www.ssoar.info The perpetual adversary: how Dutch security services perceived communism (1918-1989) Hijzen, Constant Willem Veröffentlichungsversion / Published Version Zeitschriftenartikel / journal article Zur Verfügung gestellt in Kooperation mit / provided in cooperation with: GESIS - Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Hijzen, C. W. (2013). The perpetual adversary: how Dutch security services perceived communism (1918-1989). Historical Social Research, 38(1), 166-199. https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.38.2013.1.166-199 Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Dieser Text wird unter einer CC BY Lizenz (Namensnennung) zur This document is made available under a CC BY Licence Verfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu den CC-Lizenzen finden (Attribution). For more Information see: Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.de Diese Version ist zitierbar unter / This version is citable under: https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-381597 The Perpetual Adversary. How Dutch Security Services Perceived Communism (1918-1989) ∗ Constant Willem Hijzen Abstract: »Der ewige Gegner. Die Wahrnehmung des Kommunismus durch den Niederländischen Geheimdienst (1918-1989)«. For more than eighty years, Dutch security services perceived communism as the ultimate threat to nation- al security. From its inception, the anticommunist threat perceptions contained references to foreign, possible, potential, and ideological elements of the com- munist threat. This put the activities of Dutch communists in a different light. Although for a long time there were well-grounded reasons to do so, we find that there were periods when the actual threatening character of Dutch com- munism decreased. However, the security services did not decrease their sur- veillance activities vis-à-vis this ‘red menace’. To account for this discrepancy, we use insights from securitization theory, organizational studies, and intelli- gence studies to deconstruct threat perceptions. We find that whenever actual- ly threatening events, such as the revolutionary threat of 1918 or the World Wars, became part of a distant past, the security services emphasized the sym- bolic and potential nature of the communist threat. The symbolic character of the threat, institutionalized and continually reinforced by processes of cogni- tive bias, thus accounted for its unchanging threatening character. Only through external intervention have these perceptions changed. Keywords: security services, threat perceptions, securitization, communism, conspiracy, organization theory, cognitive closure. 1. Introduction “A cunning plot,” a former employee of the Dutch security service said, refer- ring to the collapse of world communism in the early 1990s. He had dedicated his whole working life to opposing communism. Communists “were that smart.” The fall of communism therefore “certainly seemed to be a plot,” the former intelligence officer reasoned, because it benefited the communists in two ways. On the one hand, communists were now free to come to and move around in the West. They would have no problems bringing in weaponry. On the other hand, in the former, in the former communist countries in Central and ∗ Constant Willem Hijzen, Centre for Terrorism and Counterterrorism, Institute for History, Leiden University, Postbus 13228, 2501 EE The Hague, Netherlands; [email protected]. Historical Social Research 38 (2013) 1, 166-199 │© GESIS Eastern Europe, chaos would follow after the collapse of communism. So after a couple of years, still according to the former intelligence officer, people would start longing for communism again and then communists would be able to seize power again, this time supported by a veritable majority of the popula- tion.1 This view of communism would not have raised many eyebrows, say, fifty years earlier, when the Cold War started. But in 1998, when many of the for- mer communist regimes had already successfully transformed into capitalist and democratic state systems and had exchanged their political elites corre- spondingly, these words appeared to be somewhat outdated (Best, Gebauer and Salheiser 2012). However, the comment was not just an individual aberration; on an organizational level, anticommunist threat perceptions proved to be per- sistent too. Even when other security issues such as student radicalism and international and domestic terrorism came to the fore, during the 1960s and 1970s, and politicians and activist organizations pushed the security service to end its interference with domestic communist organizations, the leading cadre of the security service stuck to its anticommunist position. The service held that since the essence of communism did not change, „the policy of the security service remained unchanged.” Opposing this threat, the respective heads of service adamantly decided, should therefore be maintained as the cardinal responsibility of the security service.2 How should we account for this unflinching belief in the threatening nature of communism? “Beginning from the known,” as one of the fundamentals of the intelligence profession prescribes, the historiography on Dutch intelligence and security paints us a picture of a security service unwilling or unable to change in princi- ple. Keeping a certain distance to socio-political actors in the environment because of its secret character, the Dutch security service maintained its auton- omy in determining threats too. In its own perception, the security service thought it was better equipped to assess the danger of communism than minis- ters or members of parliament (De Valk 1996, 11, 44; Engelen 2007, 69-70, 236). This observation helps us to grasp a very important contributing factor to the continuity in threat perceptions, i.e. organizational dynamics and logics, but 1 Interview with an anonymous former employee of Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst in a radio documentary, ‘Going back on track: serving the country’, VPRO radio documentary, broad- cast 15th November 1998; Het Parool, 17. October 1998, ‘That good Cold War: interviews with six employees of the Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst’. 2 E.g. Aurora meeting 3rd May 1965 [the so-called Aurora meetings were meetings between the head of the security service and his managers of the different departments, held two or three times a week to discuss current affairs]; Semi Static Archive of the Algemene Inlicht- ingen- en Veiligheidsdienst, Report of meeting between head of the BVD and the minister of Interior Affairs, 8th June 1967 and 12th January 1982. HSR 38 (2013) 1 │ 167 it fails to shed light on the question of why organizational logics dictate this particular outcome. In this article we argue that although the security services did perceive and analyze alterations within international and domestic communism, they were not able or willing to ‘desecuritize’ the communist threat. In this argument we will stress the importance of symbolic and organizational influences on the way threat perceptions evolved over time and argue that ‘desecuritization’ as an internal decision was not an option. Only external intervention could funda- mentally alter these perceptions. 1.1 Theoretical Orientation The specter of worldwide communism is pre-eminently associated with the realm of conspiracy theories. Conspiracies can be, as stated in the introduction to this HSR Special Issue by Beatrice de Graaf and Cornel Zwierlein, part of security and conspiracy ‘dispositives’. Dispositives, according to Michel Fou- cault who coined the concept, are ‘heterogeneous ensembles’ of ‘discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures’ and many other things (De Graaf and Zwierlein 2013, in this HSR Special Issue). As the aim of this article is to understand the continuity in anti- communist threat perceptions, it would stretch too far to look at all facets of a supposed anticommunist ‘security dispositive’, let alone a communist ‘conspir- acy dispositive’ (De Graaf and Zwierlein 2013, in this HSR Special Issue; Balzacq 2011; Buzan, Waever and De Wilde 1998, 23). Instead we ask the question of why the Dutch security services considered communism to be a menace for such a long time, even though its character changed in important respects. To put it more precisely we ask which dimen- sions of the communist threat changed over the years, why other aspects never changed at all, and why the security service for such a long period of time never decided to terminate the operational and analytical intelligence activities in communist circles. A possible answer to this question would be that communism was threaten- ing all those years. Some authors follow this line of reasoning and emphasize the strong ties between Western communist parties and ‘Moscow’ (Guiat 2003, 176). The communist parties’ mere existence thus justified authorities worrying and security services opposing the communist parties.3 Although we agree that in certain periods communism seemed to be a grave threat, we assume that nothing is essentially a menace. People interpret events, groups, and situations as threatening and construct representations of that threat (Balzacq 2011, 2; Hansen 2006, 25-8). To understand why communism was an enduring threat in 3 Right-wing politicians and thinkers in particular emphasized the continued threatening character of communist organizations, e.g. Frits Bolkestein (1998). HSR 38 (2013) 1 │ 168 the eyes of Dutch security