Between the devil and the deep blue sea - University of Canterbury

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and 1919. As we shall see, during the interbellum years, the GreatWar was seen as a
momentous event in the Netherlands and was commemorated and studied accordingly. It
was not until the outbreak of the Second World War, in fact, that the earlier conflict lost the
meaning it had in the 1920s and 1930s.
One explanation for the decline of the Great War in public consciousness and
historiography is the impact of the German invasion and subsequent occupation in 1940 on
successive generations. The period of Nazi control over the Netherlands was the most
traumatic event the nation endured since its rebellion against Spanish rule in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Not surprisingly, the Second World War has left an enduring
legacy, which continues to influence Dutch culture today. For this reason alone, it is
understandable why one war has completely eclipsed another in popular memory and also
why historians have focused predominantly on explaining the events of May 1940 and their
consequences rather than those of August 1914.
Yet the Second World War also had a more subtle impact on the loss of Great War
memory, which relates to popular and historical conceptions of neutrality. During the inter­
war years, many Netherlanders believed that their neutrality policy had saved them from
invasion between 1914 and 1918. While they understood that the war years had been far
from easy, the mere fact that they remained neutral convinced them that neutrality was an
inviolable foreign policy, that in future conflicts the large powers would respect their
tenitOlial integrity once more. 6 Often, they based their beliefs on idealised conceptions of
what happened during that conflict. 7 Many attributed the maintenance of Dutch neutrality
solely to careful adherence to intemationa1laws and imparting an equally unattached
attitude to the warring states, rather than focusing on the compromises involved in
upholding non-belligerency. The belief that the onus for preserving neutrality lay with the
neutral was widespread and subsumed the expectation that it was in the best interest of the
world to respect Dutch neutrality as long as the Dutch did so themselves.
6 Bart van Waesberghe, "De Belgisch-Nederlandse verhoudingen en het gevaar van een Duitse aanval op de lage
landen" [Belgian-Dutch relations and the danger of a German attack on the low countries] Belgisch Tijdschrift voor
Nieuwste Gesch ieden is. 25, no. 1 - 2,1994 - 1995, pp. 103, 187.
7 The historian James John Porter went so far as to assign such ideas with a label: "the myth of idealistic neutralism"
("Dutch Neutrality in Two World Wars" PhD. diss., Boston University, 1980, pp. vi - viii).