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

One Dutch brothel owner told the New York Times: ‘In the old days, pimps mostly stuck to the rules, and police would warn people, like, “Hey Jan, you’re crossing the line.” There was a kind of balance. But the local sex bosses are too old or dead or in prison, and the market has opened up.’ According

to one report, a police list of eighty violent pimps included only three who were born in the Netherlands. In one case in 2009, two Nigerian men were convicted of trafficking 140 women into the country, removing them from asylum centres and then convincing them they had been placed under voodoo curses that could only be lifted by having sex with around 3000 men.

In 2007, the Amsterdam city council decided that enough was enough and voted to clean up the Red Light District. Legalising the sex trade ‘hasn’t worked’, said the city’s mayor at the time, the left-wing stalwart Job Cohen. ‘We’ve realised this is no longer about small-scale entrepreneurs, but that big crime organisations are involved here in trafficking women, drugs, killings and other criminal activities,’ he said. Armed with strict new zoning rules and powers to revoke brothel licences, authorities began buying up brothels and converting them to other uses. Within a year, roughly a third of the city’s 150 or so brothels had closed. In one deal, the city council reportedly paid €18 million to acquire eighteen large-windowed

shopfronts from a brothel landlord known as the ‘Emperor of Sex’

Being back in Britain – albeit very briefly – also made me realise the extent to which I had ‘gone Dutch’. In the course of nearly five years in the Netherlands I had, I thought, become rather more laid-back. I was less concerned about career and money, and more inclined to prioritise quality of life over status. If I met someone at a party, asking their occupation might be my tenth question rather than my first. I had developed a deep love of cheese sandwiches and good coffee, and a curious affection for the colour orange. I even nurtured a strange kind of love for the unappealing Dutch landscape, learning to see past the flat boggy polder to the wide panoramic skies and magnificent sunsets beyond. I was inseparable from my bicycles and motor scooter and didn’t miss my old car at

all. I had perhaps even become a little more cheerful, less inclined to the natural grumbling and cynicism of Brits, and more uncomplicatedly optimistic like the Dutch. I was more likely to speak openly and ask difficult questions directly, and had changed the way I spoke English – adopting the Americanised vernacular of people who had learned the language from subtitled MTV. A pavement was a ‘sidewalk’, rubbish ‘trash’, a motorway a ‘highway’. I had even come to sympathise with the prevailing Dutch view of British people: that they were funny and fashionable, but also a little too pale and unhealthy and stressed and obsessed with social status. Compared to the hale and hearty Dutch, everyone in London looked like Ron Weasley.

The Netherlands, for all its faults, was happier than Britain, more efficient than France, more tolerant than America, more worldly than Norway, more modern than Belgium and more fun than Germany.

As a people, the Dutch were healthy, creative, curious, friendly, worldly, always willing to chat with strangers or help out a friend. The mythical ‘work–life balance’ for which others strived in vain seemed to come naturally to them. Compared to citizens of almost every other country, they worked fewer hours, took longer holidays, spent more time with their children, but enjoyed a higher standard of living. In an era when much of the world was cynical and pessimistic, most Dutch remained tolerant, internationalist and open-minded. Challenges like immigration and economic stagnation meant that some freedoms were being trimmed, but I couldn’t help thinking that if the Dutch could preserve even a fraction of their distinctive, happy-go-lucky outlook in the coming years, then the future of orange looked very bright indeed.