Abstract
Jennifer L. Foray, Visions of Empire in the Nazi-Occupied Netherlands, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012; xiv + 337 pp.; £60.00 hbk; ISBN 9781107015807.
The role of the clandestine press in Nazi-occupied Europe has been extensively discussed in the voluminous national historiographies of the Second World War. The multiplicity of newspapers, pamphlets and flyers provided an outlet for diverse groups across the political spectrum to disseminate information to the public and keep them abreast of events when independent news was a scarce and restricted commodity. Beyond this, such publications also provided an opportunity to expound ideas about the future after liberation, and this has been explored in some major projects, not least those concerned with the history of European integration. Less attention has been paid to ideas about empire. This book examines in detail how the Dutch underground press saw the Netherlands as an imperial state at a time when the metropole was at the mercy of German rule, the East Indies were occupied by the Japanese, and the only realistic chance of liberation was through the agency of the major Western powers. The author has based her analysis on an extensive examination of five key clandestine publications and has attempted to show the range of ideas expressed by its editors and contributors. She has chosen her examples widely, from the communist party’s De Waarheid through the more socialist-oriented Het Parool to the more neutral but Calvinist-leaning Vrij Nederland. Editorial disagreements in this latter publication gave rise to the more overtly Calvinist mouthpiece of the pre-war Anti-revolutionary party, Trouw. Her final example is Je Maintiendrai, a more overtly ‘establishment’ source that had contributions from many of the country’s intellectual elite.
In framing her topic, she has given a short exposition on the place of empire in the interwar period, suggesting that it received little attention in the 1930s. While it is clear that domestic considerations predominated, the idea of empire was probably more of a subconscious presence in Dutch thinking, only occasionally emerging from the shadows – for example, during the mutiny on the Dutch warship, De Zeven Provinciën in 1933. Moreover, her analysis of the period seems to rely heavily on English-language sources, which raises the question of whether Dutch authors could have been more heavily referenced here. It is also not the case that the Anglo–French occupation of Curaçao and Aruba in May 1940 came at the invitation of Queen Wilhelmina, as this was in fact a post facto justification of events.
The body of the text outlines the characteristics of resistance in the country after the German invasion in May 1940 and then uses a more-or-less chronological approach to examine the image of the empire before the Japanese invasion of the East Indies and the trauma that followed the rapid capitulation of this most prized and iconic colonial possession. It goes on to look at the reaction to Queen Wilhelmina’s famous speech on 6 December 1942, in which she promised a re-examination of the relationship between the metropole and the colonies. While this was couched in more vague terms than is often credited, it nonetheless sparked a wave of debate about what the future kingdom might look like. Alongside her analysis of the Dutch case, the author also incorporates a wealth of detail on contextual issues such as Charles De Gaulle’s Brazzaville Conference in early 1944 that sought to restructure the French relationship with their overseas colonies.
In the final analysis, the ideas propounded in wartime resistance publications were undoubtedly diffuse, spanning everything from a root-and-branch modernization of the relations between the metropole and the Indies to a complete restoration of the former imperial structure – but these were all overtaken by events. The powerlessness of the Dutch government-in-exile to respond when the Japanese surrender came, coupled with an overstretched British presence in South East Asia and US reticence about assisting the restoration of European colonies, meant that it had few practical options when Sukarno declared Indonesia’s independence. It could be charitably argued that little of this could have been predicted by those inside the Netherlands unaware of the international political landscape as the war came to an end, although discussions after the Netherlands was liberated suggest that many among the elite continued to adopt the posture of an ostrich by refusing to accept new military and political realities – for example, by refusing any form of negotiation with Sukharno’s Nationalists. As this book amply demonstrates, there was never a consensus within the resistance on the future of empire, and the continuance of this ambivalence was to have tragic consequences for Dutch attempts to re-establish a relationship with its East Indian colonies.