After 1945 we said: never again. For eighty years we built a world of international agreements and came to assume it would always be there. But since the turn of the century, Xi, Putin and Trump have shown that power still matters more than rules. What we took for progress turned out to be a long pause.
That pause is over. Few places show it as starkly as Ukraine. At the invitation of The Peale in Baltimore, and through DutchCulture, I spoke on September 17 with Ukrainian colleagues about what a museum means in a society that is losing its balance.
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The Long Pause
Panel contribution, “Preparing Museums for a Crisis: Lessons from Ukraine”, The Peale, September 17, 2026
On the back of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring in the Mauritshuis in The Hague there is a small red triangle. Almost every painting in the museum still carries one. Red, white or blue, the colors of the Dutch flag. Red meant priceless, white meant important, blue meant replaceable.
Those marks were put there before the war reached us. In the nineteen thirties the museum’s director could see what was coming, and he asked the government for a place to hide paintings. By the time the Germans invaded in 1940, the Mauritshuis was the only museum in the country with its own bomb-proof vault. He had already made his choice about what would leave first. Girl with a Pearl Earring had a red triangle, and when the vault itself became unsafe, he took her to the south of the country himself, by train.
After the war the little triangles remained on the paintings.
Since this spring, Dutch museums have something similar again. Our national museums association and our national heritage agency published a tool together, and it asks for one thing above all: make a list of the objects that get protected or evacuated first in an emergency.
One has to realize that the moment you make such a list, you have made a second list too. A list of the things that stay behind. Museums are being asked to make that choice now, in peacetime, rather than later under pressure. I don’t know how many museums have actually done it. But the fact that the tool exists at all tells you where we are now. Let me tell you how we got here.
But one thing first. I am not going to talk about what is happening in Ukraine. My fellow panelists know infinitely more about that than I do, and they speak from experience where I can only read and listen. What I can talk about is the shift Dutch museums are going through right now, and the invasion of Ukraine is a large part of the reason for it.
After 1945
In 1945 Europe was in ruins. Dutch museums collected their masterpieces from the places where they had spent the war. Rembrandt’s Night Watch came home from a cave system in the south. Many of the Van Gogh paintings, still privately owned back then, came out of a bunker in the dunes on our west coast.
After the war the museums opened their doors again, and we said to each other: never again.
We spent eighty years building on that. Europe was rebuilt with American help, at a pace that looks impossible in hindsight. And more importantly, together we built a world order made of rules. Not a world government, just agreements between governments. The European Union is the clearest example. Countries that keep their sovereignty but accept that they have to live with what they agreed to together. Slow, cumbersome, sometimes maddening. But we always got there in the end.
When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, that model looked like it had won for good. For about a decade we genuinely believed the world was converging. Human rights, trade agreements, democracy.
I grew up inside that belief. It felt like a description of reality. But now we know it was not inevitable progress. It was a long pause. An exception we mistook for the norm.
Crisis
Since the start of this century the world has become unrecognizable. There are new powers. Xi in China, competing ruthlessly in some markets and flooding others. Putin in Russia. And now an American administration that deals with the world far more bluntly than we were used to.
Europe still tries to think in universal rules, because it was the rules that let us flourish. We could not imagine Putin would do what he did, because we assumed a rational world does not permit that sort of thing. But the world does not run on rationality alone. A great deal of it runs on resentment, on emotion, and on raw power.
And it is not only geopolitics. Back in 2009 a group of earth system scientists, now working out of Potsdam and Stockholm, proposed a way of measuring how much pressure the planet can take. They called them planetary boundaries, nine systems that keep the earth stable. Their latest assessment says seven have been crossed: climate, biodiversity, land use, freshwater, the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, chemical pollution, and as of last year ocean acidification. Only the ozone layer and air pollution are still inside the safe zone. It is not an official standard, but the European Union uses the framework in its environmental policy.
The crisis is systemic.
So the question is not how we prepare for one threat. It is how we live with permanent instability.
Urgency
At the end of 2024 our government set up a national heritage task force. Around the table sat many organizations: the museums association, the national archives, provincial and municipal governments, the Dutch UNESCO commission, and major national museums including the Rijksmuseum and the Mauritshuis. Together with the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Justice and Security.
What is new here is not that the military is at the table. The Hague Convention on the protection of cultural property in armed conflict was signed in 1954 here in The Hague, less than half a mile from where I am sitting right now, and our armed forces have had heritage protection officers for years. What is new is the urgency, and a reversal of who is expected to do what. Two years ago the commander of our armed forces said publicly that heritage institutions need to prepare themselves, so that in a large conflict soldiers can concentrate on fighting. Just as you see in Ukraine, he added.
We cannot assume the armed forces will step in and help us immediately. We are responsible for our own preparation and our own first response. We have to do this ourselves.
Government language has changed to match. Our national heritage agency now writes, in plain text, that the Netherlands is already a target of hybrid attacks, of cyber operations, espionage and sabotage, and that there is a real possibility the country becomes involved in an armed conflict. It writes that cultural heritage can be used strategically in such a conflict, through disinformation and propaganda, or destroyed on purpose. That is a government agency putting that on paper.
And all of it sits in one frame. Hybrid conflict, flooding, power failure, wildfire, cyberattacks, civil unrest and protest all appear side by side in the same documents. You cannot separate these things.
I serve on several museum boards. These questions are on almost every agenda right now. Five years ago they were on none of them.
Finally
Everything I have described is about buildings and collections. Power and data, priority lists and evacuation routes. That is the kind of resilience we make plans for, because it is the kind you can put in a plan.
But the resilience that actually matters sits in the people who work in those museums. And you cannot arrange that with a protocol. It comes from the answer to the question of why we do this work at all. For us in the Netherlands that question stays theoretical, at least for now. In Ukraine it gets answered every day.
So that is what I want to ask my Ukrainian colleagues. Not what you need, but what you know. What turned out to matter most when almost everything else was gone?
I am asking because we are here preparing for something we can only imagine, and because I genuinely believe that the answer from people who are living it is worth more than all the plans we have written put together.
Thank you.
Photo’s: the backside of the ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ with the red mark;
the Night Watch by Rembrandt is being transported from its hiding place in the dunes near Castricum to the St. Pietersberg near Maastricht;
some paintings from the Rijksmuseum in their hiding place in the St. Pietersberg.