political transfer as transformation
- Categories
- Article/Artikel
- Magazine Title
- European Review of History
- Magazine Year
- 2005
- Magazine Number
- 2
- Creator
- Aerts, Mieke
- Shelfmark
- map: Feminisme 2005
- Thesaurus
- feminisme, politiek, geschiedenis, Nederland, België, 19e eeuw
- Description
- Historical reconstruction enables us to perceive the origins of organized feminism in Belgium as a case of political transfer from Amsterdam to Brussels. For it was the spectacular appearance that Dutch feminist Wilhelmina Drucker put in at the Brussels Congress of the Second Socialist International in 1891 that sparked off a first wave of feminists organizing in Belgium. However, this specific case of political transfer, with its many dissimilarities between political actors and political frames, forces us to review critically some assumptions basic to the field. Political transfer may not be so much about attribution of similarity leading to imitation, as about the certification of actors in highly volatile political situations. In that case political transfer should be conceived not as wholesale importation of 'foreign' political practices, but as a reinvention of all elements of a political configuration interdependently and relationally, so as to let actors, frames, political styles and the articulation of political claims emerge transformed through contention.