Family ties? Afrikaner nationalism, pan-Netherlandic nationalism and neo-Calvinist “Christian nationalism”

Abstract

This study, building on longstanding debates on “German” national socialist (“Nazi”) and “Dutch” Calvinist influences on Afrikaner nationalism, examines the latter’s intersecting relationships with Dutch neo-Calvinist “Christian nationalism” and pan-Netherlandic or Diets nationalism (embracing Dutch, Flemings and Afrikaners). Like similarly-minded Dutch (or Flemings), Afrikaners most drawn to Diets nationalism were often those most attracted to German-inspired Romantic volks-nationalism, of which national socialism was the most extreme variant. Diets nationalism, volks-nationalism and “Christian nationalism” were not mutually exclusive, but part of an overlapping transnational web which influenced not just such outliers as volks-nationalists Piet Meyer and Hans van Rensburg or neo-Calvinist Hendrik Stoker, but “mainstream” Afrikaner nationalists such as Daniel Malan, Dutch-trained and, like the pre- eminent Dutch neo-Calvinist, Abraham Kuyper, a conservative Reformed churchman-turned-politician. Like volks-nationalism, Diets nationalism had a wider appeal than German national socialism, but later often took on a far right authoritarian aspect which in World War II discredited it in the Netherlands, as did Afrikaner nationalist opposition to fighting Hitler. While orthodox Dutch Calvinists moved toward a more internationalist perspective, breaking with their South African cousins over “apartheid”, “Christian nationalism” survived among Afrikaner nationalists, although looking more like volks-nationalism than anything recognizably neo-Calvinist, but neither could it meaningfully be labelled “Nazi.”