Why the Dutch are Different: A Journey into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands

by Ben Coates

the Maeslantkering storm-surge barrier, a massive set of flood gates that prevented the sea rushing upriver to Rotterdam.

the huge network of dams and floodgates that cobwebbed the southern Netherlands, known as the Delta Works.

The impetus for building the Delta Works had come almost sixty years previously, on the night of 31 January 1953, the date of the greatest natural disaster in the history of the Netherlands. An unprecedented combination of high spring tides, strong winds and a major storm had pushed sea levels along the Dutch coast to several metres higher than normal. The poorly maintained flood defences were quickly overwhelmed. As the country slept, water poured over the dikes.

By the time the waters receded, nearly 2000 people had drowned and another 70,000 had been forced to flee their homes. Dikes along roughly a third of the Dutch coastline were destroyed, and some 200,000 hectares of land submerged, including dozens of towns and villages previously thought safe from flooding.

The geography of the Netherlands was transformed, with huge tidal bays turned into tranquil lakes and miles of new highway running along the tops of enormous dams. Altogether, the length of the Dutch coastline was reduced by nearly half.

It was perhaps not a coincidence that the Dutch word for ‘beautiful’ and the Dutch word for ‘clean’ were one and the same – schoon.

the first time a head of state had ever been assassinated using a handgun.

James, meanwhile, was captured by the Dutch and forced into effective house arrest in Rochester. A week or so later, his guards deliberately turned a blind eye and let him escape to France. Soon after, in early 1689, a special ‘Convention Parliament’ declared that because James had fled, the crown should pass to William and his wife Mary, who would rule the country jointly. The crown of Scotland followed a few months later. London remained effectively under Dutch military occupation and a Dutch Prince ruled from the English throne. The Prince of Orange went on to rule England for nearly a decade and a half. (Mary died after roughly

five years on the throne, after which William ruled on his own.) In Britain, his Glorious Revolution and the reign that followed had enormous consequences. As a condition of taking the throne, William had been compelled to sign a Bill of Rights, which was later seen as establishing the basic principles of British democracy. For Catholics, however, William and Mary’s rule was less positive: they were denied the right to vote or stand for parliament, and British monarchs were forbidden from marrying Catholics until as late as 2011. Equally controversial were the couple’s escapades in Northern Ireland, where King William and the former King James met for a rematch in 1690 at the famous Battle of the Boyne. Heavily outnumbered, James fled the scene and awarded William’s largely Dutch and English army a victory that would be celebrated by some Northern Irish Protestants for centuries to come, many of them clad in the orange colours of their former leader.

Buried in Westminster Abbey, William was commemorated by a statue in London’s St James’s Square. It depicted him on horseback, just about to trip over a molehill.

Philips was founded in the city in the late 1800s by a cousin of Karl Marx,

for much of the early twentieth century, the Netherlands remained starkly segregated along religious lines. Until as late as 1960, for example, just one in twenty of all Catholics who married did so to a non-Catholic spouse.

Ironically for a country forged out of Protestant dissatisfaction with Catholic rule, the system put particular power in the hands of the Catholic community, with a single political party operating all but unchallenged as the political wing of the Catholic Church. On both sides of the divide political parties were tight and disciplined, able to rely on a strong base of support without much competition for votes. However, the endless need for different religious groups to reach a compromise made Dutch governments unstable, with frequent disputes over issues such as abortion. In 1952, a bizarre situation arose during negotiations to form a new coalition government when a Catholic party claimed the right to appoint the foreign minister, despite objections from Protestants who pointed out that every other foreign minister in the European Community was already – as they saw it – a Catholic taking orders from Rome. In a typically Dutch compromise, the dispute was resolved by appointing two foreign ministers, a Catholic and a non-Catholic, who both represented the country overseas for the next four years.

By the 1950s the pillars were already beginning to crumble. Economic development and increasing personal mobility drove the so-called nivellering, or levelling, of Dutch society. As the Catholic magazine Tablet reported in 1954, in southern cities like Eindhoven employers such as Philips had a tendency to ‘attract workers and technicians from other parts; men with enquiring, searching minds, the setting of their own lives… often sundered from the family tradition’. These migrant workers were, the magazine noted with a sigh, ‘men sometimes ready to describe themselves as agnostics when it comes to religion’. The Second World War also did much to undermine the pillars. Wartime occupation by the Nazis forced the Dutch to cooperate with one another in o...

had to depend on their social networks and religious institutions for services like education. Perhaps most importantly, the elites who had once sustained the pillars began to lose the will to fight for them. In 1967, a Catholic bishop took the revolutionary step of announcing on tele vision that party choice should be a matter of individual conscience, not religious denomination. The result was a sea change in the way the Netherlands was run. Between the 1950s and the 1990s, the proportion of practising Catholics who voted for a Catholic party almost halved. Three successive general elections saw unprecedented turn over in parliamentary seats and the political parties themselves began to fracture, wit...

in the 1950s around nine out of ten Dutch Catholics attended mass regularly, but by the early 2000s this had fallen to under one in four.

In 1839, the Dutch belatedly recognised the independence of Belgium, formalising the existence of the Netherlands and Belgium as separate countries. William was officially appointed the first King of the modern-day Netherlands. He would, however, not remain on the throne for long – he abdicated soon after and married a Belgian Catholic.

‘What does it say on the bottom of Belgian beer bottles?’ a popular joke in Rotterdam asked. ‘OPEN AT OTHER END.’

the Golden Age – the period of exceptional dynamism and growth, roughly the length of the seventeenth century, during which the Dutch led the world not just in the production of fine art but also in trade, science, philosophy and architecture. At a time when much of the rest of Europe was mired in crisis, one of its smallest countries had managed, within a relatively short period, to produce Rembrandt and Vermeer, inspire Locke and Voltaire, build the canals and townhouses of Amsterdam, and establish an empire that stretched around the world.

The Low Countries were the birthplace of the atlas, the globe and the principles of triangulation, and many Dutch nautical terms found their way into the English language – yacht, schooner, jib, skipper, bow, boom, sloop, cruise, deck, wreck, blunderbuss.

Dutchmen who followed Janszoon to Australia were largely unimpressed by his discovery, complaining that the barren landscape was ‘inhabited by savages’ and surrounded by fish that were ‘unnatural monsters’. Nevertheless, they were swift to claim as much land they could, and within a few years the whole country was known to the world as ‘New Holland’.

In need of a staging post for ships on their way to Asia, the Dutch also established the Cape Colony settlement that would later become South Africa, a country speaking an adapted version of Dutch and planted with acres of vineyards to help combat sailors’ scurvy. In Mauritius – named for the Dutch Prince Maurits – sailors entertained themselves riding bareback on giant turtles; in what is now Sri Lanka, they made enemies of local Hindus by butchering and eating sacred cows.

For a while the Dutch fleet was bigger than the English and French fleets combined, and the Netherlands imported more from Asia than did Portugal, France, England, Denmark and Sweden combined. The rapid growth of the Netherlands’ trading links naturally concerned its rivals, including the English. Like the Dutch, the English had arrived late at the empire-building game, for many years only watching with envy as the Portuguese constructed a lucrative global trading network. Under Queen Elizabeth I, however, the English began building a serious naval force. At first the Dutch and English were allies. In 1585, Elizabeth signed the Treaty of Nonsuch with the United Provinces of the Netherlands, the two countries agreeing to unite against Spanish attempts to cement the Catholic dominance of northern Europe. English sea captains such as Francis Drake did a fine trade in capturing Spanish loot. As Dutch sea power grew, however, relations between the Dutch and English became increasingly strained. In the seventeenth century, King Charles I signed a series of treaties that had the effect of gradually switching sides, so the English were aligned with Spain against the Dutch. During and after the English Civil Wars, leaders including Oliver Cromwell continued to invest heavily in building up the English navy, and became increasingly keen to challenge Dutch dominance of the seas. In 1651, the devoutly Calvinist Cromwell even attempted a barely disguised takeover of the Netherlands, se...

Within a decade or so of the peace treaty being signed, war had broken out again. England won an early victory off the coast of Lowestoft, but in this second Anglo-Dutch war the Dutch generally had the upper hand. The conflict was later best remembered for the embarrassing defeat of the English at the 1667 Raid on the Medway, in which a flotilla of Dutch ships sailed up the Thames, smashed through the chains that were meant to blockade the river, and burned much of the English fleet moored at Chatham. Coming within a few years of the Great Fire of London (which many English suspected the Dutch of igniting), the Medway raid was traumatic for the English, and panicking Londoners made plans to flee the city when rumours spread that full-scale invasion was imminent. London diarist Samuel Pepys wrote: ‘All our hearts do now ache; for the news is true, that the Dutch have broken the chain and burned our ships… and, the truth is, I do fear so much that the whole kingdom is undone.’ Ultimately, fears of a Dutch invasion proved ill-founded. Having wreaked havoc in small towns along the Thames, the Dutch eventually withdrew, but not before sinking almost every ship they could find and

taking with them the pride of the English fleet, the Royal Charles. Their navy in tatters, the English had little option but to accept defeat. ‘In all things, in wisdom, courage, force, knowledge of our own streams, and success, the Dutch have the best of us,’ wrote Pepys, ‘and do end the war with victory on their side.’ The Dutch remembered the war rather more fondly...

Five years after the Raid on the Medway, the conflict ignited yet again. Like a playground bully ganging up with others, the English had secured an important ally this time – the French. In 1672, Louis XIV of France invaded the Dutch Republic with support from the English navy. The French quickly seized control of much of the country, but the tables turned when the Dutch opened dikes around Amsterdam, flooding a huge area of land to create a ‘Water Line’ blocking the path of the invaders. The Dutch navy, meanwhile, fought fiercely to hold off the English ships that were attempting to attack from the sea. Further afield, the Dutch even managed to seize New York City briefly from the English, renaming it ‘New Orange’. A peace ...

In 1621, the Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie, or Chartered West India Company, was established. Modelled closely on its eastern counterpart, the WIC (as it is usually referred to in English) aimed to replicate the VOC’s successes in the Americas. Like the VOC, it had the power to establish colonies, build fortresses, sign peace treaties and attack European rivals. Compared to its predecessor, the WIC’s successes were rather limited – the new Company quickly became embroiled in battles against the Spanish and Portuguese and it struggled to turn a profit. It did, however, succeed in expanding the Dutch sphere of influence in the western hemisphere, establishing Dutch trading posts in Curaçao, Aruba and Sint Maarten, Suriname, Brazil and Guyana. The Netherlands would remain a significant colonial power in the Caribbean for centuries to come.

Perhaps the most notable Dutch outpost in the Americas was founded in 1609. The explorer Henry Hudson, an Englishman working for the Dutch, had been searching for the fabled Northwest Passage to Asia when his ship, De Halve Maan (‘The Half Moon’), landed on the east coast of North America. Hudson’s weary part-English, part-Dutch crew thought they had arrived in paradise.

Over the next few decades the new colony flourished, until the Dutch ill-advisedly swapped it with the English for the Caribbean outpost of Suriname in 1667. Its new owners promptly gave it a new name: New York.

On 22 July, the Pilgrims sailed in a stubby little ship called the Speedwell to Southampton, where they switched to a ship with a more famous name: the Mayflower. Two months later, 102 travellers arrived at Plymouth Rock in present-day Massachusetts. Anchored offshore, they drafted a document they called the Mayflower Compact, setting out basic principles of democracy and equality, based on ideas they had heard discussed in the Netherlands. The Plymouth Rock colony would go on to be celebrated as the birthplace of the United States, and the ideas the Pilgrims had ferried from Leiden, together with the documents the Dutch had published declaring their independence from Spain, eventually helped inspire the Declaration of Independence. When future President John Adams later visited the Netherlands to raise funds for the American Revolution, he was struck by the influence Dutch culture had had on his home country. ‘One nation is a copy of the other,’ he said.

Late to take up slaving, the Dutch were also late to give it up. Almost a century after the abolitionist William Wilberforce vowed to end slavery, and decades after the parliament in London abolished the slave trade on British ships, the Dutch were still going strong. The British officially abolished slavery in 1833, France a few years later. The Netherlands did not do so in its main slaving colony, Suriname, until 1863, and even then the ban was not fully implemented for another decade.

According to a survey by the American sociologist Melissa Weiner, less than a quarter of Dutch school history textbooks mention slavery in the country’s overseas colonies, and even those that do usually focus on the hardships endured by Dutch colonists rather than the suffering of the slaves. There are notable exceptions, including the admirable National Institute for Study of Dutch Slavery and Its Legacy, but I found it difficult not to read something into the fact that while London’s monument to slavery was situated in the very heart of the city, a few metres from the Houses of Parliament, Amsterdam’s sat largely unnoticed in a park outside the city’s historic centre.

The decline of the Dutch slave trade was mirrored by the decline of the nation’s trading empire in general. For tourists the delights of the Rijksmuseum’s Royal Gallery epitomised the Dutch Golden Age, but by the time Rembrandt was buried in an unmarked grave in Amsterdam in 1669, the country’s status as a global power was already fading. The reasons for the Dutch decline were complex, but included the fact that the monopolies on trade enjoyed by the two great trading companies were actually not always profitable. Large fleets and numerous forts and trading posts were hugely expensive to maintain, and as the VOC and WIC expanded they began to prove Benjamin Franklin’s dictum that great empires, like great cakes, tend to crumble at their edges. As spices such as nutmeg declined in popularity and competition from

other European powers increased, merchants’ profit margins grew ever thinner. England also played a significant role in the Company’s decline. Following the three previous Anglo-Dutch Wars, a fourth conflict broke out in 1780, after the English discovered that the Dutch had secretly been supporting the rebels who were fighting for independence in the American Revolution. The Dutch colonies in the Caribbean, in particular, were doing a roaring trade with the rebels just as the English were trying to starve them out. Ironically, the only real fighting of the war took place off Dogger Bank, the vast sandbank that was the last remaining relic of the land bridge once linking England and the Netherlands. That skirmish was won by the Dutch, but they proved unable to rally enough of a naval force to build on their victory, and the English launched fierce attacks against Dutch colonies around the world. In 1784 the Dutch were forced to admit defeat – a humiliating move that was later seen as the beginning of the end of their time as a major world power.

By the late 1700s the WIC had gone bankrupt and the VOC was struggling to stay afloat, eventually going bust in 1798. It was disbanded a few years later, an ignoble end for a once mighty institution. With the VOC gone, the Dutch crown assumed responsibility for all its overseas possessions and debts, including the colony of present-day Indonesia. It would cling to them for nearly another 150 years. The story of Dutch decolonisation is too long to recount here, but suffice to say it was not an edifying spectacle. Colonial power had routinely been abused in places like Java and Sumatra, and many of the local inhabitants lived in abject poverty. In the mid-nineteenth century the Dutch writer Multatuli wrote a famous book about the corrupt administration of the Dutch colonies, Max Havelaar, one of the first publications to advocate what later became known as ‘fair trade’. The ensuing publicity shamed the government into adopting a more ethical policy, but did little to address the underlying injustices.

for its size, the Netherlands retained a formidable military footprint, with Dutch forces playing a significant role in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Libya, for example. An airbase in the south of the Netherlands even housed a small arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Wall Street was originally De Waal Street and Broadway was once better known as Breede Weg. Several other Dutch words also made it into the American vocabulary: cookie, waffle, noodles, brandy, coleslaw.

In the colony of the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) perhaps four million more died under Japanese occupation.

Even as the First World War engulfed Northern Europe, the Netherlands had avoided the conflict.

the Dutch authorities were generally scrupulous in maintaining their impartiality, even looking the other way when German forces passed briefly through Dutch territory on their way to invade Belgium. When the First World War ended, it was to the peaceful Netherlands that the defeated German Kaiser was exiled, billeted in a manor house in Doorn until his death in 1941. Rising at seven every morning, he spent much of his time tending the extensive gardens – in 1929, he told a visiting interviewer he had felled his 20,000th tree, but asked that this not be reported lest critics ask: ‘What are twenty thousand trees compared with twenty million German lives?’

Even as tensions increased, many Dutch leaders refused to believe that a second global war would be much different from the first, believing that they could sidestep the conflict. Dutch neutrality, the Prime Minister said, was ‘a beacon in a dark world’.

To the Nazis, the Dutch coast offered vital staging posts for the planned invasion of Britain. An attack on the Netherlands looked inevitable. The Dutch, moreover, were ill-prepared to defend themselves. While other countries had relentlessly built up their armed forces in the 1930s, until as late as 1940 the Dutch possessed not a single tank, and had a collection of weapons mostly dating back to the 1800s. In a rare exception, the country had established a new regiment of 3000 soldiers after the First World War ended: a regiment of cyclists, with the motto ‘Swift and Nimble – Composed and Dignified’. As Pete Jordan later wrote, their firepower included a military band equipped with

bikes with special handlebars that could be steered while playing a horn. When Nazi invasion looked imminent the Dutch Army was belatedly mobilised, but the country’s defensive strategy remained largely as it had since the seventeenth century: in the event of an invasion, a ‘waterline’ of land would be flooded to create a liquid barrier protecting major cities. If things got really bad, they could rely on a second Cyclist’s Regiment created in March 1939, with gleaming new bicycles and a corporal who served as a mechanic. On the evening of 9 May 1940, Hitler authorised the invasion of Western Europe. The codeword ‘Danzig’ was flashed to German forces and the following morning they attacked the Netherlands, ignoring the Dutch foreign minister’s protests that his country had no quarrel with anyone. The invaders were so confident of swift victory that one of their commanders, General von Sponeck, had brought with him a formal dress uniform to wear when he accepted the Dutch surrender from the Queen. For the Dutch, more than a century of peace was over.

reinforcements for the Texel mutineers never came. It

took thousands of German soldiers more than a month to regain control of the island, after which all the surviving Georgians were executed. The uprising, now all but forgotten by most historians, was to be one of the last battles of the war in Europe.

The Netherlands received well over a billion dollars from the European Recovery Program (ERP), the post-war aid initiative better known as the Marshall Plan. Relative to the size of the Dutch economy this was an enormous sum: the Netherlands received roughly ten times as much aid per capita as Belgium. As well as financing the country’s physical reconstruction, the ERP aimed to put the Netherlands on a path towards mass production and consumption on the American model – exemplified by the programme’s US-produced slogan, ‘You Too Can Be Like Us’. The Dutch government deviated from capitalist orthodoxy by building a generous welfare state, but even decades later the Dutch still had a noticeable love of all things American, from fast food to fashion, from TV comedies to holidays in Florida and New York.

By the mid-1950s, industrial production was nearly double what it had been immediately before the war.

Even before the war, bicycles were hugely popular in the Netherlands. When novelist Virginia Woolf visited Amsterdam in 1935 she wrote in her diary of ‘cyclists [who] go in flocks like starlings’. This love of bicycles was partly for geographical reasons. The flat landscape made travelling by bicycle relatively effortless, and the small size of the country meant that cycling from point to point rarely took long. Narrow streets also resulted in driving in cities being bothersome, while the general lack of space led to frequent difficulty in finding a parking place. Economics played a role too – Dutch fuel taxes

were high, while because of the lack of major national car manufacturers, cars had to be imported and so were very expensive.

When cities like Rotterdam were rebuilt, care was taken to plan not only new roads and train lines but also miles of new cycle lanes, complete with clear signposting and dedicated bicycle-only bridges, tunnels and traffic lights. Cyclists were given automatic priority at roundabouts, and thousands of bicycle parking spaces were provided at train stations. Many areas were designated as woonerven, ‘living streets’ in which cars were forbidden to move faster than walking speed. As commuters in other countries began using new motorway systems to commute from their suburban homes to their workplaces or shopping centres, the Dutch became increasingly accustomed to cycling everywhere. The fact that cyclists had no legal obligation to wear a helmet meant the fashion-conscious were not deterred from cycling, while strict legal