Fascinating biography of Albert Winsemius, father of the Botlek and guide to Singapore ★★★★☆

‘The man who made the Netherlands and Singapore rich’, is the subheading of Frans Stoelinga’s book Albert Winsemius. †The greatest Dutch poverty fighter of the 20th century’, reads on the back cover. These are not just slogans, such as the best singer or greatest football player of the 20th century, because Stoelinga received his doctorate for a dissertation on Albert Winsemius, who died in 1996. The statements must be scientifically substantiated.

Now the dissertation has also been turned into a book for the general public, because such an important man deserves more than just the attention of the scientific elite. After the war, Winsemius formed the basis of Dutch reconstruction with his export model. The ‘pacemaker of post-war industrial policy’, as described de Volkskrant him in 2014. In the 1960s, the economist did it all over again in the Asian city-state of Singapore, now the richest country in the world per capita after Luxembourg and ahead of Qatar.

The fact that Albert Winsemius had not previously been devoted to a biography is actually special. In the Netherlands he is best known as the father of Pieter Winsemius, who became a minister. Albert, himself the son of a Frisian cheese maker, operated in the shadows all his life; in the 1950s in that of Willem Drees and the post-war Minister of Economic Affairs, Jan van den Brink. In the 1960s and 1970s in that of Lee Kuan Yew, the autocratic Prime Minister of Singapore, the pinhead nation at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula.

Together they took Singapore from the third to the first world. It made little difference to Winsemius that democracy or human rights were set aside. ‘Success, where the end often justifies uncompromising means, has become Winsemius’ trademark,’ writes Stoelinga. Winsemius advised Lee to eliminate opponents such as communists if necessary, if they thwarted his policy: “Throw them in jail, kick them out of the country or have them killed.”

In the shadow

His operating in the shadows also had to do with his controversial wartime past, during which he continued to work as a civil servant and even made a career. After the war he got away with a mild purge, because in the eyes of people like Jan Tinbergen (CPB director) and Piet Lieftinck (Minister of Finance) he was indispensable for the reconstruction. ‘Because of his great energy, lust for power and intelligence, he will get exactly what he wants’, the Netherlands Institute for Psychotechnics wrote after a test.

In 1949, Winsemius became director-general at the Ministry of Economic Affairs. He tempted more than 400 international industrial companies, 150 of which were American, to open a branch in the Netherlands. Winsemius was made responsible for the distribution of Marshall Aid. His premise was that all attention should be focused on the export industry. ‘In this way, Winsemius became the father of the Botlek area, the chemical industry in Zeeland and South Limburg, the salt industry in Groningen and savior of Hoogovens’, says Stoelinga. The concrete aim is that in 1952 the Netherlands should sell two and a half times as many industrial products as in 1948, so that dollar income is in balance with expenditure. He also became a major advocate of the establishment of vocational schools, of which there were already 180 in 1951, a doubling compared to 1939.

Singapore Guide

In 1960, when he was asked by the OECD, the World Bank and the UN to put his expertise at the service of Singapore, the Netherlands was ‘the guide country’. The city-state’s GDP per capita is lower than that of Mexico at the time. Two-thirds of Singapore’s 1.6 million people live in shacks with corrugated zinc iron or leafy roofs. Once again, in the context of planned industrialization, he managed to attract dozens of foreign companies – American, Japanese and also Dutch (Shell, Philips) – to Singapore.

Ten years later, Singapore has full employment, just as it did in the Netherlands between 1945 and 1955. ‘Lee Kuan Yew’s administration is reminiscent of the autocracy under Queen Wilhelmina and her first governments after 1945’, writes Stoelinga. Parallels are also the diligent work and thrift, the commercial spirit, the scarcity of raw materials, the strong population growth, hydraulic engineering know-how and the polder model. The Social and Economic Council, in which the government, employers and employees in the Netherlands make agreements about wages, pensions and retraining, will be transplanted ‘one on one’ to Singapore. This took on a parallel with the polder model with the establishment of the National Wages Council. Later, when he sees industrial companies opting for lower-cost countries such as China and Vietnam, he guides Singapore from an industrial to a service economy, with a thriving tourism and financial sector.

Failures do not leave Stoelinga unmentioned. For example, in 1971 Winsemius led a committee that advised on a merger of the Rhine-Scheldt and Verolme shipbuilding groups. It was a fiasco and he would also be heard by the parliamentary committee of inquiry into the RSV affair. His advice to dictators in Greece and Turkey also did not turn out well. And his lobbying for the arms industry in the 1950s, during which he became a multimillionaire himself, is more than a cosmetic flaw. Because the book originated from a dissertation, you cannot really get a grip on the private person of Winsemius and his motivations. In addition, the text is often barren and larded with English quotations left untranslated. But that does not detract from the importance of the biography. It is a fascinating description of one of the most important visionaries of the 20th century.