Book Blog: Is my Book . . . Relevant, Now?

​When I started my research into Dutch-American relations more than two decades ago, I was at the time aware that I was engaged in a very niche topic. My focus was what scholars called “Americanization,” an approach that even then was beginning to fade into the twilight. The issue for me was to ask what the vast imbalances of power between the USA and the Netherlands meant for the smaller partner. How did American influence work? How did it get its own way? Were there situations in which it could be resisted? Was American power always a form of international bullying? Or could it be benign? I found answers to those questions, and present them in my book. What I didn’t expect then, and still don’t understand now, was how my little niche topic would suddenly become one of the paramount topics of concern in the third decade of the century.

​As I show in my book, American power in the postwar Netherlands was decisive. American influence solved a host of what would have been otherwise intractable foreign and domestic policy dilemmas for the Netherlands, including the interrelated problems of what do with and about Germany, and how to carve out a nominal national independence within an otherwise integrating Europe. On the domestic front, thanks to American influence, postwar Dutch political leaders were able to propose and fund the beginning of what would later become an extensive welfare state.
 
I also learned the ways in which American influence could be problematic, either because it sought an overweening influence, notably in the area of defense and Cold War rearmament, or because it could be expropriated and exploited by the Dutch themselves, most tragically in the case of the two bloody police actions when the Dutch attempted, against all logic, to retain their Indonesian colonies.
 
American power could be problematic, but I found no evidence of “Americanization,” of an unwanted and excessive intrusion into political and economic affairs, much less “cultural imperialism.” Dutch choices responded to Dutch minds and hearts, not American.
 
But there was nevertheless extensive influence and what we might call penetration. The Americans WERE everywhere. American capital, public and private, flooded little Holland. And American influence was everywhere because it was wanted. The Dutch wanted American investments, they wanted American power as a ballast in the international councils of Europe, they wanted American backstopping of collective European defense. They got a lot out of the relationship. And the Americans did too, as I try to make clear. The Americans, of course, reaped the benefits of those investments. They extended American defense perimeters at much lower cost (higher than they wanted, of course) than if they had to foot the bill all by themselves. They reaped enormous benefits from the widespread acceptance of American economic hegemony, in the form of the reserve dollar, favorable trade deals and steady markets, and plenty of outlets for excess American capital. Perhaps most of all, Dutch acceptance of American power legitimated that power, helping to solve the perpetual crisis of legitimacy that afflicts all imperial projects.
 
What American power, and Dutch acceptance of that power (and by extension, most of western Europe), did was to create a new world. Much has been said, and very rightly so, about the bloody exploits of American power at the savage imperial frontier, from Vietnam to Iran to Guatemala and nearly everywhere else in the “global south.” Nothing that I have written attempts to deflect from that imperial reality. But empire also means stability and prosperity, at least for those fortunate by birth, location, and race to find themselves near the imperial center. Reasonable people can debate whether, on balance, the costs are worth the benefits, but what is undeniable is that for many (most?) people in the imperial center, empire vouchsafed peace and prosperity well worth the cost.
 
What I did not foresee when I first undertook the project is that so many Americans would decide, peremptorily and seemingly without debate or consideration, to accept the sudden collapse of what the Americans and the Dutch, and so many throughout Europe, chose to build in those years immediately after the wanton destruction of World War II. It is dizzying and disorienting to me that my research is both suddenly no longer niche, but apparently also no longer relevant to any world in which we now live. I still don’t know how to make sense of the Trump administration’s attack on NATO (virtually a dead letter at this point), what is to be gained by alienating Europe, and how the surrender of American global hegemony (which relies for its existence more on goodwill than it does on American military might) benefits the cause of prosperity and stability anywhere. There is no automatic reason to expect with the retreat of the United States, and the concomitant rise of China and Russia, that anywhere in Africa, Latin America, or Asia will be made safer and more prosperous. The Europeans are, by definition, manifestly less safe today than they were prior to Trump. Just ask Greenland.
 
I wonder if most Americans are aware of what they had built in the 1940s and 50s, and what therefore they are giving up in the implosion of American global hegemony?
​--David J. Snyder