Postcolonial Netherlands

amsterdam university press GERT OOSTINDIE Postcolonial Netherlands Sixty-five years of forgetting, commemorating, silencing Postcolonial Netherlands GERT OOSTINDIE Postcolonial Netherlands Sixty-five years of forgetting, commemorating, silencing amsterdam university press The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research nwo( ). Original title: Postkoloniaal Nederland. Vijfenzestig jaar vergeten, herdenken, verdringen, Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, 2010 Translation: Annabel Howland Cover illustration: Netherlands East Indies Memorial, Amstelveen; photograph Eveline Kooijman Design: Suzan Beijer, Amersfoort isbn 978 90 8964 353 7 e-isbn 978 90 4851 402 1 nur 697 Creative Commons License CC BY NC (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) G.J. Oostindie / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2011 Some rights reversed. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise). Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 7 1 Decolonization, migration and the postcolonial bonus 23 From the Indies/Indonesia 26 From Suriname 33 From the Antilles 36 Migration and integration in the Netherlands 39 The disappearance of the postcolonial community and bonus 44 2 Citizenship: rights, participation, identification 48 The right to remain Dutch 50 Postcolonial organizations: profiles and meaning 55 Political participation 66 Ambivalent identities 70 3 The struggle for recognition: war and the silent migration 73 From war to exodus 75 War and bersiap 76 The ‘cold’ reception 81 The uprooting of the Moluccans 85 Veterans and the Indisch community 88 Memorial culture 91 West Indian and Dutch stories and silences around war and exodus 97 4 The individualization of identity 101 Identity: individual perception, public significance 102 Indisch identity, from Tjalie to Indo4Life 106 Moluccan identity around and after the rms 114 Diversity without unity: Caribbean identity 117 Recognition and erosion 125 5 Imagining colonialism 130 The Companies 131 ‘Something magnificent was done there!’ 135 The West Indies: without pride 144 Colonial slavery, postcolonial settlement 148 Unfamiliar discourses and new silences 155 Pleasing everyone, all of the time? 159 6 Transnationalism: a turning tide? 163 Decolonization, migration circuits and generations 165 Citizens and their transnational orientations 168 Postcolonial organizations and transnational politics 172 Cultural transnationalism, ‘diaspora’ and community 184 7 An international perspective 188 Migrations in post-war Europe 189 France: republican dilemmas 192 The United Kingdom: Britishness and multiculturalism 197 Portugal: reluctant re-migrants 201 A typical case: slavery in European memorial culture 203 Colonial past and postcolonial migrations: a broad comparison 208 Typically Dutch? 212 8 ‘Postcolonial’ (in the) Netherlands 215 Postcolonial migrants: integration, identification, community 217 New ideas about the ‘Netherlands’ 223 Intermezzo: international heritage policy 228 Postcolonial studies in the Netherlands, a missed opportunity? 234 The future of the colonial past 238 Notes 243 Bibliography 262 Acknowledgements 281 Index of people, organizations and memorial sites 282 INTRODUctiON The Netherlands is a small, but densely populated Western European country, a large part of which was reclaimed from the sea. Once a prominent player in world history, it is now a middle-sized partner in the European Union. There have been times when the Dutch were proud of their accomplish- ments and their position in the world, other times when they were self-ef- facing or frustrated, and often all of these at the same time. This Dutch am- bivalence has also caught the eye of foreign commentators. The British historian Simon Schama observed that even at the zenith of their power and wealth in the seventeenth century the Dutch were constricted by an ‘embar- rassment of riches’.1 The image of the Netherlands in the Golden Age is of a country of indus- trious workers, adroit merchants, ruthless colonialists, and God-fearing Protestants who took pleasure in their wealth with mixed emotions. This society was reputed to be exceptionally tolerant of religious diversity, to have a flourishing cultural and scientific life, to be a magnet for migrants, and a state that rejected the notion of a hereditary monarchy. The Republic liked to see itself as setting an example. But over the next few centuries it was increasingly cut down to size until it became a modest player on the world stage, significant in world politics largely because it managed to maintain its position as a colonial power, with the Indonesian archipelago as the pearl in its crown. And thus it remained, even after it became a monarchy follow- ing the Napoleonic Wars and, in 1848, a parliamentary democracy – albeit initially a strongly elitist one. The Second World War brought the German occupation of the Nether- lands, the Japanese invasion of the Netherlands East Indies, and American and British protection of the Dutch Caribbean colonies of Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles. It was not until later that the extent to which the Neth- erlands had suffered from its imperial overstretch became clear; the way in which the political elite stubbornly tried to avert Indonesian independence 7 revealed a provincial mentality that did anything but tally with the domes- tically, widely-held conviction that the Dutch could teach the world, not just its colonies, about selfless development and gradual emancipation. Indonesia refused to be appeased, let alone repressed any longer; only the two small Caribbean colonies voted to remain Dutch. ‘Indië verloren, ramp spoed geboren’ (The East Indies lost, a disaster born) is how the colonial lobby presented the change to the Dutch, but this pessimism turned out to be un- founded. Even without its colonial wealth, the Netherlands showed robust economic growth in the post-war years, growth that was partly translated into a gradually expanding system of generous collective provisions. De- cades of almost uninterrupted development once again turned the Nether- lands into one of the most prosperous countries on the planet. The Nether- lands also became a consumer society. In this it differed little from other countries in the Western world, but it was often experienced as a more pro- found rupture with the past, because the archetypical image of the Dutch had long revolved around a strong work ethic and great thrift. Decolonization and increased prosperity brought great demographic changes. Just as in the Golden Age, the Netherlands once again became a land of immigration. In 1945, the population numbered around nine million inhabitants; today over 16.5 million. In 1945 the Dutch population was almost entirely white, today there are around three million ‘migrants’, first and second generation, most of whom come from the global South. The number of Dutch people with roots in the colonies is estimated to be around one million – colonial history has, literally, come home. At the same time a radical shift occurred in the realm of religion and ide- ology. The image of the Netherlands as a Calvinist country may have remained unduly strong for centuries, as Catholicism continued to dominate regions outside the urban agglomeration of Amsterdam-Rotterdam- Utrecht, the Randstad. However, more decisive was the way in which religious and ideological differences had been pacified since the late nineteenth century. Verzuiling or ‘pillarization’ was key to this. Catholics and Protes- tants, but also socialists and liberals, organized themselves into their own ‘pillars’, presenting their members with a broad spectrum of duties, mores and services. Education, from primary school to university, was segregated into Catholic, Protestant and ‘public’ (non-confessional) institutions and each pillar had its own political parties, press, unions, and broadcasting corporations. Even the leisure sphere was subject to verzuiling, right down to the ideological persuasion of women’s magazines and sports clubs. In the post-war Netherlands, which had emerged destitute from the Sec- ond World War, this system – which has been termed ‘consociational de- 8 POSTCOLONIAL NETHERLANDS mocracy’ by the political scientist Arend Lijphart – had a stabilizing effect initially. 2 As the pillars’ leaders kept their grassroots in line, trying to keep them away from other pillars, they increasingly found themselves having to reach compromises at a political and labour-relations level, where each pillar had something to gain. The post-war reconstruction of the country owed much to this policy of compromise. The turbulence of 1960s and ‘70s brought the first cracks in this pattern. The Netherlands launched into a rapid pro- cess of secularization and a strong wave of individualization pulled the rug from under verzuiling, which was increasingly experienced as claustropho- bic. Within a matter of decades the Netherlands had changed from a sober and prudent country to one that was overwhelmingly secular, in which citizens took less and less notice of the traditional authorities. As sociologist Frank J. Lechner

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