United States public diplomacy in the new Netherlands, 1945--1958: Policy, ideology, and the instrumentality of American power

Drawing on archival sources in the U.S. and the Netherlands, this dissertation addresses the question of American power in the Netherlands in the early years of the Cold War. Two important methodological concerns inhere. The first distinguishes between American mass culture, on the one hand, and the intentionality of U.S. state power on the other. The second concern is to trace both the transmission and the reception of U.S. policy. A "public diplomacy" framework is thus established by which the ideological preferences of U.S. policymakers are established and analyzed within the modernizing postwar Dutch political economy. A series of encounters between U.S. policy and discrete aspects of the postwar Netherlands are examined, including the economic doctrines of U.S. policymakers as expressed in the Marshall Plan, the effect of the American diplomatic ideal of the "Free World" on Dutch diplomacy, U.S. military aid, and the mobilization of American information policy within postwar Dutch mass culture. This kaleidoscopic approach avoids the cultural shortcomings of a traditional diplomatic approach while viewing U.S. power in the Netherlands as a discrete and intentional presence.; American historians have largely neglected contemporary Dutch history save for the Dutch role in postwar de-colonization. The analysis finds that the postwar reconstruction of Dutch politics, economy, and culture, which occurred within the context of the concerted projection of post-WWII U.S. power, remained a decidedly Dutch affair. The rebuilding of Dutch society constituted something of a revolution in political and economic thinking compared to prewar Dutch society, and stands in sharp contrast to the general political and cultural retrenchment of American society in those years. American economic, political, and cultural power was essential to Dutch modernization, which proceeded along Dutch lines quite apart from the ideological preferences explicitly conveyed in U.S. public diplomacy. U.S. power, in other words, became an instrument, but not an ideological agent, in postwar Dutch modernization.