What Every American Should Know About Europe

by Melissa Rossi

  Ethnicity: 83% Dutch; 9% Moroccan, Turk, Antillean, Surinamese, Indonesian; 8% other (1999 estimate)

  Religion: 41% none; 31% Roman Catholic; 13% Dutch Reformed; 7% Calvinist; 5.5% Muslim; 2.5% other (2002 estimate)

  Language: Dutch; Frisian

  Literacy: 99% (2003 estimate)

  Famous Exports: Heineken, Philips Electronics, Unilever (Birds Eye, Slim-Fast, Wishbone)

  Economic Big Boy: Royal Dutch Shell (oil and gas); 2004 total sales: $265.19 billion1

  Per Capita GDP: $30,600 (2005 estimate)

  Unemployment: 4.6% (January 2006 Eurostat figure)

  EU Status: Founding member (entered EEC 1957)

  Currency: Euro

  Quick Tour

  Don’t be fooled by the flower markets awash with color and the skinny picturesque buildings scrunched along canals. Nederland is more than lovely: she’s smart, rich, and is a showcase of sensible planning, a place where every square inch is accounted for and put to good use. For decades it appeared the efficient Dutch had figured out how to run a country that hummed along on her own. Affluent and tolerant, they had seemingly solved social woes with open minds—euthanasia and gay marriage are legal, prostitution and hash houses are licensed and taxed—and, having wrapped up domestic issues, they had plenty of time to ponder their role on the planet. Cerebral sorts, fond of debate, the Dutch love chatting through the night in candlelit restaurants, solving all the world’s problems—even if nobody’s listening.

  Licensed cannabis cafés first appeared in the 1970s. The idea was to separate soft drugs from hard ones. Better to buy small amounts of hash from tax-paying café owners, the Dutch reasoned, than from street criminals who also peddle heroin and cocaine. The Dutch say the tolerant approach works. Relatively few of their youth smoke the herbaceous substances, and the proportion of those using hard drugs is negligible. Rates for all drug use are lower than in the United States. A 1997 study from the University of Amsterdam found that only 16 percent of the Dutch had ever tried cannabis, despite its wide availability, while 33 percent of Americans had; 4.5 percent of Dutch used marijuana at least once a month, compared to 9 percent of Americans. Later studies showed the same: Dutch cannabis use was about half of that in countries where it’s illegal—perhaps information for American “war on drug” bureaucrats to put in their pipes and smoke.

  GLOBAL WEIGHT

  Once a fearsome colonizer and maritime power, the Netherlands isn’t the global power monger she used to be. With 16 million residents and a landmass that fits into France fifteen times, the country no longer has a booming voice in Europe or on the world stage. But the country has found weightiness in her new role as global justice center. The Netherlands is home to the UN International Court of Justice (the UN’s judicial organ), the UN-sponsored International Criminal Court (an independent war crimes court), and international criminal tribunals, including the one that tried Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic. She also flexes serious financial muscle with the banks Fortis, ABN-AMRO, and ING—and Royal Dutch/Shell is the world’s second largest petroleum company. Philips Electronic and Unilever also add billions to the GDP.

  The Netherlands, home to many philanthropists, is one of the world’s highest per capita foreign-aid donors.

  Much of the Netherlands is an anachronism: residents bike down cobbled streets or skate across icy canals to their jobs in the winter. Cities are architecturally old world, but have modern public transport; towns are pedestrian zones where shops sell warm-from-the-roaster coffee and jam bubbling away in copper pots—and shop owners still live upstairs. Wherever you are, you can count on one thing: the Dutch put their trash out in an orderly fashion—in the correct bags, on the right days. That’s just how things work around here.

  GEOGRAPHICAL CONFUSION: THE NETHERLANDS VS. HOLLAND VS. THE LOW COUNTRIES

  Officially called the Netherlands, the country is also (erroneously) known as Holland. In fact, there are two Hollands: North Holland holds Amsterdam and, South Holland contains political headquarters the Hague (Den Haag)—but they are only two of the Netherlands’ twelve provinces. Back when the catchy name was the United Provinces of the Protestant Netherlands, mapmakers may have found that it was easier to fit “Holland” on the map. The area was also called the Low Countries, since much sits below sea level; until 1830, Belgium and Luxembourg were bundled in the “Low Countries” package.

  The popular image of an evolved society with all wheels smoothly turning recently had a wrench thrown into it. Suddenly, issues from immigration to renegade royals and—what?!—high-profile murders are rattling what long has appeared to be one of Europe’s mellowest lands. With mosques and churches burning, the typically sedate Dutch found themselves with plenty of new debating to do, namely how to defuse a situation that, in late 2004, suddenly seemed to hold the makings of Europe’s first religious war in four centuries. What struck the match was a most unlikely phenomenon in this permissive country: being killed for self-expression.

  THEO VAN GOGH AND THE TEN MINUTES THAT ROCKED THE COUNTRY

  Nobody can say that barrel-chested filmmaker Theo van Gogh—great-grandson of Vincent’s brother—wasn’t pushing it. Known for being blunt, the director was also racist. The group he most disliked were Muslims; he’d speared them in his newspaper columns and mocked them in his book, Allah Knows Best. But Van Gogh’s most infamous work, a forceful ten-minute film called Submission, brought a backlash never before seen. The film, written by Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali—who, being of Somali descent, was born Muslim—told of routine abuses to Muslim women, the ritual of clitoral removal being one. Van Gogh didn’t just make his point—he made it in a manner pointedly offensive to Muslims. In the most controversial scene, a Muslim wife describes abuse by her husband and his family (her brother-in-law raped her) while the screen shows a woman, shrouded in transparent veil; under it, viewers see her naked body covered in writing, detailing the Koran’s many punishments for females. After Submission was broadcast on Dutch state TV in August 2004, both Van Gogh and Hirsi Ali were bombarded with death threats. Hirsi Ali hired armed security. Van Gogh didn’t. On November 2, 2004, a man bicycled up to the filmmaker on an Amsterdam street, shot him half a dozen times, slit his throat, stabbed him, and, with the bloody knife, slammed a note into his chest that warned that the United States, Europe, the Netherlands, and Hirsi Ali would all “go down.”

  Van Gogh’s slaying prompted the coolheaded Dutch to blow up. They hit the streets, banging pots and pans, yelling for vindication, and mourning the death of an era when they could safely speak their minds. Flames darted through mosques and a bomb exploded in a Muslim school. Radical Muslims retaliated, torching Christian churches and targeting Dutch schools. Violence continued for weeks as an issue came to full boil, namely, the problem of immigrants who don’t want to assimilate, who drain the system, and who resort to crime—and who are increasingly putting the Dutch system under siege. And that’s where politician Pim Fortuyn, a friend of Van Gogh’s, enters the story. He was the one, say the Dutch, who first put his finger on the place that hurt.

  As in Germany and Scandinavia, many immigrants from Turkey and Morocco were initially invited to the Netherlands as “guest workers” to perform menial labor during the economic boom of the 1960s and 1970s.

  Given the Netherlands’ previous sensitivity to ethnic and religious issues—prohibition of discrimination is the first item in the Dutch constitution—the world was agog when a bald, openly gay dandy pushed into the Dutch political scene and unleashed a slew of attention-grabbing sound bites and radical ideas. The Netherlands was “all full up”—“16 million is enough!” announced Pim Fortuyn, a former sociology professor turned political candidate and columnist from Rotterdam, the city that houses most of the foreign-born population. The country needed to bolt the door to immigrants, who were fueling a crime wave, opined Fortuyn; Muslims were disruptive, he said, calling Islam “a backward culture,” unkind to women, intolerant of gays. So outrageous wer
e his pronouncements that the “Livable Netherlands” Party (which Fortuyn headed) quickly kicked him out. No problem: Fortuyn started his own party, Lijst Fortuyn, with a platform that was progay, prodrugs, proeuthanasia, anticrime, and against allowing 30,000 asylum seekers into the country each year.

  Pim Fortuyn shook up the PC

  PIM FORTUYN: STIRRING IT UP

  The Dutch government is known for three things: compromise, compromise, and compromise. None of the country’s half-dozen major political parties typically wins a majority, so odd coalitions form that compromise themselves right out. So plodding is the political scene that jaws dropped open in 2001, when mouthy Pim Fortuyn muscled his way in front of the cameras, wearing slick Italian suits, puffing cigars, and raising an issue that nobody else dared mention. The typically PC Dutch squirmed uncomfortably when the candidate put the spotlight on immigrants, saying many were welfare leeches, criminals, and illiterate in the Dutch language—ideas too sensitive to discuss before, even if government reports bore out some of his claims.2 Fortuyn didn’t endorse sending immigrants back, but he didn’t want many more—and he wanted Dutch life preserved, as made plain in his book, Against the Islamization of Our Culture. “I am also in favor of a cold war with Islam,” he said.3 Even stranger than the emergence of this un-PC candidate was the fact that the Dutch were attentively listening. For months leading up to the April 2002 elections, few talked of anything but Pim, the country’s most colorful candidate ever, who baited Muslim imams into insulting him and flounced out of TV interviews. Just before the election, the man who so riled up the country was shot down in broad daylight as he left a radio station. The Dutch were shocked to the bone—not only by the assassination, something that hadn’t happened to a politician in the Netherlands since the seventeenth century, but by the assassin. The killer was not a Turk or Moroccan, but a young, soft-spoken vegetarian named Volkert van der Graaf—a homegrown white Dutch man. And Van der Graaf wasn’t even religiously motivated. Fortuyn had promised a seat in his party to a prominent mink farmer, whom the gunman believed mistreated animals. He may have killed the politician, but he didn’t shut him up. Fortuyn talks even from the grave, perhaps even more effectively than when he was alive. In the past century, only Hitler has affected the country more.

  Fortuyn’s death didn’t hurt his showing. That April, his party took 17 percent of the vote, forming a coalition with the parliamentary winners, the conservative Christian Democrats. That government crumbled within 100 days—the belligerent Lijst Fortuyn members blocked progress—and in the 2003 election they lost two-thirds of their parliamentary seats. Nevertheless, the issues Fortuyn lit up are now burning: under Prime Minister Balkenende, the government slammed the brakes on immigration; failed asylum seekers are being deported, and Rotterdam is banning poor immigrants from moving in. “Multiculturalism” is a dirty word—more so after the death of Van Gogh, who, ironically, had just finished a film about Pim Fortuyn. Van Gogh did more than memorialize the murdered politician; in his death, Van Gogh became a martyr to Fortuyn’s cause. And, as if fulfilling Pim’s prophecies, radical Muslims are more aggressive than ever. Journalists, politicians, and professors are now under armed guard, after being issued death threats by Islamists. The threats appear to come from a group of some three dozen Muslim radicals known as the Hofstad Group, who are mostly under thirty—some are teenagers. They’re not trained terrorists, but nobody doubts their potential danger. They’ve reportedly planned strikes on nuclear plants, and Van Gogh’s killer was one of the gang.

  ROTTERDAM: CITY OF THE FUTURE?

  Flattened by Nazis during WWII, Rotterdam doesn’t fit the quaint image of a Dutch town. In Europe’s first city built for cars, the skyline is a glassy assemblage of angles, including architectural oddities such as geometric “cube houses”—diamond-shaped apartments perched on stilts. It also was a magnet for immigrants, partly due to a plethora of government-subsidized housing; over 30 percent of the city’s population is now foreign-born. Gangs of immigrant thugs were a big factor in Fortuyn’s stance and popularity. And when a government study was released in 2004, saying that if current trends continued, Rotterdam’s population would be over 60 percent immigrant, the city council responded with land laws. Those moving to Rotterdam must now have residency permits, which are only granted to Dutch speakers who earn over $11 an hour—a ceiling that many foreign-born workers can’t reach. “We have more unemployed people and crime than anywhere else,” said Rotterdam city council member Ronald Sorensen, who is Fortuyn’s political heir. “If people want to come to Rotterdam they must have a job. If they don’t have one, then we don’t want them.”4

  Oh, the Netherlands has her problems: crime in cities is rising, Amsterdam is clogged with glassy-eyed tourists, the parliament keeps falling apart, and even when functioning can make an insomniac snore; the Yugoslav and Russian mobs are moving in with their sex slaves, and newcomers use the wrong bags for their rubbish, and put them out on the wrong night. Despite all of this, the Netherlands remains special. Except for the weather—which ranges from goosebump gray to bone-numbingly cold—and except for the expense (laying your head anywhere on this densely packed bit of land isn’t cheap), and except for the annoying egalitarian habit of splitting every bill down to the last eurocent (alas, there really is such a thing as “going Dutch”) and except for that ever-present Dutch attitude of “We’re more evolved than you” (well, maybe they are), the Netherlands may be the best place on the planet—except, of course, that the country is so frighteningly flat. There’s just no place else quite like the land of tall skinny buildings peering over canals, where windmills and pot shops exist side by side, and where prostitutes press against glass not far from museums where tourists press up close to take in paintings by the masters. The Netherlands is that rare country where the medieval and modern often coexist in harmony, and where liberal notions spring from pragmatic honesty and acknowledgment of the moneymaking potential of vice.

  NEDERLANDS: THE LANGUAGE FACTOR

  Gutturally combining about twenty-three letters per word, the Dutch language is neither easy nor romantic—but one won’t get a job here without speaking “Nederlands.” Some “guest workers” brought in during the 1960s are fluent, but their families often aren’t. Since 1998, foreigners who marry Dutch citizens must take yearlong language classes.

  Vocabulary Builder: Gedogen, translated as “closing one’s eyes,” is a prominent feature of Dutch tolerance. One example: buying small amounts of marijuana at pot cafés is condoned, but it’s illegal for anyone to supply the smoke to the café. But nobody looks out for backdoor transactions.

  History Review

  For a small, soggy triangle of land, the Netherlands has made a huge splash in the world—and much of her rise came from water. The Dutch set sail in superior ships to pluck the planet’s riches; watermills fueled early Dutch industry, gas finds in the North Sea brought much of the country’s current wealth. More important: the sea’s role in creating a cohesive society. Scarcity of dry turf created a highly organized, efficient society where land is valuable, population is dense, everything is planned, and everyone has a part and a say.

  “God created the world, and the Dutch created the Netherlands.”

  —Dutch saying

  LAYING THE FOUNDATION

  The Dutch worked up from lowly beginnings. Over a quarter of Dutch land lies below sea level; for most of history they’ve been obsessed with pushing back water and creating new land. Early settlers built homes on mounds, minimizing chances they would float away, but in the twelfth century the Dutch launched civil engineering projects that are impressive even today. With a shared enemy in the encroaching sea, villagers worked together to devise clever schemes to keep water out. They stuck logs into marshes and elevated towns; they constructed canals that siphoned high rivers; they designed dykes to keep water back and windmills to pump water into canals. Amazingly, these were simple medieval folk who weren’t fulfilling the orders of kings but
initiating these clever public works on their own. More astounding: the Dutch not only controlled the surrounding water, they conquered it. Using pumps to dry out bogs, they filled them in, reclaiming the lost territory for farmland, pastures, and housing. For over nine centuries, the Dutch have created new land with the fill-in-the-swamp process they call poldering, which is still responsible for the continuing physical growth of the country today.

  Oddly, Iberia was nearly as important as water in shaping the Dutch psyche. In the sixteenth century, the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch were all part of the same kingdom, a historical oddity that shows how convoluted the Habsburg Empire had become. Spain and Portugal each presented the Netherlands with something that profoundly altered the Dutch future: one was a zealot, the other a map.

  For centuries, the Netherlands was part of the Holy Roman Empire, a grab bag of land that extended from Vienna in all directions across Europe. It wasn’t a unified affair. Imperial territories were scattered into principalities and duchies; different corners of the Netherlands were lorded over by mighty counts, dukes, and bishops who didn’t heed the Holy Roman Emperor, who typically sat far off in Austria. That changed under Charles V. Born in today’s Belgium, he took a great interest in the Netherlands (which then included Belgium and Luxembourg). This was Europe’s richest region, thanks to the extensive trade market the Dutch built up, transporting Eastern European grain and Portuguese wines. Because Charles was forever getting into wars, he slapped heavy taxes on the Dutch to fund military escapades.