oa Van ‘helsche machines’ en Russische provocateurs - De strijd tegen het anarchisme in Nederland

In this paper the emergence and effect of international anarchism during the late nineteenth century in the Netherlands is analysed as a security and conspiracy dispositive. The dispositive was invoked by anarchists and police officials alike, who used new techniques of suggesting threat and imagining danger. It was legitimized by the late nineteenth-century public fear of chaos, revolution, and moral decay, connected to an exaggeration of science’s new possibilities. And it led to new ways of governing the threat and risk posed by the anarchist alien, including the Ochrana’s setting up of attacks in order to frame bonafide socialists and social democrats. In the Netherlands security considerations were mitigated by considerations of liberalism, freedom of speech, and pragmatism. Here the fight against the Black International, however, also attracted political attention, and in the 1890s became a pretext for a new attitude towards foreigners and socialists.