usually vote for the Polish representatives with my wife and my children vote for the Dutch ones). What did the author find out? First, that there were significant differences between the three groups of migrants. The Surinamese went mostly for the homeland-directed activities (they were the only group of migrants, who came from the former Dutch colony, with a painful record of corrupt deals between the postcolonial Surinamese and Dutch political elites). The Turks and the Kurds shared their focus on transplanted homeland politics (revived in a foreign setting), but they differed in that the Turks