G. Oostindie Squaring the circle; Commemorating the VOC after 400 years In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 159 (2003), no: 1, Leiden, 135-161 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:06:06PM via free access GERT J. OOSTINDIE Squaring the circle Commemorating the VOC after 400 years In 2002, the Netherlands 'celebrated' the establishment, exactly four centu- ries before, of the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, East Indies Company). By pure coincidence, that same year a national monument in commemoration of the Atlantic slave trade and Dutch Caribbean slavery - in which the Dutch West Indische Compagnie (WIC, West Indies Company) was a key player - was inaugurated in Amsterdam. In both the celebration of the Dutch East Indies Company and the act of repentance regarding its West Indies counterpart, Queen Beatrix and the then Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok were conspicuously present.1 1 The official dates were 20 March and 1 July, respectively. This article was first presented in November 2002 as a paper at the Erasmushuis in Jakarta and for the Lembaga Adat/ Kebudayaan Toar Lumimuut Masyarakat Minahasa in Tondano. I owe thanks to the audiences at these occasions for their reactions, to the anonymous readers for the Bijdragen and to several colleagues who commented on a draft of this article: Taufik Abdullah, Sander Adelaar, Michiel Baud, Vincent Houben, Adrian B. Lapian, Remco Raben, Merle Ricklefs, Leslie Witz and, at KITLV, David Henley, Gerrit Knaap, Harry Poeze, Henk Schulte Nordholt, and Roger Tol. Enriq Hessing and Laura van Deelen of the Stichting Viering 400 jaar VOC kindly shared their criticism on this paper with me; we agreed to disagree on interpretation. After completing and circulating my first draft, 1 was presented with two other Dutch pieces on the VOC celebrations reflecting more or less the same concerns and criticism: Raben (2002) and Van Stipriaan and Bal (2002). There is a remarkable consensus in these papers and mine, perhaps underlining that the points made here are all too obvious. A very nuanced analysis of Dutch and Indonesian interpretations is provided by Lapian (2002). Peter Rietbergen (2002) provides a different perspective. Weary of 'political correctness' and a presumed widespread Dutch feeling of guilt about the colonial past, he rightly defends GERT J. OOSTINDIE is director of the KITLV in Leiden and Professor of Caribbean Studies at Utrecht University. His research interests are history (particularly slavery and decolonization), international relations, and ethnicity. He published some twenty books in the Caribbean and Latin American Studies. His most recent English-language books are (with Inge Klinkers), Decolonising the Caribbean; Dutch policies in a comparative perspective, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003, and the edited volume Facing up to the past; Perspectives on the commemoration of slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe, Kingston: Randle/The Hague: Prince Claus Fund, 2001. Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:06:06PM via free access 136 Gert ]. Oostindie Looking back on the festivities relating to the VOC which spanned over half a year, one may conclude that in spite of politely voiced objections against the whole idea of a 'celebration', the festive mood aimed for was maintained up to the end, in the Netherlands that is. In contrast, official reactions in Indonesia, once the prime operating area of the VOC, were dismissive, as were those in South Africa. The response in other states once touched by the company ranged from indifferent or at best lukewarm (India, China, Sri Lanka) to moderately interested among the two nations which can usefully incorporate VOC history in their own narrative of the national past (Taiwan, Japan). The whole project of a commemoration, let alone celebration, clearly remained a unilateral Dutch pursuit. One wonders whether this could, and should, have been otherwise. This question will be at the heart of my exposition. Behind it looms the larger question of how nations commemorate their past, somewhere between the extremes of a self-congratulatory splendid isolation and meaningless politi- cal correctness. Nation-building and the representation of the past The interpretation of the national past is a crucial ingredient in nation-build- ing, and so is the subsequent education of all citizens in the canonical ver- sion of this history. History, it has been said, is built upon achievement, and indeed much of the rhetoric of the national past centres on glorious achieve- ments, ever so many reasons for chauvinistic pride and evocations to keep that particular flame alive. Of course, achievement is not all, and in fact just as in individual lives, so in the trajectory of most nations disillusionment, disintegration, as well as defeat and humiliation by other forces and nations may figure. Such experiences need not necessarily undermine the concept of the nation. Thus, the feeling of past victimization might well be used to strengthen the sense of community, to foment revanchism or, conversely, to bequeath the nation with a touch of purity, a vulnerable absence of malice. Finally, and not very common at least until recently, there is the option of addressing the nation's past lapses from virtue in moralistic terms allowing for a national mea culpa - which, incidentally, may rebound full circle to self- the commemoration as such. Yet in my view, what is at stake is not as much the legitimacy of 'commemoration', but rather of 'celebration'. Rietbergen seems rather eager to implicitly downplay problematic aspects of VOC and Dutch colonialism by references to the many faults committed by others, including the Indonesian rulers of yesterday and today. Very much to the point is his discussion of the increasingly predominant weight of the leisure industry and the mass media in all renderings of the past, including this one. Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:06:06PM via free access Squaring the circle 137 congratulatory conclusions on the laudable humbleness of this great nation. Quite obviously, all of this defining of the nation through the representa- tion of its past becomes infinitely more complicated once there is a genuine striving to come to terms across national boundaries on such phenomena as colonialism or warfare. How does the Netherlands fit in this picture? As a preliminary note, it may be useful to remind you that decades of educational reform and weari- ness of state-sponsored nation-building have not been particularly helpful to public historical awareness in the first place. Hence what is known and particularly not known by the general public is not primarily an expression of political or scholarly decisions on content. Knowledge and awareness of the national past in Dutch society simply does not run deep. This applies to a phenomenon such as the VOC as well. With this caveat in mind, the fol- lowing observations seem pertinent. Not surprisingly, the forging of a Dutch nation in a long-winding and at times bloody war of secession from Spain, and the subsequent 'Golden' seventeenth century in which the emerging Dutch Republic shortly was the world's first hegemonic power, has long been the favourite epoch in Dutch historiography. Here there is ample achievement to be celebrated indeed, ranging from economic prosperity and international political prowess to cultural bloom and religious tolerance, from remarkable experiments in elite democratization to the successful integration of large groups of immigrants. This 'Golden' epoch was to remain a touchstone in the national memory. While the Netherlands was increasingly brought down to earth as a mere middle and eventually minor European power, this glorious episode would provide stuff for pride and inspiration as well as nostalgia up to the present. The colonial ventures in Asia figured prominently in that reckoning. As Johan Fabricius (1997:7) had it in his Scheepsjongens van Bontekoe, a 1923-adventure story on the early Dutch pursuits in Indonesia and still - if perhaps in its dying days now - a classic boys' book today, the adventures of these 'first courageous "Masters next to God" who with their valiant crew installed our authority in the [East] Indies' was definitely an example to emulate. While this 'Golden Age' produced a colonial empire still extant centu- ries later, the Netherlands plunged back to the status of a modest middle power in Europe. The Republic collapsed in the late eighteenth century and was succeeded after a French interregnum by the present Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Kingdom managed to stay outside of all European wars until 1940. Then, the Second World War produced a dividing line in Dutch national and colonial history, and would at the same time give fresh impetus to Dutch thinking about the nation's past and present. The German occupa- tion ended a long period of peace and destroyed the illusion that Dutch neu- trality would again be respected as it had been throughout the nineteenth Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:06:06PM via free access 138 Gert}. Oostindie century and in the First World War. Five years of Nazi rule resulted in the deportation and extermination of over one hundred thousand Dutch Jews and an equal number of casualties and executions among the rest of the population - roughly equal numbers, but only 35,000 Jews survived the war, as against the great majority of the total Dutch population of nine million. Material damage was enormous. The Dutch government-in-exile in London stood before the impossible task of not only monitoring the developments in the occupied Netherlands, but also directing overseas affairs. The Japanese occupation of Indonesia in 1942 was the second devastating blow, even if the Dutch at the time did not yet foresee that this would be followed by the unilateral and irreversible declaration of Indonesian independence on 17 August 1945.