Between Passive Awareness and Strategic Instrumentality: Ukraine in Dutch Foreign Policy, 1945 – late 1990s

Abstract

Long before Ukraine had become the battlefield of Europe’s security dynamics, The Hague had already recognised its strategic significance. In the 1950s, Ukraine appeared in Dutch foreign policy as the ‘weak underbelly of the Soviet Union’, regarded as a fault line to be exploited to undermine the Soviet system. Employing a framework that balances moral interests (Dominee), economic priorities (Koopman) and geopolitical strategy (Wachter), this thesis argues that throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Ukraine continued to be primarily a strategic element in Dutch foreign policy. Rather than being a direct policy objective, Ukraine was a vessel for safeguarding regional stability and maintaining stable relations between the Netherlands and the Soviet Union, and later Russia. This study offers the first systematic reconstruction of Ukraine’s role in Dutch foreign policy in the second half of the twentieth century – a significant gap in historiography – and explores the reciprocal influence between Dutch perceptions of Ukraine and policy decisions concerning the country. Ultimately, this thesis suggests that decades of passive awareness, motivated by geopolitical calculation, have contributed to the prominent role that Ukraine plays today in Dutch foreign policy.