ABSTRACT

This chapter offers a review of Dutch foreign policy from the end of the Second World War to the beginning of political co-operation in the European Community. It considers the external environment of Dutch foreign policy. The chapter considers the internal factors that conditioned Dutch foreign policy. It concludes with a summary of the main orientations in Dutch post-war foreign policy. For more than two hundred years, patterns of amity and enmity with Germany, France and the United Kingdom had defined Dutch security. However, as detente dulled the edges of Cold War conflict, Dutch foreign policy broadened its scope and began to view issues through an increasingly multilateral and UN-centred perspective. Dutch politics and society, for much of the period under review, was characterised by a system of social organisation known as verzuilling, best translated as 'pillarization' in English.