Netherlands

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NETHERLANDS.

The Netherlands was fortunate enough to remain neutral during World War I and hence escaped the bloodshed experienced by its neighbors. That is not to say, however, that the country remained altogether unscathed; the economic problems arising from the disturbance of the European economy did cause considerable hardship in the Netherlands, not least because the division of available supplies was dismally managed by local and national governments. Rioting, and even an attempt at socialist revolution, ensued in 1917 and 1918, although neither truly threatened the existing order. In international politics, the pre-1940 Netherlands was particularly conflict averse. Internally, however, the first two decades of the twentieth century were rife with conflict. While, as in most countries at the time, there was disagreement about the economic role of governments, voting rights, and many other issues, there also was a particularly problematic conflict related to diversity.

The population of the Netherlands had for centuries been divided between roughly equally large numbers of Catholics and Protestants, of which the latter were divided into several smaller denominations. The last decades of the nineteenth century had seen the emancipation of Catholics and the restoration of Episcopal structure. The relative ease with which several centuries of discrimination against Catholics had been ended owed much to the fact that the Netherlands, since 1848, had been ruled by consecutive bourgeois liberal governments. Yet the Catholics had not been the only ones to emancipate. Orthodox Protestantism also rose to political prominence, forming a power adverse to liberal political hegemony. The orthodox Protestants considered themselves the true heirs of the Dutch state. The eighty years' struggle for independence (1568 to 1648) by what they saw as a pious, Protestant nation against Catholic Spain, under the leadership of the Prince of Orange, played a crucial role in their self-perception as a section of Dutch society. Their popular slogan God, Nederland en Oranje (God, the Netherlands, and Orange) reflected their political ideology—the state was to be inexorably linked to Protestant Christianity and headed by a Protestant monarch.

While (orthodox) Protestants thus strove for a more outspokenly Protestant state, Catholics desired a strict separation of church and state. As such, Dutch Catholic politics differed from Catholic political movements elsewhere in Europe. The geographical concentration of Catholics in the south of the country, notably the provinces of Limburg and Brabant, offered the church ample opportunity to exert influence over its flock there, especially on the subject of public education. North of the Rhine, Catholics were a minority and felt a much stronger desire to distance themselves from the dominant secular or Protestant culture. Education in particular was a difficult issue in those areas where Catholics could not, through sheer numerical dominance, change the character of public education. Both north and south, the Rooms-Katholieke Staatspartij (Roman-Catholic State Party) could, more than other parties, count on a stable electoral base and support from the church hierarchy.

The solution to the tensions among liberal, Catholic, and Protestant forces was found in the "Pacification" of 1917. Under the Pacification, suffrage was made universal (effective as of 1917 for men and 1920 for women), and denominational schools were granted the same level of financial support as public ones. The extension of the suffrage ended liberal political hegemony and the rise to power of religious political parties so that Liberal parties were relegated to, at best, a secondary place in Dutch society and politics. The liberals did continue to regard themselves as the "thinking part of society" and were generally opposed to division along (especially) denominational lines. While Catholics, Protestants, and Socialists were forming broadcasting societies, published papers, etc., that were specifically aimed at their own section of the population, liberal organs were stubbornly named algemeen (general) or otherwise claimed to be directed at the population as a whole, rather than at their own supporters.

The extension of suffrage also allowed for the strong rise of a fourth, Socialist, political bloc. Socialist parties were on the rise in the early decades of the twentieth century. Socialist, anarchist, and other left-wing movements had existed in the nineteenth century as well, but only in the course of the twentieth century did they develop a stable and coherent political force. Although fringe groups had always existed, Socialist power came to center mostly on the Sociaal-Democratische Arbeiderspartij (Social Democratic Labour Party), founded in 1894, and after 1946 on the Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA; Labour Party). The consecutive communist parties and various left-wing movements always disputed Social Democratic leadership of the left wing, but were too electorally weak to muster significant opposition until very late in the twentieth century.

Thus, Dutch political power had become divided among four so-called pillars, which were to remain central to both politics and society for decades to come. Not only politics but also public broadcasting, unions, press, and education became rigidly divided along pillar lines. Perhaps paradoxically, the fourfold division of Dutch society became the basis of a remarkably stable social and political order. Although the relative size of the pillars could vary as a consequence of demographic developments or defection of individuals to another pillar, such cases were relatively rare, and the loyalty of people to their pillar was strong. As noted by the political scientist Arend Lijphart in 1967, pillarization ensured political stability in a deeply divided country. The leaders of each pillar generally were not particularly hostile toward their counterparts in other pillars and hence were willing to cooperate (and form parliamentary coalitions). They could, moreover, count on a stable share of the vote from the members of their pillar. The combination of unflagging pillar loyalty at the base and willingness to cooperate at the top made pillarization a stabilizing factor in Dutch politics and also enabled pillarized institutions to survive throughout the twentieth century. Although the traditional view of pillarization has been criticized in the early twenty-first century, notably by J. C. H. Blom and J. Talsma (2000), it remains central to the history of and historiography about the Netherlands in the twentieth century. At least until 1970, and in many ways up to the twenty-first century, pillarization remained central to Dutch political life.

Newly found political stability, however, could not ward off a period of economic hardship during the 1930s. Being a small, open economy, heavily dependent on export, the Netherlands was hard hit by the world economic crisis. A series of governments under Protestant premier Hendrikus Colijn, confronted with the difficult circumstances of economic crisis, were unwilling to leave the gold standard and allow the guilder to devaluate. The late recovery of the Netherlands from the crisis (about 1936) is commonly attributed to the stubborn attachment of the Colijn governments to the hard guilder. High unemployment and low exports marked the 1930s. Even though the Colijn governments principally adhered to balanced budgets, the 1930s were an era of rising government interference in economic matters, especially in agriculture. The rise of a more economically intrusive state would prove to be an important asset during World War II.

Any Dutch hopes of remaining neutral during World War II were quashed on 10 May 1940, when Germany attacked the Netherlands. The Netherlands capitulated after five days of fighting and the bombardment of Rotterdam, which left over two thousand civilians dead and the city center in ruins. Five years of Nazi occupation ensued, which without any doubt was the most disastrous period to befall the Netherlands in the twentieth century. Unlike most other occupied countries, the Netherlands was placed under civilian German rule, headed by the Austrian Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart. During the first occupation years Seyss aimed to win over the Dutch to the National Socialist cause, an attempt that by and large failed. The "soft approach" did, however, help to establish a relatively high degree of cooperation (later often denounced as collaboration) from much of the Dutch civil service. This allowed everyday life to go on as usual, at least during the first years of occupation. Added to the relatively restrained attitude of the occupying authorities was the reasonably good supply of basic goods. Through well-prepared economic controls, executed largely by the civil servants who had been enrolled to come to the aid of agriculture during the crisis of the 1930s, the population was at least reasonably well fed during the occupation years. Perhaps because of the relatively favorable economic circumstances, resistance, while not absent, was limited. Only the illegal press was large in comparison to other occupied nations.

The Netherlands stands out among the occupied countries as the one that, proportionally, lost most of its citizens in the Holocaust. Exact numbers cannot be given, but some 104,000 out of 140,000 Jews did not survive Nazi persecution. There has been extensive debate about why the Netherlands lost so much more, proportionally, of its Jewish population than other Western European countries. The publication of Presser's watershed study Ondergang (1965; The Destruction of the Dutch Jews, 1969) did much to dispel the contented self-image the Dutch held with regard to their role during the war. Still, it would be wrong to claim that the disastrous outcome can be blamed entirely on cowardice or anti-Semitism on the part of the Dutch, even though such claims surface regularly in the Netherlands. A number of other factors, such as Seyss-Inquart's approach to his genocidal task, which combined great sophistication with uncanny ruthlessness, also played an important, if not decisive, role. Other factors include the very orderly and law-abiding nature of Dutch society and the lack of a readily accessible safe country nearby.

In the end phase of World War II, the front came to lie within the Netherlands. After D-Day, the Allied forces relatively quickly made their way north, but their advance halted at the Rhine after the fiasco of operation Market Garden in September 1944, and the front froze on the great rivers. Due to a gradual erosion of relations between German and indigenous officials, a railroad strike, and a relatively harsh winter, food could no longer reach the western cities of the Netherlands, causing a grave famine to break out. Somewhere between twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand deaths ensued, a consequence of both hunger and disease. Being relatively well-documented, short-lived, and severe, the Dutch hunger winter has become a popular test case for medical research into the consequences of periods of malnourishment, especially in (unborn) children.

After the complete liberation of the Netherlands in early May 1945, a period of rather frenzied political activity began. During the occupation, dissatisfaction with prewar political structures, especially with pillarization, had become very vocal. Everybody, it seemed—the queen, the Resistance, the political elite—agreed that there was a need for radical change. A new political party was formed, the aforementioned PvdA, which was to be the incarnation of unified, modern politics. In practice, however, all the opponents of prewar politics turned out to have very different views on what the new order was to be like. The Doorbraak, or "breakthrough," failed completely and quickly. The PvdA came to be little more than the heir of the Sociaal-Democratische Arbeiderspartij, and disappointed liberals, many of whom had originally joined the PvdA, formed a new liberal party, the Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (People's Party for Freedom and Democracy). If anything, pillarization was stronger than ever during the postwar years and was only to wane when the Netherlands rapidly desecularized in the 1960s and 1970s.

While the Doorbraak failed miserably, one radical change was taking place, namely, the decolonization of the Dutch Indies. On 17 August 1945, the nationalist leader Sukarno proclaimed the republic of Indonesia, to the horror of the Dutch and the Dutch political elite. The fact that Sukarno had cooperated with the Japanese after they had invaded the Dutch Indies only aggravated the dismay of the Dutch at the perceived disloyalty of its Asian colony. Moreover, many believed that Indonesia was indispensable to the Dutch economy, especially as reconstruction was under way. The slogan indië verloren, rampspoed geboren (Indies lost, disaster born) became commonplace. The Dutch were not going to give up their empire without putting up a fight.

During the periods July 1947 and December 1948, the Netherlands waged war on the guerrilla army fighting for independence. This struggle ended in a bloody deadlock, much like the war in Vietnam later would. The Dutch, with their superior military technology, could retain a firm grip on the colonial cities but were almost powerless in the countryside. Because the guerrilleros could become invisible among the indigenous population, and because they could rely on the cover of the immense tropical rainforests, they were impossible to beat. It nevertheless required considerable international (American) pressure to make the Dutch accept their defeat and officially confer sovereignty over most of Indonesia to the rebels. Only New Guinea was to remain Dutch, and a source of dispute between the newborn republic and the stubborn colonizer, until 1962. After the transfer of New Guinea to Indonesia, relations between the countries improved markedly.

The independence of Indonesia had a massive impact on Dutch society, not least because it brought about a wave of immigration. Not only did the former white colonial elite return to the Netherlands between roughly 1947 and 1957, but so did many people of mixed ethnicity, as well as many indigenous people previously employed in the colonial army. With the influx of people from the former Dutch Indies, Dutch society was for the first time confronted with a very visible form of ethnic diversity. The arrival of a large "Indo" community changed the appearance of Dutch society, which had before had only a handful of non-European inhabitants. Among the immigrants were large numbers of Ambonese soldiers and their families. The Ambonese community, and initially many Dutch citizens as well, cherished the hope of establishing an independent republic on the Isle of Ambon. After Indonesia had all but crushed Nationalist resistance there and began a policy of ethnic dilution through so-called transmigration, the Republic of the Southern Moluccas, or RMS, flourished in the Netherlands under the leadership of their president-in-exile Manusama. As the Dutch government refused to support the Ambonese independence even diplomatically, relations between the Ambonese and Dutch society deteriorated. During the 1970s, small groups of young Ambonese tried (unsuccessfully) to force their way by hijacking trains, taking hostages in a school, and numerous other violent actions.

Another consequence of World War II was that it ended the Dutch preference for neutrality. The country wholeheartedly joined the Atlantic bloc. The Netherlands was among the first and most loyal members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the United Nations, and various European organizations (and eventually, of course, the European Union). Economically, the 1950s and 1960s, as in most other northwestern European countries, were an era of strong economic growth and relative prosperity. The combination of wage moderation and relative social peace provided for a highly successful economic model. In this and other respects, the postwar Netherlands often seemed, at least from an economic point of view, to be a mere annex of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Full employment, the spread of mass media, and increased leisure impacted Dutch culture in many ways, not least by leading to a new influx of immigrants. Moroccans and Turks in particular were invited to work in Dutch factories in great numbers. In spite of expectations that their presence would be temporary, many of them settled permanently in the Netherlands, forming large Moroccan and Turkish communities, especially in the large cities. In the mid-1970s, after the independence of Surinam, they were followed by thousands of Surinamese who, for various reasons, preferred the Dutch to the Surinamese nationality. The Netherlands were rapidly becoming a colorful country.

Religiousness came under increasing pressure, especially during the 1960s. Although pillarization in the form of separate parties, broadcasting societies, and schools continued more or less unabated, church attendance and loyalty to church teachings declined sharply. Moreover, the rise of second-wave feminism and modernist literature, later followed by modern drugs, sexual libertarianism, and many other new phenomena, besieged the otherwise stable political order. The presence of large numbers of relatively young people (the period after 1936, especially the immediate postwar years, had experienced very high birth rates) added much to the progressive storm that seemed to wash over the country. The old political order fought a losing battle against the onslaught of modernity during the postwar decades and was perhaps quicker to give way than in many other countries. One could speculate that the culture of pillarization, which could exist only as long as people were willing to ignore those whose worldview they despised, helped establish the famous Dutch tolerance, but such explanations have yet to rise above the level of speculation.

As in many other countries, the first decades after the war also saw the gradual expansion of the Dutch welfare state. In 1956 a Social Democratic–Catholic coalition government introduced state pensions; many other social arrangements were to follow. A great leap in the expansion of the welfare state was made after the discovery of one of the world's greatest reserves of natural gas at Slochteren in 1959. The immediate cash flow to the government resulting from this find helped consecutive governments to build the relatively generous Dutch welfare state. Yet the natural gas reserves also resulted in what has come to be known as "Dutch disease": searing inflation driven by balance-of-payment problems resulting from the sale of expensive natural resources during the 1970s. More generally, the 1970s were an era of relative decline for the Netherlands. Stagflation, the combination of recession and high inflation, hit hard and was stubbornly fought with fiscally expansionist measures. During the 1980s seemingly endless cuts were made in public expenditure by right-wing governments under the Christian Democrat Ruud Lubbers. Only in the prosperous 1990s, when the country was ruled for the first time by a coalition of liberals and Socialists, without confessional parties, did rapid economic growth cause both a sharp upturn in wealth and a slight expansion in government spending.

At the end of the 1990s, however, economic growth fell back once more and popular discontent rose markedly. The presence of numerous foreigners, many of whom were Muslims, increasingly awakened widespread discontent. The rise of Pim Fortuyn, a right-wing politician with a strongly anti-Islam agenda, and his consequent murder by a left-wing activist seemed to consolidate feelings of discontent into a viable political movement. Remarkably, one of the main reasons why the "new Right" is attacking immigrants, especially Muslims, is because it finds them to be too conservative. There have been reported calls for a more thorough "integration," or rather assimilation, of first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants, including the adoption of Dutch liberal views. The early twenty-first century did see the adoption of more extreme anti-immigration legislation and widespread anti-Muslim sentiments, even among mainstream parties. The Netherlands, in 2004, found itself once more ill at ease with the very diverse people within its borders. A pacification, however, does not as yet appear to be at hand.

See alsoAmsterdam; Fortuyn, Pim; Frank, Anne.