Johan den Hertog and Samuël Kruizinga,eds,Caught in the Middle: Neutrals,Neutrality and the First World War

Reviewed by: Maartje Abbenhuis, University of Auckland, New Zealand

For hundreds of years, the rights, duties and obligations attached to neutrality were products of international disputes and military conflict. Neutrality in the First World War was no different. During this modern, industrial and total war, the ability of neutrals to protect their independence, security and economic well-being became increasingly difficult. Unsurprisingly, the respect shown by the belligerents for the international laws of neutrality was battered by the demands of wartime necessity and global conflagration. As Nils Ørvik and others have shown, the First World War ended the applicability of neutrality as the nineteenth-century world had known it. By 1918, neutrality was firmly in ‘decline’ and those countries that had managed to remain neutral during the conflict were seriously, although not necessarily adversely, affected by it.

This volume, the outcome of a conference held at the Netherlands Institute of War Documentation (NIOD) in 2009, presents several perspectives on neutrality during the war. The subject matter is certainly relevant. Neutrality is under-represented in the history of the war and it is refreshing to find new material published in the field. As such, it covers aspects of the history of some long-term neutrals (the Netherlands, United States and Scandinavia) and a couple of occasional neutrals (Spain and Argentina) but none of the permanent neutrals. Switzerland, in particular, is conspicuously absent. While purporting to invite comparative analysis, most of the papers are nevertheless presented from a national perspective.

Of the ten chapters, three stand out. Particularly noteworthy is Lina Sturfelt’s contribution on popular neutrality narratives in the Swedish press. She convincingly argues that Swedish discourses about neutrality were not linear and swayed between ultra-negative conceptions – neutrality as parasitic and self-serving – and positive reinforcements of the angelic – humanitarian, internationalist and mediating – value of neutrality. She shows that Sweden, on the edge of Europe, was not caught in the middle of the war, as the title of the volume would have it, and came out of it with the entrenched idea that neutrality served the country’s interests well. Bjarne S. Bendtsen’s chapter is also excellent. He analyses Danish intellectual George Brandes’s publications on neutrality and reminds us that the intellectual fault lines created by the war stretched well beyond the artificial boundaries of nation and state. Like Sturfelt, Bendtsen highlights how topical neutrality was for belligerents and non-belligerents alike. Thirdly, Philip Dehne offers an enlightening chapter on Argentina’s neutrality, which alludes to the important ramifications of neutrality for wartime trade and the maintenance of empire. He also does a good job of explaining how the Argentine government used neutrality to promote its own sovereign independence.

The rest of the chapters are, on the whole, less inspiring, although based on solid research and bringing new perspectives to the field. Javier Ponce offers a sound overview of Spanish neutrality and makes some useful comments about palace diplomacy and King Alfonso XIII’s advocacy of neutral mediation. Samuël Kruizinga unpicks the complex diplomacy of the Netherlands Overseas Trust and shows how enterprising neutrals could be in accommodating and negotiating between competing belligerents’ demands. Louis Clerc investigates French perspectives of Scandinavian neutrality and concludes that over time, France was wary of the Nordic neutrals and their relationships with Germany. Karen Gram Skjoldager’s account of Danish neutrality opens with a thoughtful theoretical framework of the subject and then argues that Danish experiences during the war underpinned Denmark’s ongoing support of neutrality within the context of the League of Nations.

More problematic are the chapters by Johan van Hertog and Benjamin Coates. Van Hertog argues the somewhat obvious point that the Dutch government protested against neutrality violations in terms of international law. This was precisely what was required of neutral states, and, as Coates explains in his chapter on the legal advice given to the United States’ Department of State, it was because President Wilson ignored this requirement that his country was never ‘strictly neutral’. One fruitful direction van Hertog could take his research is to investigate why the Dutch were critical of their government’s protests about neutrality violations and why, in contrast to Sweden, their respect for neutrality had declined by the war’s end. What is confusing about Coates’s chapter is his seeming conflation of the United States’ foreign policy objectives with the mechanics of neutrality. It was the legal team’s task to advise the President on the legal ramifications of his actions, it was the President’s job to focus on politics. Still, Coates makes some valuable contributions to our understanding of America’s neutral position in the war, and shows how this powerful state was not the paragon of international law that some historians make it out to be.

Above all, what this volume confirms is that there was no singular neutral experience or perspective during the First World War, an insight that certainly deserves more research. Whether that can be done comparatively, however, given the diversity that these works attest to, is not so clear.