Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  But in Amsterdam, the 1960s didn’t end. Roel van Duijn became a member of the Amsterdam city council in 1969; he remained in city government for the next thirty years. Other colleagues from the time also joined the establishment. Some former Provos accused them of selling out, but Van Duijn said he wanted to be part of “the mechanism for change.” Indeed, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that rather than former Provos becoming establishment, the city’s establishment became Provo. Hans Righart argues in his aptly titled book The Endless Sixties that the Netherlands changed more after the 1960s than it did after the Second World War. Put slightly differently, the 1960s extended and sped up the process of change that the war had brought about. And that was especially the case in Amsterdam. In the 1960s, as Jan Donkers said, “The counterculture became Amsterdam’s dominant culture. And it’s still that way.”

  Symbolic of this, because it is part of the city’s structure, was the Provos’ White Bicycle plan, which spawned what is today probably the most sophisticated urban bicycle system in the world, with bike lanes, bike traffic lights, bike parking garages, and an elaborate system of cyclist etiquette (which, Provo style, many Amsterdammers ignore). The implementation of the White Bicycle plan can be traced to one man: Luud Schimmelpennink, a former Provo who conceived of the plan and went on to become a member of the city government. His ideas and effort also helped to initiate urban bicycle programs in cities around the world.

  Other ideas that were radical when Provo floated them have since become commonplace in Amsterdam and elsewhere. The White Chimney plan sought to impose fines on polluters—which is what the emissions trading or “cap and trade” system for managing pollution does in a more sophisticated way. In the 1970s, Roel van Duijn rose to the position of alderman responsible for energy policy; he proposed that the city explore the possibility of using windmills to create energy. “People thought I was mad,” he told me. “They said, ‘Do you want to take us back to the Middle Ages?’ But this is exactly the spirit in which society is working today.”

  Then, too, Amsterdam’s late-twentieth-century liberalism did not spring whole cloth from its homegrown 1960s counterculture movement. It came out of the city’s entire, unique history: its battles against water, the protocapitalist culture that developed against the backdrop of feudal Europe, the nonideological brand of tolerance that took hold at least as far back as the sixteenth century, when the city became a magnet for people from a variety of new religions whose chants and rants and dances would have gotten them burned as witches in other places.

  Indeed, by the later twentieth century, that kind of religious freedom was itself able to evolve in the direction of freedom from religion. Maybe the most profound post-1960s transformation in the city was in the role that religion played in people’s lives. In the city of the miracle of Amsterdam, in what had been one of Europe’s most devout societies, people simply stopped going to church. A single set of statistics tells the story. In 1900, more than 45 percent of Amsterdammers identified with Dutch Protestantism, the Christian denomination for which their ancestors had fought a war of independence against the Spanish empire. By 1971, only about 18 percent considered themselves part of the faith. In 2000, the number was 5 percent. If liberalism is, as many of its adherents and detractors alike have said through the centuries, a force that ultimately stands in opposition to religion, or as an eventual replacement for religion, then here too Amsterdam seems to be leading the way.

  The implementation of the social welfare state after World War II also brought sharp and nearly instantaneous changes. People suddenly got subsidies: unemployment payments, sick leave. Jobs came with built-in pensions. There is a relationship between the rise of the welfare state and the steady unchurching of the city and the country, as the welfare state took over some of the security-blanket functions that churches had provided. And many people found this to be a positive development. Jan Donkers, for example, told me how throughout his childhood in North Amsterdam his devout Catholic grandmother kept three statues of saints on her living room mantel. Then she started getting welfare checks of forty guilders a month. The next time he went to her house, he said, he saw the statues outside next to the trash. “She said, ‘What has the church done for us, apart from anointing German tanks when they came? Churches didn’t buy bread for us. The Labor Party did.’ ”

  Whether via the countercultural revolution, secularization, or the social welfare state, Amsterdam came out of the 1950s and 1960s with a renewed commitment to its liberal heritage. The Dutch American historian James Kennedy argues that this was due less to a full-throated avowal on the part of the city leaders of what the new liberalisms meant than to a historic willingness to compromise, to allow alternative voices to be heard. In other words, the politicians who ran the city in the aftermath of the 1960s were not all leftist radicals; rather, thanks to the polder model that was part of their makeup, they somewhat passively allowed their city to be a breeding ground for causes and ideas that were still anathema elsewhere.

  Of course, this passive allowing implies the existence of those who were being allowed, those who were forcing the new: the Benno Premselas and Roel van Duijns. The city has always had a rich array of radicals and rights promoters. But the passive character of Amsterdam’s tolerance remained apparent in the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, when it continued to unfurl the liberal banner, extending rights and freedoms on a scale unequaled in other cities. Its drug policy evolved against a backdrop of passive allowance: when marijuana first came to prominence in the 1960s, there was no built-in moral condemnation of it on the part of the government, as there was in many other places. As Provo gave way to the wider hippie culture, radio show hosts began to list prices of various types of marijuana and hashish available in the city. With drugs becoming more prevalent, the Dutch Department of Justice employed gedogen, the uniquely Dutch approach to tolerance: hard drugs like heroin were seen as an intolerable danger, but officials started to float the idea of decriminalization for soft drugs like marijuana. In 1973, three political parties, including D66 and the Labor Party, ran on a platform that advocated treating marijuana in the same way as alcohol.

  The problem with legalizing pot turned out to be less local public opinion than the fact that the Netherlands had neighbors: the country would face censure from international organizations. (Plus there was some fear that hippies from around the world would come flocking in, which of course they did.) So gedogen held sway. Since police cracked down on drug dealing in the streets, another way was found. Every Amsterdammer or visitor to the city knows the difference between a coffee shop and a café. Historically, the distinction was that cafés had licenses to sell alcohol. Because coffee shops basically just sold coffee, there was no reason for police to pay attention to what went on in them. Thus, the pot trade moved indoors, and the Amsterdam coffee shop developed its own hazy mystique. The first coffee shop, according to some, was Mellow Yellow, a former bakery on the Weesperzijde, which was started in 1973 by a twenty-three-year-old named Wernard Bruining. Thirty years later, he told a reporter that Mellow Yellow wasn’t about profit but about “clear and fair trade, and bringing people together through a joint. We were hippies. The world would be better if people were smoking dope.”

  The coffee shop idea worked, as far as the city leaders were concerned. Liberalism as an ideal—allowing people free exercise of their rights to pleasure themselves—did not feature much in official deliberations on the topic. The coffee shop concept was an expedient: it managed the inevitability of soft drugs; it contained their use; it provided for a measure of control. Technically, pot was still illegal, but provided coffee shops didn’t advertise and didn’t permit hard drug use, gedogen ruled. Thus came the golden age of ganja Amsterdam, the spliff center of the universe, the place to which latter-day hippies would flock to sit in stoned public contentment listening to Pink Floyd before boarding the Magic Bus from an office off Dam Square to ride the Hippie Trail to India and other points east. By
the 1980s the city contained somewhere around fifteen hundred coffee shops. You could buy (and still can) Super Palm, Honey Yellow, Orange Bud, Black Bombay, Indian Cream, Burmese Kush, and a hundred other varieties, as well as Dutch brownies and space cake.

  Prostitution followed a similar trajectory, with the difference that the perception of it as inevitable and thus to be tolerated goes back practically to the city’s founding. In the case of prostitution the containment idea centered on two fronts: isolating it to specific neighborhoods (there are a couple of small red light districts in addition to the main one, De Wallen) and moving it off the streets and behind windows. The first prostitute windows—in which women displayed themselves to the public—appeared in De Wallen in the 1960s. There are several hundred windows today, as well as prostitutes who work in brothels. By the 1980s prostitutes had organized themselves. An advocacy group, called the Red Thread, came into being. Prostitutes wanted legalization of the trade. They wanted to change the mind-set that saw them as fallen women in need of reform and to be thought of simply as workers doing a job.

  The year 2000 was a watershed for the kind of liberalization for which Amsterdam in its recent guise has become famous. It came about as a result of another of the Dutch convergences of social and economic liberalism. The governing coalition of parties included the main social liberal party, Labor, as well as two economic liberal parties, D66 and Liberal. Working together, and operating from different philosophical perspectives, they passed a slate of laws that extended civil liberties in several directions. Prostitution, gay marriage, and euthanasia were all legalized. This particular series of legalizations runs against the argument that Dutch tolerance is simply passive acceptance, for these decisions were made expressly to advance freedoms and rights. Same-sex marriage was a recognition of the equal rights of homosexuals, euthanasia of the right to die with dignity. Economic liberals argued for the legalization of prostitution on the grounds that citizens should have the right to practice a trade for which there is a market. Social liberals believed that legalization of prostitution would bring regulation, which would protect the prostitutes and their clients.

  The business of prostitution did indeed become more normal. Some prostitutes are members of the FNV, one of the largest Dutch trade unions. The Red Thread offers advice on its Web site to sex workers, including tax help: “As a freelancer you may deduct the cost of condoms and transportation. Unfortunately, clothing and personal care costs are not deductible.”

  Many of the problems that plagued the business for centuries remained, some of them exacerbated by legalization. Amsterdam became a center of human trafficking. Likewise, the advent of coffee shops and the decriminalization of marijuana didn’t erase problems associated with drugs. In a number of ways, the Dutch in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have served as a scientific test case for the possibilities of radical liberalization of laws related to social behavior. One conclusion is that it’s difficult to legalize something that the rest of the world does not allow without becoming a front for organized crime. As a result, Dutch politicians began to retreat from the liberal excesses. The numbers of coffee shops and prostitute windows were cut back, and Amsterdam and other municipalities began to take firmer steps to regulate the businesses.

  Yet you didn’t hear many Amsterdammers demanding that these businesses be stopped altogether. Job Cohen, who was mayor of Amsterdam from 2001 to 2010, told me that the answer to the problems caused by legalizing or officially tolerating the sex and drug trades was to better regulate. “In Amsterdam freedom is an ultimate value,” he said. “People come here because they have the feeling that they can do anything they want. That is our history, and we have to protect it.” As a result, you could find, in the wake of the city’s 2008 prohibition on cigarette smoking in public places, signs such as this in coffee shops: “In compliance with new Dutch laws we have disallowed tobacco smoking in our bar. Cigarettes, blunts, and joints mixed with tobacco must be smoked outside. Pure marijuana joints can still be smoked indoors, as can pipes and bongs that do not contain any tobacco.”

  The curious flip side to Amsterdam’s famously liberal approach to soft drugs is worth mentioning. The Dutch have one of the most restrictive attitudes in the world when it comes to prescription drugs. There is an innate mistrust of the pharmaceutical industry; the Dutch are deeply conservative when it comes to surgery. Doctors, amazingly, are disinclined to prescribe medicine. Prescription rates for antidepressants for young people, for example, are about one-third what they are in the United States. Several times I’ve gone to my doctor with physical complaints, only to have her write me a prescription for aspirin.

  Something similar—a conservatism lurking beneath the infamous liberalism—applies in the approach to sex. The society that once brandished a prudishness that Aletta Jacobs, Bernard Premsela, and Benno Premsela fought against has not only legalized prostitution but developed one of the frankest of perspectives on all matters sexual. Birth control is presented to teenagers as a matter of course; the famous “double Dutch” method—girls taking birth control pills and boys using condoms—has resulted in one of the world’s lowest rates of teen pregnancy and one of the lowest rates of abortion. The conservatism comes in in this way: sex is viewed as a matter not of secrecy but of health and normalcy. You see the same view reflected at the movies, where films that have R ratings in the United States for sexual content are open for all ages in Amsterdam. The flip side: a PG-13 film in the United States might be rated for adults only in the Netherlands, where movie violence that Americans think unexceptional is considered something to shield children from.

  In January of 2000, the Dutch writer Paul Scheffer, a prominent member of the Labor Party, published an article in the NRC Handelsblad, the country’s leading newspaper, called “The Multicultural Drama.” Beginning in the 1980s, multiculturalism—meaning an effort both to promote more diversity in society and to support the distinctness of different subgroups—had become the new incarnation of the tolerance the Dutch had shown, and in some sense invented, in the seventeenth century. Multiculturalism—which was prevalent throughout Europe—had led, beginning in the 1970s, to a broad open-door immigration policy. The Dutch had built attractive processing centers for refugees, with swimming pools, tennis courts, and laundry services.

  But Scheffer pointed out that multiculturalism was not building a new Dutch society, enriched by immigrants who blended in and added their talents to the whole. Instead, it had created an immigrant underclass that was becoming an unsupportable economic burden, whose members had little awareness of the values of the society that was sponsoring them and in some cases were openly abusive of the very values that had allowed them to settle there. Part of the problem was ideology. Multiculturalism, in this definition of the term, holds that all cultures are equal and should be treated equally; therefore it would be wrong to give preference to one language or way of doing things, even if it was that of the culture in which newcomers had chosen to live. But there was also a distinctly nonideological reason for the failure of multiculturalism. Newcomers were encouraged to keep their language and traditions not necessarily out of a pie-eyed sense of equality of cultures but because officials considered them “guest workers” who would eventually return to their home countries. The failure was also due to lack of follow-through. There was no master plan for integrating new arrivals. In its absence, the outdated pillar system, in which different groups had their own schools, neighborhoods, and media, reassserted itself. Immigrants moved into ghettos. Their children went to what were unashamedly called “black schools.” With little to encourage or force them to learn the Dutch language or culture, they became second-class citizens.

  Scheffer’s article hit a nerve because these were things that were much on people’s minds, but multiculturalism had been considered too politically correct to challenge. Now that it was in the open, a national conversation began. When the 9/11 attacks occurred in the United States, the conversati
on became a furious debate about immigration, Islam, and Dutch identity.

  One of the many people who had come through the refugee processing centers was a young Somali woman named Ayaan Hirsi Magan. She had had a hard life in Somalia and Kenya, was subjected to female circumcision at age five, and eventually fled an arranged marriage—it was to hide from her husband that she changed her name to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The Netherlands struck her as a bewildering paradise. She learned Dutch, enrolled as a student at Leiden University, and became entranced by her study of the Enlightenment. “I came to realize how deeply the Dutch are attached to freedom, and why,” she wrote. “Holland was in many ways the capital of the European Enlightenment. Four hundred years ago, when European thinkers severed the hard bands of church dogma that had constrained people’s minds, Holland was the center of free thought.”

  On Amsterdam’s Leidseplein, opposite many of the bars and clubs that make up the city’s nightlife district, is a debate center called De Balie. Hirsi Ali went there one night in November 2001, just after the 9/11 attacks, to hear a panel debate the question “The West or Islam: Who Needs a Voltaire?” The Dutch speakers took the position that the West, with its gaze narrowly focused on satisfying its consumerist cravings while vital issues were at stake, needed a new Voltaire, a new Enlightenment prophet. Hirsi Ali stood up and took the opposite position. “Look at how many Voltaires the West has,” she said. “Don’t deny us the right to have our Voltaire, too. Look at our women, and look at our countries. Look at how we are all fleeing and asking for refuge here, and how people are now flying planes into buildings in their madness. Allow us a Voltaire, because we are truly in the Dark Ages.”