‘Hip Hip Hooray and Thank You Marshall’: Gratitude, Emotion and the Mediation of Post-War Dutch–US Relations

This article conceptualises a transatlantic diplomacy of gratitude that developed in the context of the Marshall Plan as a case of emotional diplomacy by focusing on a Dutch commemorative tradition that celebrates the US aid programme. It shows that US Marshall Planners carefully refrained from explicit demands of gratitude and that it was the Dutch government, rather, that initiated a discourse of gratitude for US aid. Through the ways in which they invoked and embodied expressions of gratitude, the Dutch mediated and reframed their country's post-war demotion from a global empire to an aid-dependent country. This case, then, allows us to understand how the Netherlands strategically reconceptualised its position in a post-Second World War power structure dominated by the United States, while demonstrating how the careful navigation of the international emotional landscape played an important but as yet underexplored role in the diplomatic interactions of the post-war years.