That Princess Máxima claimed that ‘the Dutchman’ does not exist, any more than ‘the Argentinian’ by the way, was not appreciated in 2007. That red-burnt, noisy compatriot with his sleurhut on the campsite, he was recognizable everywhere after all, writes Remieg Aerts. Queen’s Day, meatball and ‘I’ll decide that myself’, weren’t those ‘cosy expressions of the national character’? Why then would ‘the Dutchman’ not exist?
It’s not that simple, as far as Aerts is concerned. Had he left it at that observation, he would have joined a list of neat thinkers and writers who describe our national character and then question it. Aerts digs in Thinking of the Netherlands at least two spades deeper. He wants to know why this national identity concerns us so much and where the search for it leads, over the years and centuries. And he wants to tell what kind of historiography that quest leads to. In the meantime, he peels off many myths about history as a science, about our own past, and especially about our self-image: who do we think we are? In his own words: ‘What I want to show is how representations of Dutch history, views on nationality and the design of politics are made.’ Thinking about thinking about the Netherlands actually.
If that sounds complicated, it does Aerts’ book a great injustice. Each page has sentences to underline. The historian Aerts, who received the Biography Prize in 2020 for his beautiful Thorbecke wants it, is a cheerful and at times villainous writer, who formulates clearly and deals in provocative statements about ‘a nostalgia discourse about a land of never’ or our deep indifference to the overseas colonial world. He calls the canon of The Black Archives ‘haphazard appropriation and conscious selectivity’. A section in which he discusses the relationship between historical science and the public was given the cheerful title ‘all your cock on the table’ – with Pik referring to school book supplier JW Pik.
Thinking of the Netherlands is a collection of thirteen more or less independent reflections, partly previously published in magazines or used during lectures or as a lecture. Nevertheless, the mutual coherence is great.
Aerts therefore approaches historiography as a functional activity. For the consumer addicted to biographies, for the nationbuilders who want to promote unity, for politicians who make a careful dig into the past to substantiate their own right. That starts with the question of where the cohesion of what we call the Netherlands actually comes from. Are they shared ancestors, the hunters and gatherers who crossed the river delta in animal skins? Is that the state, which arose from a patchwork of Burgundian possessions? Something vague like a shared folk spirit, something tangible like the shared language – always treated with a certain disinterest? Can everything perhaps be traced back to the Batavians, defended by Erasmus as a militant and lively people, and later upgraded by Hugo Grotius by placing Batavia as an ancient republic next to Athens and Rome? Or is that what binds us together is polder thinking, the ability to always come out together? Aerts makes short work of it: ‘a saccharine and self-satisfied wish performance.’
Aerts calls historical rooting that persistent search for what binds us together. He does not want to choose himself: ‘The past has lived only for itself, not for us.’ History is a kaleidoscope, he says. What we do with it is a matter of need. And needs change.
In the collection he peels off a number of elements of that self-image. Then it is about the tolerance and bourgeoisie that would form our deepest being, about how the notion of the early republic that the Netherlands once was has gradually disappeared from our monarchy, about the failed experiment to form a nation together with Belgium in the early nineteenth century.
Only in politics – to which the two penultimate chapters are devoted – does the image appear remarkably stable. ‘It is and remains monkey business’, Thorbecke already judged the House of Representatives, which he himself would assign a central place in the political machinery after 1848. That criticism has not died down since then. What is subject to change is the perceived temperature in the political arena. According to Aerts, the ‘great aversion to any form of irregular politics’ that had been dominant for a long time has now turned into a ‘politicization of emotion’. The Netherlands is also less unique in this respect than is often thought.
Remieg Aerts: Thinking of the Netherlands. Prometheus; 400 pages; €35.