Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 125, Issue 3, 2012

Security is not just the outcome of physical or political circumstances and incidents. People and organisations have to attribute meaning to those circumstances and incidents. They have to be incorporated into political, administrative, and bureaucratic decision-making processes and procedures. The history of security is not usually described in these terms. This paper provides a brief historiographical account of current histories of security. Next it shows briefly how such history can profit from recent theories and concepts in political science. In doing so, an attempt is made to historicize security and provide some new perspectives, focussing on the ideas of the ‘security dispositive’, ‘timescapes’, and political legitimacy.

In this paper the emergence and effect of international anarchism during the late nineteenth century in the Netherlands is analysed as a security and conspiracy dispositive. The dispositive was invoked by anarchists and police officials alike, who used new techniques of suggesting threat and imagining danger. It was legitimized by the late nineteenth-century public fear of chaos, revolution, and moral decay, connected to an exaggeration of science’s new possibilities. And it led to new ways of governing the threat and risk posed by the anarchist alien, including the Ochrana’s setting up of attacks in order to frame bonafide socialists and social democrats. In the Netherlands security considerations were mitigated by considerations of liberalism, freedom of speech, and pragmatism. Here the fight against the Black International, however, also attracted political attention, and in the 1890s became a pretext for a new attitude towards foreigners and socialists.

In this article we scrutinize the construction of complex threat perceptions and security conceptions in relation to the introduction of security measures by the security services. We find that for most of the history of the Dutch security services, political control and interference was limited to the decision to establish or shut down an institution, driven by security considerations, interests, and opportunities. In the meantime it was up to the security service itself to interpret threats, to set priorities, and to decide on working methods. But apart from detecting threats, civil servants of the security service had other interests as well, for example to convince others of the necessity of their activities and to secure their budgets. This creation of policy behind closed doors was contested from the 1960s on. But it was only twenty years later, when the threat perceptions of the security service and the minister responsible diverged irreconcilably, that the Dutch government actively intervened.

Between 1966 and 1979 Dutch military safety management was under fire, for which disaffected soldiers and people with anti-militaristic tendencies were responsible. They tried in numerous ways to modernize the military law, or even to abolish the army altogether. In the long 1970s the Dutch military experienced unprecedented criticism from within. This was considered to have resulted in a deterioration in the force’s preparedness and reliability. Strong measures and protection from media attention were necessary to save the army from decline. Obstruction by the government and the public prosecutor prevented the military from doing this, and isolated it in its attempt to combat disaffected soldiers and anti-militarists.

In the early modern period mercantile custom and official law, the latter of which was imposed by legislators and applied by judges, did not differ very much. In the second half of the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth century merchants trading in Antwerp negotiated with the urban and royal authorities for official precepts in order to tackle the fraud endemic in marine insurance. In response to these developments and in light of innovations in marine insurance contracts, Antwerp’s leaders adapted their legislation and renewed their judgements. After a temporary shock to relations between the urban government and the merchant community of Antwerp in the early seventeenth century, a new equilibrium was sought and found after 1650. As a result, and as had been the case before 1600, condemnation of fraudulent practices and protection of contractual liberty went hand in hand once more.

The nineteenth-century construction of the law of energy conservation was the result of long and complex international development. Surprisingly, the Dutch reception of, and contribution to, this law has not yet been investigated. Developments in the Netherlands closely followed international trends. Those within the Dutch scientific community realized the importance of Mayer’s work at an early stage. Word-of-mouth communication effectively spread knowledge of this law among the scientific elite. In 1858 physicist Johannes Bosscha introduced the term ‘conservation of work-capacity’ (behoud van arbeidsvermogen) as a replacement for the supposedly confusing name ‘conservation of force’ (behoud van kracht). Although his terminology soon became standard, it was not automatically accepted. Rhetoric and authority were instrumental in successfully spreading the law of energy conservation.

In March 1978 Defence Minister Roelof Kruisinga of the Christian Democratic Party resigned over a cabinet conflict concerning the neutron bomb. It is generally assumed that his resignation was actually due to his difficult personality and his alcohol problem, and that it was therefore of little significance for the Van Agt government. This article argues that this view is incorrect. Kruisinga’s resignation was mainly due to a disturbed relationship with his colleagues in the cabinet. When Kruisinga was forced to abandon his own position on the neutron bomb and to defend the majority position of the other ministers, he was faced with moral conflicts which eventually led to his resignation. His departure was of great importance for the peace movement, because the issue of the neutron bomb was one of the factors that stimulated its rapid expansion in these years. This meant that, from that moment on, the government had to take into account the increasing pressure from social movements and parliamentary opposition.