This series of podcast-interviews gives researchers from all over Europe a voice. We exchange views from different countries, talk about background specifics, and try to give an honest assessment of the state of the EU.

In this episode Hanco Jürgens from Amsterdam explains the political system in the Netherlands, its political culture, and the role the EU plays in Dutch politics. We also talk about the impact of the Russian war against Ukraine on Dutch politics and the German-Dutch relations.

Hanco Jürgens is a senior researcher at the Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam, the Germany Institute at the University of Amsterdam, and a fellow at the Montesquieu Institute in The Hague. He specializes in modern European history in a global context. He published on a wide variety of topics, such as the reports of German missionaries in India in the Eighteenth Century, on India and the Enlightenment, German – Dutch relations after the Fall of the Berlin Wall and German and Dutch EU policy. Currently, he is focusing on recent German history since the 1980s. He is particularly interested in the changes of key concepts in Germany such as the social market economy, civil society, civilian power, constitutional democracy, the GDR, the European Union or the Holocaust. In recent years, he published a book on the Netherlands since the Fall of the Wall and coedited a book on Germany within the European Union. As a Dutch expert on German history, he is a regular guest on Dutch radio and television and publishes op-eds in the Dutch quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad, among others about the Zeitenwende in the Netherlands and Germany.  

Notes:

• The BBC journalist Hanco Jürgens mentions at the end is Anna Holligan. Here homepage can be found here: https://www.ovgmanagement.com/anna-holligan

  The two books Hanco Jürgens mentioned are:

• “Joe Speedboat” by the author Tommy Wieringa.
  The English translation by Sam Garrett can be found here: https://groveatlantic.com/book/joe-speedboat/

• “A Concise History of the Netherlands” by James C. Kennedy: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/concise-history-of-the-netherlands/F5C341B3BCD9FA3F6846BECBC616A696

Moderation:
Felix Heidenreich (IZKT)

A project produced in cooperation with the Public Library of Stuttgart and Stiftung Geißstraße Stuttgart.