By Ismee Tames
Eighty years after WWII, the Netherlands can no longer rely on the war as a moral compass for today’s challenges. As global crises reshape our world, we must reflect on how our skills, networks, and past experiences prepare us to act or stay passive in shaping the future.
This article is the seventh in our series commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
This year, people in the Netherlands are looking back at the Second World War, which ended exactly eighty years ago.
This conflict has played a fundamental role in the development of the country and the forging of its identity.
Each year I’m asked by journalists and members of the public what we can learn from the Second World War. But this year was different: people also asked what they should do now, in our own troubled times, and where to start.
Therefore, this year I offered something different: no lessons, but an exercise to start building a practice. It is an invitation to not only look eighty years back in time, but also to travel eighty years into the future: how will people from the beginning of the next century look back on us and how we are shaping the second decade of the 21st century? And how may pondering that question make us also see the generations living through the Second World War in a different light?
The Second World War as a Benchmark?
Similar to many European countries, Dutch society has used the Second World War as a frame of reference to distinguish ‘right’ from ‘wrong’ and to learn lessons about citizenship and justice for decades. However, by now
the ‘post-war world’ has changed so drastically that using the Second World War as a benchmark to understand ‘the now’ and provide guidelines about what we need to do is starting to lose its power.
This is not only because the generations that experienced the war have almost completely disappeared, but also because the ideas and political projects that dominated post-war society are fading into the background.
At the national level, this applies to the welfare state and to consumerism, once understood as foundations of post-war society. Current inequality, climate breakdown, and geopolitical instability make these projects feel outdated and as relics of the past.
A similar transformation can be observed at the level of international politics. First, the dichotomy between ‘the Free West’ and ‘the Eastern Bloc’ that dominated during the Cold War has disappeared. Meanwhile, the international legal and political order, based on institutions such as the United Nations, that great post-war experiment, is coming under increasing pressure. We are more and more seeing an unstable, multipolar global system shaped by rival imperial powers such as Russia, China, and the United States.
In short, the current era is no longer the ‘post-war period’: in the Netherlands too, people can no longer understand the times they are living in by looking at their last major war experience and taking 1945 as the beginning of the ‘now’. Against this backdrop it makes sense that I received these questions about how to act in our own times: it is no longer self-evident or enough to recite the well-worn phrases of Never Again or Freedom and Democracy.
In the future, people will undoubtedly look back at the current era and regard it as a crucial moment in history: the 2020s will be the years in which the shape of life on earth was determined for decades to come, whether it concerned peace and war, the climate and the livability of the earth, or the political and economic organization of the world. There is a good chance that within a few generations, present-day Dutch citizens will be scrutinized using very similar questions to those that are currently raised about the Second World War: what did our ancestors do? Did they do the right thing? What can we learn from them?
What Path Are We On?
When researching the period of the Second World War in the Netherlands, I noticed how many people’s behavior was crucially influenced by three elements: their skills, their networks, and their previous experiences.
Skills, networks, and previous experiences made certain forms of behavior and specific responses to war and occupation either somehow ‘the obvious thing to do’ or rendered particular actions impossible.
This applied to people who collaborated, looked the other way or resisted, as well as to all those whose actions and attitudes fell somewhere in between.
When you think for instance of the people who resisted various examples come to the fore: like the artists who used their skills in graphic design to forge the identity cards that helped those who needed a false identity escape from persecution; or think of the businessmen, border guards, and students who used their transnational networks for new purposes, like helping people go into hiding or flee the country. We can also think of people who before the war had already worked with refugees, had been active in groups and projects seeking to strengthen democracy or were involved in mutual aid initiatives, and who could fall back on these experiences during the occupation to make decisions and assess risks.
Conversely, people in the Netherlands who were already involved in Nazi or fascist circles before the war often quickly ended up in all kinds of collaboration with the German occupiers. Their previous activities had prepared them to participate in the Nazi racist project, to radicalize further, and to be easily recruited for the implementation of German objectives.
And then, of course, there were the people whose skills, networks, and previous experiences mostly prepared them to do ‘nothing’, to look the other way, and to try to continue with ‘business as usual’ as much as possible.
Knowing future generations will scrutinize our acts, it is key for us to reflect on what our current skills, networks and experiences are setting us up to do or keep doing.
What are our skills, networks and previous experiences? How do they help us play a role to the benefit of people and planet now and in the future?
Are we perhaps training ourselves to look away? Or are we even on the path of contributing to the violence of the 21st century?
In times of relative freedom, such as those that characterize the Netherlands of today, it is still relatively easy for most people to make adjustments – the personal risks and dangers are manageable. Behavioral change may be a hassle, but it is not life-threatening.
Descendants and Ancestors
In this commemorative year of 2025, we may therefore do well to see ourselves not only as those who came after the Second World War, but also as the ancestors of those who perhaps eighty years from now will look back, searching for lessons and inspiration while scrutinizing the choices that we made.
What they will see then is what we do now.
Do we want them to see us as people who acted out of despair, anger, and violence? Or do we want them to see that, despite all our imperfections, we acted out of concern for each other and for the future? Our freedom now means putting our answer to these questions into action and reflect on our skills and how we use them, our networks and what they inspire us to do, and our past experiences and whether they make us resilient and creative or feeling angry and victimized. Doing so we can be both descendants and ancestors.
Ismee Tames is senior researcher at the NIOD, Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam and Professor in History at Utrecht University
