Making sense of the new Europe: National anxieties and everyday life in Amsterdam

Abstract

The development of a postcolonial 'new' Europe has been highly contradictory. Increasingly diverse urban landscapes and convivial, everyday cosmopolitan subcultures coincide with renewed forms of nationalism and racism that imagine the nation as homogeneously white, and non-white citizens as threatening others. My work on Amsterdam's 'notorious' Diamantbuurt asks how this paradoxical political situation manifests itself on the ground in one of Europe’s diverse cities. Public discourses about the present and future of Dutch society pivot around particular racial iconic figures, particularly 'ordinary' white Dutch, who allegedly fall victim to aggressive or even criminal 'Moroccan' young men. In this chapter, I present a number of vignettes that demonstrate how such discourses shaped life in Amsterdam’s diverse cityscape. I elaborate on two ways in which I trace connections between public discourses and everyday life in the city: through policy worlds and through iconic figures.