Dear redditors,
While reading about the Marshall plan I was surprised to see that the Netherlands received a rather large amount of money when compared to other countries. Looking at the total figure of 1128 million dollars it forms a sharp contrast when compared to 777 million for the Belgians and with 1204 million for the Italians.
Besides that I am also curious as to why the Dutch economy outgrew that of Belgium in the after-war period. Wasn't Belgium a far more industrialized country before the war?
There is a famous anecdote (sourced to former foreign minister and NATO secretary general Joseph Luns) that when the American negotiators for the Marshall Plan arrived in Italy, they were put up in a grand palazzo and feted with the best possible wine and food. When they visited the Netherlands on the other hand, they were received by Prime Minister Drees at his home and served tea and a single dry biscuit. Suitably impressed by his Calvinist frugality, they therefore decided that in the Netherlands, the aid money would be well-spent, and we therefore received a large amount of it.
Unfortunately, this anecdote is probably apocryphal. The real reason is more likely that, at least according to an article by Dutch historian Pieter Drooglever (http://www.volkskrant.nl/dossier-archief/nederland-wilde-liever-indie-dan-marshallhulp~a480200/ (in Dutch), Marshall aid to the Netherlands also applied to the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), which the US at that point still recognized as a part of the Netherlands. The amount of money given to the Netherlands would therefore not be disproportional to its size.
Drooglever also discusses how the Americans later on used the threat to withdraw Marshall aid as a tool to force the Netherlands to give up its resistance to Indonesian independence.