The Netherlands has evoked divergent images in the eyes of foreigners. Although one of the most densely populated countries in the world, it is cheerfully associated with windmills, tulips, wooden shoes, and green polders where black-and-white cows peacefully graze. In its picturesque inner cities people joyfully ride their bicycles along the canals. People speak their minds freely, are averse of authority and dogma, and tolerate different opinions and religions. This image of free expression, independence and open-mindedness, however, is easily turned into the dystopian picture of permissiveness and moral bankruptcy. In recent years foreign media have routinely associated the Netherlands with drugs, prostitution, child pornography, abortion, euthanasia and other controversial “ethical issues.” The term “Dutch disease” has been coined to criticize an over-generous welfare state doling out earnings from natural resources to voluntarily unemployed citizens and recent immigrants instead of investing them in industry. Yet the same nation was hailed to offer a “polder model” of consensus-based cooperation between employers, workers and the government to overcome economic crises. The only way to understand these paradoxes is to explore the history and function of these conflicting images of Dutchness, which often tell us more about the writers who produced them than about their topic.

Envy, Fear, and Wonder

The Dutch began to appear on the mental horizon of other nations after they became a geopolitical and cultural power to be reckoned with at the beginning of the sixteenth century. True, the inhabitants of the swampy river delta near the North Sea had been noticed and described by some travelers and writers in earlier centuries. The Roman historian Tacitus in his Germania offered an ethnography of the Germanic tribes that formed a looming threat at the periphery of the Roman empire in the first century CE. He described the red-haired Batavians that lived in the area that later became part of the Netherlands as especially given to drinking, fighting and gambling. In later centuries some travelers encountered these ominous territories for missionary work, trade or political negotiations. But for the most part the inhabitants of the delta remained hidden at the periphery of the shifting empires.

The dwellers of the river delta suddenly abandoned this obscurity to enter the world stage when Northern provinces rebelled against the powerful Habsburg Empire of King Philip II and declared independence in 1581.