29 December
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dirk Stikker, was at his desk. He had taken an opportunity to sneak into the office and catch up on some paperwork as he recovered from the Christmas celebrations. The Prime Minister had given him one task that required his attention, a formal reply to the German Foreign Ministry's note on the certification of products produced within the Dutch Empire.
The note had caused some head shaking around the Hague and Land had been quite dismayed that Germany still seemed to be oblivious to how global empires worked. Stikker, for his part saw no difference in where goods came from as Dutch standards had been enforced in certain areas, especially foodstuffs, and for him there was no distinction, wicker furniture from Batavia, aluminium ingots from Suriname, groundnuts from the Kongo, it was immaterial as all were produced in areas where the jurisdiction of the Crown and Hague held sway. He knew that Land had further controversial reforms in the pipeline that would secure centralisation of the Empire. While the Confederation Plan to make all the areas of equal importance and rank to the Netherlands proved a step too far, there was no reason why closer political union should be abandoned.
For Stikker the hardest part was to couch all this in diplomatic language for the Germans. If they wished to cling to their bureaucratic form filling then so be it, but the government would not force them to bend their rules, he knew others were eager to snap up exports, growing economies like the USA were taking larger amounts and earning the country useful currency reserves.