Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 135, Issue 4, 2022

‘I just hope they don’t overplay their hand.’ The Velvet Revolution through the eyes of the Dutch embassy in Prague

This article analyses the perception of the Dutch embassy in Prague of the 1989 Velvet Revolution. The embassy’s analyses from late October 1989 reflect the idea that a confrontation between rulers and opposition was inevitable and identified several dates this might happen. Expecting the confrontation to take place in December, the Dutch diplomats missed the early phase of the demonstrations that brought the communist regime to its knees. While they did not rule out the possibility of a violent crackdown along the lines of the Chinese example of June 1989, they did not consider it very likely. Even so, this concern seems to have informed the caution present in the embassy’s analyses in the first ten days of the upheaval. Triumphalism was lacking even though the intended outcome, political change, had been a core element in Dutch policy towards Czechoslovakia.

The perpetuation of a colonial situation. The failed contribution of the Netherlands to the Palestinian state-building process

Since the Oslo Accords of 1993, the Netherlands has been contributing to the Palestinian state-building process in Gaza and the West Bank. To this end the Netherlands uses a two-track strategy in which large-scale aid is supported by political dialogue with both Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA). Although the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the most debated foreign policy issue in the Dutch Parliament, the contribution of the Netherlands to implementing the two-state solution has been investigated only to a limited extent. This study changes that and at the same time contributes to the international literature on the European Union and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which substantial research into the attitudes of individual member states remains scarce. On the basis of extensive research, including in the archives of the Dutch Foreign Ministry, this study comes to the sobering conclusion that, due to inadequate implementation of its two-track strategy, the Netherlands has helped to perpetuate a colonial situation in the Palestinian territories.