NETHERLANDS

In 1780 the Netherlands was still a republic. Since the Dutch revolt—the struggle for independence against Spain in the sixteenth century—the Netherlands consisted of seven almost independent provinces. The province of Holland, which covered the western part of the Netherlands, was the most prosperous and powerful. Although Holland was already urbanized to an unusual degree, Amsterdam was by far the largest city; about a tenth of the two million inhabitants of the republic lived there.

In the 1780s the republic fell into a political crisis, which was a sign of fundamental changes to come. By 1920 the population had grown to about seven million. Amsterdam was the capital and still the center of culture and colonial trade, but thanks to the German hinterland the city of Rotterdam had become the main port, and The Hague had turned into the center of government, civil servants, and diplomats. The divided republic had been replaced first by a unitary state (1798) and then by a constitutional monarchy (1813–1815 and 1848) with general male and female suffrage (1917 and 1919), and the country was developing into a modern industrialized society. Although these changes could be pictured as growth, the development was sometimes dramatic, sometimes slow, and for most of this period the Dutch felt they had to fight degeneration. The culture of the eighteenth and a large part of the nineteenth centuries was still dominated by the hope to return to the great golden age of the seventeenth century. Until the 1780s when it was surpassed by Great Britain, the republic had been the richest country in the world. It was only around 1900, when a new and rapid economic development had set in, that the intellectual elite decided that the country would perhaps never regain its former power but had instead turned into a moral guide in international relations.

1780–1848

In the 1780s the conflicts between the supporters of the Orange stadtholder, the captain of the army and the most important political figure, and the party of the Patriots developed into something resembling civil war. The Patriots used a new enlightened conception of citizenship and civil society to accuse the political establishment surrounding Prince William V of Orange, the stadtholder, of doing nothing to stop the economic and moral decay of the republic. In 1787 the Patriots were beaten, and until the advent of the French revolutionary army in 1795 the Orange Party ruled supreme. French intervention resulted in the adoption of the first constitution of the Netherlands, in 1798, the beginning of a truly unitary state. The period of first the Batavian Republic (1795–1806), then the satellite kingdom under Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (1806–1810), and finally the annexation by Napoleon's empire (1810–1813), was one of political innovation, but also, especially at the end, economic decay and misery.

When the French departed in 1813, the Dutch looked back in horror at the turmoil they had experienced. Even people who had welcomed the political innovations with great enthusiasm were now convinced that the country needed rest. They cheered the son of William V, who became King William I of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands and Belgium (1815). This was not the end of the bewildering number of political changes. In 1830 Catholic, industrializing Belgium, with its French-speaking elite, broke away from the Netherlands with its Protestant elite, whose wealth had always been based on trade. King William I, who dominated politics and has been characterized as a competent, sober, and hard-working civil servant, wanted to hold on to the large United Kingdom. When he finally accepted the independence of Belgium (1839), this failure was probably the real reason why he abdicated in favor of his son William II in 1840.

In 1848 a revision of the constitution, inspired by the liberal leader Johan Rudolf Thorbecke, one of the most important political leaders in modern Dutch history, introduced direct suffrage for a minority and ministerial responsibility. This marked the end of a long period of unrest stimulated by international developments. It was also a sign that the enlightened civic culture, which in the first decades of the nineteenth century had turned into an inward looking and timid nationalism (Biedermeier style instead of Romanticism), was opening up. After the trauma of the period around 1800 the Dutch slowly began to get used to political conflicts again.

1848–1870

King William I had ruled with a constitution, but he dominated politics and had vigorously stimulated the economy and the digging of canals. He had not encouraged the development of modern politics or a modern, liberal economy. The Netherlands still had to cope with some problems of the past, the most famous being the slow development of a modern railway system (started in the 1830s but reaching completion only around 1870), due mainly to the system of canals and barges that had provided the republic with an efficient system of public transport. The development of industry was partly thwarted by the dominance of agriculture, which had for a long time been producing for national and international markets. It was not until the 1860s and 1870s that industrialization started to take off, and only in the 1890s did large industrial companies really begin to spread. It took some time, then, before the political changes introduced in 1848 began to influence the society.

Dutch liberalism of the third quarter of the nineteenth century presented itself as a movement of the future, but its conceptions of separation of state and society and of the well-educated citizen in fact presupposed a stable society dominated by a more or less traditional upper middle class and by a homogeneous bourgeois culture. The Netherlands was still a country of small towns with limited mobility, and it was not until the last quarter of the century that the pace of change really quickened. Until that time politics concentrated on constitutional issues, such as the role of the king and the relation between government and parliament. It was not until 1868 that the rule that the government needed the trust of a parliamentary majority was firmly established. This occurred after a series of conflicts that further reduced the role of the king. Colonial policy was one of the bones of contention. The Dutch colony of Indonesia (the Dutch East Indies) was one of the richest in the world. King William I had introduced a system of partly forced production of colonial goods by the Indonesian population, which provided the Dutch government with enormous sums of money, amounting to 50 percent of national tax revenues in the 1850s. This gave liberal governments the means to reduce taxes, but in the 1860s a conflict arose with another liberal ideal, free trade. Colonial politics had been very profitable for the government, but it allowed for only a very limited role for the private entrepreneur. Left liberals now began to push for free trade and succeeded in abolishing the forced cultivation of sugar and opening the colony for private enterprise.

The change in colonial policy in fact marked the beginning of modern Dutch imperialism. The Dutch presence in Indonesia had been mainly confined to the main island of Java but now began to spread throughout the archipelago. Entrepreneurs earned large incomes by producing tobacco, and later by exploring for petroleum. Dutch rule provoked resistance, resulting in a prolonged guerilla war (1873–1903) in fiercely independent Aceh, part of the island of Sumatra. But it also made a

real impact, for instance in the fields of education and infrastructure (from 1901 this was called "ethical politics"). This was the colonial counterpart of the important changes Dutch politics and society went through around the turn of the century.

1870–1914

The liberals of 1848 had thought that progress would result in the spread of a liberal culture. In this respect the main duty of politics was to remove obstacles to future development. Around 1870 a new generation of liberals argued that the liberals had achieved a victory in constitutional matters but now had to build a new society. The most important weapon in the struggle for progress was education. In 1878 the liberal leader Johannes Kappeyne van de Coppello introduced a new law to increase the quality of primary education. By introducing new standards, but still restricting subsidies to state-funded schools, the law in fact hindered the development of privately funded denominational education. This was in line with the ideal of a liberal society, but it reinforced denominational resistance against liberal politics.

The Netherlands was a country of minorities. Although the tone of public life was Protestant, and the Dutch Reformed Church was the most important church, there was no state church and there were several varieties of Protestantism: liberal and orthodox members of the main church, a number of small dissident churches, and since 1834 a breakaway orthodox church. In addition, there was a large Catholic minority of about one-third of the population and a small Jewish minority. Religion still dominated public life to a large extent, and it was the public issue the population at large cared about the most. Once infrastructural change and the abolishing of the stamp duty on newspapers allowed leaders to reach their potential adherents by train or newspaper, orthodox Protestants in particular began to manifest themselves. The Protestant morality that still pervaded liberalism was not enough; Protestant religion had to be the basis of politics. In 1879 the charismatic clergyman, politician, and brilliant journalist Abraham Kuyper founded a Neo-Calvinist party, called the Antirevolutionaire Partij because it resented the allegedly liberal principles of the French Revolution. This was the first modern political party in the Netherlands, formed even a few years earlier than the first socialist party (the Sociaal-Democratische Bond, founded in 1882, followed in 1894 by the Sociaal-Democratische Arbeiderspartij, which accepted parliamentary politics), which elsewhere in Europe often was the first modern party. Its foundation implied that many orthodox Protestants now realized that they were a minority that had to organize itself in order to achieve its goals. Its main goal was full subsidy of orthodox Protestant primary schools. Catholics, who at first had supported the liberals in order to gain religious freedom, now became allies of the orthodox Protestants in their fight for denominational education. In 1888 this alliance won the elections, and Catholics and orthodox Protestants formed a government that introduced a new law that allowed for partial subsidy of denominational primary education (1889).

The Antirevolutionaire Partij was not only the first modern political party, but it also became the nucleus of a moral community that was much larger than the party alone. It included orthodox Protestant primary schools, a new reformed church (1886), newspapers, the Free University of Amsterdam (1880), and trade unions. At the end of this development, during the interwar period, it was possible to live in an orthodox Protestant community almost from cradle to grave. In due course this system also emerged among Catholics, who at first had not felt the need to organize because most of them lived in the almost homogeneously Catholic southern part of the country, where the orthodox Protestants were a clear minority. Socialists also partly adopted the system, and the introduction of general suffrage and proportional representation in 1917 and 1919 confirmed the existence of a number of more or less stable blocs: something over a third of the vote was Catholic, a quarter orthodox Protestant, almost the same percentage voted socialist, and the rest were either liberals of some sort (most of them also liberal Protestants) or members of small minority parties.

Although the first signs of all these changes began to appear in the 1860s, the conservative and liberal elite was particularly shaken by the developments of the 1880s. This was a decade of economic, especially agricultural, crisis, and the forceful manifestation of the minorities made the impression that the country was falling apart. This provoked nationalist sentiments. The birthday of the young queen, Wilhelmina (r. 1890–1948), developed into the national holiday Queen's Day, Indonesia was a source of national pride, and the South African Boer War (1899–1902) led to a wave of nationalism. The Boers were partly of Dutch descent and were regarded as relatives, a bit primitive perhaps, but also pure and heroic.

In the eyes of the establishment, bourgeois culture also seemed to be falling apart. Until the 1880s no bohemia had existed in the Netherlands, Romanticism was not strong, and moral and patriotic feeling were an important part of literature and the arts. In 1885 a new review was founded, the Nieuwe Gids (New guide). This was a reaction to the Gids, which had, since its founding in 1837, developed into the review of the political and cultural liberal establishment. The Nieuwe Gids propagated l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake) and was influenced by French naturalism. The bohemian Amsterdam circle of the Nieuwe Gids contained not only poets and novelists but also painters and other artists. Since the establishment of the Nieuwe Gids, the history of Dutch literature has been divided into the period before and after the Tachtigers (movement of the 1880s).

The Nieuwe Gids advocated radical individualism in art, and this could be regarded as the culmination of the new dynamics of Dutch society (also symbolized by the advent of the bicycle: after a slow start, already one in four inhabitants owned a bike by 1924). But these changes did not result in an individualist society. The emerging new blocs of orthodox Protestants, Catholics, and socialists all advocated emancipation, but group emancipation. A small cultural elite may have shaken off moralism in the arts, but in politics and society it was reinvented with a vengeance. The left liberal government of 1897 to 1901 was called the government of social justice and introduced social legislation on a relatively large scale for the first time. This was based on a new idea of citizenship. The liberals of 1848 had thought that only the educated independent bourgeoisie would qualify for the vote, but the left or social liberals now assumed that (almost) everybody had a right to the vote (in 1896 the suffrage was broadened) and that politics had the duty to educate the people and provide some social legislation in order to make them fit for democracy. Citizenship was a moral conception that was shared by all political blocs. Whether orthodox Protestant, Catholic, socialist, or liberal, they all thought that the individual should be educated to serve the community; modern citizens should be responsible citizens, an idea that cherished the virtue of self-restraint. The women's movement agreed and, besides a campaign for the vote, stressed the motherly qualities of women. No lax morals, no gambling, no excessive drinking—that was the message of all moral communities. The message was surprisingly successful. The percentage of extramarital births fell to about 2 percent around 1920 (compared to percentages at least four times as high in France and Germany), and the consumption of pure alcohol fell from 7 liters (7.4 quarts) per capita in the 1870s to 3 liters (3.2 quarts) in 1930. Apparently many emancipating members of the Catholic, Protestant, and socialist communities considered it their duty and also to be in their best interest to behave as responsible citizens.

See alsoAmsterdam; Belgium; Colonialism; Imperialism.

bibliography

Aerts, Remieg, Herman de Liagre Böhl, Piet de Rooy, and Henk te Velde. Land van kleine gebaren: Een politieke geschiedenis van Nederland, 1780–1990. Nijmegen, Netherlands, 1999.

Bank, Jan, Maarten van Buuren, Marianne Braun, and Douwe Draaisma. Dutch Culture in a European Perspective. Vol. 3: 1900: The Age of Bourgeois Culture. Assen, Netherlands, 2004.

Kloek, Joost, Wijnand Mijnhardt, and Eveline Koolhaas-Grosfeld. Dutch Culture in a European Perspective. Vol. 2: 1800: Blueprints for a National Community. Assen, Netherlands, 2004.

Kossmann, E. H. The Low Countries, 1780–1940. Oxford, U.K., 1978.

Wintle, Michael. An Economic and Social History of the Netherlands, 1800–1920: Demographic, Economic, and Social Transition. Cambridge, U.K., 2000.

Zanden, Jan Luiten van, and Arthur van Riel. The Strictures of Inheritance: The Dutch Economy in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Ian Cressie. Princeton, N.J., 2004.

Henkte Velde