One of the most important aspects of Dutch identity is that they talk about their identity a lot, even more since the murders of the sociologist and politician Pim Fortuyn and filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Both these events asked the Dutch a host of uncomfortable questions about immigration, multiculturalism, their globally famed liberal values, their commitment to consensus and so on. In short these events made the Dutch think about who they were. And more than that, to talk about it. That was a few years ago. Now they are feeling a bit better. The far right seems to have stalled and the measures taken to re-assert Dutch traditions, such as citizenship classes and lessons in the Dutch language, as well as a tax on importing spouses, have re-asserted a feeling that there is a national identity to hold on to. Everything has not been lost in a post-modern haze of anything goes cultural relativism and insoluble inter-group conflicts.
As part of the national process of reflection and debate, a commission was established to identify and set out the fundamentals of Dutch identity and values. Liberal democratic governments all over the world have a touching faith in the ability of committees to answer questions that everyone else, including the government, find impossible - and impossibly tedious. They almost invariably reach conclusions that represent the lowest common denominator. If consensus is being sought where no consensus exists, reductionism is inevitable. This committee concluded that hallmark of Dutch values were democracy and the rule of law. That raised two immediate and enormous difficulties: many nations would claim democracy and rule of law as their birthright. The French and the British might even claim copyright. Secondly, Dutch people, when thinking about themselves, did not immediately think about democracy and rule of law. So that commission was all set to be a damp squib, until it was electrified by a throwaway remark from Princess Maxima, the Argentine born Crown Princess of the Netherlands. She observed that there was no single Dutch identity. Not an unreasonable assertion, you might think, given the rather anodyne conclusions of the Commission. Unfortunately for the Princess, the sky fell in and the Dutch debate and consensus model was threatened once more with the possibility of a collective nervous breakdown. The poor sociologist who chaired the Commission, a woman of considerable academic distinction and unimpeachable integrity, has lost a lot of weight and looks very stressed. There is indeed more than one Dutch identity. If identity partly resides in appearance and outlook, her identity had been altered by the debate about identity.
But I was in the Netherlands to talk to some senior people about a different aspect of identity: the attitudes of young people and what the generation gap looked like in 2007, if indeed it still exists at all. I suppose they thought I would tell them what I thought of young people today. Instead I told them what young people thought of them at least in my interpretation. I said that the brightest and best young people were angry and bitter about the legacy left them by the smug babyboomers. Sexual liberation, at which the Dutch had been at the forefront, had proved a pretty mixed blessing. AIDS and abortion left deep social and psychological scars on gay rights and feminism. Female equailty, in the having it all variant, had just made a lot of women feel stressed and inadequate, no wonder increasing numbers of professional women choose not to have children. Whether or not you choose to have children, you live with some uncomfortable consequences of the decision all your life. Liberal attitudes to drugs had simply left moral confusion and a trail of broken lives. Young people wondered how our developed societies had managed to radically increase prosperity and even more radically increase inequality at the same time. Internationally, global propserity had also left so many behind, most notably in Africa. Anti-poverty campaign members are heavily biased towards young people. And the consequence of inequality was instability, war and genocide. Above all the babyboomers had tragically neglected and raped the environment, leaving a disaster that may prove irreversible.
These were the matters of their discontent, but they also had many criticisms, not just of these matters, but also the manner of the political process. Politics as usual was no answer, either nationally or through international institutions. National politicians seem to have large ambitions and small minds. Most of their debate was self-seeking and power hungry. They were engaged in a private slagging match, only fascinating to the soon to be extinct newspapers. International politics looks and sounds like a dialogue of deaf competing factions. Kyoto and Gleneagles, to name but two, were just broken promises.
You might think, given all that, young people could be forgiven for being cynical or pessimistic. On the contrary, they were energetic and optimistic, if only the babyboomers would get out of the way. They were keen to look for new approaches and solutions - and they knew that those new solutions would be found in new ways. The potential of technology was something that the young felt could be a powerful force for good. International dialogues in the spaces being created in civil society were not all backward-looking neo-Marxism (though those tendencies still exist, courtesy of not yet retired once-Marxist academics who still leave a transitory mark on young people in their early 20s; mercifully it is generally eradicated by their thirtieth birthday). New kinds of international co-operation are emerging across cyberspace.
Once I had finished speaking, a very senior police officer said, "But you do know what is going on in the Netherlands today, don't you?" I looked baffled, wondering whether he met 'today' in the general sense or what. In fact he meant today literally. He said that for the very first time Dutch school children had gone on strike. They were protesting against the Dutch's government insistence that pupils should remain in school for 1040 hours a year, although there were not enough teachers to teach that number of hours. As a result, school students just sat round bored watching the clock go round. A charismatic 17 year old, Sywert van Lienden, had organised the first protest using the internet and mobile telephones and it had quickly spread across the school system and taking the authorities completely by surprise. Within hours he was a media hit, articulately setting out the students' case on the TV news. Fifteen thousand school students gathered in Museum Plein in Amsterdam for the second demonstration instead of going to school. The Government was left looking flat-footed and out of touch - as indeed they were. They compromised, and then stonewalled - which was almost certainly the wrong way round. Then there were the usual oldie remarks about students not knowing what they were protesting about, just having fun, not serious politics etc. This incident, whilst not an exact case study of what I had been theorising about, was pretty damn close, giving me the flush of prophecy almost totally absent in the life of a researcher. A small, harmless, meaningless gratification.
Before going to the airport I spent the afternoon in the Boijmans museum, a very fine private art collection in Rotterdam. It contained many world class exhibits, paintings by Van Gogh and Monet and so on, but the Dutch exhibits were the most interesting. Pictures of dark grey stormy skies and emotion-charged seas battering the flat, fragile lowlands of Holland, the boats tilting dizzily towards collapse. The high, white, unadorned vaulted ceilings of Dutch protestant churches, with their clean, symmetrical perspectives. All those flower paintings made out of a similar spirit of modest, understated protestant aesthetics, a counterpoint to the overblown, decadent outpourings of artists in Catholic countries. The serene merchants' houses and housewives painted so precisely by those warm humanistic artists, Pieter de Hooch and Gerrit Dou (less allegorical and more likable than the austere, brilliant Vermeer). The harmony and order of the domestic interior represents a psychological and emotional as well as an aesthetic counterpoint to those stormy, challenging seas always threatening to overwhelm the Dutch (in the era of global warming perhaps more than ever: the centre of Amsterdam is now 5 metres below sea level). Rembrandt's son Titus at his homework; his mother bearing all the wisdom, worries and weariness of the long years in the lines on her face. In the modern part of the collection were the beautiful compositions of Mondrian, who, for me, represents more clearly than any other modern artist, the Dutch blend of order and harmony on the one hand and randomness and unpredictability on the other.
Here, seen through the eyes of Dutch artists were the enduring aspects of Dutch identity and they seemed as vivid and enduring to me as they ever had: the respect for nature, the value of order and the high premium on human co-operation, combined with a distinct scepticism for messianic simplicities. A subtle harmony matters more to the Dutch than a strident melody. Pride is the worst of the seven deadly sins, and one of which the Dutch would never be convicted. They incessantly question the things they should be proud of.
As part of the national process of reflection and debate, a commission was established to identify and set out the fundamentals of Dutch identity and values. Liberal democratic governments all over the world have a touching faith in the ability of committees to answer questions that everyone else, including the government, find impossible - and impossibly tedious. They almost invariably reach conclusions that represent the lowest common denominator. If consensus is being sought where no consensus exists, reductionism is inevitable. This committee concluded that hallmark of Dutch values were democracy and the rule of law. That raised two immediate and enormous difficulties: many nations would claim democracy and rule of law as their birthright. The French and the British might even claim copyright. Secondly, Dutch people, when thinking about themselves, did not immediately think about democracy and rule of law. So that commission was all set to be a damp squib, until it was electrified by a throwaway remark from Princess Maxima, the Argentine born Crown Princess of the Netherlands. She observed that there was no single Dutch identity. Not an unreasonable assertion, you might think, given the rather anodyne conclusions of the Commission. Unfortunately for the Princess, the sky fell in and the Dutch debate and consensus model was threatened once more with the possibility of a collective nervous breakdown. The poor sociologist who chaired the Commission, a woman of considerable academic distinction and unimpeachable integrity, has lost a lot of weight and looks very stressed. There is indeed more than one Dutch identity. If identity partly resides in appearance and outlook, her identity had been altered by the debate about identity.
But I was in the Netherlands to talk to some senior people about a different aspect of identity: the attitudes of young people and what the generation gap looked like in 2007, if indeed it still exists at all. I suppose they thought I would tell them what I thought of young people today. Instead I told them what young people thought of them at least in my interpretation. I said that the brightest and best young people were angry and bitter about the legacy left them by the smug babyboomers. Sexual liberation, at which the Dutch had been at the forefront, had proved a pretty mixed blessing. AIDS and abortion left deep social and psychological scars on gay rights and feminism. Female equailty, in the having it all variant, had just made a lot of women feel stressed and inadequate, no wonder increasing numbers of professional women choose not to have children. Whether or not you choose to have children, you live with some uncomfortable consequences of the decision all your life. Liberal attitudes to drugs had simply left moral confusion and a trail of broken lives. Young people wondered how our developed societies had managed to radically increase prosperity and even more radically increase inequality at the same time. Internationally, global propserity had also left so many behind, most notably in Africa. Anti-poverty campaign members are heavily biased towards young people. And the consequence of inequality was instability, war and genocide. Above all the babyboomers had tragically neglected and raped the environment, leaving a disaster that may prove irreversible.
These were the matters of their discontent, but they also had many criticisms, not just of these matters, but also the manner of the political process. Politics as usual was no answer, either nationally or through international institutions. National politicians seem to have large ambitions and small minds. Most of their debate was self-seeking and power hungry. They were engaged in a private slagging match, only fascinating to the soon to be extinct newspapers. International politics looks and sounds like a dialogue of deaf competing factions. Kyoto and Gleneagles, to name but two, were just broken promises.
You might think, given all that, young people could be forgiven for being cynical or pessimistic. On the contrary, they were energetic and optimistic, if only the babyboomers would get out of the way. They were keen to look for new approaches and solutions - and they knew that those new solutions would be found in new ways. The potential of technology was something that the young felt could be a powerful force for good. International dialogues in the spaces being created in civil society were not all backward-looking neo-Marxism (though those tendencies still exist, courtesy of not yet retired once-Marxist academics who still leave a transitory mark on young people in their early 20s; mercifully it is generally eradicated by their thirtieth birthday). New kinds of international co-operation are emerging across cyberspace.
Once I had finished speaking, a very senior police officer said, "But you do know what is going on in the Netherlands today, don't you?" I looked baffled, wondering whether he met 'today' in the general sense or what. In fact he meant today literally. He said that for the very first time Dutch school children had gone on strike. They were protesting against the Dutch's government insistence that pupils should remain in school for 1040 hours a year, although there were not enough teachers to teach that number of hours. As a result, school students just sat round bored watching the clock go round. A charismatic 17 year old, Sywert van Lienden, had organised the first protest using the internet and mobile telephones and it had quickly spread across the school system and taking the authorities completely by surprise. Within hours he was a media hit, articulately setting out the students' case on the TV news. Fifteen thousand school students gathered in Museum Plein in Amsterdam for the second demonstration instead of going to school. The Government was left looking flat-footed and out of touch - as indeed they were. They compromised, and then stonewalled - which was almost certainly the wrong way round. Then there were the usual oldie remarks about students not knowing what they were protesting about, just having fun, not serious politics etc. This incident, whilst not an exact case study of what I had been theorising about, was pretty damn close, giving me the flush of prophecy almost totally absent in the life of a researcher. A small, harmless, meaningless gratification.
Before going to the airport I spent the afternoon in the Boijmans museum, a very fine private art collection in Rotterdam. It contained many world class exhibits, paintings by Van Gogh and Monet and so on, but the Dutch exhibits were the most interesting. Pictures of dark grey stormy skies and emotion-charged seas battering the flat, fragile lowlands of Holland, the boats tilting dizzily towards collapse. The high, white, unadorned vaulted ceilings of Dutch protestant churches, with their clean, symmetrical perspectives. All those flower paintings made out of a similar spirit of modest, understated protestant aesthetics, a counterpoint to the overblown, decadent outpourings of artists in Catholic countries. The serene merchants' houses and housewives painted so precisely by those warm humanistic artists, Pieter de Hooch and Gerrit Dou (less allegorical and more likable than the austere, brilliant Vermeer). The harmony and order of the domestic interior represents a psychological and emotional as well as an aesthetic counterpoint to those stormy, challenging seas always threatening to overwhelm the Dutch (in the era of global warming perhaps more than ever: the centre of Amsterdam is now 5 metres below sea level). Rembrandt's son Titus at his homework; his mother bearing all the wisdom, worries and weariness of the long years in the lines on her face. In the modern part of the collection were the beautiful compositions of Mondrian, who, for me, represents more clearly than any other modern artist, the Dutch blend of order and harmony on the one hand and randomness and unpredictability on the other.
Here, seen through the eyes of Dutch artists were the enduring aspects of Dutch identity and they seemed as vivid and enduring to me as they ever had: the respect for nature, the value of order and the high premium on human co-operation, combined with a distinct scepticism for messianic simplicities. A subtle harmony matters more to the Dutch than a strident melody. Pride is the worst of the seven deadly sins, and one of which the Dutch would never be convicted. They incessantly question the things they should be proud of.
see photos of Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets
