Foreword
The Geneva Convention on Refugees of 1951 for the first time included the ‘right to asylum’. But now, fifty years on, more and more countries, including those of the European Union, are finding this humanitarian principle a nuisance. Fortress Europe opens its gates only to a fortunate few. And this despite demographic statistics which indicate that because of its ageing population Europe will need over 100 million new immigrants by about 2025.
In the Netherlands and Belgium, as elsewhere, restrictive measures have been introduced in an attempt to stem the flood of refugees. This attitude has caused some concern to the former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata; visiting the Netherlands in July 2000, she called for a new flowering of Europe's old humanitarian values.
After all, throughout the centuries the Low Countries have had a liberal tradition of offering refuge to the persecuted and oppressed. That is why the themed section of this yearbook is called ‘Low Countries, Host Countries?’. It begins with a historical tour of the Low Countries as a refuge for the spirit, in the course of which we encounter René Descartes at his desk in Amsterdam, Charlotte and Emily Brontë at a Brussels boarding-school, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth on a café terrace in Ostend, Klaus Mann in his Amsterdam base and Karl Marx in a Belgian jail.
The last of the themed articles explains the question-mark in the title. It explores the boundaries of hospitality, discussing decolonisation, guest workers and the growing flood of refugees and showing how these factors have changed the Netherlands and Flanders over recent decades.
Between these two articles is a piece on ‘intercultural authors’, together with a group of texts in which a few of these authors speak for themselves. Intercultural authors? Like all labels, the term is convenient but restrictive. The choice of theme for the 2001 Netherlands Book Week - Country of Origin: Writing between Two Cultures - elicited from critics such words as ‘parochialism’, ‘neo-colonialism’ and ‘apartheid mentality’. After all, don't all real writers work between different cultures, aren't they all in one way or another displaced persons? And some of the authors referred to above have already featured in this yearbook without any mention of their origins. The first yearbook in this series took as its motto Ralph Waldo Emerson's remark that ‘The triumph of culture is to overpower nationality’. And these writers vividly illustrate that.
The editors
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