"A Test of Sentiments"

For the best part of three decades, from 1946 until 1977, civil aviation played a central role in Dutch-American diplomatic relations, consistently causing major friction at the highest levels of both the government and the business sector on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet up till now this remarkable episode in the relations between two close transatlantic allies has remained under-researched and neglected by traditional diplomatic historians unable to grasp its full significance. The dispute centered on the ostensibly anodyne wish of the Dutch national airline, KLM, to expand its access to airports in the United States. Yet the “landing rights question” exposed more than ever the uneven power relations, clashing national interests, and antagonistic perceptions that lay behind the otherwise friendly relations between Washington and The Hague. The article examines the causes and consequences of these tensions through four intense periods of negotiations in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, each case involving a set of actors, interests, and strategies. On the U.S. side, the divergence between diplomatic and commercial interests lay at the heart of a hard-nosed civil aviation policy that was not prepared to give the Dutch what they wanted. Meanwhile for the Dutch, KLM represented the epitome of national pride and pioneering enterprise, and U.S. intransigence on the landing rights issue was regarded as hypocritical and a direct threat to the continuing vitality of the airline itself. Looking to overcome this asymmetric deficit, the Dutch employed various strategies—public diplomacy, the contacts of elite networks, the “rights” of a close ally—to secure results. Coming from the perspective of “New Diplomatic History,” the article maintains that traditional state-centered historiography tends to miss the deeper terrain on which bilateral and multilateral relations among the western allies were conducted. As a result, it provides a behind-the-scenes view of alliance politics from a unique angle during the Cold War.

Alliance · Aviation · Civil aviation · Diplomacy · Elite · Government (linguistics) · Negotiation · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Engineering · International Law and Aviation · Law

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