Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden. Deel 119

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Summaries

Jan Hoffenaar, ‘Will the Netherlands be defended?’ The debate about NATO's main lines of defence at the beginning of the 1950s

At the beginning of the 1950s, the Netherlands would not have been able to defend itself in the event of a Soviet attack. Despite the fact that NATO, under the leadership of the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Eisenhower, and later General Ridgway, was in the process of rapidly building up its defences, it was still incapable of conducting a forward defence. The pivotal political and military issue in the short term centred on one question: Which areas in Western Europe could and should be kept and which not? Answers to this question exposed conflicting national interests and points of view, particularly those of the Dutch and the French. As it was taking a considerably long time to build up the Netherlands’ defences, the Dutch government had very few trump cards to add weight to its demands. Indeed, in the summer of 1952, when Parliament asked to be given a precise account of how the Dutch defences were progressing, the government was practically boxed into a corner.

Peter Hoppenbrouwers, 1302-2002. The Battle of the Golden Spurs and its impact on modern times

The commemoration, in 2002, of the 700th anniversary of the Battle of the Golden Spurs at Courtray has generated a stream of new books and articles. They shed new light on two quite different aspects of this memorable event which took place on 11 July 1302: First, the transformation of the battle into a veritable lieu de mémoire; second, the interpretation of the event itself through a more sophisticated explanation of its underlying causes and wider impact, as well as alternative views about the military action that took place. What makes the first aspect so very fascinating is the fact that the myth of 1302 eventually turned into a battlefield itself, where Flemish and Belgian nationalists sat face-to-face, and where three of the overarching ideologies of the nineteenth century - Liberalism, Christian denominationalism, and Socialism - collided. The pacifying tendency among most Belgian national politicians and professional historians, as well as the gradual appropriation of the myth of 1302 by Flemish nationalists, hampered and complicated its transformation into a collective ‘place of remembrance’ acceptable to all Belgians. One conclusion regarding the second aspect is that recent authors have great difficulty escaping the dominant models of interpretation of Moke/Pirenne in the social and economic field, and Verbruggen in the field of military tactics.

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Eric Buyst en Wim Lefebvre, The Netherlands economy during World War II viewed from a Flemish/Belgian perspective

Hein Klemann's book provides a general overview of the performance of the Dutch economy during World War II. It also deals with exploitation by the German war machine, production for the black market, price controls, and monetary and fiscal policies. The reconstructed macro-economic data, such as the evolution of real wages, is sometimes prone to serious methodological flaws. For other variables, such as agricultural production in 1945 and international trade, it is clear that more research is necessary to produce reliable indicators. Despite these critical remarks, Klemann's book offers a valuable synthesis, and other countries, such as Belgium, can use it as a source of inspiration.

Hein A.M. Klemann, Reaction to Buyst and Lefebvre

I only partly agree with Buyst and Lefebvre's contention that I am no longer interested in treating the problems of collaboration and resistance as a key subject in World War II history. I oppose only a historiography in which moral answers are given to the question on why resistance was limited and adaptation common in the early years of the German occupation in the Netherlands. To answer this question, it is better to look for concrete differences between the Netherlands and other Western European countries. Its economic history can provide such an answer. In the Netherlands, the early years of the German occupation represented a period of economic welfare. As a result of the opening of the German market after a period of almost 10 years of German economic isolation, and as a result of enormous German orders, the Dutch economy flourished from July 1940 until late 1941. It ended the period of pre-war depression and mass unemployment. Together with the well-organised distribution of food, this economic boom may not have resulted in an outright acceptance of the occupation, but it at least made it easier for the population to accept what seemed to be inevitable anyway.

Buyst and Lefebvre do not agree with the way I calculate from the new series of the national income, which showed a very limited decline, and available national income, which showed a dramatic decline from 1942 onwards, by subtracting the German withdrawals of goods and services from the Dutch economy from the national income. In their opinion, only income transfers without compensation should be subtracted from national income to compute available national income. I agree with this, but do not believe that the Germans gave any compensation for their withdrawals. Of course, Buyst and Lefebvre are right; Dutch companies were paid by the Germans for their orders, but the money with which they paid was illegally taken from the Dutch treasury or acquired by inflating the Dutch money supply without compensation. This is important because it makes clear that on the one hand Dutch national income did not

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decline - as was thought until only recently - by almost 50% between 1938 and 1944, but only by 15%. Nevertheless, Dutch society rapidly declined into acute poverty because the occupier took up to 45% of the national income without compensation. As a result, available national income declined by more than 50%.

Nor do Buyst and Lefebvre like the way I explained my calculations: They think I am too cryptic. My reasons for this were because I believe that the book is important not only to economic historians but to everyone interested in World War II and I wanted to prevent it from only circulating among a limited number of economic historians. In fact, most of my calculations had already been published earlier. Of course, they are correct in their assertion that the decision to make the book available to a wider audience makes it hard to find all the explanations of the calculations. The explanations are present, however they tend to be brief and are scattered throughout the book. To compensate for this, I will publish all the calculations on the web, as soon as possible.