Introduction

Dutch nationals who came to the Netherlands from the former colonies after 1945 often found that their legal status was far less secure than they might have expected. Dutch policies and debates on post-colonial citizens after 1945 illustrate how, time and again, politicians redefined the meaning of Dutch nationality for post-colonial citizens. In fact, Dutch lawmakers were quite reluctant to respect the rights of Dutch nationals from their former overseas possessions. This chapter addresses how, and in what contexts, members of the Dutch Parliament and government tried to circumvent the fact that Dutch citizens from the overseas territories were entitled to the same treatment as their metropolitan counterparts. These political discourses regarding post-colonial citizens alert us to the fact that the principle of equal citizenship – recognised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) as a cornerstone of the nation-state – can never be taken for granted, even in contemporary liberal democracies such as the Netherlands.

Practically all post-colonial migrants to the Netherlands had been either Dutch citizens or subjects during colonial rule. After 1945, they started to move to the Netherlands in greater numbers under a variety of historical circumstances. The history of political debates concerning these post-colonial citizens illustrates that membership of the legal community of Dutch citizens does not necessarily lead to unconditional inclusion in the imagined community of the ‘Dutch people’, as we will see.

The dynamics of post-colonial citizens that I explore in this chapter not only illustrate how difficult it is to achieve the ideal of ‘equal citizenship for all’, but lead us to question the meaning of formal legal citizenship with regard to inclusion in society. Although post-colonial citizens were never subject to extreme forms of othering and dispossession of rights such as, for example, were Jewish Germans in Nazi Germany, their formal legal citizenship did not guarantee unconditional inclusion in the country of nationality either. By the token of the ‘optimistic’ approach to formal citizenship Pieter Boeles, a professor of migration law, made the following observation: