Netherlands, art, jurisprudence, etc

We’re in Amsterdam at nearly the end of our fabulous summer trip. It was good to start in Venice and end here. Both cities have a lot in common. Not only the reclaimed-from-the-swamps aspect of them– leaving them both laced with such a great network of canals. But also the role each city played back at the beginning of the European Ascendancy.
That was kind of why it felt appropriate for me to be writing in the CSM this week about the European / North Atlantic Ascendancy coming near its end.
On Thursday and Friday, in The Hague, I was able to conduct some really excellent interviews. These were with:

— the Chief Prosecutor of the new ICC, Luis Moreno-Ocampo (from Argentina),
— the Deputy President of the Int’l Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, Judge Kevin Parker (from Australia), and
— one of the judges on the Appeals Bench opf the ICC, Judge Navanethen Pillay (from South Africa.)

I found all of them to be intelligent, very sympathetic people who have evidently thought very deeply about the roles of their respective institutions within the emerging international society. All of them had (I think) previously read the article I had recently in Foreign Policy, which was quite critical of the role of their courts. So honestly, I was prepared for some of them to be a bit defensive and close-mouthed. But they weren’t at all. On the contrary. They all seemed really happy to grapple with the tough issue that I raised in that article; and they all seemed to have thought very deeply about these issues themselves, beforehand. Much more deeply, I would say, than most of the chorus of international court boosters in the western human rights movement, some of whom seem to have little idea about the gravity of very basic rights issues in soecieties reeling from war and atrocity.
So anyway, that was all good– and it provides a great basis for the visit to Uganda, which I’ll embark on tomorrow, from Schipol airport.
… Yesterday, we went to the Rijksmuseum here. I last visited it in 1995, when I came to Amsterdam (and also The Hague) on a short visit with my daughter Lorna, then aged 10, and my father, James Cobban, then aged 85. I think it was the last significant trip we made with JM before he passed away in 1999. He loved Amsterdam! I have great memories of him jumping on and off trams like a teenager, and just drinking everything in. (“What’s that funny smell?” he asked at one point as we walked past some kind of a joint joint. “H’mm, haven’t a clue,” I said, insouciantly.)
Anyway, most of the Rijksmuseum is currently closed for renovation. But what they have open is an unbelievably rich and well-presented collection of just about 200 of their greatest treasures. (It’s also the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth this year, so Amsterdam is celebrating that, too.)
In the show, they had one room on the theme of “Global Expansion”, which just perfectly showcased the contribution that the Netherlands’ global empire-building activities made to its rise as a prosperous and self-confident European power.
I just get this sense in so many places in Europe now. Especially after I read Hugh Thomas’s masterly history of the global slave trade.
Thursday afternoon,when we were still in The Hague, we went to the Mauritshuis, which has always been one of my very favorite art museums. That is, until I learned from Hugh Thomas that Prince Maurits had made the vast bulk of his fortune purely from the profits of trading in enslaved African persons… Yes, it does affect how I look at the institution– if not, necessarily, at the art within it.
I guess I just came away from those experiences in the Mauritshuis and the Rijksmuseum with this very vivid sense of how much of the European Ascendancy in world affairs had actually been funded and underpinned through imperial rapine, their maintenance of tight control over international trade flows, and the deep involvement of so many European powers in the intercontinental (and particularly transatlantic) transport and trading of millions of enslaved persons.
And meantime, there were all these brutal Dutch (and other) colonial profit-takers and slave-traders commissioning the most wonderful artists back at home in Amsterdam to produce these wonderfully delicate portrayals of the settled and serene domestic life they were able to maintain at home… Hard to all think through. I’m still feeling the dissonance rather viscerally.