Why the Dutch are Different: A Journey into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to Zwarte Piet, the acclaimed guide to travel in Holland

by Ben Coates

obsessed; ineffectual posers more concerned with their haircuts than with hard work. As a truck driver in a bar once told me: ‘In Rotterdam we earn the money, in Den Haag they count it, and in Amsterdam they spend it.’ The rivalry cut both ways: Amsterdammers looked down on their southern rivals as unsophisticated and uncultured; inhabitants of a sprawling, dirty city with unfashionable bars, lame restaurants and outmoded shops.

Predictably, others’ disdain for their city only strengthened Rotterdammers’ pride in it, their teleph...

a proud battle cry to be shouted whenever its dignity was im...

As people who relished discussing and analysing problems, the Dutch naturally devoted hours to figuring out why their national side underperformed so consistently.

One common theory was that its failures were rooted in the country’s age-old approach to problem-solving, whereby every difficulty had to be discussed at length

until a consensus was reached. As the football writer David Winner explained, this democratic approach was one reason why Total Football was so effective – position switching depended on players...

Decades later, the 1974 loss was often grouped together with the 1940 Nazi invasion and 1953 flood as the three great tragedies to have befallen the Netherlands in the twentieth century.

Like many Dutch cities, Rotterdam had a large population of so-called allochtonen: foreigners, either born in another country themselves or the child of someone who was. For decades, the allochtonen had lived happily side by side with the autochtonen, or native Dutch; living proof of the country’s famous

The values the Dutch saw as the bedrock of their national identity – gay rights, gender equality – were unfortunately anathema to some of those who were now their neighbours. Many Muslims, for example, believed that women’s hair should be covered in public, but lived in a country where prostitutes stood naked behind red-lit windows without attracting a second glance. Newspapers reported cases such as that of a boy taken from his Turkish family by the Dutch authorities and placed in the care of lesbian foster parents, prompting vociferous protests from some in the Turkish community.

Under the traditional system of zuilen, or pillars, the Netherlands had long been divided along religious lines, with denominations given government funding to support schools and other institutions tailored to their beliefs. When it became clear that the guest workers were sticking around, the authorities naturally hoped that a similar system might work for the new minority groups. Islamic schools were awarded state funding, government subsidies provided to mosques, and travel costs paid so that imams could immigrate to the Netherlands.

What had initially looked like a proverbial melting pot turned out to be more like the spekkoek Indonesian cakes sold in the local corner shop: lots of colourful layers that sat neatly side by side but never mixed.

Rotterdam’s Stadhuis, a fine beaux-arts building that had miraculously survived the wartime bombing.

The months leading up to the unity march in Rotterdam had been marred by a series of other events. Swastikas were displayed at a march in The Hague, and fliers for pro-ISIS marches were pasted over Anne Frank’s face on advertisements for a musical about her life. A Jewish woman who hung an Israeli flag from her balcony in Amsterdam was beaten up by three men ‘wearing Palestinian-style scarves’. One survey of Dutch Turks aged 18 to 34 found that an astonishing 80 per cent thought there was nothing wrong with waging jihad against non-believers. The findings were disputed, but were worrying nonetheless. Then, as 2015 dawned, terrorists rampaged through the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris. The Dutch were naturally horrified that such a thing could happen so close by, and feared they might be next. Rotterdam’s Ahmed Aboutaleb condemned Islamic extremism so strongly and repeatedly that people began speculating whether he was positioning himself to become northern Europe’s first Muslim prime minister one day. Soon after the rally on the Stadhuis steps, he even managed to wangle an invitation to the White House to meet Barack Obama.

Part of the problem was that the discussion on how to tackle extremism forced the Dutch to reconcile two competing beliefs: that their country should be a beacon of freedom; and that discipline and order were needed to preserve the

national fabric. In practice, this meant many Dutch people behaved just as inconsistently as the British did, claiming to be completely relaxed about immigration while getting quite annoyed with immigrants. Weighing the tradition of tolerance against the need to act decisively, the Dutch were never sure quite how far to go. In 2011, for example, Wilders was put on trial for hate speech after making inflammatory comments about immigrants, but then acquitted by a judge who said his comments were ‘acceptable within the context of the public debate’. Five years later, in the wake of the furore over his ‘Fewer Moroccans’ speech, he was tried for hate speech again – providing yet more publicity for his unpleasant views, and another stark illustration of the limits of Dutch tolerance. After the 2015 Paris massacre, some Dutch newspapers reprinted cartoons of Mohammed from Charlie Hebdo, but most did not. The black flag of ISIS was eventually banned from all public demonstrations in the Netherlands, and the mayor of The Hague banned all public demonstrations in the area where the ‘Death to Jews’ march had been held. After years of letting everyone say whatever they wanted, the limits of tolerance were being tested, and it looked possible the Netherlands would become a less permissive place in the future. By the time this book went to print, Geert Wilders was – according to some polls – the most popular politician in the country; declaring himself a great fan of Donald Trump and wi...

with his pledge to ‘Make the Netherlands...

In a country known for its enlightened attitudes, a tradition that was banned in much of the western world – and outlawed in Germany by Adolf Hitler in the 1930s – was apparently still going strong.

As an outsider, I was shocked by the scene, but not entirely surprised. After a few years in the Netherlands I had become accustomed to the fact that some of the normal rules of polite behaviour didn’t quite apply. The straight-talking Dutch generally did as they pleased, thought nothing of saying whatever was on their mind and cared little for the unnecessary rituals of courtesy. ‘I don’t like your shirt!’ a Dutchman might cheerfully shout at a business acquaintance, messily eating a sandwich as he strolled in late for a meeting in his sandals. Political correctness was an alien concept, and people would talk openly in public about even the most delicate of subjects – their new boyfriend’s sexual preferences, say, or their sister’s embarrassing health problems. Under the national organising principle of ‘anything goes’, almost anything did – and that included dressing up in costumes that might get one arrested for racist behaviour on the streets of London.

that it was so liberal and easy-going as to be a kind of Woodstock writ large: a place where office workers smoked weed over their desks, visited prostitutes at lunchtime and euthanised their grandparents in the evening.

Dutch friends in turn often expressed annoyance at foreigners’ assumptions that all Dutch men were always stoned and every Dutch woman was just waiting for the chance to jump in the

For a while I jotted down in a notebook examples of what I denoted ‘Crazy Dutch Liberal Policies’. I soon gave up when I ran out of room. Cannabis was almost as easy to buy in the Netherlands as coffee, and nudist beaches as common as non-nudist ones. Terminally ill children could be euthanised; speeding moped riders need not bother wearing helmets; prostitutes were entitled to sick pay and pimps lobbied the government to cut payroll taxes. Gay couples had been able to marry and adopt for more than a decade, and 95 per cent of people said they would be comfortable having a gay prime minister. The whole country had roughly the same number of police officers as New York City, and in 2009 the Dutch justice ministry had announced plans to close several prisons because (despite offering to accommodate some of Belgium’s prisoners too) there were simply not enough criminals to fill them. Dutch soldiers were able to join trade unions. The few prisoners who did remain in captivity reportedly were entitled to visits from clairvoyants to help them contact dead relatives. The list went on. I considered myself fairly liberal, but even I sometimes recoiled at news headlines that Dutch friends took in their stride, such as the thirty-five-year-old woman who was legally euthanized because she was depressed,

or the political party for paedophiles that campaigned to reduce the age of consent to twelve.

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such characters were hugely popular across Europe, with ‘golliwog’ toys selling almost as well as teddy bears and blackface cartoons used to promote everything from jam to perfume and toothpaste. However, the characters often carried menacing undertones and were rooted in the assumption that black men were either happy-go-lucky simpletons or uncivilised savages.

When Enid Blyton’s Noddy had his car stolen in the forest, naturally it was by a dark-skinned ‘golliwog’ to whom

he had kindly offered a lift. In later years, blackface characters came to be recognised for the crude racial tropes they were, and became increa...

The debate had been sparked by the chair of a UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, a Jamaican professor called Verene Shepherd, who dared to say that if she lived in the Netherlands she ‘would object to’ the ubiquity of Zwarte Piet. Perhaps, she suggested, it was time for the Dutch to lay the tradition to rest. To say that Shepherd’s comments struck a raw nerve would be an understatement. Pro-blackface protests were held in several locations in the Netherlands, accompanied by widespread media coverage criticising the UN’s insensitive meddling. Leading politicians rushed to support the right to dress as Zwarte Piet. Facebook groups backing the tradition proliferated, and a canny marketing firm launched a hugely popular pro-Piet petition – the ‘Pietition’ – while photoshopped pictures of a blacked-up ‘Brad Piet’ spread on social media like a seasonal flu. The mere suggestion that dressing in blackface might be a slightly outdated tradition had caused the normally laid-back Dutch to respond with outrage.

In a bold rebuttal to the UN’s allegation that the practice threatened to violate equal rights protections, the Dutch pressed on with a bid to include Zwarte Piet on a UNESCO register of the world’s most valuable ‘intangible cultural heritage’, alongside Buddhist chanting, Iranian carpet-weaving and Spanish flamenco dancing.

The UN in turn said it was ‘deeply troubled by the virulent intolerance’ expressed by those who could not accept criticisms of Zwarte Piet. The right-wing politician Geert Wilders responded by calling for the entire UN to be abolished. Still the debate rumbled on, periodically rejuvenated by ill-advised comments from politicians, commentators and celebrities. Foreign news outlets expressed amazement at the latest example of crazy Dutch behaviour, while the Dutch media remained firmly in the pro-Piet camp. Soon after the event in Rotterdam, the leading Telegraaf newspaper reported of recent events in South Africa: ‘There have been reactions abroad and in the Netherlands to the death of Nelson Mandela, who died, of all times, on Sinterklaas evening, with Zwarte Piet.’

For many Dutch, nevertheless, even these modest changes represented a frontal assault on their cultural heritage.

soon learned that while Dutch friends would happily debate the rights and wrongs of issues like abortion or gay marriage, attempting a dinner-table discussion about Zwarte Piet was like marching into a minefield: bound to end in a horrible mess.

The Dutch tradition of tolerance was rooted partly in the country’s geography. Flat, open and without many obvious geographical borders, it had historically been impossible to fence off outsiders or hold new ideas in quarantine for long. ‘Holland doesn’t have mountains,’ the great Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom once wrote. ‘Everything’s out in the open. No mountains, no caves. Nothing to hide. No dark places in the soul.’ As a local saying went, the Dutch always preferred to approach things rechtdoorzee, or ‘straight on through the sea’ – directly and honestly, with no room for face-saving or beating about the bush.

A willingness to accommodate dissidents like Locke, Voltaire and Galileo had helped make it a centre of enlightenment thinking.

Many people even installed angled mirrors – spionnetjes – on wall mounts next to their upstairs windows, so they could spy on the comings and goings below. It was perhaps not a coincidence that it was a Dutch television company that invented Big Brother

‘Don’t worry,’ the new mother explained, ‘that’s just the government nurse’, a sort of nanny/maid provided by most compulsory health insurance schemes to help bridge the difficult gap between excellent hospital care and heavily subsidised childcare. Perhaps as a result of all this attention, the Dutch children I met were invariably bright and charming, exuding the happiness and self-confidence one would expect from those who

had always been treated like pint-sized royalty.

The Netherlands has a long history of tolerance of drug use. In the seventeenth century, the opium trade played a not insignificant role in ensuring the profitability of Dutch colonies overseas. In later years, the Dutch government enforced a highly profitable monopoly on the production and trade in opium, which ended only with the Japanese invasion of the East Indies during the Second World War. In the early 1900s the authorities opened an official cocaine factory in Amsterdam, which did a roaring trade in drugs for medical use until 1963. I’d heard it claimed that the stunned looks on the faces of people in some seventeenth-century Dutch paintings was due to the fact that they’d been smoking something stronger than ordinary

Even the word ‘drug’ was thought to be derived from the old Dutch term droge waere, or ‘dry goods’. While other countries battled to prohibit mind-altering substances, the Dutch had, for much of their history, viewed them as simply another good to be traded.

The authorities’ overall approach was one of tolerance and discretion, aimed at reducing the harm caused by drug abuse rather than eliminating drug use altogether.

Although the intensity of the debate about Zwarte Piet was difficult to understand, it was indicative of something I found fascinating about the Netherlands – the fact that despite the country’s liberal reputation, it could in some ways be an old-fashioned and even intolerant place.

Euthanasia was legal in the Netherlands, but saying mean

things about the King could land you in jail. Prostitutes could sell sex in Amsterdam, but residents of the same city needed permits to park at their own homes.

Left indignant on the pavement, I was consoled by a passer-by who had seen the whole incident. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she reassured me. ‘After legalising drugs and hookers, they had to outlaw something.’

Over time I developed the theory that the contradiction between indulgence and restriction was rooted in the delicate equilibrium between two competing forces in Dutch culture. On the one hand, the Netherlands had a long tradition of providing refuge to religious, political and scientific heretics. The Dutch therefore placed a high priority on protecting individuals’ rights to behave however they pleased, regardless of what others thought. On the other hand, theirs was also a country forged in conflict with nature,

facing a constant existential threat from flooding. Good order, cooperation and discipline were essential in order to ensure the country remained dry, and hence the Dutch ha...

Tolerance of personal quirks was therefore balanced by intolerance of anything that suggested disorder or a lack of caution. For an outsider, the hidden undercarriage of restrictive regulation could be both confusing and annoying. I started to understand the sentiment once expressed by the Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLar...

More than half a century after Albert Camus wrote that Amsterdam’s concentric canals resembled the circles of hell, parts of the historic canal district had become a dingy warren of brothels, kebab shops for the suddenly hungry, and tacky souvenir emporiums selling ‘Stoner Simpson’ T-shirts and bongs. As a friend who lived in the city centre once texted me: ‘Amsterdam on Friday night is hell. Nothing but drugged-up Englishmen and Italians looking for the nearest dealer or whore.’

At one point, US authorities claimed that 80 per cent of all the world’s ecstasy supply was manufactured in the Netherlands.

The Dutch responded by taking steps to reverse their previous tolerance. City mayors were given the power to close coffee shops on public order or public health grounds, and some more harmful drugs were outlawed. Strong ‘skunk’ cannabis was reclassified as a hard drug amid concerns about its psychotic effects, and hallucinogenic ‘magic mushrooms’ were banned after the death of a young French woman on holiday in Amsterdam.

As early as 1413, city authorities in Amsterdam decreed that ‘whores are necessary in big cities and especially in cities of commerce such as ours’ and for that reason ‘the court and the sheriff of Amsterdam shall not entirely forbid the keeping of brothels’. For centuries thereafter, laws banning prostitution were lax, and enforced only occasionally. As the number of international visitors to the city soared, scores of brothels opened for business, catering to both local customers and horny tourists keen to visit the famous Red Light District.

synonymous with paid-for sex. However, as with the drugs trade, recent years had brought increasing concern about the practical implications of such a tolerant approach. In the late 1980s, the collapse of the Berlin Wall had sent a wave of young women from Eastern Europe to Amsterdam. In the 1990s, the Schengen agreement meant a citizen of any EU country could set up (or be set up) as a sex worker, without needing a work permit or visa. By 1999, just a third of Amsterdam’s prostitutes were Dutch, with the rest coming from Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. Inevitably, not all these women had joined the sex trade of their own free will. One UN study found that the Netherlands had become one of the world’s top destinations for trafficked women; another investigation identified ‘serious abuses such as trafficking in women, prostitution involving girls under the age of consent and forced prostitution’