In his seminal writings on ‘race’ in the Americas, Harry Hoetink opened new horizons for the understanding of how ideas about race, color and ethnicity are constituted and then become self-evident elements of the frame of reference of particular groups and cultures. Even if there are evidently political dimensions to these processes of establishing ethnic boundaries around and between peoples, his explicit perspective was more of a social-psychological nature. In this contribution, while subscribing to most of Hoetink's ideas on the subject, I attempt to give the discussion a twist by directing it towards the ways in which young and ethnically heterogeneous nations have used race and ethnicity in the process of nationbuilding.

While taking all of the Caribbean as a frame of reference, I specifically discuss ‘Dutch’ Caribbean experiences. This geographical focus aims to correct the cursory neglect of this part of the region in writings on the Caribbean. More importantly, it should underline the theoretical relevance of including these cases in comparative studies. (n Hoetink's writings, comparisons of Curaçao and Suriname provided additional credibility to his approach of disentangling metropolitan backgrounds and systems of slavery, and of severing the erstwhile seemingly self-evident link between the specific nature of slavery in a given colony and its subsequent record of race relations. The following analysis, through its focus on Dutch Caribbean experiences, ultimately addresses wider dimensions of ethnicity, nationbuilding, and the frustrated experiences of decolonization in the region.

Post-World War Il decolonizations

The contemporary Caribbean differs in a myriad of ways from the region it was in the early 1960s, when Harry Hoetink started to develop his theories on race relations in the Americas. An increasing economic and hence political marginalization has negatively affected most of the region. Standards of living, the functioning of democracy, and guarantees of civil rights may still be relatively high in the Caribbean, especially if one were to take the so-called Third World as a frame of reference. However, in much of the region, the relevant comparison is not the one with the ‘Mother Continents’ of Africa or Asia, or with geographically and historically nearby Latin America, but rather with the old metropolises in Europe, and the dominant new one, the United States. From that perspective, the economic and political development of the last decades has been disappointing.