I'm Paul van Schoor, and in today's podcast, I'm speaking with Professor Rob
van der Larsen about the cultural landscapes and competing memories involved in collaboration.
Rob trained as a historian and in his research built bridges to cultural studies and anthropology.
As Research Director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage and Memory Studies
and Professor for War, Heritage and Memory at the University of Amsterdam,
Rob takes a retrospective look at collaboration in the Netherlands during the
period of the Second World War.
So welcome, Rob. Great to have you here. Thank you, Paul.
So Rob, maybe we could start with you giving us a quick sketch of your professional
development that brought you to the point where you are today.
You mean in collaboration? No, in general, just to understand a little bit the
expertise that you bring to the discussion.
I'm trained as a historian, and I worked actually for 20 years as a historian
in the history department of the University of Amsterdam.
And I've done a lot of things, broad periods and mostly theory,
but also cultural history for long periods in Europe, in the Netherlands, etc.
And from there, I moved into the cultural science department around 2000,
which I found very interesting.
I was a cultural historian, as I said, trained also as an anthropologist.
And and there were a lot of new initiatives among them, for instance,
media studies, which we founded at that time.
I've been part of that of that department for, let's say, two years.
And then I found some kind of new interest in in the yeah, let's say the whole
fascination with the past, which you could find far outside history department at that time.
Time, which of course we now all call heritage and memory, et cetera,
which was quite new in the early 21st century.
So I started at programs in master programs in heritage and memory studies and museum studies.
And then we became a kind of apartment with restoration and conservation and curating expertise.
Actually nowadays, a quite broad session, also part of the media studies,
for instance, in archival sciences and in film studies.
And then from all these expertise, we created a new kind of research institute
called the Amsterdam School for Heritage and Memory and Material Culture,
which is now one of the most advanced of the six faculty of humanity schools.
It's completely facilitated and part of the faculty management structure.
And after doing all that, I'm actually now moving in a sort of...
I'm back to my earlier position.
I'm now head of the Cultural Sciences Department, which actually needs some kind of refreshment.
So they took the old guy like me to support that.
That's basically my task now. But I have all the expertise, of course,
in-house. And as you know, I'm.
And also already from from at about 2000, 2010, in that period,
we started large projects.
And one of them, one of the largest was called Dynamics of Memory,
was a big, broad NWO project in the Netherlands.
Actually, some five years before, I already was a kind of advisor of the government,
some government ministries of welfare and education, for instance.
And um and in that um i was one of the advisors of the heritage of war program
and from from that some huge national program in the netherlands started dynamics
of memory which was which was broadly sponsored by all the ministries and by
a lot of museums and heritage institutes and funds.
And um and that brought me some for some five six years to let's say literally
evaluating some 300 projects on new technology, digitization in particular.
Which was absolutely new in 2005 by discussing that.
The idea was actually that the war, the Second World War, was going with pension, as it was called.
They would expect no new generation to be interested in that old stuff,
so they said, yeah, we want to close actually those resistance museums and all that nonsense.
And we have a sort of archive with the Red Cross, with the names of Red Cross victims.
What can we do with it? Nielt at that time, the National Institute for War History, wasn't interested.
And they said, well, there is some sort of fool at the University of Amsterdam
who's interested in heritage. Go talk with him.
Well, that became then the largest program ever created by Ministries Together
in Science, the Heritage War Program.
And we connected to NWO, which started Dynamics of Memory.
And from that, everything changed slowly.
I started international projects like Periscopes, for instance,
which is still an existing network.
Programs with Cambridge University, where they were also interested in heritage
research. I've heard people like David Lowenthal at that time,
a lot of expertise brought together.
And that ended in the kind of collaboration with WeWork together,
Paul, the assessing campscapes project, ICXS, which was a very interesting project.
Here I funded an Horizon 2020, which brought together a lot of universities,
six European European universities and six campscapes, which grew,
of course, later on to some eight of each, and a lot of companies working in,
especially also in fields of digital digitization and visualization.
Well, there are other projects which I'm still in, working on,
like on critical heritage, future of Europe, these kind of training programs.
There is also a sort of, let's say, spin-off of this ICXS project,
like Houses of Darkness, which worked with three of these campscapes together
in visualization technology.
So there's a lot being done, but there's also a lot still to collaborate,
let's say, with future partners.
You enter this discussion on collaboration,
well prepared in the context of memory studies and conflict history,
but what is collaboration and what purpose does it serve?
Yeah, collaboration is, well, we know, of course, all about these collaborative
research grants, like in Europe.
Collaboration is a, well, let's say technically, it's an interesting Latin term,
of course, which I think first became known in normal speech only in France
at the end of the 19th century, the period of Ernst Renan,
those nation-state building concepts,
which means that collaboration was doing something bad.
I mean, collaboration, we now see it as a positive term in Europe,
as working together to achieve a lot of things like research.
But collaboration had a long history already going back to this actually working
with the enemy, you could say.
It became very negative in the Netherlands. If people said to me,
would you like to collaborate, then in the Dutch pronunciation,
collaboratie, actually only
means one thing, which is working with the enemy, the occupying forces.
In a worse sense, that is, of course, now the nation state becomes less important.
For many people now in our generation, it actually means working together in
genocide processes or the Holocaust or something like that.
Collaboration in that sense is a negative term in the Netherlands,
but let's say the Anglo-Saxon and also in France, in the Anglo-Saxon culture,
it has this double meaning.
Some have found an escape on that. I think it's necessary sometimes to use that.
We speak about collaboration and about collaborationism.
Collaborationism is then what the Dutch called collaboratie.
And collaboration is more what in Dutch language would be called samenwerking, working together.
So in that sense, I think we can use the term collaboration in the European
way. Well, knowing actually that some European countries with an occupying history
have some sort of negative connotation with the term.
But of course, this negative connotation is actually what you would mean with
a concept like collaborationism.
Could you unpack this a little bit with respect to these origins in the emergence of the nation state?
Yeah, a nation-state is a 19th-century invention, although we,
of course, as a historian, I can say, let's say, the department I was part of
for some time was called the Dutch history,
section, let's say, which means that every country in the world has since about
1870, not before, chairs in national history.
And how strange it seemed before then, there was no national history.
There was a history, of course, a history of regions, of what was called states,
also in a small country like the Netherlands.
The term states was actually used for what we now call provinces.
In Germany, you can still find the term states for the different duches,
for example. The different parts of the country all had their own typical state
organization, like you see also in the US, for instance.
To call all that together a state, a nation, that is really a 19th century invention,
starting, of course, in the late Romantics.
After the French Revolution, you could say from, let's say,
the 1820s, 1830s, there was this general idea that people were not living together
simply because there was a king or an emperor or whatever who brought or created
a kind of structure of all these different smaller noble estates or something like that.
But there was also a kind of natural cooperation between people.
There you see already a term like cooperation to drop off.
And that idea is that people shared something, like a language,
for instance, like a history, like a past.
So, to create this kind of culture, this imagined community,
as Benedict Anderson would call it, that really means you have to invent a history,
which explains later on when this
nationalism became more rigid and more competitive in a European context,
especially between countries like Germany and France, for instance,
that these histories became, let's say, were rewritten.
They were rewritten in a national context, in a national dynamic.
Now, how remarkable this is, that when we started, for instance,
Dynamics of Memory as a European project,
that I was one of the co-editors of a volume, which we started with the idea
that we tried to find out how this history of the Second World War,
I mean, we talk about a world World War and the Holocaust were actually completely
written in a different narrative in all these European countries.
And that is quite remarkable. It means that even international phenomena are
in Europe still up to today being understood from a national frame.
And that has to do with the invention of the nation state.
And this nation state, you could say, formally it's invention,
let's say, at about 1813, 1815.
But as a cultural concept with this notion of history that people felt to belong
to each other, that dates from at about 1870.
From that period on...
What did the term really describe in that sense?
Was it the identification of an individual with an opposing nation state,
like in some sort of, in terms of an identity?
So what purpose did it serve when it arose?
Yeah, the remarkable thing is that people started to identify,
of course, with a culture, which was originally a regional culture.
And then it became nationalized.
So in these different parts of one country, they're found to be friends.
For instance, it's a great book written with an American historian,
Eugene Weber, who called the title of the book is From Peasants into Friendsmen.
And this whole process starts in 1870 and ends in 1914.
So, you see, very late, French people who spoke all kinds of different patois,
different dialects, were trained by the same school system, etc.,
to feel themselves French in the first instance.
Now, that happened in many countries. And what happened is not only that they
felt themselves to belong to one country, which is a nation,
but also connected that to a state.
So, the nation became a nation state. They became loyal to a state,
which means that people started to fight for that state as in an army.
Conscription armies also date only from after 1870.
So only the First World War was the first moment that you could say that labor
classes went to war, which was a tragedy, by the way, of course,
because socialism was international at that time and couldn't expect it to happen.
But what you see already then in 1914, the First World War was not only a clash
between France and Germany, it was actually also already then the disaster of socialism,
because it made perfectly clear to all the nation states that nationalism had won,
that nationalism was stronger than socialism.
Now, one guy, as we know, was very clever in understanding that the combination
of these two, national socialism, was, of course, the winning formula. Exactly.
Yeah, exactly. That is what happened. But let's say what you see from 1870 on
and after this First World War is that people became more and more loyal to a state.
They paid their taxes, which was completely, absolutely not done in the 19th
century still. I mean, this is a very recent invention.
And after the Second World War only, we created this welfare state that the
state took care of all these people.
But can we look under the hood? Can we look under the hood of this in terms
of what are then the underlying features, right?
So what defines that collaboration with the nation state? state.
Yeah, that is the collaboration. The remarkable thing is that collaboration
is actually what happened in behavior between the relationship between state
and citizen became that of collaboration.
But during the First World War and more especially during the Second World War,
collaboration, which was already a phenomenon, which was actually the basis
of the modern nation-state, suddenly became a negative concept.
Because it means collaboration became working together as citizens or as states with occupying powers.
So it means actually that you were collaborating with the occupier.
And that had everything to do, of course, with the invention of the nation state.
Because, let's say, in the 16th, 17th, 18th century, when a country was occupied,
it was completely normal to collaborate with a new state, with a new authority.
That was the general way everything works.
Now, officially, this was even still so in the Second World War.
When the Dutch government, for instance, took exile in London.
They let know to the Dutch administration that they had to collaborate,
with the German occupier. That was official policy and legitimized.
So that happened. All these local and regional government institutes worked
together with the Germans as if nothing had changed.
They took over the national government, of course, appointed their own,
fascist collaborators, so to say, in central crucial administrative position,
But all the others, the thousands, ten thousands of others, including school
teachers, et cetera, everyone stayed in business.
And after the war, of course, we're accused of collaboration.
I think also at economic collaboration, but in a certain way,
even taxpaying was collaboration.
Now, this is a sort of absurdity because collaboration was the normal way of
working together in the state.
But because of this negative impact of occupation, which was in many countries
new in the sense that in many countries, nation states, let's say, before that was normal.
But after the nation state, it was generally they only worked together with a nation state.
So working together with an enemy nation state then became a negative concept,
became a kind of treason.
But because it was, on the other hand, completely legitimate behavior,
up to today, among historians, there's a big debate about what actually collaboration is.
Because economic collaboration or administrative collaboration at a certain
level is completely normal.
Without that, there would exist chaos.
So to let trains do their work, et cetera, you need a kind of collaboration.
But when the trains are transporting Jews to Auschwitz or Westerbork Auschwitz
in the Netherlands, then this economic normal collaboration suddenly becomes
a kind of morally wrong collaboration.
Now, that's a debate which, after the Second World War, actually was not that strong.
There were some kinds of, let's say, investigation communities.
But how strange it is, let's say for France, for instance.
We now, today, would say Vichy France was one group of collaborationists.
I mean, these people were ideologically not going in resistance.
They were actually serving the German occupying state. But because Vichy France, by the Germans,
was given the illusion of being the continuation of a free France state,
after 1944, when the Allied forces invaded France and liberated it from the Germans,
Vichy immediately changed position and said, ah, we are still free. We didn't collaborate.
So we now immediately start finding the collaborationists.
Those people who ideologically were working for the Germans,
thousands of them were already trialed in Vichy France.
It's now forgotten because this is the wrong kind of memory,
because now for us, whole Vichy France was actually collaborating.
So I see that even after the Second World War, the term collaboration has changed extremely.
I remember even from my own duty, for instance, that we had trials of those
project developers working for the Germans in building the Atlantic Wall.
They were not regarded in the end as collaborationists, because the general
idea was actually they did a good job by giving the Germans the illusions that
they worked for them with Dutch people who didn't have to go then to Germany, etc.
So it was a kind of Robin Hood kind of, it was almost resistance.
But you have two dimensions popping up here, right?
Because that means on the one hand, there is a tension between collaboration,
which seems to suggest some form of free will, and coercion,
like you cannot do anything else.
And then there seems to be a very decisive element of a moral judgment,
which again, of course, is linked to whatever the root of history is at that point in time.
So first is linked with coercion.
In some sense, you could say, look, if I work within the context of a nation
state, you might describe my engagement as collaboration, but there's nothing
else I can do. I'm essentially coerced into going along, right?
So how should we disentangle these two elements?
And, yeah, let's say in trials, for instance, this term collaboration is still the general term used.
That means that you always have to deal with the complexity that economic or
administrative collaboration in a certain way is held on the same level as ideological collaboration,
being a camp guard, for instance, or something like that.
Or better said, that a camp guard or a camp commander would always position
himself as being actually only the administrative collaborator.
If I wasn't there, someone much worse than me would probably have taken over
because I'm not anti-Semite or whatever.
I'm not even pro-German or whatever. I did my job. on.
And so that's the general idea everywhere in all occupied European countries was we were experts.
We were asked. We did our best job. We were neutral.
We were Fachleute, to say it in German.
And that is possible. I mean, it's possible to use the term in that way as if
you You were simply still in the normal existing collaboration with your own state.
But because there was also resistance and resistance was something working against that state,
there has been, let's say, a moment to see this occupying state no longer as a legitimate state.
So that was a state with in the end laws. That's always a good thing,
of course, when the state, when it would have won the war, Germany,
we wouldn't have this debate, of course.
So it's all relative, let's say, history.
But it's also a moral dimension. That is, in resistance is already a moral,
a political moral dimension of being a good patriot or not.
I mean, in many countries, they were called, let's say, fighters for martyrs
for the nation, even on all the monuments.
Monuments and partisans. And the problem is, of course, that also national socialists
collaborating with the Germans, even fighting against the Russians, for instance,
in the Russian wars in Eastern Germany and Russia, were also keeping themselves for being patriots.
They also call themselves partisans sometimes. The craziness is that there is
almost nothing to divide because this is, again, if you think back at the First World War,
you could say this is the kind of nationalism that won that war.
And that nationalism could be seen as very strongly focused on those countries
occupied, you're a partisan where you fight against the occupier,
but it could also be ideologically transmitted to fighting for that country
which had the best national ideas.
Let's say the national socialists who had better ideas than the communists.
So fighting against Dutch communists would then be a patriot thing to do.
Now, in that sense, terms like collaborations were very difficult to use in trials.
And you see them used very much in public debates because there's always this
moral dimension that in some way it's bad.
And it gets a new kind of dimension after the 1970s,
80s with the Holocaust narrative Because then it's no longer only working for the occupying country,
whatever you think about that, but it's also being part of the SS or supporting
by whatever, even if you were only, let's say, exploiting labor camps, for instance,
like some that's almost government organizations have done, the Heidemaatschappij, the Moor Company.
Company, these created a lot of these camps in which Jews, for instance,
were already having to work before the deportations to the extermination camps started.
All that kind of collaboration.
Has been reviewed, you could say, reframed from the perspective that we know
what happened afterwards.
We know in the end where it leaded to. And that makes collaboration, again, morally wrong.
And that is now the general, let's say, the general opinion,
I think, which is shared by most Dutch people, at least, and most French people.
But that seems to be more a colloquial, informal definition because you also
highlighted already that in the actual court cases,
apparently as a concept it didn't hold
so can you can you explain that was it really rejected
offhand was it investigated and yeah but you saw immediately after the war was
of course that collaborators that the term was immediately used for for treasoners
um national treasons of the nation you could say what in dutch is called land
for others um these were generally called collaborators,
and they were sent then to the camps.
When the Jews were liberated from the camps, you could say, the National Socialists
and this specific group of collaborators were immediately sent and turned to
these former concentration camps.
But in the end, you see that almost all trials failed.
Because, yeah, what is a collaborator? I mean, a member of a National Socialist
Party, it's clear that you're You aren't ideologically collaborating with that regime.
That is possible, even if you personally never collaborated.
I mean, it happened quite often.
Let's say small farmers, for instance, in some parts of the country,
who for whatever reasons became a member of an organization that actually became
a National Socialist organization,
were, of course, accused of ideological collaboration, although they never probably
ever worked for any German organization or did anything in that sense wrong.
But those people who actually collaborated would say, okay, we collaborated
because we had a position already before the war in the state apparatus.
And we continue to do that because we wanted to keep the country together.
And we were legitimized by the government in London. I mean,
we actually collaborated for them.
So that is very, very difficult to explain that there is something. What is the graduation?
You can do that only at the moment when you really find proof that people also
ideologically collaborated.
So, when this collaboration ended in, let's say, a membership of a National
Socialist Party or organization, okay, then you could say, now we know that
you actually worked for the occupier.
But this is, you can see, this is not a general way to fight.
However, there were also cases against so-called traitors, Dutch citizens who
actually directly worked for, let's say, the German Secret Service,
the Gestapo, to infiltrate, let's say, resistance movements and get people arrested.
These were cases that really also led to convictions.
Yeah. And those cases, were these also seen collaborators or was that then called treason?
Yeah, because these people, collaboration is only possible when you have a position
already in the state apparatus on whatever level, and then you start collaborating with the enemy.
Let's say a government, well, let's say Denmark, for instance,
or Norway, these governments who stay there,
Belgium in a certain way, these governments collaborated with the Germans,
the Balkans, for instance, the Ustasha regime or the Ukrainian nationalists, they collaborated.
But if you start making a career as a secret agent without having a position
before in the Netherlands, you could say you're just only your workforce for an enemy organization.
So that is treason. Then you are in the service of another country's,
of the occupier, let's say the occupier's military or police organization.
But that is a strange concept, because the same concept is also used against
communists who went in the 1930s to Spain to fight against the fascists.
They lost their citizenship in the Netherlands, and they only received it back,
some of them only in the 1970s.
Even though they were active resistance fighters during the Second World War,
you couldn't be more patriot than that, you could say, but they never earned that back.
And they lost their jobs, actually, to National Socialists who came back from
the camps in the early 50s or the late 40s, because then Cold War started.
And also because of that, they were still not held for trustful citizens.
So, collaboration can take very, very strange ways, but also this kind of treason
because these people were also accused of having been served,
not an enemy state, but simply a foreign state and fought against the Germans,
which was still, before the Second World War, still a befriended nation.
So, if you fought against German army, for instance, in Spain in 1936 to 1938 or whatever.
Then you were actually fighting in the service of a Spanish government,
although officially Spain was a befriended nation, the Republic.
The Netherlands, for instance, forgot that and said, OK, no,
but you were fighting against our Germans and that's a befriended nation.
So you see, this concept is also absolutely weird.
And there is another way, of course, to escape it. Let's say many of these people
working for the Germans, police people or whatever, after the war,
they simply went to Germany.
If these people lived in Groningen, for instance, or in Asche,
near the German frontier, or in Limburg, they simply had to move 50 kilometers.
And they lived in Germany. And many of them, most of them have now, of course, died.
But let's say up to not too long ago, many of them lived there in a completely normal life.
They had a death sentence or whatever in the Netherlands. But the Netherlands
was not able to catch them because the German government were not allowing them
to deliver them to the Dutch state.
And that is, I mean, this is another case of the complexity of what it means.
Collaboration for, let's say the Germans would say they collaborated in a positive
way for us. They collaborated in the interface.
But in the Netherlands, the collaboration was not the worst thing.
You could not be trialed very seriously for collaboration.
It was more what actually they did, that was working for a foreign occupying organization.
And let's say, be taken part in killings of resistance fighters, for instance.
That was most of the job which they were accused of.
Right. But now, if you step back from the nation-state perspective in collaboration,
then defining features are, for instance, shared goals, right?
Entities, agents can collaborate because there's a shared goal.
But now in this context, there's an asymmetry because we speak of a nation-state
or the idea of a nation-state and all its organizations and an individual.
So would you think also in that context there's still a sense of a shared goal,
or should we just redefine that.
That's a good question, Paul, because the strange thing of the concept is also
that it's used for states,
governments collaborating with the occupying countries or collaborating not
with an occupying country, but with the access countries, for example,
by the promise of being independent,
like VC regime or like some of the Eastern European countries or Denmark.
Denmark delivered its Jews, for instance, on the promise of being independent.
And even social democrats were in the governments there.
I mean, they also delivered the communists. That was good for the social democrats
because they were competitors, of course.
You see, collaboration on the government level was also quite normal and usual during wartime.
But, of course, we generally used the term in the Netherlands,
for instance, collaboration, not on that level.
Although this is probably the only level which you can really use it in a neutral
way, let's say, because this is something which you really can define.
But generally, in public speech, the term is mostly used for this citizenship,
these citizens who collaborate with the enemy.
And there it becomes blurred because what's collaboration for one citizen is
not collaboration for another citizen. For instance, the famous case of the
major in wartime, the burgemeester in the oorlog.
This is just the Dutch concept to make clear how problematic some things could be.
Suppose you're a burgemeester, you're a major of a small village or a larger town,
and people want you to stay because they trust you during this occupation,
and they know that you can probably help to, let's say, to moderate the situation.
Which is actually, of course, based on negotiations.
Then after the war, formally, you could be accused, and they have been accused, of collaboration.
Now, this was, in that sense, not ideological collaboration and not morally
wrong, Because they probably, some of them even, hid a lot of Jews,
for instance, and they supported that.
Of course, others were ideologically wrong. They were really collaborating in
the sense that they worked the other way around, but these were mostly appointed
by the occupying regime.
Now you see that even their collaboration already is blurred,
but what happens with all these cases,
let's say a famous case is the Jewish Council, the Yotzerat,
the Jewish Council, that the
Germans invented based on some members of the Jewish elite in Amsterdam,
famous among the Jews themselves, already before the war in support in German
Jews, for instance, refugee camps.
They were also, of course, those people who created Westerbork in that sense,
originally as a German Jewish refugee camp.
Now, these people became then appointed by the Germans after the occupation
as representing the Jews in the Netherlands, in particular in Amsterdam.
Them and um and slowly they
became instead of representing became collaborating
in making the list in in
in registration in selecting those people to be sent to the camps every time
at every new step with the idea now yeah we take this this thousand for for
this week and maybe then we save some 500 others up to the moment that no one
was left and they had to be sent themselves to the camps.
But this is an important step, right? Because that means the German occupier
put in motion a process where they also engineered this collaboration as you just described it.
Would you agree with that? This was an engineered process?
This is exactly what it was and it shows the cleverness of the German occupier.
I mean, I mean, what I always want to make clear to students and colleagues
is that fascism has nothing to do with primitivism or with backwardness or with
people who are against change and,
you know, what you often find also now in interpretation of populism.
These are those people who, like with Brexit, for instance, who don't want to
be part of Europe because it's modern. No.
National socialism, like fascism in Italy, were extremely modernist and extremely
supported by people like us, for instance, by intellectuals,
by professors, by political powers.
There was a lot of knowledge here, and they knew very, very well how to deal and how to occupy.
They were really experts, maybe brilliant experts, and maybe the best occupiers
ever existed. I mean, they did everything faster than the Roman Empire,
for instance, than Napoleon.
What they did was unbelievable. I mean, it's not comparable to anything on a world scale.
And it could have been successful if not some stupid mistakes were made in the end.
But, I mean, successful in their own terms. For us, it would be disastrous.
So, also in this whole...
Let's say what they created was
Jewish self-destruction, a system that you give the illusion to people.
And this is exactly collaboration, like that we would be invited in Europe to
work together with some other groups in a collaborative project.
But actually, the collaborative project is selecting ourselves,
possibly, to send yourself into a kind of unknown destruction machine.
But you don't know it yourself. You think you're actually doing the right thing.
Maybe in a certain way you think, well, maybe it is better for Jews to live
somewhere in a new state like Israel, but then in the East, let's say.
By all these strange illusions, I mean, there were so many plans also in the Netherlands.
Why not sending the Jews to Suriname, for instance, where they had so many of these plans?
What's the mechanics here? So May 40, German invasion in Holland.
Then they wait quite a while, actually, before they really start to ramp up
this process of engineering collaboration.
So what, in your mind, are then the key steps in that process that led to,
in that sense, the auto-destruction of the Jews?
These key steps were taken very slowly. Yeah, that is, of course,
everyone from now looking back, you could say, why were people not immediately
going, leaving the country already, let's say, from the 1st, from May 1940?
Because everyone could know, especially those people knowing the German Jews
and Austrian Jewish refugees, what happened in Germany, in the German Reich,
especially also after the Anschluss.
I mean, all Jews losing their jobs, losing their fundings, their houses, etc.
So in that sense, everyone could expect what would have happened.
And not only Jews, of course, in Germany, the project started with the persecution
of political enemies, with socialists and communists, even liberals.
I mean, even already in 1933, von Papen was already persecuted.
I mean, those people who were supporting Hitler themselves from the central parties.
So everyone could have known what would have happened.
But it's the illusion always that you think, well, we know the Germans,
they are a civilized people, they will occupy, they will do strange things in
their own countries. We'll never do that in the Netherlands.
We are in peace already since the Habsburg period, let's say.
So this was one big disillusion.
And yeah, what is the mechanism? The mechanism is that the Germans,
before they entered the Netherlands, had already made an Anschluss in Austria.
Seyss-Inquart. Don't forget, he was the leader of the Anschluss of Austria.
Then Seyss-Inquart, the same Seyss-Inquart was sent in 1939 with Coutre-France
to Poland to make the annexation of Poland possible, of parts of Poland, the Schwarzengau, etc.
And then Seyss-Inquart was sent from Poland to the Netherlands.
So this was a very experienced staff which he had. I mean, No other one in the whole Europe.
Maybe some people, especially in the Netherlands or England,
with experience in, let's say, the Dutch Indies or India, have ever witnessed anything like this.
But in European context, it never happened that the same people were responsible
for creating a kind of occupation, onslaught, annexation, whatever you would
call it, from one country to another, step by step.
So when Seisingquart entered the Netherlands, he knew exactly how to deal with
it, how to work slowly into a kind of new kind of juridical structure,
change the courts, for instance.
I mean, all the processes we now see in Hungary and Poland, let's say,
were in the same way happened in the Netherlands.
At a certain moment, Nuremberg laws were officially also being part of the system
and nobody believed it because it was so completely different.
Than anything you could believe.
But another thing was, of course, the use of camps. They were in the Netherlands already.
As we know, of course, also from this research of Leon Tokke,
all that kind of information, which is still every time strange to combine.
But there was a social security system already since the unemployment,
since the crisis of the 1930s.
Especially for people in the cities to work on the land, And reclamation work
by this Moore company had a Heidemaatschappij.
And so unemployed people, young people, were constantly sent from the cities to these camps.
Now, these camps were taken over by the Germans immediately from 1940.
They knew exactly where they were because they were already long before the
Second World War in the Netherlands, investigating all the spots.
They knew everyone, every person, everything they could use.
This was not an unknown country for them. And so what you see is that this whole
unemployment system, which was governed, administered by social security officers
in all Dutch communities,
was completely taken over by the Germans.
They were giving new instructions by no longer sending Dutch boys to these camps,
but only Jews from all ages.
And that happened. Within a few months, around Amsterdam, some 20 of these camps
were already filled with only juice.
And then the second instructions were,
change the number of camps, we bring them together, let's say we integrate some
20 camps, we make them into five,
and then bring them to the middle of the country, or to the new lands,
let's say the new polders, broader.
Larger projects, what the Germans call the West Polynesia zone.
I mean, the Polish project is called the Oost Polynesia zone.
So from there, Then the camps became concentrated in the eastern part of the country.
So from Groningen to Limburg, already quite near Germany. And Westerbork was in between.
So this happened already before the camps were emptied in 1942.
And everyone had to be sent to Westerbork. And suddenly from that moment on,
Westerbork was taken over.
Up to that time, it was still, how strange it seems, a German Jewish refugee
camp with a Dutch director governing
this camp, but having people which he didn't know what to do with it.
And then suddenly new barracks were built, and this whole large group of some
8,000 people from the unemployment camps were arriving.
And a few weeks later, the Jewish Council had sent the addresses to the Hague
of the children and the wives of all these male persons.
And the 8,000 male persons then suddenly were accompanied in Westerbork by trains
from Amsterdam by their wives and children.
Now, let's say they all had a wife. That's 16,000. They all have one, two, three children.
So there we are. We are already at some 20,000, 30,000 people,
maybe. That's a third of the whole Holocaust.
This happened without any kind of formal pogrom or institutionalization.
That is a large collaborative effort. Exactly, exactly.
Is that achieved as a planned project? Is that achieved by shifting the norm,
by smoothly shifting the norm?
Because what is surprising, okay, in Holland, there was the strike of February
41, which was a big response, especially in Amsterdam, against these measures against the Jews.
So in some sense, you could argue this is where maybe Seyss-Inspord misread
how easily society would go along in that process?
Or do you think that was for them just a blip that could easily be suppressed and not a real concern?
Well, this is the February strike. The problem is that the February strike is,
of course, in history, it has been very much politicized.
So we all know that members of the Communist Party were organizing it,
but after the war that was not done, to make that too clear,
Because, yeah, there was, of course, always this general notion of how could they have organized it?
Because we had this Revitrop-Molotov Pact, the Germans and the Soviet Union were working together.
So it's impossible that the communists were doing this, actually.
But, of course, the communists were organizing it. And they were the only one
who could do it because they were the only one being underground already.
They were in this command, and they have this control within the Amsterdam tram
lines, within the harbour, for instance, all those people who were actually actively organising.
But of course, supported by students and by all other kinds of groups,
and Jews themselves, of course, not to forget, against what you could see as
the first programme. because this is another element which is not widely known.
But what happened was that Amsterdam not only contained already in February
of 1941 Jews from Amsterdam, but they also had brought already Jews from neighboring
cities like Edam, for instance,
or Zaan, the Zaan part of the Netherlands, the northern part of the Netherlands,
were all brought already to Amsterdam.
And they created and called that ghettos, officially in German Judenkartier.
So there were planned two of them, one in the south and one in the center of the city.
Most known is, of course, that one in the center of the city,
the oldest Jewish part of the city.
And from there, you could get in, but you could not get out as a Jew.
So that was already being done at that moment. And there were NSB,
National Socialist Youth Organizations, walking there with marshes and,
you know, teasing these Jews and making jokes and that kind of thing.
And left-wing Jews in particular, who also were trained themselves in karate, fighting sports, etc.
Of course, at that time, when nothing happened before, this was before the programs, were fighting back.
And at a certain moment, one of these fascists was killed by a Jewish boxer.
And that was the moment when fascists started to create a kind of riots in this neighborhood.
And the Germans had brought Jews from a kind of Zionist training camp in the
north of the country, also to Amsterdam, who were themselves Zionists,
not communists, but also militants. and this created an explosive atmosphere.
And what happened that this riot then for the Germans was a kind of testing
ground to find out what happened if we get them up in a kind of program,
which we were trained doing that, of course, in Poland already for two years.
And we take them all and send them to a new camp. This first camp was built
in the Dune area in Schagen, this area in North Holland.
It's an unknown camp because it stayed only there for a year.
It was only meant for communists and for this first group of Jews.
And so they were kept out of there. And that was the moment when this strike
started, this first strike in Europe against Jewish pogrom.
And this had an enormous impact. And then the Nazis became very much irritated,
but also shocked, because even for, let's say, National Socialists,
they had this strange idea that the Dutch actually were also an Aryan people,
actually kind of German people.
In the past, in the Habsburg period, there had always been one empirical state,
so why not having the Jets as a sort of even a kind of elite,
maybe even in the German state? They had high respect for the Jets.
Then suddenly, this happened in the capital, and not only between communists
or whatever, but a broad support from Amsterdam people, don't do anything to our Jews.
We will fight back. That was a signal which was so strong that immediately created
an idea we have now to operate in a very systematic way because the Dutts are
stronger in resistance than we think.
They have a kind of secret resistance, not the kind of thing you find in,
let's say, in other countries where they shoot back all that,
but they have this kind of community approach.
So it was very important to use the mechanism of collaboration collaboration.
Finding out those Dutch people which you could use by creating something which
was almost, it was not like in Poland, let's say, by making it too explicit,
but using the Dutch police, you know, to find the Jews and using Dutch organizations.
Organizations, and of course, create this fiction of the Jewish council by having
them, the fiction of self-control.
What you see in Poland, for instance, in these ghettos like lots, that kind of system.
That's what they use here, but in a way which looked more like the Dutch system of polarization.
Like almost from, look, we have this socialist and we have the Christians and
the Catholics. And now you get also your organization, that we have a sort of
context in the Hague and that we don't have to have all these different.
So that sort of spirit was behind it. Right.
And it also means that says in court and his lieutenants had two models that they had to manage.
On the one hand, there's a model of how does a society respond and how do we shape that?
But also a model almost at the individual level, which is how do we make sure
the members of a Jewish council keep on going along,
settling all sorts of very conflicting challenges between, let's say,
their own survival and that of other people.
So, were these two models there?
Was this also in some sense formalized by them? Was there really a rulebook
for that? Or how did they play that out?
I think you could say there are two interpretations here.
One is absolutely, it's true, there were these two models.
One is, let's say, conciliation, moderation, tempering, being in contact, negotiations.
And the other is what happened directly, for instance, after this February strike,
is operating in a very, very aggressive, terrorized way.
But you use another kind of instrument for that. For instance,
the SS, an organization which normally is not to be found on the streets.
So, as you could say, okay, we had to do that, that was not… Now,
the second thing is, you could say, maybe these are the same people doing this, using these two models.
I'm myself quite sure it works this way.
But for Dutch historians in general, they have a more friendly interpretation.
Reputation, and they would say, now you had good guys and bad guys.
Now, I'm not sure about that. I think good guys are very good at also being
bad guys, but it has to do a lot also with Dutch trials.
Let's say Gemmeker, the commander of Westerbork, sending these 60,000 Jews to Auschwitz.
He was sentenced only for six years because actually he behaved like a gentleman,
like a kind of atmosphere.
Now, this is the way Dutch people generally like to see the situation.
That's very ironic, right? Because it means also current historians still believe
the image that the Germans purposefully created. Yeah.
This is a very effective image.
It has a big impact in Dutch history that.
Because it is difficult to understand, of course, that the same person can be a Jekyll and Hyde.
But it is completely understandable when you know also colonial regimes, how they work.
They always work with collaboration, creating elites like the Dutch,
the Indo elites, the mixed race people. Of course, they collaborate.
They work in the Dutch Royal Army. and on
the other you have the groups where these same people are
used to send people to camps or to fight
terrible wars but these are invisible for
the others and that's that's how it works now let's
say for jews the system was quite harsh from the beginning and for communists
but for normal dutch people um it wasn't bad at all i mean of course there were
there were bad situations and especially the last the last years of the war
were not that nice, but also because of the war events.
This regime worked in double ways. That is a general approach.
Let's say one of my family members,
I was born in Aalsmeer, was sent to one of these sub camps of Neuengamme.
And they were doing no more than some illegal journalist work.
And these guys then, when nobody expected it, were suddenly catched up somewhere
in October 1943 or something like that,
sent in a bad time to this camp and then had to work in the sub-camp working
on the Frisia Wall, a kind of Atlantic Wall project near Denmark.
And this whole system was based that these people were probably in the Netherlands,
let's say, friendly, interrogated and been sent away with the promise that they
had to do some work in the labor camp.
But you know how it is, within a few years, you're back.
They arrived there. And within three months, they were dead.
The same way the people from Putten, all these male people from Putten,
this whole village was fired.
Nobody knows why. But the mail was sent to the same sub-camps of Neuengamme
and it worked in the same way in the same period of the year and all died within a few months.
So these were actually extermination camps, death camps, which we don't know.
Nobody has described the history of these camps because they are not fitting in the image.
You think of Jews being killed in these camps.
Nobody speaks about Dutch people being killed in comparable ways or Russians,
for instance, in these Russian camps.
But now, Rob, if we bring it back to the theme of collaboration in this case,
you gave a really very clear sketch on how this slowly played out in the Netherlands, right?
And how the German occupier gained control using collaboration from these older nation-state roots.
And would you say that's also a recipe they followed within Germany itself and
other Western European states?
It was a generic approach that they took?
Yeah, but you could say that generally in the East, in the Eastern European
parts, there was a lot of collaboration.
But this was ideological collaboration.
You could say this is collaborationism.
And there was a lot of terror.
So the combination of collaborationism, let's say by Catholic nationalists in
the Balkan states or Ukrainian nationalists in Ukraine being very anti-communist, etc.
All that sort of collaboration worked together with an extreme lot of terror,
communists, the Jews, the minority groups, ethnical terror.
And in the West, ethnical terror was not part of the system.
It happened, of course, to Jews, but they were killed not in the West.
They were killed in the East. They were first sent there to where terror was already normalized.
In the West, you could say people, the only terror they knew were actually some
bombings during the first part of the war.
For instance, in the Netherlands, the battles at the Grebbeberg,
but also the bombing of Rotterdam, one of the first cities to be completely
bombed by the Axis, by the Germans.
Of course, the first was Guernica in the Spanish Civil War.
But in combination with what happened in England, which was officially not occupied,
but had a lot of these bombings, you could say this is the experience in the West for normal people.
And of course, the Battle of Arnhem later on in the second part of the war, the Liberation War.
But the pogroms and the deportations of the Jews, these were very specific.
These people were isolated in first instance, taken from their original neighborhoods
and cities and towns, concentrated in these ghettos in some big towns like Rotterdam and Amsterdam.
And from there, for instance, let's say I live myself in a small Dutch town
where some 50 Jews were killed in Auschwitz.
And so we were. But there was never a memorial up to the mid-60s for them.
There was a monument for those people in resistance being killed,
some 10 persons, but not for these Jews.
Why not? I asked later on, why did it never happen?
He said, yeah, but these Jews were not, when they were killed,
they were already not living in this place.
They were sent to Amsterdam. them so where they actually they
were sent from a ghetto to a camp which
means that the original place where they live we're not regarding them as their
as their own victims they didn't belong because we were no survivors there was
also no family to so we only have but if you look at the system in the netherlands
and and we would do some counterfactual reasoning on this,
what could have been the response of Dutch society to disrupt this plan?
Well, the problem is, of course, when you don't have terror against total population,
like in Poland, for instance.
I mean, the Poles were not very friendly to Jews, but they suffered the same
kind of occupying terror as the Jews themselves or the Ukrainians.
So in that sense, that's what they shared.
It means that all of them were in a certain way in resistance.
In the Netherlands, there was resistance only from, let's say,
from 1942 onwards, but most of the Jews were already sent to camps.
It was, of course, based partly on finding hiding places for Jews,
later on hiding places also for Dutch boys in particular being threatened to
be sent to the Eastern Front.
But that was a kind of situation which was indirect terror. It was terror,
but it was indirect, it was invisible.
And which means that being in resistance was even, it was risky,
but it was also against the sort of mentality people had because they were very
brave people and very civilized people.
And you had to do what the government says.
Also, even if the government is an occupying government, it's still a government.
So it's not that easy to come into resistance. In the same way,
when, let's say, when a neighboring village would have been completely terrorized,
then I would expect the whole population to go in resistance. It will not happen to us.
But when something like that is not happening, but only some few civilians, some few young,
radicals were taken out, some communists, yeah, I wouldn't say who cares because
people cared, but they knew it would not happen to me.
Because I am a normal, I'm doing my job, I've never been in politics and whatever.
So that made this whole situation in the Netherlands, the resistance movement
was actually very much related to some political parties underground,
not even social democrats. They were generally not in resistance.
Some groups were in resistance, but they could not trust themselves because
the greatest trade union was actually collaborating with the Germans.
What would have done? More strikes? More strikes? Or put more people in hiding?
Yeah, it would have made a big, big difference. If, for instance,
these trade unions were, like in some other countries, were supporting resistance,
that would have made a big, big, big change.
But by a lot of these former political parties and party members being not openly
in resistance, I mean, some of them were not able to because they were taken as hostages.
To some of the camps in Vught, for instance, in Birols-Gestel.
So that happened in many countries, of course, you take the elite the most and
you bring them together to a camp so they can no longer lead their own parties,
then you see this party's fragment.
It happened also to the communists. The communists were working together even
with liberals, et cetera, in the underground.
So everyone had to find new kind of collaborations operations in resistance,
to use the same term also for the resistance movement.
And you know how difficult it is, because you never know who you can trust.
I mean, you work together with people who are also, but they could also be,
of course, secret agents. Many of them were.
And if they weren't, they were kept for a moment, sent to what is called one
of these prisons, interrogated, martyred.
And let's say and of
course they became they had to
become almost if they wanted to stay alive a kind
of spy or whatever so this happened
in a very massive scale and the intelligence of Germans was quite good also
because of the cooperation of all these local police people I mean in Amsterdam
for instance resistance was almost impossible because on every corner on the
street there were police people the whole day.
And they were all trained in Avigar. And Avigar was a center,
which was an SS training center.
They even had a Jewish camp there, of which almost all Jews,
when they were in the end sent to Westerbork, even camp commander Jammerker,
had never seen people in such a worse condition,
that he first sent them to the hospital of Westerbork before sending them to Auschwitz.
I mean, the irony of all this is so crazy.
But this was a training camp for Amsterdam police people to become, let's say, Jew hunters.
So many of these Amsterdam police, and don't forget, these Amsterdam police
people were not trialed after the war, and they were still there,
many of them, during the 1960s Provo movement.
This is one of the explanations why Provo was provocating the police,
because these were military-trained, SS-trained police people.
That's amazing. They were even honoured after the war. Wow. Yeah. But now we're up so...
But what you're describing is that this notion of collaboration is an automatic
consequence of having this relationship between a nation state and its citizens.
So that means given that structure in which we exist, we are all collaborating
continuously by necessity.
But also, it shows also a vulnerability in that system because the citizen is
collaborative with this abstract construct of a nation state based on a sense
of trust, a trust in that system.
Like the system is well-intentioned towards us and the common good.
And that's in some sense what the German occupier co-opted,
because people could not break out of that assumed relationship of trust between
themselves and the nation state. Would that be a correct interpretation?
Yeah, exactly. This is absolutely correct. And it's not only on the kind of
system as we now describe for the camps, for instance, which were not guarded
by Germans, don't forget.
Inside these camps, there were Jewish kapos.
So they were sent, Jews themselves sent other Jews into the trains.
But outside, for instance, in Westerbork and other camps, also in Germany,
in Westerbork with two police commands, battalions, the battalions were one
from Bremen, German city,
a reserve battalion which already had been fought in the Eastern Front,
experienced in the Russian war.
And the others were an Amsterdam battalion, which probably also had some Eastern
experience and were trained in Avergord.
So, actually, there were only 40 Germans who did the whole job sending 107,000
people to the extermination camps.
This explains everything about the term collaboration. But then there is also
a positive kind of collaboration, not positive in the moral sense,
but the Germans were also doing a lot of things.
They were not only occupying and stealing and robbing, which they also did.
They looted everything from the Jews and sending the political enemies to the
camps and the intellectuals and whatever you want.
But also a lot of intellectuals and architects and engineers and whatever you
want to have worked with them together.
We're very happy because if you look, for instance, to the restoration of Amsterdam City,
if I look out of my window here, if I would change my screen,
you would see all these buildings which were actually rebuilt during wartime
in a city like Amsterdam, which was not destroyed.
Because this was the golden period of heritage business of what the Germans
called Detmalschus. These were all collaborating.
What they did was actually finding out what was... And that was their escape
route after the war. There were some trial investigations.
And they said, yeah, you collaborated with the Germans.
You worked in the kind of Heimatarchitectural works rescheduling.
But yeah, the problem was the Germans loved Rembrandt. The Germans loved the Dutch Golden Age.
And so what all these architect said, no, we were actually playing with them.
Because the Germans didn't see that we were very Dutch nationalists. We were patriots.
We were building in an old Dutch style.
And that was their escape route. They didn't say, of course,
that the Germans loved this old Dutch style. It was especially what they wanted them to do.
But now given the model and the history behind it that you sketch on collaboration,
now in the European context, we are shifting partially away from a nation-state
concept to one of a federated Europe.
So what would be the consequences then of the sense of collaboration?
Because it also means we have to reorient people's loyalties to an even more
abstract entity of a European Union.
So do you see that these forms of collaboration will then change as a result?
Yeah, this is the same. This is actually the same process as what happened in
the 19th century with the invention of the nation state.
In first instance, you could say this was a cultural process.
I mean, for some countries like Germany, this is also the official idea that
there was already a kind of German people, starting with Herder,
etc., from the late 18th century in music and in poetry and in philosophy.
Philosophy and after that came slowly the national
german empire empire state but um
but this was of course not really how
it really happened because um there is always this this this combination of
political power and culture because we all know culture is used also on the
micro level always use you don't build an opera hall because people like it
that you want to show the opera enterprise already bringing you in the kind
of mood, it creates power, it creates the.
Image of those people who are creating it, of the elite sitting there on the
balcony, and those, et cetera.
So in that sense, this is also going on in Europe.
Europe has been for a long time believed in the myth, you could say,
of a Europe of different culture, different nations, as they call it,
of regions, different regions.
The idea was the nation-state will slow down and then what comes up for it is regional context.
Let's say people in Germany could share some things with France in the same
kind of regions, like Elsbeth Lotharingen, for instance,
or the Dutch in Limburg and those people in Eastern Gelderland or whatever it's
called in Germany, or in Belgium, Limburg, these could also share some sort
of historical comparative culture,
maybe even a dialect or something like that,
Northern Italy with Austria, et cetera.
Now, we all know that this is a big mistake because if.
Ethnic war happens. It's always exactly in these regions.
Let's say former Balkan wars in the 1990s. What happens is that neighbors are killing each other.
Those people who share the same culture, they share the same language,
but don't feel themselves still different because there is some sort of identification
with another religion or whatever.
It's always that it doesn't work
this way culture is more let's say
is as much divisive as it's
as it is as it is shared and it's it's not a base to build something on you
have to really start from from from the structure itself and in european now
you could say it's complete failure you you can say there are many cultures
now working together in europe but maybe there is more affinity between,
let's say, Geert Wilders or Thierry Baudet, this populist in Western European countries,
with Viktor Orban in Hungary than with their own prime minister.
This culture of trust has been completely lost in a certain way.
You even see it nowadays with this COVID-19 situation, that people create a
kind of identity by being against vaccination, for instance.
What could be before anti-Brexit or could be Brexit in England.
It is a sort of mostly regionally based also in Northern Italy,
for instance, with Lega Nord, which then became suddenly a national party.
And then suddenly also people in Sicily started to drop up and support that
same party, which was five years before, if there was anything Lega Nord people
hated, it were Sicilians.
Experience so you see this cultural element
is a fixing floating thing it's not
something which really goes back to a past all these past are invented i mean
everything which people believe of being i'm really dutch or i'm really french
it's very nice but this can change just as much as state borders can change
and that is the big issue of europe of course that.
That it is based in a very, very meager program because it brings together very,
very different states of nation states together, you could say,
which still, for a big part,
are still being creating this nation state.
I mean, in Western Europe, you could say, OK, the nation state is in fatigue.
It's already slowing down.
It's an old concept, which people don't believe anymore. more.
Western Europeans probably were ripe after the Second World War to start together
and create something on a new base together.
But Eastern Europe, after the fall of communism, is only now reinventing its nation state.
It's now using the models of the 19th century as being completely new.
I mean, these people like Orban or all these small dictators,
their models are those dictators from the 1920s, 1930s, or whatever,
who were dictators because they were fighting the outcome of the First World War.
The Trianon Treaty, for instance, in Hungary, they wanted to become really big Hungary again.
Or the Poles who probably want to have Lithuania, whatever, being their old
borders back. They probably want to go to Odessa again.
I mean, the craziness of this nationalism, that is what is in the head of people
and not being part of Europe. I mean, the Hungarians are part of Europe because
they know that they earn a lot of money by Europe, and Europe is simply giving
it to them without any kind of restriction.
But now, what were the steps for Europe and the European Commission to guide
this process in a constructive way?
What would you see as the three most important measures they should take?
Yeah, this is a complex question because you know that in our programs,
we only wanted to highlight many of these kinds of cultural conflictive processes.
I mean, I'm a historian, I'm a cultural scientist, and most people think I love
history and I love culture.
So in many of the debates in the past decades I've been, they always said,
yeah, but you wanted to have more of this in education, for instance, of school.
I remember once being said that it's better even than to stop history and no
longer talk about culture because there's nothing more divisive when people
start to define themselves in these terms.
So if I belong to this culture and you belong to another culture,
it means we don't share a heritage, for instance.
If you start a European project, you know how it worked in Europe.
They really believed in a value community, not only an economic community,
but also a value community.
Now, that is beautiful, but how can you start a value community with all these
politicians having their cultural agendas, these churches which still exist,
all these national organizations,
all these national histories, all these national culture projects,
and broadcasting companies, etc., mostly owned by national politicians.
Politicians, that is completely impossible because every politician knows you
have to create a certain way, like in sports, a certain competition to win.
So you start by making clear what the difference is between your party and the others.
Now, in Western Europe, of course, we all know there is no difference.
So there is no difference at all, not at least between a Christian Democrat,
a social Democrat, and whatever you can imagine else, it's simply the same.
I mean, when they govern, they do the same thing. There's no difference.
Even in the United States, you could say, in the end, in geopolitics,
there is hardly any difference, even between Trump and Biden.
It's, in the end, the whole way they treat Russia or China or Europe, there is not that.
There is a difference in tone, in style, but not in interest,
not in long-term policy.
Now, that is what lacks in Europe. Europe has not had any debate in geopolitical
sense because Europe is a weak, soft community of people with idealized ideas,
no more Second World War.
Believing in culture and history, have this idea that they have this rich history.
Forget that they have a rich history basically based on war and on terror.
I mean, every European country has been in war together or been in civil war.
And that's where all this art
comes from. They loot it. In every museum in Europe, you find looted art.
In that sense, they don't have to give it back to Africa, all of them.
They can also give back it to each other.
I mean, take the famous Jeroen Bosch painting. You're now in Spain.
I mean, El Bosco, it's all looted art.
It's looted by Alfa from the palaces of the Orange family.
Well, the Orange family is still there. They're monarchs. If they would have
some curts, they would go to the Spanish friends of them and say,
well, give me our paintings back.
That's a good suggestion. But Rob, in that perspective,
do you believe that if we take the European meta nation state that people pursue now,
do you see that European citizens will be able to collaborate in that context
in a sustainable and constructive way? Is it even possible?
Yeah, the double answer is actually that in the same way as you could make a
difference between culture and collaboration on a citizen level and on a national state level,
you could say the national state level by fixing,
by connecting these nation states to cultures,
that is the worst thing.
If you forget that and you can get people out of that frame and make clear that
they share a common aim in Europe, which is make Europe safe.
Make it sustainable, also in terms of climate, et cetera.
You do all these things with people's share on whatever level.
You create welfare systems that I think the European project will be a big success,
as the European economic project before the EEG was a big success.
For instance, after the Second World War, by its agrarian reconstruction.
I mean, a continent completely devastated in two or three decades was actually
became one of the richest of the world that nobody would have expected that.
The ending of this embassy between Germany and France, for instance, had a lot to do with that.
How to deal with sharing coals and mine, all these resources.
Now, we discussed it, I remember, some years ago together already.
What strange it is that we don't have such a complete lack of discussion about these main things.
I mean, you see it in geopolitics. Conflicts now in the Southeast area between
China, the US, Australia,
the Southeast states, Indonesia, it's all based on resources,
on trade systems, like the Silk Road, for instance, between China,
but all these European states.
I mean, the harbor of Athens, which has been bought by the Chinese.
How the fuck is it possible that a European, that Europe will make this possible?
It's crazy that you make such big mistakes, that there is no discussion on that.
That people like us, for instance, are not hired only to have this competition
with research research foundations,
et cetera, ask us to be in an advisory board to discuss these things and to
think about long-term developments,
not from a political party system because that's, of course,
how it works today, but really as a kind of long-term, like it is in the U.S.
And all these normal other countries, that you bring these expertise together
and think about how to create.
This can be the big issue, the only big question, How to survive Europe for
the 21st century. Right.
Because we're really not going in the right direction. Okay. No, no.
You're right. There are concerns here. But now, as my last question,
if you could change one thing by magic, right?
You could change one thing to make this project sustainable and successful.
What's the one thing you would change? Yes.
The strange answer is collaboration.
Because what we actually have in Europe, you know, you work yourself in international
projects and you know how it works.
You have cooperation. We have a cooperation system, actually.
Countries cooperate together. But it's not collaboration. And collaboration,
if you would do it in the right way, it would mean like those projects of us,
which we have, we do field work.
We work on the same site and we think about it and we discuss it.
Of course, let's say we need much more time and much more funding to make it
really into a big success if we want to make it.
But what works is when you have people
from all these different parts of Europe together and
bring them together and let them not speak their own language in this parliament
and being part of these fictive parties that you have people from former communists
from Romania or whatever being part of the social democratic faction in the
European parliament who don't have any idea the background of these people they
speak different languages.
That is that I mean this is a guarantee for
failure and the only thing to let it
make into to a success is to let these people collaborate
and to collaborate not only on that level but everywhere
on every european level if it's a school system or
whatever also this that let's say even the secondary school maybe already the
primary schools you could create these kind of collaboration not fictive like
like what you now have with the dutch town and that french town and the eastern
european town and they have a kind of cooperation of course this is nonsense but really
make it into a collaboration that you could say, okay, we share expertise.
What can we do to fix these kinds of problems, let's say, with sustainability?
It could be very practical sustainability of buildings, let's say,
of natural resources, of forests, whatever.
How do you do that in Romania? What do you do in Poland?
You have this old Polish forestry. A student of mine is doing an internship there.
It's absolutely fabulous. but that you
want to have on on you know in a very very
keen way in politics in geopolitics
and i think this is this kind of collaboration this
is then the the man this this is we should reinvent the term let's say in that
sense what you would really mean with collaboration if you're if you're a company
for instance you want you don't want to have your people in different departments
and they don't know what they do for each other like university it still works
with this craziness of disciplines.
But what happens when you bring people
together? You let them share this information. And that is what I mean.
And I think the nice thing about European Research Project is that actually
there you see a glimpse of what it could be.
As scientists, we even have a difficulty explaining to our own colleagues in
our own university what we're actually doing.
We are sort of, maybe we're the only Europeans, Paul.
Rob van der Laarze, thank you very much for this conversation.
Okay, it's been my pleasure. Hi, you listened to one of our podcasts in the
series on collaboration produced by the Ernst Trommel Forum and the Convergent Science Network.
You can find more episodes on our website.