SubprojectsIn the Enemies of the State project we work on three different projects. As project leader Beatrice de Graaf writes an overview of national security in the 19th and 20th centuries. The two PhD-candidates each look at national security from the perspective of security instruments: Constant Hijzen looks into the role of intelligence and security services and Coreline Boot investigates the role of the armed forces. Please click on each of the subprojects for more information.
Who were the decision-makers regarding the new national security infrastructures? What were their intentions, what threats did they identify? What factors did propel them to construct these images of national security threats and interests? Did these measures and corresponding threats possess political legitimacy? Did the decision-makers and/or their measures mobilize public and political support? Did the new security instruments change the underlying security regimes and culture, did they create new security and threat images?
How did a professional ‘secret state’, consisting of a system of intelligence & security services, as well as the underlying assumptions on national security threats and interests came into existence after 1945? Which national security measures were carried out (establishment of bureaus, organisations as well as concrete measures such as ‘internment lists’, occupational bans in government institutions), and what where the underlying threat assumptions? Was this process of constructing a secret state made subject to parliamentary or public control? How did parliament, opposition, society react to these security measures?
The onset of the Cold War brought to the fore new international and national threats to the military. On an international level, Moscow and its allies became a permanent military and political danger. Nationally, organizations from inside and outside the army started to criticize the military culture, its national and international security policy (including the Dutch contribution to the NATO), or even doubted the legitimacy of the military institution itself.