How High is High Enough? Dutch Flood Defences and the Politics of Security

Author(s)

  • Samuël Kruizinga University of Amsterdam
  • Pepijn Lewis University of Amsterdam

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10365

Keywords:

Security, Securitisation, Flood, Water, 1953

Abstract

Why are Dutch flood defences as high as they are? And who has made that decision? These seemingly simple questions have complicated answers because they deal with issues of security. Increasingly, historians and political scientists point to ‘securitisation’ theory to help explain how some security issues are socially constructed as a threat and thereby dramatised as an issue that needs to be dealt with urgently. This article argues, however, for a focus on ‘desecuritisation’: the process by which measures are first suggested and then adopted to prevent the security breach from reoccurring, thereby allowing for a return to ‘normal’. Experts, we suggest, play a key political role in this process, which often remains under- or unstudied because it deals with specialist subjects such as economics or physics. In this article, we analyse the choices and compromises made by the Delta Committee in the wake of the catastrophic storm surge of 1953 in the Netherlands, and the way these were then shrouded in the language of absolute scientific certainty, leading the Dutch Government and Parliament to accept the committee’s recommendations without seriously questioning their basis.

 

Hoe hoog moet een dijk of dam zijn? En wie bepaalt dat eigenlijk? Antwoorden op die vragen hangen samen met visies op wat veiligheid inhoudt en de vraag hoe veilig iets kan of moet zijn. Historici en politieke wetenschappers die geïnteresseerd zijn in ‘veiligheidstheorieën’ doen dat steeds meer vanuit de gedachte dat bedreigingen voor die veiligheid het resultaat zijn van een politiek, intersubjectief proces waarbij een probleem tot een dringend veiligheidsvraagstuk wordt geconstrueerd. Dit artikel suggereert dat juist ook aandacht moet worden besteed aan ‘desecuritisatie’: het eveneens politieke proces waarbij maatregelen worden gesuggereerd en vervolgens goedgekeurd om herhaling van de dreiging te voorkomen en terug te keren naar de normaliteit. Dit proces vindt vaak (deels) plaats buiten de traditionele politieke arena. Hiervoor worden experts ingeschakeld die een zogenaamd apolitieke en wetenschappelijke oplossing dienen uit te werken. In dit artikel analyseren we hoe de Deltacommissie na de Watersnoodramp van 1953 haar desecuritisatiearbeid verrichtte: door politieke aannames te construeren en die vervolgens als rationele wetenschap te presenteren.

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Author Biographies

  • Samuël Kruizinga, University of Amsterdam

    Samuël Kruizinga is senior lecturer in contemporary and military history and programme coordinator for the MA in Military History at the University of Amsterdam. He studied at Leiden, Paris and Oxford and obtained his PhD in 2011. His main research interests are the global impact of conflicts in the nineteenth and twentieth century, including the First World War and the Spanish Civil War, the history of foreign fighting, and small states. Recent publications include ‘Struggling to Fit In. The Dutch in a Transnational Army, 1936-1939’, Journal of Modern European History 16:2 (2018) 183-202; ‘Small, medium, or large? Domestic discourses on the size of the Netherlands and their foreign policy implications, 1815-1939’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 27:3 (2016) 420-436, ‘Neutrality’, in: Jay Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. II (Cambridge 2014) 542-575, 712-714. For more information, visit his website at http://www.uva.nl/profiel/k/r/s.f.kruizinga/s.f.kruizinga.html. E-mail: s.f.kruizinga@uva.nl.

  • Pepijn Lewis, University of Amsterdam

    Pepijn Lewis received his Master degrees in history and philosophy from the University of Amsterdam in 2015. His MA thesis (Geenszins verwaarloosbaar. Een eeuw van Nederlands risicobeleid rond overstromingen), in which he combined both disciplines, was awarded the Huygens-Descartes thesis prize in 2015 and won second place at the University of Amsterdam Thesis Award 2016. He currently works at ABN AMRO. E-mail: pepijn.lewis@gmail.com.

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Published

2018-12-13

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

How High is High Enough? Dutch Flood Defences and the Politics of Security. (2018). BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review, 133(4), 4-27. https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10365