11. Between Leuven and Utrecht: the afterlife of Pieter Geyl and the ‘Greater Netherlands idea’

Fons Meijer*

In the preface to Napoleon: Voor en tegen in de Franse geschiedschrijving (1946), published in English as Napoleon: For and Against (1949), Pieter Geyl declared that history was a ‘discussion without end’, by which he qualified historical truth-finding as an unceasing war of words, an infinite verbal battle between conflicting interpretations of the historical past.1 Nowadays historians may consider this observation to be something of a truism, but during the first half of the twentieth century, Geyl was one of the first historians to introduce to the Dutch (and wider European) historical profession a debating culture that was grounded on the principles of contestation and even polemics. In the interwar period his broadsides were aimed at the followers of Robert Fruin and Henri Pirenne and their, in Geyl’s view, myopic ‘Orangist’ and ‘Belgicist’ narratives of the history of the Low Countries. After the Second World War he threw himself into great debates with macro-historians such as Arnold Toynbee and Jan Romein on the nature and theory of history.2 If anything, he was the embodiment of his own principle.

It is ironic, to say the least, that in the decades after his passing on New Year’s Eve 1966, Geyl himself stood at the centre of a Historikerstreit. In the 1970s and 1980s, against the backdrop of a growing historiography on the Flemish national movement and the publication of two editions of his correspondence, Geyl’s political involvement in the Flemish movement was discussed intensely and controversially by Dutch and Belgian historians. Was Geyl, as he repeatedly proclaimed himself, a moderate voice within the Flemish movement that consistently opposed extremist factions, or did he have a hidden agenda and work secretly towards the dissolution of the Belgian state? Two main groups of participants can be discerned within this debate: the ‘Utrecht’ group of historians, which mainly consisted of former students of Geyl’s and upheld his self-conception of moderation, and the ‘Leuven’ group, centred around the professor of modern history Lode Wils, who aimed at debunking Geyl’s self-image. One can indeed wonder whether this discussion was ‘without end’: although no consensual conclusion was reached in the debate, the smoke cleared in the 1990s and the participants shifted their attention to other historical issues.

To understand history is to understand how it has been discussed; Geyl knew this, and it is the premise this chapter is built upon. Whereas in many studies on Geyl, the debate between ‘Utrecht’ and ‘Leuven’ is reduced to a historiographical prelude or introduction,3 this chapter recognizes that the debate as such is interesting enough to analyse, for it shows in which contexts and by which means historical knowledge develops. What were the impetuses that fuelled the debate? Who were the main participants? Why did they take certain positions? What were their arguments and how did they respond to one another? By putting the debate centre-stage and scrutinizing its internal dynamics, this chapter will argue that current understandings of Pieter Geyl’s ‘Greater Netherlands idea’ are not shaped by a balanced exchange of ideas between like-minded historians but instead are the product of a collision of different interests. While the ‘Utrecht’ historians were mainly defending their late mentor against (what they believed were) false allegations, for the ‘Leuven’ historians the study of Geyl was only one facet of a larger historiographical project, namely the debunking of the traditional narrative of Flemish nationalism.

This chapter will first offer a brief overview of Geyl’s affiliation with the Flemish movement, with the focus being on the image Geyl himself presented of his political motivation and how this image was perpetuated by most historical observers. It will go on to demonstrate that the publication of the first series of Geyl’s correspondence in the mid-1970s inspired Leuven historian Louis Vos to write an article critical of Geyl’s political integrity and how this publication sparked a short but fierce debate. Finally, this chapter will look at how the publication of the second series of Geyl’s correspondence in the late 1970s and early 1980s offered Leuven historian Lode Wils the possibility to revive and even intensify the debate. It will also analyse why the debate petered out in the 1990s and assess to what extent the debate has influenced our current understanding of Pieter Geyl.

A battle on two fronts

Geyl’s Greater Netherlands affiliation does not have one single origin.4 Early expressions of his political engagement can be found in writings from his days as a student of Dutch literature and history at Leiden University. Historian Jo Tollebeek has shown that he was a keen reader of non- conformist literature (Multatuli, Willem Kloos, Lodewijk van Deyssel) and for a short period of time even developed socialist views, opposing the disciplining forces of bourgeois society.5

His commitment would intensify under the influence of various encounters with the Flemish national movement in the 1910s. He visited Jan Derk Domela Nieuwenhuis Nyegaard, a second cousin of his mother’s, who strongly supported the Flemish national cause, in Ghent in 1910.6 A year later, Geyl returned to Belgium to take part in a Flemish student conference at Ghent University that was entirely dedicated to the ‘Dutchification’ of the institution (1911). This was a key demand of the Flemish movement, which opposed the fact that Belgian universities were still exclusively using French as the language of instruction. At this conference Geyl met many prominent representatives of the Flemish movement, with whom he would later associate.7

The ‘Flemish question’ (concerning the position of Flanders within the Belgian state) left a deep impression on the young historian, as evidenced by an article that Geyl published on his return to the Netherlands, in which he described his eye-opening experience in Ghent in a romanticized way: ‘This will be a sweet memory for the rest of my life. It was beautiful to see a people awaking […] The enthusiasm that arose and which I encountered does not lie.’8 Geyl ended the article with an appeal to his fellow Dutch countrymen not to ignore what was happening in Belgium: ‘Our future bears great and glorious opportunities. The revival of Flanders presents us with broad horizons.’9

After defending his doctoral thesis in 1913, Geyl moved to London to become British correspondent for the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant before, in 1919, changing career by accepting the position of professor of Dutch studies at the University of London. In the years that followed, his sympathy for the Flemish national cause translated into political activism for the Greater Netherlands idea. First and foremost, he expressed this ideological affiliation in a series of books and essays in which he targeted both the traditional narrative of Dutch history, as heralded by the liberal historian Robert Fruin during the second half of the nineteenth century, and Henri Pirenne’s master narrative of the history of Belgium, set out in his eleven-volume Histoire de Belgique (1894–1932).10 Geyl frequently argued that most of his historical colleagues failed to recognize that the contemporary states of the Netherlands and Belgium were not primordial entities but the result of a turbulent history that could have been very different. He juxtaposed what he saw as their ‘myopic’ narratives with his own ‘Greater Netherlands’ account in which he emphasized the historical and cultural interconnectedness of the Dutch linguistic area encompassing both the Netherlands and Flanders. This ‘Greater Netherlands’ conceptualization of Low Countries history would culminate in his magnum opus De Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Stam (‘The History of the Dutch-speaking Peoples’), a three-volume work published between 1930 and 1959, but left uncompleted.

While working in London, Geyl became increasingly involved with the Flemish national movement in Belgium on a political level. In 1919 he re-established contact with Antoon Jacob, a militant Flamingant whom he had met in Ghent eight years earlier.11 Through Jacob he became acquainted with many other key figures of the Flemish movement (Hendrik Borginon, Leo Picard, Herman Vos), and together with the Dutchmen Carel Gerretson, a historian from Utrecht, and Pieter van Eyck, a poet and literary scholar whom he knew from his school years, attempted to steer discussions within the Flemish movement in the direction of a Greater Netherlands solidarity.12

Already at this time, questions were being raised about Geyl’s political motivation. In 1920 his former mentor Petrus J. Blok advised Geyl in a letter to waive his ‘deceptive’ ideas, in which Blok perceived irredentist tendencies.13 That Blok was not the only one to suspect Geyl of radical ambitions became apparent fifteen years later, when Geyl applied for the university chair of general and Dutch history in Utrecht. Several officials at the Dutch Foreign Office intervened in the appointment process, voicing their concerns about landing the university with a subversive political troublemaker by appointing Geyl.14

This fear was not wholly unjustified, for the Flemish movement was plagued by internal disputes. A significant minority within the movement were radical figures centred around the journal Vlaanderen, led by Josué de Decker and Robrecht de Smet. This extremist faction propagated nothing less than the dissolution of Belgium and the attachment of Flanders to the Netherlands; in the 1930s, it increasingly leaned towards the antidemocratic doctrines of fascism and national socialism.15 In an article of 1934, Geyl had been critical of these doctrinaire hardliners within the Flemish movement.16 While fostering Greater Netherlands as an ideal, he argued that the political realization of this ideal was out of question. A year later, in a memorandum that he sent to the Foreign Office in reply to questions that were being raised about his political affiliations, Geyl once more emphasized that he had always belonged to the moderate wing of the Flemish movement.17

His attempts to demonstrate that he had never been and would not be a subversive influence were successful, as his appointment was eventually approved and he became professor at Utrecht University. In various later publications too, Geyl would insist that he had always been a voice of moderation. In his inaugural lecture in 1936, for example, he criticized the anti-democratic and racist state nationalism that could be witnessed in Germany and Italy,18 and in his autobiography, penned during his wartime captivity, he stated of the Vlaanderen faction:

I have learned to understand and – to a certain extent – sympathise with that [extremist] state of mind […] but from a personal point of view, I would have none of it, and I always have seen, very clearly, the dangers of it for cultural and public life, and for the movement itself.19

If anything, his Greater Netherlands battle in the interwar period was a conflict on two fronts, on the one hand arguing against the traditional Dutch and Belgian politicians who did not share his Greater Netherlands ideal, and on the other opposing the extremist and anti-democratic factions within the Flemish movement itself.20

After the Second World War and until his retirement in 1958, Geyl’s Greater Netherlands commitment became less apparent, his attention shifting to other historiographical subjects.21 At this time, observers readily accepted his self-image of moderation during the interwar period. The historiography on the Flemish national movement was only slowly getting off the ground, and early studies did not critically question Geyl’s position within the movement. Partly, this had to do with their scholarly proximity to Geyl: one of the first studies on the history of the Flemish movement was written by one of his doctoral students, Arie W. Willemsen, who in his thesis confirmed what his mentor had always proclaimed himself.22 That Willemsen was very much inspired by Geyl’s works and activism was reflected in the fact that in the decades to follow he took a keen interest in contemporary Belgian politics himself and would often side with the Flemish nationalists.23 Consequently, as we will see, Willemsen later frequently acted as a passionate defender of his former mentor’s honour and integrity.

In the years immediately after his death, the traditional perception of Geyl’s political activism was still not being queried. Only the Nijmegen historian Lodewijk Rogier dropped some notable hints, in an obituary for the Koninklijke Academie van Wetenschappen. While writing that in the polarized atmosphere of the 1930s, Geyl had explicitly engaged with the democratic rather than the extremist factions, Rogier also acknowledged that in the decade before Geyl had confessed that the ‘break-up of Belgium’ and an alignment of Flanders with the Netherlands had been a desirable prospect to him.24 Little attention, however, was paid to these hints, and ten years later the Groningen historian Ernst Kossmann would still argue that Geyl had been one of the ‘moderate’ and ‘pragmatic’ voices within the Flemish movement.25 However, as Kossmann, previously one of Geyl’s successors to the London chair (1957–66), probably knew, this notion was, by then, no longer unchallenged.

The publication of Geyl en Vlaanderen (1973–5)

Soon after Geyl’s death, the university committee supervising his archive argued that it was in the late professor’s interest that parts of this archive (letters, memoirs, and other autobiographical writings) be published – after all, Geyl had always been a very public figure. Two of his former students were recruited to plough through his papers and select documents suitable for publication. These two students were Willemsen, by then working at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the national library of the Netherlands in The Hague, and Pieter van Hees, who was affiliated with the historical department of Utrecht University and in his student years had worked as Geyl’s academic assistant during the latter’s retirement.26 A bibliography of Geyl was published in 1972,27 but the first really substantive output of their work was a three-volume edition of a selection of Geyl’s correspondence, published between 1973 and 1975. Since his Greater Netherlands activism had been one of the most prominent aspects of Geyl’s career – he himself had stated this at the time of his retirement28 – the editors decided that the series would consist of an anthology of letters and notes concerning the Flemish movement and Greater Netherlands and thus called the series Geyl en Vlaanderen (‘Geyl and Flanders’).29

As Jo Tollebeek has argued, by the beginning of the 1970s, cracks were starting to appear in the image of Geyl as a mostly cultural, politically moderate proponent of the Greater Netherlands idea.30 In 1972 Hermann W. von der Dunk, professor of contemporary history at Utrecht and a former student of Geyl’s, wrote a biographical entry for the yearbook of the Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde, raising questions about his former mentor’s political affiliation:

[Geyl] always remained rather vague when it came to the future of Belgium and when he fiercely fought the Greater Netherlands fundamentalism of the magazine Vlaanderen, he mostly did so because he considered such positions unrealistic, ergo dogmatic, ergo harmful for the Flemish movement. His fight was thus not a fundamental rejection of such ideas, but rather a pragmatic decision.31

However, documents to substantiate Von der Dunk’s assessment were missing, a situation that changed a year later with the publication of the first volume of Geyl en Vlaanderen.

The first scholar to critically evaluate Geyl’s self-image based on his published correspondence was Louis Vos, a historian at the University of Leuven. In an article of 1975 published in Bijdragen en Mededelingen Betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (BMGN, today also known by its international title Low Countries Historical Review), he committed himself to investigating Geyl’s vague and contradictory positions regarding the political future of Belgium that Rogier and Von der Dunk had already hinted at.32

To understand why Vos got involved in the discussion about Geyl’s position within the Flemish movement, it is vital to comprehend how the historiographical debate on the Flemish movement had been developing since the 1950s, and Vos’s position within it. When, in 1958, Willemsen published the first study on the movement during the interwar-period, the topic had still been somewhat taboo among Belgian historians, since the collaborationist reputation it had acquired in the Second World War was still fresh in memory.33 This changed during the late 1950s and 1960s, when many individual historians, against the backdrop of a growing culture of remembrance, started publishing studies on a wide range of aspects of the Flemish movement. By the beginning of the 1980s, the subject was being tackled more systematically, emphasized by the publication of a two-volume encyclopaedia of the Flemish movement between 1973 and 1975.34 The narrative put forward in this work, one that was also increasingly becoming an important part of the Flemish collective identity, proclaimed that, step by step, the Flemish movement (and especially the nationalists within it) had emancipated the Flemish people from their francophone oppressors and led them to a future of freedom and autonomy.35

Vos did not endorse this narrative, for he was part of a revisionist group of historians around his academic mentor Lode Wils in Leuven, one of the first historians to take it upon himself to debunk this ‘Whig narrative’ of Flemish liberation. In numerous books and articles, Wils showed, among other things, that there was no such thing as an enduring Flemish self-awareness in history and that many of the Flemish movement’s victories had been achieved due to the commitment of moderate individuals within traditional political parties, not because of actions by radical Flemish nationalists.36 His interpretation of Belgian political history also prompted Wils to revise the interwar history of the Flemish movement, arguing that, while many Flemish nationalists fell victim to and were lastingly influenced by German Flamenpolitik propaganda during the First World War, which aimed at convincing them to endorse German expansionist claims, the real progress had been made, again, by moderate sympathizers to the Flemish cause in the Catholic and socialist political parties.37 Within this new framework, Wils interpreted the Greater Netherlands movement, with its connections to Germany and the Netherlands, as a foreign, radical, imperialist and even fascist force within the Flemish movement. In 1977, Wils would argue that:

most Greater Netherlands activists were Dutch nationalists, who hoped, during the First World War, that a German victory […] would make it possible that Flanders, one way or other, would be connected to the Netherlands […] [After the First World War] their incentives and financial support were of crucial significance for the spreading of anti-Belgian ideology within the Flemish nationalist movement.38

The publication of Geyl en Vlaanderen offered the ‘Leuven’ historians the opportunity to scrutinize the motivations of one of the most prominent Greater Netherlands figures within the Flemish movement and test their framework. Even though Wils eventually became the primary advocate of the idea that Geyl was one of the key figures of Dutch annexationism, it was his former student Vos who was the first one to include Geyl in the Wilsian demythologization of the Flemish movement.

In his 1975 article, Vos put forward the thesis that Geyl’s political opinions had not been as moderate as he had always proclaimed and argued that Geyl, in the 1920s, had been a Dutch nationalist and an anti-Belgian agitator. According to Vos, various remarks by Geyl that emphasized his alleged moderation were smokescreens put up to disguise his real political objective, the break-up of Belgium. Vos argued that Geyl obviously knew that if he had openly presented his ‘real’ irredentist position, it would work against him. Instead, Geyl would have taken a roundabout approach, in which he openly advocated for Flemish autonomy within the existing Belgian framework as a transitional solution while secretly hoping that this compromise would fuel political crisis, which would eventually make it easier to mould public opinion towards a Greater Netherlands solution.39 Borrowing an expression from Geyl himself, Vos qualified Geyl’s political activity in the 1920s as ‘walking on eggshells’ (‘eierdans’) since he was constantly consciously trying not to offend anyone en route to achieving his ultimate political aim.

Vos also pointed to various passages in Geyl en Vlaanderen that he viewed as supporting his interpretation that Geyl had shown ill will towards the Flemish national cause, for example by opposing the Belgian–Dutch Treaty, which was rejected in the Dutch Senate in 1927. Quoting a letter by Geyl, Vos argued that Geyl had known the treaty would have been beneficial for Flanders’ material prosperity, but still actively opposed it.40

Unsurprisingly, the editors of Geyl’s correspondence perceived this article as an attack on the integrity of their former mentor. In the same issue of BMGN, Willemsen therefore published a critical response to Vos’s allegations. Qualifying the image that the Leuven historian had painted of Geyl’s political activism in the 1920s as a caricature and reproaching Vos for not grasping Geyl’s personality and ideas,41 he acknowledged – and this had not been done before – that there were indeed passages in Geyl’s correspondence that demonstrated that Geyl had fostered the Greater Netherlands idea as a political ideal, but suggested Vos had not taken into account the various contexts in which these remarks were made.42 Geyl was not an extremist, Willemsen argued, but on the contrary denounced dogmatism and political stubbornness. Yes, his affiliation with the Flemish movement was motivated by his Greater Netherlands ideal, but no, he did not consider the political achievement of this ideal realizable politically anytime soon. In that sense, Willemsen continued to argue, no tactical considerations or ‘image-building’ were involved in Geyl’s writings.

Willemsen also criticized what he saw as Vos’s eclectic use of the letters published in Geyl en Vlaanderen. He argued that Vos had merely gathered random quotes instead of considering the whole picture. When it came to Geyl’s opposition to the 1927 Dutch–Belgian treaty for example, Willemsen argued that Vos could have known, and possibly even had known, that Geyl had frequently made the case for a new treaty.43 All in all, Willemsen, in this author’s view, quite convincingly refuted the picture of Geyl as an extremist in disguise and showed how his point of departure that generalized the role of Greater Netherlands activists within the Flemish movement, prompted his reading of Geyl’s letters.

Vos’s attempt to justify his conclusions in a short response to Willemsen notwithstanding, the majority of scholars contributing to the debate did not follow his line of argumentation.44 Ludo Simons, a literary scholar, librarian and conservator in Antwerp, argued that Vos had written his article out of a ‘dogmatic apriorism’, and historian Eric Defoort even deemed Vos’s article an example of how not to conduct historical research.45 Hendrik Borginon, who had been one of Geyl’s contacts in the Flemish movement, also sided with Willemsen’s interpretation of the correspondence, as became apparent in an article he published in the Flemish newspaper De Standaard on 23 March 1977.46 The only scholar to side with Vos in his judgement was – not surprisingly – Lode Wils, who, in a televised debate about Pieter Geyl, endorsed Vos’s claims.47

This first episode of the Utrecht–Leuven debate reveals the different agendas at play: while Vos used Geyl’s correspondence to implicitly make a more substantial claim about the nature of the Flemish movement, this appropriation of Geyl’s letters and notes was opposed by authors who had known Geyl personally. They cared less for the larger historiographical debates in which Vos participated, their primary concern was debunking the simplified interpretation that the Leuven historian produced of the versatile man who had initiated and enriched their professional careers. The fact that most other scholars backed their arguments seems to indicate that they had the stronger case. Because of this specific dynamic of the debate, however, a consensus was not reached; on the contrary, when Wils revived the debate in the 1980s, his verdict of Geyl became even more critical.

The publication of Briefwisseling Gerretson–Geyl (1979–81) and afterwards

The Historikerstreit over Pieter Geyl got a second impetus when, between 1979 and 1981, a new edition of Geyl’s correspondence was published. This time, the series consisted of five volumes of correspondence between Geyl and the Utrecht historian Carel Gerretson (1884–1958), who throughout his lifetime had been one of Geyl’s closest associates. The correspondence was edited by Pieter van Hees, who was gaining prestige as an expert on Geyl’s archive, and George Puchinger, a Protestant historian who had been a student of Gerretson’s. In the introduction to the first volume of the correspondence, entitled Briefwisseling Gerretson–Geyl (Correspondence Gerretson–Geyl, 1979–81), Van Hees and Puchinger argued that an anthology of their exchanges would ‘offer a unique insight into Dutch historiography during the more than forty years that Geyl and Gerretson were both active [as historians]’.48 The correspondence received critical acclaim – Ernst Kossmann, for example, wrote a very positive review for the BMGN.49

Geyl and Gerretson had first met in 1911 at a Flemish student conference in Ghent and would, from then on, build a strong personal relationship around their shared leanings towards the Greater Netherlands idea. Along with Van Eyck, they tried to promote the Greater Netherlands idea within the Flemish movement, among other things by launching a cultural journal, although it was short-lived (Leiding, from 1930 to 1931).50 Even when Geyl left London for Utrecht in 1936 (where Gerretson had been professor of colonial history and anthropology since 1925), their correspondence continued.

Ideologically, however, the two historians shared only their belief in the Greater Netherlands idea. Politically, Geyl was a left-wing liberal and, after the Second World War, became affiliated with the Partij van de Arbeid (‘Party of Labour’, PvdA), whereas Gerretson was very much shaped by his Christian upbringing and developed into an advocate of right-wing, nationalist policies. Even within his political party, the Christenlijk Historische Unie (Christian Historical Union, CHU), he was somewhat of a conservative outsider – in particular, his fierce opposition to the post-war decolonization of Indonesia was not appreciated by many of his party colleagues. In the 1930s he had even gravitated towards fascism, although for a brief period only, which resulted in a temporary cooling of his friendship with Geyl.51

For Lode Wils, who was increasingly working on the revision of the interwar history of the Flemish movement, this correspondence offered new material to, once and for all, show the world who Geyl had really been. Without referring to the controversy Vos’s ‘walking on eggshells’ article had triggered in the second half of the 1970s, Wils revived the position his former doctoral candidate had taken. In Wetenschappelijke Tijdingen, a scholarly journal dedicated to the history of the Flemish movement, Wils argued that the publication of Geyl’s correspondence with Gerretson proved that Geyl’s real political motivation went even beyond the thesis Vos had formulated.52 According to Wils, Geyl and Gerretson were Dutch imperialist agents, who, affected by the German expansionist Flamenpolitik propaganda and the imperialist tendencies of the Belgian department of the Dutch Foreign Office, had worked towards the disintegration of the Belgian state. Through his opposition to the Belgian–Dutch Treaty and the support of the extremist magazine Vlaanderen, Geyl had acted like a foreign, malevolent influence that sought to disrupt the internal structure of the Flemish movement and thus weaken the position of Flanders. Wils even went so far as arguing that Geyl did not mind that the Flemish movement had drifted towards fascism in the 1930s; only when he was taken hostage by the Germans in 1940 and recognized the demise of the Greater Netherlands idea would Geyl have switched his imperialist for (social-)democratic political positions.

This article was a sharply written, posthumous verdict on Geyl’s political affiliations during the interwar period and it was only a matter of time before the Utrecht historians published a critical response. In a contribution to the same journal a year later, Van Hees and Willemsen angrily replied to Wils’s ‘conspiracy theories’.53 As Willemsen had already done half a decade earlier in his reply to Vos, Van Hees and Willemsen criticized the eclectic treatment of Geyl’s correspondence and showed how, in their view, Wils’s impression of the Flemish and Greater Netherlands movements did not withstand scrutiny. Unlike Gerretson, Geyl had for example not been involved in the Flemish movement at the time of the First World War and could therefore not have been influenced by German Flamenpolitik propaganda. Wils, according to Van Hees and Willemsen, would also have deliberately ignored the internal divisions of the Flemish movement and the Belgian roots of the Greater Netherlands idea to paint the picture of a parasitic, exclusively foreign, Greater Netherlands movement. The two men argued that Geyl had indeed had a strong desire to intervene in Flanders and had in fact been advocating for unity within the Flemish movement (with the consequence that his pleas could sometimes be grasped as contradictory), yet he had never envisaged a weakened or disintegrated Flanders.54

In a brief response in the same volume of Wetenschappelijke Tijdingen, Wils did not engage in a full refutation of his opponents’ arguments, believing that his previous article had encompassed everything he wanted to say about Pieter Geyl. As mentioned earlier, the study of Geyl was only a small part of his revision of Flemish history – tellingly, the Utrecht–Leuven debate was only one of the many polemics Wils would become involved in during his academic career.55 It is for this reason that he concluded the article with the announcement that he ‘would prefer to dedicate [his] time to more constructive projects than such articles’.56

In the wake of this scholarly dispute two more articles were published on the matter. In a contribution to the Dutch historical journal Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, the Rotterdam historian and theorist of history Piet B. M. Blaas reflected upon the correspondence between Gerretson and Geyl and came to the conclusion that Wils’s impression of Geyl was ‘totally unfounded’.57 In an article in the same journal that aimed at giving nuance to some of Blaas’s impressions of Geyl, Hermann von der Dunk argued that the ‘breakaway tendencies’ that Wils perceived within the Greater Netherlands movement were of Belgian, not Dutch, origin, and that Geyl could come across as a radical because of his sharp style of conducting polemics, but that this certainly had not been the case when it came to his political motivation.58 Von der Dunk also replied to other recent articles by Wils and Vos, in which the two had argued that Geyl’s historiography concerning Belgium was prompted by political (that is, anti-Belgian) motives and was therefore unscholarly.59 Von der Dunk argued that, apart from the fact that it would be rather difficult to distinguish between ‘scholarly’ and ‘unscholarly’ historiography, Wils’s and Vos’s representation of Geyl’s historical works was strongly influenced by their conception that the Greater Netherlands idea was the offspring of Dutch Calvinist imperialism, a frame into which – even with the best will in the world – the agnostic Geyl could never fit.

Just as it did in the 1970s, the debate petered out after the ‘Leuven’ historians went under in a flood of critical responses. This time, however, the debate did not resurface. This was largely due to lack of new input: in the next three decades no new source material about Geyl was published. This changed only in 2009 when Geyl’s autobiography was edited by Pieter van Hees, Leen Dorsman and Wim Berkelaar.60 By then, however, the most prominent protagonists of the original polemic had either (almost) entered retirement (Lode Wils was eighty years old, Pieter van Hees seventy-two and Louis Vos sixty-four) or had passed away (Arie Willemsem in 2003).61 The next generation of historians cared less about discussing Geyl’s political motivations, for they were moving towards new research questions. Under the influence of the cultural and linguistic turns and constructivist concepts such as ‘imagined communities’, ‘invention of tradition’ and ‘lieux de mémoire’ (sites of memory), historians of Flemish nationalism started to look at the more cultural and discursive aspects of the Flemish movement – this can be witnessed for example in the works of the historian Marnix Beyen.62 Historians specifically concerned with Pieter Geyl have also shown less interest in his affiliation with the Flemish movement. The most prominent exception is Leuven historian Jo Tollebeek, whose writings on Geyl’s affiliation with the Flemish movement to some extent echo the arguments of his former mentor Lode Wils.63

Even though the two camps of historians have never reached a compromise, the debate has still affected our current understanding of Pieter Geyl in a positive way, simply due to the efforts the participants on all sides had to put in to substantiate their claims. And even though the ‘Utrecht’ historians, in this author’s viewpoint, were arguing the stronger case, the ‘Leuven’ historians have justifiably drawn attention to the often contradictory and sometimes even suspicious positions Geyl took during the interwar period. This has even led to a significant concession by the ‘Utrecht’ historians, who have admitted that Geyl’s Greater Netherlands idea was not solely cultural, but also fuelled by political ideas about the future of Belgium.64 Leaving us with a less hagiographic and more realistic image of Pieter Geyl, the importance of this debate should therefore not be underestimated.

Geyl between Utrecht and Leuven: concluding remarks

When Pieter Geyl deemed history a discussion without end, he had in mind a rational, uncorrupted discussion: in their quest for finding the truth, historians should not be driven by dogma or doctrines but only by their motivation to show, as Leopold von Ranke put it, ‘how things actually were.65 That this conception of the historical debate cannot be applied to the Utrecht–Leuven debates of the 1970s and 1980s has been argued in this chapter. Pieter Geyl’s Greater Netherlands activism was not debated in an open and unbiased way by like-minded historians; on the contrary, Geyl’s legacy was torn apart by two diverging agendas. On the one hand, the ‘Utrecht’ historians were driven by a very close relation to their late mentor: Willemsen and Von der Dunk had been students of Geyl’s and Pieter van Hees had worked for him after Geyl’s retirement. On the other hand, Vos and Wils were participating in their own Historikerstreit, namely that about the Flemish movement, and attempted to support their claims by means of analysing Geyl’s correspondence. That a nuanced interpretation of Geyl’s letters was being overshadowed by this bigger historiographical project perturbed them less than it did the Utrecht historians. Only when a new generation of historians entered the stage did the pressure ease.

Is the Utrecht–Leuven debate an exception to the rule that historical knowledge is being produced by historians who are free from any form of prejudice? It is the position of this author that it is not, for history is not only about impartial truth finding but also about signification and emancipation. History, namely, is not only about ‘how things actually were’ but also about its appropriation: who owns history?66 The Utrecht–Leuven debate, therefore, shows how, in modern democracies, history is not the reserve of a like-minded elite of liberal historians but should be a public good; it also demonstrates how the rules of the historical debate, therefore, will never be well defined. As a result, the historical debate can be intense, sometimes even painful, yet above all extremely relevant.