Why the Dutch Are Different: A Journey into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands [1] by Ben Coates was an amusing look at Dutch culture and the people who inhabit the Netherlands. I didn’t find it so much a treatise on the various characteristics that make Dutch people different from the rest of the world, as it read more like a light-hearted exposé about why the Dutch are so quirky, instead. Coates sums it up in one point, which he pads out for the length of his book: the Dutch are different because they are the most tolerant people on the planet. Long a haven for religious, political and scientific heretics, the Netherlands places value on individual liberties and the right to behave however one pleases, regardless of what others think. Why did the Dutch become so accepting?
“The Dutch tradition of tolerance was rooted partly in the country’s geography. Flat, open and without many obvious geographical borders, it had historically been impossible to fence off outsiders or hold new ideas in quarantine for long.”
This reputation for freedom has been the Netherlands’ strength, and its people are fiercely proud of it, however, Coates wrote, the Dutch do have to deal with some unsavoury opinions foreigners have of their country:
“Outside the Netherlands, the prevailing view of the country was that it was so liberal and easy-going as to be a kind of Woodstock writ large: a place where office workers smoked weed over their desks, visited prostitutes at lunchtime and euthanised their grandparents in the evening.”
I must admit that on my first visit to Amsterdam I had a tough time finding any fridge magnets that didn’t feature marijuana joints or images of prostitutes on them.
The small size of the country is overcrowded with over eighteen million people. So little space means a general lack of privacy, and Coates wrote of his experiences where others–often complete strangers–barrelled their way into his private business to offer their own opinions. Such an open society also leads to the most interesting eavesdropped conversations, and the author regailed us with what in North America would be considered intimate discussions with one’s best friend or doctor.
Sometimes such an open policy of tolerance can lead to intolerance, and the author wrote of the rising right wing in Dutch politics. (This book was published in 2015.) Coates, who lives in the Netherlands, surprised me by confessing that he did not have a favorable opinion of the Moroccan immigrant population, whom he alleges are loathe to integrate and are most un-Dutch by being intolerant of others. New right-wing political parties run on platforms of curbing the country’s immigration policy, asking how the Netherlands can be so tolerant that the country allows the intolerant to harass others. This is a point that Coates addresses at the end of the book. For the rest of it, however, he wrote a history of the country through the centuries, with a focus on WWII and the ravages the country faced under Nazi occupation. We learned how the Dutch work tirelessly to keep the country from being submerged and why they like their bicycles and soccer so much. Yet I wouldn’t say any of that was remarkable enough to make the Dutch people “different”, and thus it was misleading to use that word in the main title. The subtitle was more appropriate for the overall theme of the book.
[1] The formal title page capitalizes the A in Are.