The Low Countries. Jaargang 10

History

Selective Affinities
Anglo-Dutch Relations, 1780-1980

The publication of Unspoken Allies marks the rediscovery of Anglo-Dutch relations as an interesting and fruitful topic for historical investigation. The book is the outcome of academic cooperation across the North Sea led by professors Nigel Ashton (lse) and Duco Hellema (Utrecht University). Its starting point is the Gaullist view that the Netherlands and Britain are different from the continental Europeans, since both are Atlantic nations and have been shaped in large part by their maritime and colonial past.

With their introduction and postcript the editors provide a frame for the various well-documented contributions, written by ten Dutch and five British historians, which focus on the role of international relations in the history of Anglo-Dutch contact over the past two centuries. The order of presentation is chronological, and the book closes in the 1980s - so it is slightly odd to see a picture of Tony Blair and Wim Kok on the cover, when inside the book these two labour party modernisers are hardly mentioned at all.

The colonial theme figures prominently in the book. From the end of the eighteenth century the Dutch colonial empire was sheltered under the British umbrella, and safeguarded by the British in order to maintain the European balance of power. In the twentieth century the colonial issue comes up again in the chapter on Anglo-Dutch relations during the Second World War - momentous years, when the future of the Dutch colonies was in peril, and the Netherlands itself depended on Great Britain for the restoration of its sovereignty. This is followed by an extensive chapter on Anglo-Dutch relations during the Indonesian revolution (1945-1950), which concedes that the political assessment of the situation on Java by the British officer Laurens Van der Post had been ‘essentially correct’ - something he himself did not fail to advertise in his memoirs, The Admiral's Baby (1996).

There are, surprisingly, no British contributions on the colonial theme, and this may explain why for example Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, is only mentioned in passing. From both sides, though, Anglo-Dutch colonial relations deserve much further study, along the lines of Bromley and Kossmann's Britain and the Netherlands in Europe and Asia (1968). Thus, it would be very interesting to find out how the treaties which the Dutch concluded with native rulers were assessed in Whitehall and the India Office. Many other colonial episodes are waiting to be explored in the rich archives and libraries of London. Jaap Harskamp's recent catalogue of British Library holdings, The Indonesian Question, offers a good starting point here.

The other contributions in the book focus on Anglo-Dutch relations in Europe, especially in the twentieth

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century. During the First World War the neutral Dutch performed an uneasy balancing act between Germany and Britain, and were subject to very strong pressures on matters of trade and security. At the end of that war there was the high drama and theatre of diplomatic bluff and counterbluff over the German Kaiser Wilhelm, who had sought asylum in the Netherlands. The inter-war period was dominated by trade problems. There is a very interesting chapter on security issues in the run-up to the Second World War - a welltold tale, based on a lot of original archival material from the Public Records Office. This is followed by an extensive chapter on the political and military contacts between the Dutch and the British during the Second World War, although there is no mention of the Englandspiel.

After the war Anglo-Dutch relations moved into a different key, and the issue of European cooperation and integration took centre stage. The enlargement of the European Community to include Britain was one of the key priorities of Dutch post-war foreign policy. The unsuccessful first and second British applications to join the European Community are discussed in detail here, and we learn not only to what lengths Dutch diplomats went in order to assist the British, but also that for Britain they ‘were not necessarily the most useful ally to have’. The book ends with a contribution on the very different views of the Dutch and the British on the Middle East during the oil crisis of the 1970s.

In their postscript Ashton and Hellema conclude that ‘Anglo-Dutch relations have lost a considerable part of the meaning they had in the past’. The two countries no longer possess colonial empires, and Anglo-Dutch relations today are firmly embedded in the multilateral frameworks of eu and nato. But there still is ‘an underlying, unspoken alliance in terms of ideology and interests’ between the two countries, in particular in their long traditions of parliamentary democracy and their liberal views on international matters. True as this may be, there have often been tensions, conflicts and crises too - most recently when Dutch Euro-diplomacy seriously underestimated the strength of British Euro-scepticism and was defeated in the run-up to Maastricht.

Unspoken Allies is a stimulating book, well-supported with extensive archival evidence, and one hopes it will be followed by further research on topics that have not been covered here. In the field of contemporary international politics, it would be interesting to have a study of the special relationship between recent Dutch and British prime ministers, first Mrs Thatcher and Ruud Lubbers, today Tony Blair and Wim Kok. In the field of business the success of Anglo-Dutch joint ventures merits closer study, for example the purchase by ing of Baring's Bank. Beyond this, it would be interesting to broaden the scope of investigation to the field of social policy, and to investigate on the one hand how the Dutch are adopting British privatisation in public transport and other sectors of their ‘polder model’ economy, while conversely, the British are debating the relevance for their own society of the legalisation of soft drugs, prostitution and euthanasia, as well as the Dutch approach to public housing and urban development.

reinier salverda

Nigel Ashton and Duco Hellema (eds.), Unspoken Allies. Anglo-Dutch Relations since 1780. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001; 310 pp. ISBN 90-5356-471-3 (Publication sponsored by the Dutch Foreign Office).
Jaap Harskamp (ed.), The Indonesian Question. The Dutch / Western response to the struggle for independence in Indonesia 1945-1950. An annotated catalogue of primary materials held in the British Library. Introduction by Peter Carey. London: The British Library, 2001; xx-210 pp. ISBN 0-7123-1127-0.