A Unified Empire of Equal Parts: The Dutch Commonwealth Schemes of the 1920s–40s

Abstract

A few short years after the end of the Second World War, the Dutch colony in the East Indies became the independent Republic of Indonesia. Importantly, the final agreement signed in 1949 also established a Dutch-Indonesian Union, a loose commonwealth connecting the two nations. Contemporary and recent observers alike have dismissed this Union as a last-ditch and ultimately futile effort by the Dutch to maintain their fading imperial authority, but, as this article demonstrates, the commonwealth idea originated years before the events of decolonisation. Exploring the various schemes advanced during the 1930s and 1940s, this article devotes particular attention to the period 1941–45, when members of the Dutch resistance in the German-occupied metropole proposed and debated the Netherlands' imperial future for the benefit of a general public seemingly willing to consider colonial reform. Seen in light of its pre-war and wartime popularity, the commonwealth's post-war appearance hardly seems surprising or desperate. Rather, it emerges as a logical outgrowth of decades-old ideas and developments in both the European Netherlands and the East Indies.