American Power in the Netherlands

My current book project, American Power in the Netherlands: Modernization and the Politics of Clientelism, 1945-1959, is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic and will be published in 2025. This book tells for the first time the story of American economic, political, and cultural influence within the post-WWII Netherlands. The book advances two intertwined stories: 1) The recovery of Dutch politics, international relations, and socio-economy after World War II, and 2) The role of American power in facilitating and advancing that Dutch modernization. ​

The postwar Netherlands was a devastated country. In this environment, American economic aid, military support, and cultural interventions were pervasive and could not be ignored. They also carried profound ideological intentions. The Americans sought, quite conspicuously, to Americanize the Europeans, to convince them of the supremacy of market systems, of the political utility of economic growth, of “Free World” unity, and of US leadership throughout. Yet in this case, Dutch leaders were perfectly capable of keeping most American ideological pressures at bay. One of my essential contentions is that postwar Dutch modernization largely pursued its own course. American power became instrumental, even decisive, in the reconstruction of the Netherlands without the ideological preferences of that power becoming operative within Dutch political and social systems.

Such an account of American power helps move us away from cruder notions of “Americanization” as a force of overwhelming pressure in favor of a more nuanced account of American power and the selective reception of that power by Dutch interlocutors. What is at stake in this case, in other words, is Dutch agency. Officials in The Hague responded to the postwar environment in creative and imaginative ways, offering a new social contract and redefining the Netherlands’ role in the world. Access to American power made much of this possible, but it was a modernization on Dutch terms. The insights are applicable in other contexts.

This book therefore further reveals how the modern American empire functioned. We know about that empire’s operations at the savage frontiers, from the Philippines to Guatemala to Vietnam, where regimes of violence carried American ideas and interests. We certainly know what American empire looked like in competition with its Cold War geopolitical rivals. American Power in the Netherlands adds a new dimension to these coordinates of empire and demonstrates the limits of American power within, but at the peripheries of, its own imperial system, precisely where we would expect that power to enjoy its greatest advantage.

This book argues that while less obviously violent than in other parts of the world, the American presence in Europe was nevertheless part of its global Cold War empire. An “empire by invitation” the United States may have been, as the great historian Geir Lundestad put it, but the invitation makes American intentions no less pervasive or revolutionary. The descriptor “clientelism” preserves the imperial intentions behind the fact of American power while allowing scope for agency at the receiving end. Indeed, one of the insights of the “clientelist” approach is the recognition that power placed on offer by the Americans was solicited, appropriated, and leveraged at the receiving end. The provision of American power gave Dutch policymakers options and opportunities that they would not have had otherwise to pursue outcomes of their own devising, often even at odds with the Americans who had provided such opportunities in the first place. The development of the welfare state, the evolution of Indonesian policy, and the postwar industrialization of the Dutch economy are direct examples of this selective expropriation of American power.