Introduction

Abstract

The computer-assisted workflow, based on emotion mining to identify, measure, and compare emotionality of texts, is applied to two different case studies in the following chapters. The baselines of emotional language use in the Dutch parliament have been set in Chapter 5. For each thematic case study, a subset of parliamentary discussions from the period 1945-1989 was retrieved from the Handelingen (see also Chapter 3). Chapters 6 and 7 address a first case study and deal with the parliamentary discussion of national legislative schemes aimed at a group of people that were retrospectively regarded as 'soldiers' outside the regular national army. The former anti-Nazi resistance received much public and governmental attention from the first years after liberation onwards. These people had been actively involved with resistance activities or had been working against the Nazi occupier in other ways. Sometimes, this led to their death, or to lasting illness that affected their circumstances (or those of their families) long after the war. They were, by the postwar government, treated as veterans or former soldiers. The Resistance was used to legitimise the still precarious post-war political order. To whom did the Resistance belong? Who had been part of this group?Although it rolls off the tongue, the actual groups of people which 'the Resistance' refers to is (and was) not easy to delineate. In wartime, there had never been a singular, homogenous, or unanimous group that acted united under the term 'the Resistance'. Resistance against the Nazi occupation in the Netherlands had consisted of various acts of a heterogeneous conglomerate of individuals, initiatives, and groups. The notion of a homogeneous unity should be considered as constructed. 'The Resistance' was used as a reference to position oneself -and others. Unity of the notion of 'the Resistance' was, both during and after the war, needed for the government and various other groups of people to express themselves or to claim legitimacy and power. This, however, by no means diminishes the actual deeds and actions of a whole range of people obstructing the occupation and its persecution of groups within society -most notably those people labelled as Jewish.Each case study in this investigation consists of three parts. The first part introduces the political and societal background of the history of national legislation aimed at 'the Resistance' and, in the second case study, war victim legislation. Leg-