2. The Greater Netherlands idea of Pieter Geyl (1887–1966)

Pieter van Hees†

After Belgium’s secession from the Netherlands in the revolution of 1830, it took a few decades until Dutch-speaking writers and philologists from both sides of the border established regular contact with each other again. From mid-century onwards, visitors from the north began to be invited to assemblies of the Flemish movement and introduced to the struggle for equal rights for the Dutch language in Belgium, particularly in education but also in other aspects of public life. In the then unitary Belgian state, Flemish had only a poor second status after French, the language of the educated classes, which was prevalent in all social, political and economic contexts. It was by attending one of these assemblies that in 1911 Pieter Geyl discovered what would become a dominant theme in both his life and his scholarship. He was deeply impressed by the vitality of the Flemish movement and especially by the student campaign demanding higher education to be delivered in their mother tongue.1

Around the same time, interest in the Dutch language also reawakened north of the Dutch–Belgian border. Many people in the Netherlands took pride in the fact that their language was spoken in other countries around the world: in their colonies in the East and West Indies, in parts of North America, in Flanders and, not unimportantly, in South Africa, where the battles of the Afrikaners, then known as Boers, against English imperialism were followed with keen interest.2

Geyl’s pre-war interest in Flanders and Flemish–Dutch relations was renewed after the First World War. Between 1913 and 1919 he had been London correspondent of one of the leading Dutch newspapers, the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, before in 1919 he was appointed professor of Dutch studies (changed in 1924 to professor of Dutch history) at the University of London, a position he held until his departure for a university chair in Utrecht in 1935. He was an outspoken proponent of the Greater Netherlands idea that sought to unite all speakers of Dutch at least culturally, if not also politically in one state, and pursued this aim both in the historical-scholarly and in the political fields.

The Greater Netherlands idea in historiography

As a historian, Geyl developed an alternative interpretation of the genesis of the Dutch state in the course of the revolt against the Habsburgs in the sixteenth century. In a series of lectures given at University College London in 1920 and later repeated in Belgium and the Netherlands,3 he formulated the thesis that the line that came to divide the old Burgundian lands during the rebellion against Philip II’s policy of centralization had been the result of military fortune or disfortune. The prevalent opinion among Low Countries historians until then had been that the partition was rooted in deep differences in national character between the north and the south, differences determined by the tenacity of the northern provinces – which were to become the Dutch Republic – in their struggle for old liberties, freedom of religion for the Calvinists and loyalty to the stadholders of the house of Orange.

Geyl deplored the division and dismissed the old view as a deterministic view of history. In his eyes, the cause of the partition could be found in chance elements of the military situation: Geyl pointed out that Parma had not been able to cross the barrier posed by the great rivers Rhine, Waal and Maas and for this accidental circumstance the northern provinces had been successful in breaking away, while the southern ones had not.

At the same time, Geyl criticized Henri Pirenne (1862–1935), the most prominent Belgian historian of his time, who like Geyl regretted the partition of the Burgundian lands, if for different reasons; however, Pirenne also saw an advantage in the preservation of the unity of the principalities of Brabant and Flanders, the nucleus of what was to become Belgium. In Pirenne’s eyes, Flanders, Brabant and the francophone provinces formed a fortuitous amalgamation of social, economic and cultural factors, an ideal blend of Latin (Romance) and Germanic cultures.

Geyl’s novel interpretation met strong opposition because it challenged values and opinions that for a long time had been regarded as certainties among Dutch historians. The newcomer was considered arrogant for his criticism of highly esteemed historiographical authorities and reproached for intermingling history and politics, a claim that Geyl did not dismiss but defended by claiming: ‘Politics and history have much to gain from each other, the first depth [from history], the second sense of reality [from politics].’4

In the Netherlands, Geyl had challenged the consolidated historical opinion of, among others, the liberal historians Robert Fruin (1823–99), Pieter Jacobus Blok (1855–1923) – who had also been Geyl’s academic mentor – and Herman Theodoor Colenbrander (1871–1945), all from the University of Leiden, and Gerhard Wilhelm Kernkamp (1864–1943) from the University of Utrecht, as well as the opinion of Protestant historians such as Adriaan Goslinga (1884–1961) and Jan Cornelis Hendrik de Pater (1887–1971). Fruin saw the partition of the Low Countries around 1585 as inevitable, a view that he expressed most famously in his 1857 book Tien jaren uit den tachtigjarigen oorlog, 1588–1598 (‘Ten years from the Eigthty Years’ War, 1588–1598’) (1857). It was not a passing misunderstanding that had caused the split but ‘a profound difference between Northern and Southern Netherlands, in origin, in national character, in history, in religion, in mode of government, in social condition’.5 Blok, Colenbrander and Kernkamp shared Fruin’s assessment, whereas Goslinga and De Pater took another point of view. In their eyes, the choice of Calvinism and the role of Calvinist supporters in the rebellion against Spain had caused the split between the northern and southern Netherlands. Geyl’s alternative interpretation, however, from approval from Roman Catholic historians such as Lodewijk Rogier (1894–1975), who praised Geyl’s 1930 article on the protestantization of the northern Netherlands, in which Geyl, himself an agnostic, stated that the influence of Protestantism in Dutch history was exaggerated and the role of Roman Catholics underrated. Of course, there were later corrections to the views expressed in Geyl’s article, but it triggered a still-interesting discussion of the role not only of Roman Catholics but also of the ‘silent majority’ during the rebellion against the Habsburgs.6

To return to Geyl’s great debate with Pirenne, in 1909, while still a student, Geyl had already scribbled the following remark in his copy of the first volume of Pirenne’s Histoire de Belgique:

What I object to in this Avant Propos, is that Pirenne too exclusively speaks of ‘Belgian’ where the context would often require ‘Netherlandic’. How many of his observations apply just as much to the North-Netherlandic civilization! The North–South union, too, lasted too long and was too real to be completely ignored.7

Geyl elaborated on this early critique of Pirenne’s Histoire de Belgique in his Holland and Belgium (1920) and in many subsequent lectures and articles. The Belgian historical establishment, for example Charles Terlinden (1878–1972), Hubert van Houtte (1872–1948), Léon van der Essen (1883–1963) and Hans van Werveke (1898–1974), opposed Geyl’s critical view of Pirenne’s work, whereas young Flemish nationalist historians such as Hendrik J. Elias (1902–73) and Robert van Roosbroeck (1898–1988) embraced these new ideas. So did the francophone historian Léon-Ernest Halkin (1906–98), although he asked for more attention to be paid to the francophone regions of Belgium. But more importantly, former opponents such as Van Werveke, Van der Essen and François Louis Ganshof over time came to appreciate Geyl’s less deterministic view of the partition of the Low Countries. In 1938, Van der Essen wrote in Nederlandsche Historiebladen, ‘The unity of the Netherlands! It is a fact that the lesser-Dutch and the lesser-Belgian historiographies failed to take into account.’8 Ganshof, Van Werveke and Van der Essen would go on to collaborate with Geyl in editing the Nederlandsche Historiebladen, a historical journal with a mixed Dutch and Flemish editorial board that existed from 1938 to 1941.9

Geyl’s sharpest critique of Pirenne was not directed against the latter’s views on the sixteenth century but on his interpretation of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. When writing his Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Stam (‘History of the Dutch-speaking Peoples’), Geyl admitted that Pirenne knew more about medieval history and the history of the Burgundian period than Geyl,10 and the Dutch historian P. B. M. Blaas observed that in his 1936 inaugural lecture at Utrecht University, Geyl in fact came quite close to a Pirennean interpretation of the sixteenth-century history of the Netherlands.11 But in the early 1920s Geyl’s ideas were novel, which is why Rogier, in his obituary of Geyl for the Koninklijke Academie der Wetenschappen could write, ‘So there is a picture of Dutch history from before Geyl and one from after Geyl. I do not know of any Dutch historian for whom that applied in a similar way.’12

The historian Lode Wils from the University of Leuven, one of Geyl’s strongest critics, begged to differ, but accepted that under Geyl’s influence historiographical problems of the sixteenth century are now interpreted in different ways, if only for North- and not for South-Netherlandic historiography.13 Geyl however never considered an amende honorable, a public apology, vis-à-vis Pirenne; he only admitted that on the matter of the sixteenth-century partition of the Low Countries, Pirenne had published ‘no untenable simplifications’.14

History of the Netherlandic stam

Most profoundly, Geyl expressed his Greater Netherlands view in a multi-volume history of the Dutch-speaking people in the Low Countries. For its first volume, published in 1930 under the title Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Stam (later English translations were published under different titles),15 he used the notion of stam or ‘stock’ in the title because, in his romantically inspired linguistic-nationalist view, language boundaries should form the natural borders of a future federal union of the Netherlands and Flanders. Such a union might have come into existence in the sixteenth century, if it had not been for the barrier of the great rivers that prevented Parma from reconquering the North. Geyl’s was a more possibilistic approach to history, but at the same time itself not entirely free of a degree of finalism. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century the unity of language between the north and the south had hardly played a role in political discourses and there was little awareness among the population on both sides of the border of their common language. Other weak points in Geyl’s narrative were his underconsideration of the role of the francophone territories of the Burgundian lands and his unsatisfactory explanation of the emergence of the eastern border of the Netherlands.16

While historians generally accepted Geyl’s claim that the revolt in the Netherlands had been a conservative revolution, his critical view of the violent actions of the zeegeuzen (‘sea beggars’) encountered a more mixed reception. The importance of his interpretation lies in the nowadays widely accepted insight that the division of the Burgundian Netherlands was caused by a series of accidental, mostly military, events. These accidents, by the way, were less Parma’s inability to cross the great rivers, as asserted by Geyl, than Parma’s lack of funds to remunerate his soldiers, as John Huxtable Elliott and Geoffrey Parker have demonstrated clearly since.17

Another major point of criticism was Geyl’s nationalism. The linguistic nationalism he espoused was a typical nineteenth-century phenomenon, widely spread and accepted in the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries. But in the late 1920s these ideas overlapped with German völkisch and national-socialist theories about connections between language, race, ‘blood and soil’ and authoritarian leadership, notions from which Geyl distanced himself clearly and repeatedly.18 His stam idea, based on the notion of unity of language, was founded purely on culture, not on ‘race’. In a 1938 lecture at the Rotterdam School of Economics, the predecessor of today’s Erasmus University, about the precarious political situation in Czechoslovakia, he even brought himself to declaring that different languages could peacefully co-exist in one state.19

In contrast to Geyl, his friend and successor on the chair for Dutch history in London, Gustaaf Renier (1892–1962), in his inaugural lecture ‘The criterion of Dutch nationhood’, rejected language as the most important marker of nationality, instead highlighting the factor of common history, in the words of Ernest Renan: ‘avoir fait des grandes choses ensemble et vouloir en faire encore’ (‘to have done great things together in the past and to want to do them again in the future’).20 Renier’s successor, Ernst Kossmann (1922–2003), authored the Oxford History of the Low Countries, a joint history of the Benelux states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which he treated Belgium and the Netherlands as separate entities, their partly shared language not a point of particular interest. In the Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (‘General History of the Low Countries’), a large-scale historical handbook project initiated after 1945, language again did not play a major role.21 Instead it was geography that determined the handbook’s division into chapters, one of the reasons why Geyl declined to participate.

It is remarkable that Geyl left his own Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Stam unfinished, ending in 1798. Of course, after 1945 other historical subjects demanded his attention and brought him fame, for example his studies on the relations between the Orange stadholders and the Stuart and Hanoverian dynasties, as well as his study on Napoleon and his public disputes with Arnold J. Toynbee.22 But the question imposes itself: had he not himself lost faith in the project?

That said, his views on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which Geyl brought together in his Stam – interestingly, he found most of the historical sources for his works in British archives when living in London – are still of some scholarly importance today. Less so the role that Geyl had envisaged for his magnum opus to play in the propaganda for a political Greater Netherlands state.

Political Greater Netherlands

As mentioned before, Geyl’s Greater Netherlands ideology also had a political side to it. The idea of a federal state uniting the Netherlands and Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, appealed to some radical supporters of the Flemish movement. These Flamingants comprised two groups that after 1918 reluctantly worked together. The first consisted of Flemish soldiers who while fighting in the Belgian army during the First World War had joined a clandestine organization striving for better conditions for the Flemings after the war. Many of them envisaged a federal Belgium. Similar thoughts were alive among the so-called activists, Flemings who had collaborated with the Germans during the occupation in 1914–18. The activists did not reject the idea of a Greater Netherlands state, but neither was it their preferred solution to what they saw as Flemish grievances in Belgium.23 It is worth mentioning that ideas of a separation or federalization of Belgium could also be found on the Walloon side.

Separately, the front movement and the activists were fringe groups, but by working together and forming a political party, the Frontpartij (‘Front Party’), they managed to obtain five seats (out of 186) in the 1919 general elections, giving them the role of a pressure group for Flemish rights in the Belgian parliament.24 However, their political achievements were small and often undermined by internal conflict. Problems were also caused by activists who in 1918 had asked for asylum in the Netherlands, where they were supported by members of organisations like the Dietsche Bond and the Dietsch Studenten Verbond (‘Dietsch’ being an ancient term for Groot-Nederlands).25 It goes without saying that Geyl’s idea of a federal Greater Netherlands state was popular in these circles, but one should not lose sight of the fact that these groups consisted of only a few thousand members and were by no means representative of the general Dutch population who, on the whole, did not feel any particular attachment to Flanders. The Dutch government was also strongly opposed to any encroachment on Belgian sovereignty, as, for obvious reasons, was Belgium.

Geyl’s ideas might have fallen on fertile soil, but they did not bear fruit. Constant conflicts, heated discussions and a high level of distrust among the various factions of the Greater Netherlands movement dominated the interwar period. Despite Geyl’s impatience and sometimes radical language, he tried to moderate between the various factions,26 and these efforts and his mediation can be explained by his familiarity with the struggle between the Irish republicans and England. As a newspaper correspondent, he had followed this nationalities conflict with great attention and met several Irish nationalists in person, among them moderate, but also radical members of Sinn Féin.27 Familiarity with this conflict may have brought him to favour moderation in the discussion of national identities. In Geyl’s opinion, the Greater Netherlands state was a vision for the distant future and had to be realized by parliamentary action, not by revolution. However, most Flemish activist refugees in the Netherlands and many members of the Front Party saw things differently and sought to dismantle the Belgian state as soon as possible. Geyl usually tried to bring the factions together and pleaded for co-operation between them. Together with Herman Vos, member of parliament for the Flemish nationalist party, and others, he drafted a bill suggesting a federal statute for Belgium in 1929,28 with the intention of giving the Flemish people more power and influence in the then still-unitary Belgian state. The bill was an outright failure, as the Belgian parliament declined to discuss it and the proposal caused great discontent among the Greater Netherlanders in the north and south. Moreover, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, many Flemish nationalists and Greater Netherlanders in the north radicalized and turned in the direction of fascism, then on the ascendant.29 Geyl warned publicly against this ideology, but his was a vox clamantis in deserto, a voice calling in the wilderness.

After the publication of Geyl’s letters and notes on the Flemish question in the volumes Geyl en Vlaanderen (1973–5) and later in Briefwisseling Gerretson–Geyl (1979–81), a discussion about Geyl’s ‘real’ intentions as a Grootnederlander started. Louis Vos and Lode Wils in particular argued that Geyl’s objective was the dissolution of the Belgian state and that his more moderate statements were only to disguise this, his ultimate aim. Moreover, Wils stated that Geyl shared responsibility for the choice that the Flemish nationalist party made in 1933 when voting for a national-socialist policy. These opinions were countered by Arie W. Willemsen, Ludo Simons, Hermann von der Dunk, myself and others.30 In fact, by the mid-1930s Geyl was already distancing himself from the Greater Netherlands movement, but in one way or another he still believed in Flanders, for in 1932 he wrote, ‘The future of the Netherlandic civilization in Flanders (this is what counts in the end).’31

The Second World War and contacts with Flanders after 1945

Geyl’s firm attitude against national socialism started in 1932 at the latest, when he encountered an already completely nazified German student organization at a student congress in Rostock on the Baltic coast of Germany. From then on, he warned publicly, in writings and speeches, against the threat posed by this political movement. His anti-Nazi opinions were well known to the German occupiers who on 7 October 1940 took him hostage and kept him imprisoned until 14 February 1944. After his release, he started to write for Vrij Nederland, an underground newspaper of the Dutch resistance, stating his desire to renew contacts with Belgium and Flanders as soon as the war ended.32

A political Greater Netherlands, which had never been a realistic prospect before the war, was of course completely unthinkable after 1945. Geyl supported the development of Flemish–Dutch relations via the Technical Commission, an executive committee of the Belgian–Dutch Cultural Treaty of 1947 with the task of promoting cultural exchanges, education, preservation of the Dutch language, exchange of students etc. At the same time, he advocated close collaboration between the socialist, Catholic and liberal parties in Flanders, both in letters and during visits to the country. Throughout his lifetime the results of all these efforts were negligible. One explanation for this might be that Geyl underestimated the antithesis between the clerical and the anti-clerical political camps in Belgium; since the end of the nineteenth century, liberals and socialists had feared the domination of a Catholic Flanders. Another explanation can perhaps be found in his personal contacts in Flanders and in the Netherlands in the interwar-period.33 Geyl, in his correspondence, lacked long and intensive contacts with leading Catholic, liberal and social-democratic politicians in Belgium.34 Even in the 1930s, when his friend Herman Vos (1889–1952) became a member of the Belgische Werklieden Partij (‘Belgian Labourers’ Party’, BWP), this did not change much, as Vos was not very influential within his party. After Vos’s death, Hendrik Borginon (1890–1985) was Geyl’s foremost contact in the Flemish nationalist party. Borginon, however, did not have the political clout of Hendrik J. Elias and Staf de Clercq, and Geyl’s correspondence with the latter two was limited. With the other party leader of the radical right, Joris van Severen, he entertained no regular contact.

After the war Geyl’s relations with important Catholic, liberal and socialist Flemings remained infrequent. A new contact was Henry Fayat (1908–97), a professor at the University of Brussels, member of parliament and several times minister. Fayat was genuinely interested in contacts with the Netherlands, but he did not belong to the leadership of the Belgian Socialist Party. Mutatis mutandis, the same also applied to Geyl’s contacts with political leaders in the Netherlands. He had some contact with social-democratic politicians after his return to the Netherlands in 1936, but these were not relevant to his political Greater Netherlands ideas.

In conclusion, it is clear that Geyl’s views regarding the separation in the Burgundian–Habsburgian states have enriched the interpretation of the Dutch Revolt and brought about a more possibilistic approach to the past. In politics, the realization of a Greater Netherlands state was always utopian, but as early as the 1930s Geyl saw the possibility of a federalization of Belgium, which eventually became a reality in 1973. He did not live to see this because he passed away on New Year’s Eve 1966, a tragedy for a man who said that the Flemish question had dominated his life.35