This is just the latest shift in a bewildering series of changes to Dutch euthanasia laws. Two years ago, a 17-year-old girl called Milou Verhoof became the first underage person in the Netherlands to be euthanized not for any physical ailment — but because of severe psychological suffering. The number of people euthanized here rose 10% in 2024, with 2025 seeing another jump.

Little wonder Dutch citizens are feeling increasingly uneasy about their country’s ethical frontiers. While there is broad support for euthanasia generally, a study from July 2026 shows that figure falls to about half when discussing very young children. It’s a similar story when it comes to that other progressive nostrum: transgender policy. As a poll from August found, two-thirds of citizens think the Netherlands is too radical in giving hormone treatments to children who doubt their gender.

It all suggests that Dutch hyper-liberalism is increasingly threatened. Yet if that’s an unsurprising reaction to decades of radicalism, the country’s old centrist parties thunder on as usual. Given the rising power of far-Right alternatives in The Hague and elsewhere, that cannot end well.

The Netherlands is often seen as a pioneer when it comes to freedom of thought and action. Postmodernism, which emerged in the late Sixties, found very fertile ground here — as citizens and politicians alike dismantled old truths around religion, science and even the nation state itself. Suddenly, everything seemed possible, and everyone could choose their own fate. Your identity? You decide that for yourself. Your death? Up to you.

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These attitudes are typified by “15 Miljoen Mensen” (“15 Million People”), a 1996 song that revels in its liberalism. First sung by a musical duo called Fluitsma & Van Tijn, it’s since become a kind of alternative national anthem. “15 million people / On that tiny piece of earth,” proclaim the song’s lyrics. “They shouldn’t be forced into a straitjacket / Leave them alone.”

How these ideas became so popular is partly a matter of geography. Flanked by swamps and river deltas, and without many resources of its own, the Netherlands has traditionally been a trading nation. Along the way, the Dutch developed a tolerant national character: you can believe what you want, be who you want, as long as we can trade without problems. The fact the Netherlands pioneered freedom of religion in its 17th-century Golden Age is a good example of this attitude, as was the country’s studied neutrality during the First World War. At the same time, the Dutch talent for pragmatism can be attributed to our eternal struggle against the sea. We still talk about our “polder model”: originally referring to the collaboration needed to maintain the country’s dykes, but which now implies a culture of consensus-making across politics, business and the trade unions.

These deep historical trends are shadowed by more recent developments, not least the decline of so-called “pillarization” (“verzuiling”). For all their self-proclaimed tolerance, the Dutch largely self-segregated until the Second World War. Catholics only associated with Catholics, Protestants with Protestants, socialists with socialists. An individual’s whole social life — which church they attended, which newspaper they read — was organized around a single “pillar”.

After 1945, however, this pillarized society fell apart much faster than elsewhere — largely a function of lightning-fast secularization. In the early Sixties, the Dutch were still churchgoers, but a few decades later the nation was largely secularized. The transformation was hardly unique to the Netherlands, of course, but it was unusually rapid and far-reaching. In 1971, only 23% of Dutchmen were non-religious; by 2023, 48% were.

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This cultural revolution might be explained by material factors. From 1945, the Netherlands experienced an enormous jump in prosperity. The new model of social welfare duly made personal development and quality of life more important. Combined with that old liberal tradition, issues like women’s emancipation and sexual emancipation became hugely important, as the Dutch wallowed in their individualistic reputation.

Postmodernism brought us abundance, choice, freedom and tolerance. These were the values that made us, as Fluitsma and van Tijn had it, “the country of a thousand opinions”. But because of that rampant secularization, the Netherlands had relatively few conservative counterforces, certainly compared with more religious countries such as Poland or Italy. This is clear enough in Dutch politics: even Christian Democratic Appeal — nominally conservative, and which dominated parliament for decades — has now embraced postmodern progressivism.

The results of all this are increasingly stark, not least in politics itself. The Dutch establishment now chases individualism in every sphere of life — in appearance, in gender, in how people choose to die. Shared values have fallen away. In their quest to promote this liberal utopia, government systems have become over-regulated and top-heavy, with new laws rushing ahead of public feeling.

A case in point is Mark Rutte, prime minister from 2010 to 2024. He was then replaced by a conservative coalition — including the New Social Contract, a party I co-led in 2025 — but across his long tenure, Rutte and his colleagues increasingly viewed ordinary people with distrust, and dismissed their concerns. If this finally explains the state-sanctioned killing of a toddler, the views of voters be damned, it’s an attitude that’s infected other policy areas too. When, for instance, 44,000 parents receiving childcare benefits were wrongly labeled as fraudsters, the establishment ignored their plight for years, with devastating consequences for families.

If the establishment is still happy with the progressive consensus, voters themselves have started hunting for new values. Or rather, they’re returning to old ones: around community, responsibility, discipline. That, in turn, is pushing increasing numbers of people away from mainstream politics. It’s telling that in recent times a number of Dutch anti-establishment parties have risen in the polls, with New Social Contract just one example.

In the end, the Right-wing cabinet we formed following Rutte’s departure did not last long. Our differences on the rule of law with the PVV, Geert Wilders’ far-Right party, ultimately proved too great. Not that the centrists, now back in power once more, seem to have learned much from their defeat. On they go with the same progressive ideas, even as we’re on the eve of a new values-driven era.

This establishment blindness is clear across politics. Despite plenty of resistance, hospitals can now terminate pregnancies up to 24 weeks. If the baby is nevertheless born alive — babies are viable at that stage — care is taken that their life ends “without suffering”. A generous transgender policy, which two-thirds of Dutch citizens are against, is nonetheless continuing unchanged, while the Senate is also considering a bill that would allow the artificial cultivation of human embryos.

If “sensible” centrist politicians keep on this path, taking no account of the values that ordinary voters are asking for, they will only add fuel to the anti-establishment fire. In our dealings with Wilders and the PVV, I saw how dangerous that could be in the long term. Nor is my country alone. Next year, elections are being held in Germany, France, Italy and Poland, among others. People across the political spectrum will rightfully worry about the rise of the far-Right. But defeating that threat will not come from simply ignoring what voters are saying — on euthanasia or anything else.

But while Wilders can comfortably fill a small venue with traditional working-class voters, young men in black, MPs and party stalwarts in this stronghold and fishing village north of Amsterdam, the question is whether he will do the same at a national level. This veteran of Dutch politics is leading in one of the polls, and is neck and neck with two other parties in another, with a snap election today. After a shock win in 2023 elections, his far-Right Party for Freedom (PVV) party failed to pass its promised asylum laws, collapsed the coalition and has slumped from its current 37 seats to between 23 and 29 in the final polls.

Yet many continue to support the one-man party’s narrative about how asylum seekers — 12% of immigration last year and less than the European average — are responsible for the country’s housing woes, integration questions, and price inflation.

The Netherlands does experience real pressures: starting with demography. Like many Western European countries, it is dependent on immigration for its future prosperity. A state commission last year recommended “moderate growth” to 2050 — from 18 million currently to 19 or 20 million. It has an aging population and Europe’s shortest working week. In this rich land, a larger group of labor migrants and highly-skilled “expats” are essential to staff farming, distribution and meat processing jobs, as well as more high-tech industries.

As for the low-paid migrants who come in larger numbers from Eastern Europe, they typically face the worst housing and exploitation. Left-wing parties like Frans Timmermans’ GreenLeft-Labour argue that cracking down on poor conditions and minimum wages is a better way of getting a “grip” on migration in Europe’s second-most densely populated country. Wilders, by contrast, proposes a “total asylum stop”, the army at the borders and stronger measures to eject people who are refused asylum or commit a crime — without discussing labor migration at all.

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Faced with a housing crisis — caused by a decade of stimulating property speculation, a rising number of single-person households, and a lack of building to keep up with population growth — views have polarized around immigration. Wilders blames the asylum seekers, who get priority for 7% of new social homes if they get a residency permit; Dutch media and progressive Amsterdam politicians criticize “rich” expat workers, who buy 1.5% of houses nationally.

Today’s election, therefore, is a turning point: will a centrist coalition (excluding Wilders) form an effective government in the 150-seat parliament, build affordable housing, solve an environmental crisis around excess nitrogen compounds and address affordability? Or will dissatisfaction only grow among disaffected voters, especially since the main parties have now erected a cordon sanitaire against the controversial, anti-Islam Wilders?

Certainly, Wilders manages to inspire a level of loyalty rarely seen in other parties, in this fragmented political culture.“Being a freedom party voter becomes a social identity, it becomes who you are,” says Bert Bakker, who studies political communication at the University of Amsterdam. “And just as supporters of Ajax [football club] remain loyal to the team even though it’s going through terrible periods of management, regardless of government, a core of the Freedom Party supporters will stay loyal.”

The fact that Wilders has not succeeded in government; that many of his ministers were accused of incompetence; and indeed that he walked away within 11 months, does not, Bakker says, matter to them. “We live in a very fragmented country,” he continues. “There’s just a strong group of voters who feel the country is moving in the wrong direction. And that a lot of that is tied to [beliefs about] migration and/or corrupt elites — that’s the populist part of it.”

People at the event on Saturday tell me Wilders truly hears their concerns. “He is going to save our country — I hope so,” says Astrid Arnold Harmsen, a special-needs assistant who hands Wilders a hand-written letter. “There’s a lot going wrong here. It’s impossible to get social housing, children can’t get a home, immigration is too high and we do too much for foreign [countries] instead of for ourselves.”

Do they have a point? While the Netherlands scores well on income equality — probably due to high income tax — wealth is spread far more unevenly. The richest 10% hold more than half of the assets, and a decade of housing-market stimulus has doubled prices: Europe’s second highest increase in the price-income ratio. Homeowners, 57% of households, still receive €11.2 billion in mortgage interest relief, while 17,000 more people are paper millionaires as property values soar.

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The extent to which such problems are the fault of immigration, however, is open to debate. The UN special rapporteur on the right to housing last year said that foreigners were not responsible for the country’s general housing crisis. Steije Hofhuis, a postdoctoral researcher on migration at the Berlin Social Science Center, points out that settled asylum seekers take up just 12% of new social housing stock — if you don’t count people who have moved from one social home to another — while it has not been acceptable to talk about the “broken” asylum system, or neighborhood cultural issues in recent years.

No less important, while the Netherlands still has a comparatively high stock of social housing, the “free” private rental market is small and expensive. With a shortage of some 400,000 homes, that’s hardly surprising. This has downstream effects too, with surveys indicating a social divide between those with academic and vocational educations, even as the latter are not well represented in councils and parliament.

Wilders, in Hofhuis’ view, has no interest in solving these issues. “I’m afraid it’s a somewhat cynical model of Wilders,” he says, “and I do find it genuinely interesting why so many people are so eager to vote for him when it is so clear he’s not interested in solving any problem.” “I think the level of anger is just huge and he, of course, has a vocabulary that appeals to that and worsens it.”

Wilders’ offensive style does not preclude him from winning votes, even though he has a conviction for insulting Dutch Moroccans and proposes anti-constitutional laws and policies on Islam.

What might prove more damaging for Wilders, rather, is something as banal as the weather. “If the turnout of the voters is high, it’s likely that the PVV will profit from that,” explains Bart Koenen, senior researcher at the Verian polling research center. “There are a lot of PVV voters who, in reality, when it’s bad weather on Wednesday, look outside and say: ‘Oh no, I’m not going to vote.’ [Wilders is] very aware of the fact that he has to mobilize a lot of people who haven’t got that much confidence in democracy.”

The Netherlands’ longest-serving MP faces other challenges too. The Christian Democratic Appeal leader Henri Bontenbal has had a dramatic rise in the polls, with a message of competence and common decency. Young and dynamic D66 liberal democrat leader Rob Jetten looks to be enjoying a last-minute boost with a “yes, we can” (Het kan wél) campaign that also takes on issues around immigration, proposing to limit sectors with a high demand for low-paid labor, while giving refugees, who have a good chance of winning asylum, the opportunity to have language lessons and work from day one. Together with the PVV and GreenLeft-Labour, they are vying closely for first and second place.

At a campaign event in Amsterdam on Sunday, D66 supporter Henri de Haan says the Netherlands could represent a new dawn for European centrism, after the failures of the far-Right in government. “You see nationalism in France, Belgium, Germany, England,” he suggests. “Parties that play on these feelings. I think that in the Netherlands we are a bit ahead because we have seen that an extreme Right, divisive party, [the] PVV has exploited those feelings to win votes, they were the largest, they were in government and they have achieved precisely nothing.”

But in the meantime, says Koenen, it has become “more socially acceptable” to be far-Right. A recent anti-immigration demonstration in The Hague is a case in point: despite descending into violence, many protesters failed to cover their faces.

All the while, Koenen suggests that politicians across the European Union will be looking closely at the Dutch results. “It’s the first,” he says, referring to the fact that the Dutch, ahead of other European countries, will go to the polls to judge the success of the far-Right at the heart of power. “I think that there will be a change, that people will choose the middle parties, the center parties. But it doesn’t lead to less voting for the PVV.”

Yesterday morning, Wilders told the leaders of the three other Right-wing parties in the governing coalition that he was quitting and withdrawing his ministers. Given that his party was the largest in the coalition — which also constitutes the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), the farmer-citizen movement (BBB), and the good governance party New Social Contract (NSC) — this was pretty much a death sentence. By the afternoon, Prime Minister Dick Schoof had resigned, saying it was all “unnecessary and irresponsible”: a snap election now looks likely.

Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Wilders and his anti-migration, anti-Islam party. The man often called a “firebrand” has exploded what is likely to be his only shot at Dutch government.

Wilders’ official reason for leaving the coalition was asylum policy. A week ago, he presented a 10-point plan to cut migration; his measures included using the army to police the border and sending home many Syrian refugees. When his fellow coalition leaders refused to add his plans to the coalition deal, instead inviting the PVV asylum minister to submit them as policy proposals in the normal way, he walked out.

Yet the real problem for Wilders is not the asylum numbers — refugee applications halved in the first quarter of this year compared to 2024. It’s that Wilders’ party has been plummeting in the polls. In the 2023 election, his party won 37 of the 150 seats. Now it’s polling neck and neck with the center-right VVD — another pillar of the governing coalition — though other polls put Frans Timmermans’ GreenLeft/Labour alliance in the lead.

Where, then, is Wilders going wrong? Asylum is normally the golden ticket for the Dutch far-Right: it was the most significant issue in the last election, after a row broke out about a small number of refugees who had priority for social housing during a severe national housing crisis. There were also widespread concerns about asylum centers opening across the country.

But today, the two greatest issues the Dutch think their politicians should be dealing with are the housing crisis and healthcare. Wilders’ poorly thought-through proposals on both have stuttered. His party demanded a rent freeze for social housing in the spring budget, which infuriated housing corporations and private owners, and received the worst possible feedback from the Council of State. It has since been withdrawn. Meanwhile Wilders’ promise of a lower future healthcare “excess”, it turns out, will also mean higher health insurance premiums, which is not exactly a vote winner.

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His asylum minister Marjolein Faber has also made a series of missteps — most recently, refusing to sign honors for Dutch volunteers involved with refugees — and has struggled to answer questions on two migration bills: the first would introduce a dual status for political refugees and those fleeing war; the second would limit family reunification.

This experiment in government has revealed the deep inconsistencies in the Freedom Party’s policies and the inexperience of most of its ministers. Wilders is a staunch Thatcherite and yet has a voter base with ties to the Socialist Party. His manifesto is a hotchpotch of measures that claim to help the working class but don’t make economic sense. Despite being a veteran opposition politician, he lacks a vital skill set in a system of proportional representation: he cannot compromise nor build coalitions.

The other three coalition leaders have been talking about Wilders in terms normally used to describe a grumpy toddler. “It is totally irresponsible. It is so childish. I do not think it is worth a voter’s mandate,” said Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, leader of the VVD.

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But Wilders’ relationship is even more strained with another coalition party, the NSC, whose popular founder Pieter Omtzigt withdrew from politics last month. Omtzigt, one of the key figures in uncovering a childcare benefits scandal in which some 40,000 parents were incorrectly accused of fraud, created his own Right-wing party on a ticket to promote constitutional rights. To enter into an uneasy coalition with NSC, Wilders, who has a criminal record for insulting Dutch Moroccans, promised to put “on ice” his manifesto’s anti-constitutional measures such as banning mosques, Islamic schools, and the Koran.

Ironically, like Wilders’ Freedom Party, the NSC benefited from a 2023 protest vote, with many voters apparently wanting to punish a tin-eared elite that seemed to be ignoring the common man. Yet not much progress has been made on the policies on which both were elected. And in the background of this uneasy marriage, the Dutch housing crisis is getting worse, with one in eight houses facing subsidence due to climate change, and signs this week that some schoolchildren are sleeping in garage boxes or in cars after relationship break-ups, due to a lack of housing.

Like many other Dutch protest parties, the NSC and BBB have collapsed in the polls to virtual insignificance. But there are signs that central and Christian parties — traditionally the bedrock of Dutch politics — are recovering their support. Last week, Yeşilgöz-Zegerius hosted British startup Looking for Growth in a campaign-style meeting in Amsterdam’s business district. And the cherub-faced new leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Appeal, Henri Bontenbal, has seen his party’s poll numbers recover during its period in opposition. “What we have seen in the last two years is the evidence why we don’t want [to work with the PVV],” he told Dutch media on Tuesday afternoon. “I see the PVV standing on a platform with autocrats like [Hungarian prime minister Viktor] Orbán, flirting with Donald Trump, ridiculing the press… Especially when the world is so unstable, we should cherish democracy.”

While Wilders might have made world headlines, he has probably given up power for good. Although he told the Dutch press he would be back — “the next time to become prime minister and… make the PVV bigger than ever” — it is unthinkable that he could muster more than 50% of the vote in the splintered Dutch political scene. After this performance, surely nobody will want to go into coalition with him again — and some of his voters, in vox pop interviews yesterday, seemed baffled. The question going forward, as the Netherlands heads into its next election, is whether these fractious political gangs can stop fighting and get on with business.

To this day, evidence is still emerging of how Dutch people looked away — and sometimes even profited — as 102,000 of their fellow countrymen, women and children were murdered. It is the worst record in Western Europe. But now, as survivors approach the end of their lives, the Netherlands seems ready to pass on a truer Holocaust story to a younger generation.

In his new documentary, Lost City, director Willy Lindwer highlights evidence of the tram journey that brought Anne Frank and her family from the Weteringschans prison to Central Station on 8 August 1944 after their “secret annex” hiding place was discovered. It turns out that the Amsterdam transport company, the GVB, invoiced the Nazi occupier for these tram rides for 48,000 Jewish people — and continued to do so even after the war.

“What we discovered,” says Lindwer, “is that the Amsterdam tram collaborated in a massive way with the Nazis. And that last invoice was never paid so Amsterdam got in bailiffs for two years after the war to try to get 80 guilders back from the tram ride that the Frank family was in.”

In the coming years, the Dutch will have to confront more unsettling truths. Earlier this month, the Netherlands opened its first National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam to tell not just the tales of the astonishingly brave resistance, but also stories of the Jewish people who were murdered, the civil servants who betrayed them, and the ordinary people who did nothing — or even took the houses and possessions of the deported.

Inevitably, these two cultural events have become entangled in the public consciousness following Hamas’s bloody attack on Israel on October 7, and Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Israeli president Isaac Herzog used a speech at the opening of the National Holocaust Museum to call for the “immediate safe return” of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas — while, outside, crowds of pro-Palestinian protesters turned nasty, apparently jeering at Holocaust survivor Rudie Cortissos and his great-granddaughter (although they said they supported the museum). The number of reported incidents of antisemitism in the Netherlands doubled last year and the Centre for Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI) reported an “enormous peak” after October 7.

To understand all this, we must look to history, and the several important ways the Netherlands differed from other Western Nazi-occupied lands. On 10 May 1940, the German army invaded the neutral country, and after five days of fighting and heavy bombing of Rotterdam, the Dutch surrendered. The state was destroyed and a new administration was installed headed by Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian Nazi who would go on to order the deportation of the Dutch Jewish population to Nazi extermination camps.

The Netherlands — in particular, Amsterdam — had for centuries been a safe place of refuge for Jewish people. But during the war, there was far more solidarity with the Jewish populations in France and Belgium than in the Netherlands, possibly because Dutch society was based on separate “pillars”, communities living alongside one another rather than mixing. The geography of this small, densely populated and relatively unforested land certainly meant there were far fewer places for Jewish people to hide.

Indeed, while there was a Dutch resistance movement that smuggled 600 Jewish children to safety from the site of the Holocaust Museum, many citizens also profited from occupation. So-called “Jew hunters” were paid for betrayal, a Dutch railway charged Jewish people for their tickets, Amsterdam levied housing tax on Holocaust survivors for their time in the camps, and Jewish property was routinely stolen. In Lost City, a Jewish woman describes escaping arrest to find all her valuables stolen by her neighbours. Tini Jacobs-van Dulst remembers cycling through the city with her mother in September 1943, aged six, looking at empty houses and choosing one on the Diezestraat. “We never spoke about why these houses were empty,” she says. “I found out myself as a teenager.” And my late neighbour, Maud Hedeman, who survived via a prisoner exchange with Switzerland, could never understand why a Dutch family would not give her father back the family rug when they returned.

After the war, the extent of this betrayal was not discussed. For many Jewish people, the memories were simply too painful. Tram line 8 was scrapped, “Euterpestraat”, the street of the German headquarters, was renamed after resistance fighter Gerrit van der Veen, and there was little space for the Jewish war experience in public life.

“The memories of Dutch Jews were mostly suppressed,” says Bart Wallet, professor of modern Jewish history at the University of Amsterdam. “All the attention went to the resistance and to the military that liberated the Netherlands. Jews specifically didn’t fit the image that people wanted to convey during memorial activities and monuments… The Jewish community held their commemorations until the Sixties exclusively inside synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, not in a public sphere.” Only now, he says, can the Dutch people bear to face the full story. “The Holocaust Museum is a pivot point in Dutch memory culture.”

But for many Dutch Jews, this doesn’t go far enough. Holocaust survivor Salo Muller, who won group compensation from the NS railway service to repay the cost of Holocaust train tickets, has also demanded an apology and reparation from Amsterdam’s trams.

Simmering in the background, meanwhile, is a row over a public-funded “cold case” study naming Jewish Council member Arnold van den Bergh as the “betrayer” of Anne Frank’s family. Rosemary Sullivan’s bestselling book on the case, The Betrayal of Anne Frank, was stoutly refuted by historians in the Netherlands and later withdrawn. It is seen by some as implicitly blaming the Jewish population for its own destruction. To the frustration of relatives, who have retained an American law firm to defend Van den Bergh’s name, the deeply contested book is still available in other countries.

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Further research on the involvement of Amsterdam’s government in the Nazi’s antisemitic policies is expected to be released this year by the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. “We saw ourselves as the nation of Anne Frank,” says emeritus professor Johannes Houwink ten Cate. “It hurts when we are forced to see ourselves as the nation of the tram driver transporting the Frank family to the station and from there to a transit camp, and to a death camp from there. It took us a long time to come to terms with our not-so-good track record during the Holocaust.”

This reassessment is a function of a former colonial nation wrestling with its identity. The background is one defined by tumult: where Geert Wilders wins an election by attributing all social woes to asylum seekers, where middle-class Amsterdammers blame “expats” for their housing crisis, and where, in government, the Dutch apparently lose their famed ability to “polder” across differences and form a normal coalition.

And in this polarised, politically fragmented country, it throws up the question of who “belongs”, where we all originally come from and how much that actually matters. Was Dutch tolerance ever all it was cracked up to be? And where on earth is it now?

Faced with such a task, looking honestly at the past is a good place to start. But it is an uncomfortable journey, just like the tram ride when Willy Lindwer realised that, on the way to their deaths, Anne Frank’s family would have had a brief glimpse of their secret annex.

It’s a sentiment shared in Lost City by Izak Salomons, who was imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen. At one point, he explains how his sweet, six-year-old grandson asked him how he survived the war. “I said: ‘Well, we were in a camp…The Germans weren’t very nice.’ Then I saw that he was welling up and so to comfort him, I said, ‘Now they are nice again.’

“He mulled it over and then said: ‘True, but they are still ashamed.’”

Around 650 refugees are being taken off the ship; only 220 will remain. It has already outstayed its agreed welcome — until March 1 — in the North Holland village of Velsen-Noord. The local council has agreed that children currently attending a local school and people with an economic “bond” can stay until the end of May, but after that? Nobody knows.

This is the reality of temporarily housing asylum seekers and migrants on disused cruise ships or barges — a policy the UK is also pursuing. The Government plans to house hundreds of asylum seekers in Dorset, on the ship that was criticised for poor conditions when it was used as a detention centre in the Netherlands in 2006.

Cruise ships and other vessels have been employed at scale in the Netherlands since a refugee shelter crisis hit a year ago, as asylum seeker numbers headed to a five-year peak. There were devastating scenes at the Dutch registration centre of Ter Apel, where people were sleeping outside for days. One baby died in a “cold, draughty and dirty sports hall” overspill centre. The Netherlands’s Doctors Without Borders was deployed for the first time within the country itself.

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Since then, national and local Dutch politicians have been tied up in a debate about who should house asylum seekers and where. The COA refugee settlement agency reports that the total number of asylum seekers being sheltered has more than doubled since 2017, to almost 52,500 this month. A new wave of refugees is expected this year.

Two cruise ships are currently being used to shelter refugees: the Silja Europa, and the MS Galaxy, housing 1,500 people at an industrial harbour in Amsterdam. In Nijmegen, there are two other ships with 250 Ukrainian refugees; in Arnhem, Ukrainian refugees have been sheltered on two small cruise ships — although they are permitted to work straight away. There are five boats housing refugees and asylum seekers in Rotterdam.

On board the Silja Europa, Abdul Aziz, a 40-year-old lawyer from Syria, is sitting in the middle of a deserted lounge area. He has been here for seven months and hopes to find work, a house, and then to bring over his wife and two sons. “The ship is good,” he says. “It is a good life, but there are problems because of many languages, many countries. I transfer to Nijmegen on April 24 — it’s difficult to leave the ship to a new place with four, maybe five people in the same room.”

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With an eye to avoiding an appearance of luxury, the ship’s swimming pool, gym, casino and shops are closed, although one facility provides second-hand clothing and sanitary products three times a week. The disco, looking out onto the North Sea channel, is now a “silent space” for private prayer and weekly female-only fitness classes. There’s a children’s play area run by refugee volunteers and a restaurant offering three meals a day, beginning at 3.15am during Ramadan, when I visited. A medical area has a dedicated doctor and nurse, so as not to detract from local facilities, and there are offices for the IND immigration service and a refugee charity aid VluchtelingenWerk help area.

“We really don’t want to give the impression that we are living a sort of a luxurious life here,” says location manager Hanneke Niele, describing how the 32 nationalities and eight languages rub along. “People get three meals a day and a cabin. And if you compare it with some shelters, then it is luxurious. But we use it as an emergency shelter. Boredom is one of the biggest challenges. No matter how beautiful it is, no matter how much privacy people have, if they are not allowed to work and do not go to school, that is just a disaster.”

In other ways, too, the ship falls short. Taqwa, 24 and from Jordan, is grateful for the help but says it is tough not to be able to cook herself. “I think in the average prison you have more space,” says councillor and head of the liberal democratic D66 party Bas van Ruig about the cabins. “It is ultimately an emergency solution.” The other problem with temporary shelters is that they make an unsettled situation even more febrile, constantly breaking people’s connections and shifting them between schools and potential work.

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“Look, we were faced with a difficult choice,” says Rutger Groot Wassink, who is deputy mayor of Amsterdam and in charge of asylum policy. “Do you think people should lie on the grass of Ter Apel or do you give them shelter on a boat? I’d rather they have shelter on a boat. But you can’t do this for long.”

For Wassink, the situation is highly political. “During the war in Syria, we sheltered about 60,000 people. But we have since cut back and also sent a message to the rest of the world: ‘Don’t come to the Netherlands.’ As a result, many reception locations have disappeared.”

Meanwhile, refugee organisations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) advocate a return to well spread, small and permanent reception locations, which are far cheaper for the public purse. “Even in the mess last year in the Netherlands when people were sleeping outside the now infamous Ter Apel, it didn’t deter people,” says Andrea Vonkeman, office head. “People were still coming. I don’t think a causal relationship has ever been established with a good system as a pull factor and bad conditions as a deterrent.”

As the debacle at Ter Apel brewed last summer, the policy to house refugees on ships was announced and sparked huge opposition — particularly to the initial idea (quickly scrapped) that the vessels might be moored at sea. However, despite these concerns, there have been no notable incidents so far on board. Children go to school, the ships have been opened to journalists and locals, and there are bus services so refugees aren’t stuck at remote locations.

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Standing at the harbourside in Velsen-Noord, even local politicians who vociferously opposed the ship thought twice about the hard departure date. “If we knew then that we would have so little nuisance, it would not have been a problem,” said Joost Bleekman, head of Velsen Lokaal. Still, agreements were made, and he doesn’t want the boat to stay.

Where will the refugees go next? While some municipalities have stepped up, perhaps motivated by compensation — Velsen-Noord was given more than €3 million — other regions have done nothing to help. A controversial bill to forcibly “spread” asylum seekers evenly throughout the country has been repeatedly postponed, and the protest party BoerBurgerBeweging — which is critical of the plan — has just won regional elections, potentially throwing a spanner in the works.

Without an adequate, permanent system in place, refugees are doomed to keep on moving. As Niele walks around the Silja Europa in her smart pink jacket, one man after another approaches her politely, anxious about where he is going to be shipped next, asking for her help. One thing’s for sure: this is no pleasure cruise.

“It’s fine on the other side, it’s fine on the other side!” sing five rowdy, dancing Brits, to the tune of the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West”. On the other side of the 14^th century Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal, a cluster of partying men yodel back. It is midnight on a Friday in the heart of Amsterdam’s De Wallen district, and I am on a reconnaissance tour with Amsterdam’s Night Watch.

This is not the Night Watch memorialised by Rembrandt in 1642, the civic militia that would defend the city of Amsterdam from outside attack. Now the enemy is within, in the area named for the old city walls, but now infamous as the red-light district of Amsterdam. Els Iping and her neighbour Romeo are pacing the streets. Armed with quiet words and high-vis jackets, they are part of the “Wallen Watch”, a local vigilante defence force against drunken, doped-up tourists on raucous, licentious holidays.

When tourists slip behind chains intended to dissuade them from trespassing on people’s doorways to smoke weed, when there are strippers dancing on bars without a sex licence, when two groups of British tourists share their version of 1980s hits with entire neighbourhoods, Els politely takes note. “Please could you be quiet,” says this grandmother and former politician, who has lived in the Red Light District for four decades. “People live here.” To my amazement, every time, the tourists (often British) look abashed, say sorry and go on their way.

Why have the people of Amsterdam been forced to take public order into their own hands again? Because six decades of tolerating sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll have turned their city centre into a non-stop Saturnalia for visitors “on holiday from their morals” (as former Labour councillor Dennis Boutkan memorably put it). But morality aside, it is also a question of numbers: with thousands packing out the roads and streets on weekend nights, it is sometimes impossible for even emergency vehicles to access the area. And Els and Romeo are not alone in believing all this has been facilitated by the legal grey area of state policy on soft drugs.

Romeo, who has lived for six years at the heart of all this, says that when he leaves for his morning work at 4am, there are frequently still groups of screaming tourists. “With the corona rules, the place was empty in a day,” he says wistfully. “I saw people who live here, who never dared to sit outside before, having a picnic.” Now the pandemic lockdowns are gone, the tourists are back. And 47% of them are tempted to Amsterdam by the coffeeshops, although it’s clearly the combination of party behaviour (drinking, screeching, leering, urinating, with a spliff on the side) that creates the most localised nuisance. “We started last year with 30 people,” Els tells me. “Six people have moved away. It’s noise you can’t arm yourself against. We are desperate…but I don’t want them to win.”

“They”, in her view, are the businesses that have everything to gain from a loud and cash-filled Red Light District: the drug dealers offering a menu from pills to cocaine, the brothel owners, the 166 cannabis “coffeeshops” (100 serving tourist demand alone), plus sweet shops, bars and restaurants (for those with the munchies). Some may be set up by upright businessmen; some, says the mayor of Amsterdam, are part of criminal networks. Thanks to the opaque business constructions common in the Netherlands, it’s hard to tell them apart.

And for local residents, ironically, the Dutch idea of “tolerance” has become completely intolerable. The prostitution windows where sometimes-trafficked foreign women show off their cosmetically enhanced wares, the raucous bars, the coffeeshops where cannabis is sold and smoked, feel like an invasion: not a liberal paradise, but a human zoo from another age. A soft drugs policy that was ahead of its time in the Sixties has stranded the Netherlands in a no man’s land between controlled legalisation and arrant criminality. Under the Opium Act, a policy of toleration or gedoogbeleid means that the state allows “coffeeshops” to be established, taxed, and to sell cannabis to customers for consumption on site. However, since commercial cannabis growing is illegal, they have to buy from criminals.

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Mayor Femke Halsema, the deputy mayors and heads of the local police and public prosecution are convinced that the situation is untenable. Halsema believes that full legalisation and regulation of cannabis — and also cocaine — is the answer. In the meantime, she wants to enforce an existing national law to ban tourists from coffeeshops in order to shrink the sector. A majority of city councillors, concerned about more vulnerable young men being sucked into dealing to meet tourist demand and a consequent explosion in street crime, voted against her proposal this month.

Diederik Boomsma, councillor and head of the local Christian Democratic Appeal party, is one strong advocate of banning tourists from coffeeshops and is raising awareness about the dangers of drug use. “Peter Hitchens wrote a book about the drug policy in Britain and it starts with saying: cannabis isn’t merely a drug: it’s a cause,” he tells me. “That’s true in Amsterdam more than in other places and when something becomes a cause, people associate it with their self-understanding as a free, liberal, open-minded, tolerant city. But it doesn’t work. On the one hand, we say it’s allowed, you can buy the stuff in this coffeeshop, but it’s supplied by criminals so obviously you are going to have a huge criminal infrastructure. Why would you do something that funds violent criminals? Peter R de Vries was murdered right in front of my house.”

He is referring to the murder of a Dutch journalist who had been advising the crown witness against an alleged drug cartel — a killing which shocked the country into paying attention to its drugs problem. It was the third execution linked with the Marengo murder trial (involving leading members of a Dutch-Moroccan criminal organisation) following the deaths of the crown witness’s brother and his lawyer. For while the Netherlands’s transport links and horticultural and technical skills have made it a perfect landing-point for South American drugs (alongside its hugely successful domestic drug industry), this has brought violence in its wake. Experts like Jan Struijs, chairman of the Nederlandse PolitieBond police union, go as far as to call the country a “narco-state 2.0.”

Threats that the Telegraaf newspaper suggests come from the quarter of organised crime have recently even been aimed at Dutch Princess Amalia and Prime Minister Mark Rutte. And four suspects were arrested in and around The Hague on suspicion of preparing to kidnap Belgian justice minister Vincent van Quickenborne, after Dutch drug gang violence spilled over into Antwerp this summer. Across the Netherlands, drug experts like Pieter Tops and Jan Tromp — who wrote an influential 2019 report on the “dark side” of Amsterdam — believe some coffeeshops are part of a chain of ever more violent and lucrative drugs criminality, with shops, bars and property used to launder the money (part of a dodgy €16 billion a year that washes around the country, according to the De Nederlandsche Bank).

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It’s a desperate situation, with the Dutch government investing millions in deterring crime that undermines public order, and putting together international partnerships to make its coastline “as unappealing as possible” for drug criminals importing their products. The public prosecutor finally has a larger budget to go after crime that has seeped into the “upper” world: lawyers, art galleries, accountants, banks and even civil servants who have committed alleged passport fraud, sold private details, failed to properly scrutinise their clients, or been over-eager to take payment in cash.

The justice minister of the Netherlands, Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius doesn’t think legalisation by the Netherlands alone will do much, but admits the tolerance policy on cannabis really isn’t working. “If I’m honest, the ‘back door’ as we have it now in the Netherland, that [soft drugs] are tolerated but you can’t grow them, is very difficult to explain,” she tells me, after a meeting of European justice ministers in Amsterdam.

“Abroad, people look at you as though you are crackers. One point of view is that weed and soft drugs are another sector, another branch, with hard-working entrepreneurs and nothing wrong. But there’s also a notion that this is an entry point for cartels and other levels of drug dealing. You need to look at this very carefully.” She hopes that a much-delayed trial of legalised growing within 10 local areas begins soon so the ministry can analyse whether regulated cannabis growing reduces criminality. Meanwhile, others countries are experimenting with more permissive approaches to cannabis. Uruguay made the drug legal in 2013, followed by Canada, Mexico and some US states. Medical usage was legalised in Portugal in 2018 and Thailand is turning a blind eye, to stimulate tourism.

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While some people, including Amsterdam’s mayor Halsema and the attorney for the Marengo crown witness, Peter Schouten, believe legalising and regulating drugs is the only way to sort out the situation in the Netherlands, others want to send a message that drug tourism isn’t welcome. Boomsma has proposed a ban on weed smoking in public in the centre of Amsterdam, and believes his motion will get a council majority this year.

In the meantime, the situation in De Wallen — even compared with the bad old days of heroin addicts on the streets — is relentless for local people like Els and Romeo. While some political parties are focused on the problems of vulnerable districts on the outskirts, Els and Romeo point out that it is madness to make any part of the city essentially unliveable at a time of desperate housing need. Even some of the tourists seem blown away by it all. A young Australian woman emerging from the Casa Rosso “erotic theatre” at the end of the night on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal, seems a bit dazed. “I need to wash off the filth,” she says, looking around and only half-joking.

The Netherlands needs more than a shower of liberal platitudes to clean up De Wallen. It needs clear drugs policy, a flashlight on criminal constructions and a power hose.

Set in the World State in AF 632 (AF standing for “After Ford”, he of the Model T), Huxley’s dystopia offers nothing but synthetic nosh. At a party for the World State’s Alphas, the guests are induced to “take a carotine sandwich, a slice of vitamin A pâté, a glass of champagne-surrogate”. Even the proles get “beef-surrogate” — which these days we might call a plant-based burger.

If Huxley were to visit the tiny Dutch university town of Wageningen, he would be unnerved by the accuracy of his forecast. So would you. Wageningen, an hour by car from Amsterdam, is the capital so-called “Food Valley”. Every which way you look, there are fields burgeoning with crops, giant glasshouses, and modernist glass-and-steel labs where more than 6,500 scientists are planning the future of food. It all seems lovely — starry-eyed researchers beavering away to end global hunger and halt climate change via a revolution in food technology — until you look closely at Food Valley’s strategic “Sustainable Protein System”, or examine the list of companies investing in the “Silicon Valley of Food”.

The Sustainable Protein System is the promotion of “alt-proteins”, as opposed to the conventional proteins we might get from food, which come from farmed animals. Some of the alt-protein research in Food Valley is directed towards consuming insects (“entomophagy”); some is more focused on algae, fungi — or mycobacterial this, that and the other. But the big research bucks are flowing one way only, and that is to plant-based alternatives to meat.

More than 60 agri-food multinationals have invested in Food Valley and centred their research operations there. They include Kraft Heinz, Nestlé, Cargill, Kikkoman, and Dupont. Upfield, the giant plant-based group behind Flora and the Greek vegan cheese brand Violife, has constructed a €50 million Food Science Centre at Wageningen. This pales in comparison to Unilever’s €85 million Foods Innovation Centre, nicknamed “The Hive”, with its priority research area for “plant-based ingredients and meat alternatives”.

Multinationals love the phrase “plant-based” because it is a euphemism for the messianic, cultish, modish cause they have adopted: veganism. But the official FoodValley NL platform is less squeamish about its mission: it self-identifies as “Vegan Valley”.

Is it not curious how veganism, which dresses itself in the hip clothes of animal welfare, anti-climate change and eco-feminism, can’t wait to get into the blender with big business? Sniffing around the multinationals of Food Valley are no less than 3,500 SMEs, a remarkable number of which are vegan start-ups. They can smell the money, and vegan ethics invariably melt when some suit from a corp opens the wallet — even when that suit is from the very meat industry vegans profess to despise.

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The flow of tainted money into veganism began big time in 2016, when Tyson Foods, one of the world’s largest meat-processing companies, took a 5% stake in fake meat start-up Beyond Meat. In 2018, Unilever bought Dutch meat-replacement producer De Vegetarische Slager for an estimated €30 million. Last year, the Brazilian meat giant JBS bought the Dutch meat-replacement company Vivera for €341 million. According to statements issued in the wake of the purchase, Vivera will remain an independent operation within JBS and keep its current management. So that’s okay then.

And any vegan SME settling in Food Valley concerned it might miss out on the largesse of the corps need not worry: there are other sources of funding. Food Valley is subsidised by the Dutch state, and the EU. Both have pumped hundreds of millions of euros into Food Valley. In 2020, the Dutch Research Council granted €1.7 million for a single research project into animal-free milk protein.

And this is just the funding we know about. Transparency, in Food Valley, is limited. When Dutch investigative journalist Vincent Harmsen went to court demanding that Wageningen University, the driving force behind the Food Valley “ecosystem”, release information about its scientists’ relations with agrochemical firms Syngenta, Monsanto and Bayer, the court upheld the university’s right to keep schtum. During her tenure as president of the university, Louise Fresco was simultaneously a paid non-executive director of Syngenta. All of which begs the question, how objective is the science coming out of Food Valley, given who’s paying for it?

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The story goes that it’s cursed cows that are supposedly wrecking the planet, by belching methane and hogging fields which could be planted with soy for humans. Food Valley’s mission to find a bright answer to humanity’s protein problem trades heavily on the Netherlands’ reputation as an agricultural wonderland. The Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency (NFIA) — after boasting, “No Beef Here: How the Dutch are Innovating Plant-Based Proteins” — gushes that “the country is the second largest exporter of produce in the world, so it’s clear that the Dutch have created something unique within their borders that might inspire others”.

Actually, the Dutch model of agricultural surplus is a little less perfect than advertised. Post-War, the Netherlands’ agriculture minister Sicco Mansholt vaunted industrialised, mechanised farming — and, as the first European commissioner for agriculture, broadcast his vision across the continent. The Mansholt Plan — criticised notably by E.F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful — was upscaled into the Common Agricultural Policy, and it certainly resulted in plenty (there were wine lakes and butter mountains). But the CAP gobbled nearly 70% of the EU budget and left a continent stripped of nature. The Netherlands was among the worst cases. People rightly complain of the UK being “nature-depleted”, but The Biodiversity and Habitat Index composed by Yale University puts the Netherlands in 25th place and the UK — yes, the UK — comes in sixth.

As a result of its celebrated intensive farming, levels of nitrogen pollution in the Netherlands are so high that in 118 of the nation’s 162 nature reserves, nitrogen deposits exceed ecological risk thresholds by an average of 50%. In fact, the Netherlands is in the midst of a full-scale political crisis over nitrogen. The government’s efforts to cut the amount pumped out by the agricultural sector it once lauded have been fiercely opposed by the farmers it once encouraged. During the summer, police fired live rounds at one of the country’s now commonplace tractor demos, and the municipalities of Apeldoorn and Harderwijk declared a state of emergency.

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The Netherlands, then, is hardly a success model of how a country should feed itself — let alone the rest of the world. Perhaps in its promotion of alt-protein, the nation is undoing its previous farming wrong? The cultured meat burger was born here, after all, in 2013, the brainchild of Professor Mark Post. (Post went on to found plant-based Mosa Meat — which, of course, took investment from a real meat company, The Bell Group.) But it looks as if the Netherlands is just repeating its earlier mistake, a double-Dutch agricultural error of mass over matter, surplus over substance.

Proponents of alt-protein claim that it is a necessity, required to feed the world’s growing population. The world’s farmers, however, already produce enough to feed current and future mouths. The problem is waste — a third of global food is binned, or left to rot — and distribution. You can produce as many plant-based burgers as you care to, but if the poor are unable to access them, they will still hunger.

But then, Big Veganism has little incentive to target the hungry. A recent paper, “Vegan food geographies and the rise of Big Veganism”, makes the salient point that “lower-tech, minimally-processed and socially embedded vegan foodways are noticeably absent” from the vegan model being promoted in places like Food Valley. Think about it: the essential ingredients of plant-based food are wheat and soy, precisely those crops already industrialised by the Dutch model and in the grip of the agri-multinationals. A Big Vegan world, without reform to waste and food-distribution policies, would require about one-third more cropland. It would therefore also require more artificial fertiliser (likely nitrogen-based), plus pesticides, herbicides and all the other polluting “cides” produced by Bayer, Syngeta and the rest of the agri-chemical giants.

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The Brave New World of Big Veganism will be, in other words, a corporate dream. Industrially-produced crops will be fed into factories owned by food multinationals and transformed — by energy-demanding and expensive machinery — into a meat substitute. That meat substitute is then likely to arrive in a supermarket in an expensive, value-added, ready-made form (“plant-based chicken tikka”, “plant-based spaghetti Bolognese”, ad nauseum). Big Veganism will kill home cooking — the making of meals from prime ingredients — which is a form of freedom, a creative act. Mind you, the veganised masses will be too feeble to protest against the loss of their humanity: in June last year the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that children on vegan diets were, on average, 1.2 inches shorter and had up to 6% lower bone mineral content than meat-eating peers.

Will meat substitutes actually provide us with any nutrients at all? We won’t know. The exact composition of the product will be, of course, a corporate, patented secret, meaning anyone who wants the ability to feed themselves in a world without farm animals will have to cough up. But if Big Vegan’s recipe for its fake steak is hush-hush, you can bet that the principal ingredients are wheat gluten, soy and water — so add a carbohydrate-induced obesity epidemic to the enervation of the masses.

If this is Food Valley’s recipe for the future, then Ford help us. What is to be done? The hero of Huxley’s Brave New World is the noble savage John, brought into “civilisation” from a wild reservation where he grew and cooked his own food. After being persuaded by a World State shopkeeper to buy beef-surrogate, John regrets it, and sets his mind to never eating it again — as an act of rebellion against a fake-nice, authoritarian, dehumanising system. Maybe John was onto something.

Harskamp is the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, a postcard-perfect village of neat houses and tree-lined streets that is home to just over 3,500 people. The idea that the population might increase by 20% overnight came as a shock to some. When the Garretsens neared the Harskamp Barracks, around 250 young local men were burning tyres, hurling fireworks, and howling “Our own people first!” and “Harskamp belongs to us!” Garretsen immediately got her son out of there. “There were fireworks everywhere,” she told me.

Today, on a spring afternoon on the same spot, it is hard to imagine such a scene. The Afghans have left, and the barracks are now home to around 650 people who fled the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On a grassy patch outside the gates, a large Ukrainian flag flies. Refugees cycle past on bikes loaned by locals, giving cheery waves. Volunteers from one of the local churches hand out Dutch syrup waffles to children. A short walk away, Garretsen shows me a clothing bank, brimming with items donated by Harskamp residents.

Harskamp is representative of a wider contradiction in Europe’s treatment of refugees. In 2015 the arrival of more than one million people (most fleeing the Syrian civil war) saw wealthy European nations descend into panic and bickering. Southern nations accused their Northern counterparts of not doing enough to help. While Germany briefly opened its doors to people fleeing war, Eastern European countries rolled out razor wire at their borders, and since then the EU’s refugee policy has focused on keeping people out.

The arrival of more than six million Ukrainians, however, has been met with an outpouring of goodwill and a spirit of cooperation. For the first time, the EU has activated its Temporary Protection Directive, which means Ukrainians arriving in an EU nation have the right to live, work, attend school, and travel freely to any other EU country. There has been very little resistance: even the anti-immigrant populist parties who saw their support surge after the 2015 crisis have been broadly supportive.

The contrast between the warm welcome offered to the largely white, Christian Ukrainians compared to the more hostile reception for people from other cultures and religions has raised valid questions about racism and prejudice. Still, in Harskamp, the new spirit of tolerance appears to extend to everyone. Those I spoke to were embarrassed about the events of eight months ago. “The people here demonstrated and that’s not good,” says 29-year-old Bas Sturm, a deliveryman who organises football games between people living at the barracks and the villagers. They are determined to get it right this time.

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While the Afghans have left, about half the people staying in the barracks are non-Ukrainians, who were in the country for reasons such as work or study when Russia invaded. “We were welcomed [in Harskamp] in a way we never thought we would be,” says 20-year-old Algerian Guedah Siefedinne, who was studying business administration in Kyiv. “They didn’t care if we came from Ukraine or not. It was just, ‘you need help: you will eat, you will feel safe.’” Nigerian languages student Franklyn Ibeawuchi agrees: “They take care of us, the hospitality is so great. They have been asking us what we want, so they can assist us.”

But spend some time talking to the residents of Harskamp, and it becomes clear that their reserves of goodwill come with a significant caveat: that the refugees will eventually leave. And there is every indication that Vladimir Putin understands this.

European fears around migration have long provided opportunistic autocrats with the potential for blackmail. Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi was expert at exploiting concerns about unmanaged migration, extorting various financial pledges from the EU to keep people away.  The current Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan frequently threatens to renege on a €6 billion deal signed with the EU in 2016 to stop people crossing the Aegean Sea. Last winter, the regime of Belarus’s leader Aleksandr Lukashenko started bussing people seeking asylum to the border fence with Poland, in retaliation for EU sanctions.

Lukashenko’s ally Putin no doubt closely monitored that move. Putin has a history of stoking anti-migrant sentiment to try to destabilise the EU, both with disinformation campaigns that spread negative stories about migrants and financial assistance for anti-migrant parties. Now he is trying to light the fuse of the powder keg he created.

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The relentless Russian targeting of civilian and vital infrastructure in Ukraine — schools, hospitals, farmland, grain silos — seems calculated to make Ukraine uninhabitable, thus forcing an unprecedented number of people out of its borders. As the New York Times put it in a recent editorial: “Refugees are not a design flaw of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.”

If Putin’s aim was to exacerbate the divisions of the 2015 crisis, however, so far he has failed. Across Europe, governments and volunteer groups have come together and found short-term solutions to house the people fleeing war. Hundreds of thousands are staying in the homes of volunteers. Governments have found innovative solutions. The Netherlands has come up with 55,000 beds, including in monasteries, holiday camps, and cruise liners.

But people cannot stay on boats or in military barracks forever. Yulia Popeuchenko, a 38-year-old pharmacist from Krivoy Rog in Ukraine, is sharing one room in the Harskamp barracks with eight other family members. With a ten-year-old daughter, a one-year-old son, and a husband back home fighting, she is worried about what comes next. “It is nice and quiet here but we would like to move to a place where there will be better conditions for the children”, she tells me. “I can’t cook for my children here.”

Ira Koval, a volunteer with the Ukrainians in the Netherlands Foundation, says she sees the same situation across the country, with people becoming frustrated at the temporary solutions and no sign of any long-term planning. Meanwhile, tensions are emerging. There are reports of host families in the UK evicting their Ukrainian guests. In the Czech Republic, which is hosting more than 300,000 Ukrainians, there are concerns about the financial impact.

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It is the next phase — longer-term integration of Ukrainian refugees — that will prove the most politically testing for Europe. More often than not, existing problems in host nations tend to get projected onto new arrivals, when they cease to be seen as guests. The Netherlands, for instance, will have to find a balance between providing homes for Ukrainians when many Dutch people have been waiting years for stable housing. The country is suffering an acute housing crisis, with nearly a million new homes needed by 2030. Germany is facing similar challenges, whereas in Spain the government will have to justify assisting Ukrainians to find work when around 12% of its population is unemployed.

“Once people get the feeling other groups are being preferred over them, that fuels the radical Right and anti-immigrant parties”, says Jasmijn Slootjes, a senior policy analyst at think tank Migration Policy Institute Europe. And that is what happened in Harskamp last year. “People were afraid that they will continue to live here”, says Bas Sturm. “We have few homes here that we have to pay a lot for, and the [perception is that] refugees here get a home sooner.”

Everyone I spoke to in Harskamp laughed off the idea that people staying in the barracks will remain in the village. They tolerate the current situation because it is a temporary one — the refugees are due to leave by 3 August — but where exactly they will go next is unclear. Sturm thinks that the Afghans who left Harskamp last year have been resettled in permanent housing. But Sander Schaap, a spokesperson at the Dutch Council for Refugees, says in fact most have simply been shuttled between different temporary asylum centres. More than 35,000 refugees in the Netherlands were already awaiting permanent accommodation before the Ukrainians arrived, with many living in appalling conditions in tents.

“It’s total chaos at the moment”, Schaap says. “There’s a big lack of permanent and temporary locations all across the board, and the crisis in the asylum system is going to accelerate over the days and weeks and months to come.”

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Nevertheless, the collective experience of Harskamp over the past eight months is instructive. When the Afghans arrived, the local government failed to inform the community. This time round, the mayor held consultations and town hall meetings to discuss any concerns the villagers had. Local authorities across Europe can learn from this example: while it’s important to publicly make the moral case for hosting victims of war, they must also frankly address local worries, whether they be genuine questions over the allocation of resources or misconceptions fuelled by disinformation.

Simple measures can alleviate tensions in the short term. In Harskamp, Bas Sturm started the community football matches after witnessing the animosity towards the Afghans, and saw attitudes change quickly. But the longer-term issues like housing prove thornier. Authorities must take into account the needs of both the existing communities and refugee populations. “Whether you discuss access to housing or access to education,” says Jasmijn Slootjes, “frame it as a long term investment for the entire society and not just for those coming from Ukraine”.

In the past, many European governments have shied away from making a strong, passionate, and informed case for hosting refugees, fearful of losing political ground to the far-Right. But if countries show that having refugees on European soil — whether they are from Ukraine or elsewhere — is not a worst-case scenario but a perfectly manageable situation, they remove one more weapon from Russia’s arsenal. Because while Putin may be waging war on the people of Ukraine, he knows that the battle for Europe’s soul will be fought in placid little villages like Harskamp.

A hit squad compared to a “well-oiled murder machine”. A lawyer and journalist shot on the streets of Amsterdam. A blasé approach to killing the wrong person — there’s even slang for every accidental victim: a vergismoord. Welcome to the Marengo trial, where 17 men stand accused of involvement in six murders, four attempted murders and preparing for six others between 2015 and 2017.

Fear hangs in the air around this court case, telling a tale of a country where the hydra of organised crime has so many heads that it is threatening the very rule of law. When the trial resumed this month, journalists were asked to sign agreements not to name judges or prosecutors, for fear of them being targeted. After reports that co-chief suspect Ridouan Taghi was planning a jailbreak, the streets around the fortified courtroom known as the Bunker are ringed with police cars and trained teams made up of police and soldiers.

The Marengo is only the latest in a series of organised crime trials to shake the Netherlands. This year, Dutch courts are also trying alleged criminal druglord Roger P., accused of turning shipping containers into an underworld prison, with its own gruesome “torture chamber”. Meanwhile, a Marengo side-trial involves motorbike club Caloh Wagoh members charged with shooting dead five people, preparing three other murders and “putting another seven people on the waiting list to be killed”.

“I call The Netherlands a ‘narco-state 2.0’,” says Jan Struijs, chairman of the Nederlandse PolitieBond police union. “We aren’t Mexico, with 14,000 dead bodies, but in our parallel economy, there is an attack on public order and unprecedented numbers of people with personal security — politicians, judges, prosecutors, police staff, journalists — because there is still a serious risk from organised crime. It is a huge problem, being tackled on every front, but we have a long way to go.”

Struijs first raised concerns that this small, well-connected trading nation has “characteristics of a narco-state” four years ago. At the time, there was a muted political response. But then the brother of the Marengo crown witness Nabil B was shot dead and the crown witness’s original lawyer, Dirk Wiersum, was gunned down outside his house. Finally, last July, celebrated crime reporter Peter R de Vries, who had unconventionally agreed to act as Nabil B’s representative, was shot in the head on a busy central Amsterdam street and died of his wounds.

Today, few would argue that increasingly violent crime has clawed its fingers deep into civil society. But as Lieselot Bisschop, criminologist at Erasmus School of Law in Rotterdam, points out, before you can combat the crime, it is important to understand who is involved and how. She and a team of researchers have been looking at the key drug runners’ entry and exit point of Rotterdam port, where last year a Hit and Run Cargo team (HARC) confiscated a record 72,808 kilos of cocaine plus another record of 1,500 kilos of heroin. “Whether it’s a good thing that they are catching more, I don’t know — is more going through anyway?” says Prof Bisschop. “The quantity aspect is always very challenging. It’s a dark number, guesstimates.”

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Meanwhile, the Netherlands is apparently a centre of synthetic drug manufacture, with regular busts of “professional” crystal meth and MDMA labs, especially in Noord Brabant. When international police decrypted millions of messages on devices criminals thought were secure — such as Sky and EncroChat, and the Dutch decoded Pretty Good Privacy software for Blackberry’s in the Marengo case — they lit up a web of crime.

Experts agree the Netherlands’s infrastructure is key for both legal and illegal trade. In their 2020 book, Nederland Drugsland, Dutch police academy professor Pieter Tops and journalist Jan Tromp explored how criminals exploit its efficient ports, good roads, and strong financial and digital infrastructure. “The Netherlands has long been a trading country — not just the harbours but also our high-quality internet environment. We have huge numbers of bankers and our country is central in Europe in terms of all kinds of transport and transit,” says Struijs. “We have huge numbers of imports, which means a lot of drugs are mixed with legal trade, coming in containers of fruit or liquor. Organised crime takes advantage of the legal infrastructure.”

Corruption is another factor. As a nation, the Dutch are keen to make a deal — and regular businesses haven’t always been too fussy about carrying out background checks, as various banking money laundering cases and high tax haven rankings show. The NVB Dutch banking association says an estimated €16 billion in illegally-earned cash washes around each year.

Personal corruption is also a problem in a port 40km long and with 180,000 employees, says Bisschop. “Within Europe, it is definitely the gateway for any kind of trade and probably for cocaine. Over the years, the port has become more physically and digitally secure. We think this has contributed to more pressure on the people in the port. Basically, you need corruption to pull it off — both public and private, not just police and customs but also planners in container terminals. You need someone on the inside.”

So in court, says veteran crime reporter Saskia Belleman, there has been a spate of cases against allegedly corrupt customs staff, shipping and port employees, partly as a consequence of a Dutch gedoogcultuur of looking the other way. There are also concerns about so-called “collectors”, often young men who trespass into the harbour and collect drugs.

Nobody knows if the Netherlands is worse than other European port countries in terms of international organised crime, but its soft drug culture is undoubtedly a weak spot. Although smoking cannabis and coffee shops selling the drug are tolerated, it is illegal to grow commercially. This means that cafes offer a legally tolerated channel for criminal activity, and a training ground for young criminals.

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In the Netherlands, it’s become increasingly common to read about the ethnic aspect of organised crime — the so-called “Mocro Maffia” Moroccan-origin mafia which inspired a true crime book and spin-off television series. But Peter Schouten, one of the new lawyers for the crown witness in the Marengo trial, says: “It’s not true that it’s only people with another ‘heritage’. Certain gangs have a kind of micro-organism, a gangland where there’s a lot of the same culture, but there are other gangs arrested, and you read stories saying that the new kingpin is ‘Bolle’ Jos from Brabant.”

It’s hard to measure organised crime, partly because victims don’t always make reports, but ethnic minorities are overrepresented as crime suspects. Statistics Netherlands researcher Maarten Bloem says, though, that “if you correct for age, education level, socio-economic category, there is not much difference between different ethnic origins”. He concludes: “It’s not so much about someone’s colour but the situation in which they find themselves.”

It is unclear whether the segregated, Dutch grammar school system helps contribute to excluding certain groups, too: critics say it selects too young, hammers in socio-economic difference, and makes no account for innately-talented children who speak Dutch as an additional language.

Crime, after all, can be seen as a way out of poverty and an equal opportunities recruiter. So there’s a widespread recognition that long-term crime prevention needs to offer other options, especially to young men in problem districts. There’s a new drive targeting “vulnerable” areas in Utrecht, and projects such as working with the “top 600″ criminals and their families in Amsterdam. Meanwhile, international efforts have been led by the mayors of Rotterdam and Belgian Antwerp — where a record 90 tonnes of smuggled cocaine was found last year. They have visited South American counterparts and lobbied governments to ramp up international efforts against organised crime, increase barriers in harbours, and confiscate criminal assets.

In Rotterdam, there are promising signs of public-private cooperation, with busts by the multi-agency HARC, a new Information Sharing Centre, a business integrity initiative, and a “training container” to coach harbour staff in combatting corruption. A long-awaited law banning civilians from the container area is in place to help apprehend those vital ‘collectors’ picking up drugs from containers, while Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb is also enforcing a €2,250 anti-nuisance penalty. The new Dutch coalition hopes to add to these initiatives. It will start investing specifically in combating crime that “undermines” public order from 2023, ratcheting up to a €100m yearly investment by 2025. In the meantime, the last budget put aside an extra €434m to increase annual budgets for police, judicial organisation and subversive crime prevention, though experts warn that money must not be used to add to the layers of bureaucracy.

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Instead, some want a shift in public attitudes on drug taking: as the prosecutor said in the torture container trial, show users the “abhorrent” consequence of their habits rather than perpetuating the permissive, hippy culture of the Seventies. “It’s not done in the Netherlands to point in the direction of drug users,” says Belleman. “If you don’t use drugs, there’s no market. But people who use cocaine at the weekends don’t make the connection between organised crime and their drug use — and if you tell them, they are really offended.”

Perhaps the biggest problem, however, lies in how to prosecute those alleged criminals who are caught. In the mega-Marengo trial, hearings are currently mired in details such as whether the co-chief suspect Saïd Razzouki left his reading glasses behind when he was extradited from Colombia in December, and whether due process was followed in his subpoena.

The accused in the trial deny the charges, and Schouten doesn’t expect a verdict until 2023. “This trial is under an enormous amount of pressure,” he says. “This is about the rule of law, the dyke against injustice, and we must continue to protect this. But there is a lot of fear.” Even when the trial verdict is reached, until words turn to action, that fear is unlikely to go away.

Sitting respectfully in our ‘pews’, we put our hands together… and clap. This is not a service but a comedy night. And Amsterdam’s newest ‘church’ is really a theatre for debate and cultural centre in disguise. Incensed by the illogical nature of the current Dutch coronavirus restrictions, Yoeri Albrecht, director of De Balie, last week changed the statutes of his organisation and registered it with the chamber of commerce as a faith-based movement: overnight, The Philosophical Society; the Community of Reason was born.

It is unlikely to be the last. His example, a group of Dutch mayors predicted wryly in an open letter to the government, is likely to mark the start of “an unprecedented religious revival in the coming weeks”.

The Netherlands has been in partial or full lockdown since November, primarily due to the pressure of patients with the Delta variant on the hospital system and one of Europe’s least efficient booster campaigns. But just over a week ago, the restrictions were loosened — albeit in a strikingly surreal fashion.

In the Netherlands today, brothels can open but museums can’t. You can sweat, unmasked, in a gym but you can’t sit in a bar nursing a quiet gin. “You can come together in the Veluwe [in the country’s Bible Belt] to talk about a 2,000-year-old book, but you can’t get together in Amsterdam to talk about a book from last month,” as Albrecht put it.

So last Friday night, I was among 50 people who snuck into De Balie under the cover of darkness — for fear of the police turning up — who signed a big, black book to join the community, and prepared to enjoy a night of much-missed comedy. “The Philosophical Society; the Community of Reason is about democracy and the rule of law, the solace and consolation of culture, experiencing something together that culture can give, seeing a bit of light after two years of darkness,” said Albrecht – something of an unusual opening blessing.

Everything about the evening was as absurd as the situation in the Netherlands. The crowd devoutly wore face masks and staff religiously scanned coronavirus ‘QR code passes’. But the comics were not announced in advance, photos and recording were banned, and the whole affair had the illicit frisson of an under-age boozing session.

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Yet De Balie is far from alone in its rebellion. Across the Netherlands, bars and restaurants have been opening regardless of the restrictions – especially in towns near the German and Belgian borders. On Saturday, for instance, 30 hospitality venues threw open their doors in Horst aan de Maas in protest. Last Wednesday, some 70 museums and galleries around the country decided to ‘open’ as temporary hairdressers, beauty salons and gyms – including world-renowned institutions such as the Van Gogh Museum, the Concertgebouw, and Amsterdam’s oldest theatre, De Kleine Komedie.

“We have a problem with the fact that hairdressers and nail bars and commercial activities can be open, and we can’t,” explained Van Gogh Museum director Emilie Gordenker. “We support everything we need to do in order to keep people safe. But this policy just seems contradictory and it seems to favour the commercial sector over the cultural one.”

Even the Dutch government appears to recognise this inconsistency. In a bizarre moment during a recent press conference, Mark Rutte emphasised that the Dutch have a constitutional right to protest, and that temporary openings could be viewed in this regard. “The right to demonstrate also applies to sectors like the hospitality industry, and I can imagine that mayors could look at ‘what’s allowed for a little while’… with the emphasis on ‘a little while’,” he said. “So if they want to open for a few hours to show ‘we are demonstrating’, then it’s up to the mayors how they deal with that.”

If it was an attempt to shunt on responsibility for enforcing his restrictions to local government (even though this is actually their structural role in the Netherlands), it soon backfired. Last week, 31 mayors — including Amsterdam chief Femke Halsema and non-conformist Breda mayor Paul Depla — wrote to the Government, pointing out that short-term policy-making is “reaching its limits” and putting local enforcers in a perilous position against a growing mood of civic disobedience. “It is in fact impossible but also undesirable for the state to use repression to forcibly convince Dutch citizens that the measures are correct,” they pointed out.

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Ahead of the Government’s next coronavirus press conference tomorrow, it also emerged at the weekend that the country’s medical advisory body, the Outbreak Management Team, wants cultural and hospitality venues to reopen alongside everything else until 8pm each day.

No doubt it would be a welcome move; but is it too little too late? In the Netherlands, the damage from these lockdowns has become increasingly evident. In the government’s most recent press conference, new health minister Ernst Kuipers admitted that two-thirds of young people are suffering from loneliness. Even since the November partial lockdown, the SCP, a social and cultural government think tank, has found that psychological wellbeing had dropped, particularly among the young.

And as for the affected industries, it’s unlikely that, even if the restrictions are lifted, business will be able to return to normal any time soon. Thousands of people working in the hospitality and culture sectors have simply given up and looked for work elsewhere. Many will be in coronavirus quarantine, after coming into contact with someone who has been infected. And for those who do want to return, it won’t simply be a matter of turning up to work the day after an announcement is made. An orchestra can’t just suddenly pick up bows and be ready to perform again next week: they need advance notice to plan.

“You see that the Netherlands is mentally exhausted with the pandemic and all of the restrictions — young people but also a lot of others,” said Concertgebouw managing director Simon Reinink on Wednesday, as the orchestra gave a protest rehearsal in front of a crowd of 50 people. “The one thing that can give meaning to life is the cultural sector. There has been a chronic underestimation of the importance of culture for people’s psychological health and wellbeing — and this is a huge problem.”

And as more rules are broken, mainstream civic disobedience risks becoming a habit; this is a country where ‘rules’ (like soft drug laws) are already treated flexibly and even the prime minister admits society tends to be “slightly anarchistic”. “Rules only work if they rest upon social and political agreement,” pointed out the group of mayors in their letter last week. “For example, almost everyone in the Netherlands understands and respects the importance of stopping for a red light. Enforcement powers are there to bring the few offenders into line and issue fines.”

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Despite last week’s mini-revolts, that remains a sentiment shared by most of the country. While “wappie” Dutch vaccine sceptics and pugilistic rioters sometimes make a lot of noise, 89.2% of the population is double jabbed, and almost 55% are boosted. Most of us have done our bit, we’ve followed the rules, despite their inconsistency and blunt capriciousness.

But all the signs suggest that we have reached a turning point: the latest reports suggest that while mostly-Omicron coronavirus infections are ramping up, the number of people needing hospital treatment is relatively stable.

But from the images of the violence that were soon shared across the world, there didn’t seem to be much of that famed Dutch moderation, openness and reasonableness on show. While the rioters left destruction in their wake, it later emerged that the police had directed live rounds of fire at rioters, leaving four people with gunshot wounds. As Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans — who initially likened the protests against the Netherlands’ latest coronavirus restrictions to a World War Two bombardment (before retracting the war analogy after facing a barrage of criticism) — said, there was a “bitter irony” to the location of such wanton violence.

Dutch leaders were quick to paint the riots as acts of hooliganism rather than protest, with commentators citing the existence of group chats where people reportedly said things such as: “Where’s the protest? I want to riot.” Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb called it “an orgy of violence” that drew “a number of people who had no intention of acting peacefully, but who were there to riot, to confront the police, and to destroy public property”. Dutch caretaker justice minister Ferd Grapperhaus echoed his comments, saying that a protest against a controversial (and as yet unimplemented) idea to restrict access to certain areas for unvaccinated people was hijacked by football hooligans and criminal low-life.

But just 10 months after a the country was gripped by nationwide riots in protest at an earlier coronavirus curfew, such an explanation seems overly simplistic. I can’t be the only person here in the Netherlands left wondering why some of the country’s 17.6 million citizens are so visibly out of control and alienated from the majority. This isn’t some new phenomenon: the Dutch police have been highlighting the increasing violence of protesters for several years.

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According to the latest reports, it seems that rioters in Rotterdam were made of a number of disparate groups, motivated for a range of reasons. Football hooligans, young men with nothing to do, harbour workers with low wages and job security, and those suffering from the national shortage of decent housing were all ripe for civil disobedience. As MP Attje Kuiken says: “It’s a poisonous cocktail.”

But behind their resentment — which includes recent anger at a nationwide ban on fireworks this New Year — there are clearly bigger social problems. A widespread disaffection with government is evident in the peaceful protests in major cities practically every weekend (sometimes for things as trivial as wearing face masks).

As in many other Western countries, there is a deep polarisation in Dutch society, and increasing distrust in politicians. This was exacerbated when the Government fell in January over a scandal in which tens of thousands of parents — most of dual nationality — were wrongly accused of childcare benefit fraud and forced to pay back every cent they had ever received, with devastating consequences for their financial, personal and children’s wellbeing. Last week, the Dutch highest court officially apologised for upholding unlawful tax office rulings. But while 15,000 people have received €30,000 in compensation so far, the apparent racism engrained in government institutions has not yet been fully investigated.

After elections in March, resulting in a hugely splintered outcome, Dutch political parties are still unable to form a government — a telling picture about the difficulty in finding common ground. Those who voted for change are no doubt disappointed by the continued presence of the same establishment faces around the table, led again by liberal Mark Rutte. Meanwhile, newish far-Right parties such the Forum for Democracy have delighted in exploiting the pandemic to undermine “the political elite”. As Amsterdam University cultural anthropologist Dr Danny de Vries tells me: “Just a few days ago one of them publicly threatened another politician in the chamber, saying his time would come when tribunals are held to hold him accountable for ‘corona crimes’” Only last week, the leader of FVD, Thierry Baudet, compared corona measures to Nazi Germany.

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Yet the country’s political leaders have hardly earned a glowing report. For all their confidence in their liberal, efficient and wealthy society, they have been behind at every step in the pandemic. The Government was one of the slowest in Europe to start vaccinations, and now that it has one of Europe’s highest infection rates, it has just started offering boosters. Moreover, despite being perfectly well aware that there have been at least 31,000 corona deaths (as recorded on death certificates), the Government continues to put a much lower figure of “officially-tested positive deaths” front and centre on its dashboards. Conveniently, this number (18,966) is less than neighbouring countries like Belgium, which have always recorded suspect deaths too.

And so while there is broad support for vaccination and the Dutch have fully vaccinated 84.7% of adults, trust in government policy and leadership has plummeted recently. There have been U-turns on policy, with nightclubs open one minute, and then closed the next, and an imprudent loosening of most restrictions at the end of September. With coronavirus infections at record highs in the past week, and hospitals saying they will soon have to make decisions about who gets the IC beds, virologists are talking once more about the need for a full lockdown — and it’s not only the coronavirus sceptics or protesters who are looking at December with sinking hearts.

When he appeared on a morning chat show yesterday, Nijmegen mayor and chairman of the National Security Council Hubert Bruls was keen to emphasise that most people are not out on the streets rioting. That’s true, and it’s difficult to say whether the Dutch have more coronavirus sceptics — or, indeed, hooligans — than anyone else (although the head of Viruswaarheid corona protest group Willem Engel, adds a certain flair to events with his experience as a former dance teacher).

But anyone who has ever tried to stand in a queue in the Netherlands will realise that there’s a widespread sense of assertive individualism here, which is not often restrained by social norms such as politeness or the-other-person-was-actually-first. Basic rights like freedom of speech, movement and protest, are also grounded in the constitution, which has meant that it is very difficult for a government to restrain them. This has led to a surprising number of civilian court cases about coronavirus policy (eventually overturned by the courts).

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As a Brit living in the Netherlands, I’ve been surprised how much opposition there has been to following relatively minor rules such as wearing a face mask in certain places; the mere prospect of showing a coronavirus pass for entry is enough to cause a spiky hour of debate in most social groups, where it’s likely that at least a few people will disagree with their existence as a matter of principle.

Another element that might sit behind recent discontent is something that the Netherlands is often praised for: a light-touch legal system and emphasis on alternatives to prison and processes like mediation. Although Grapperhaus has pledged to fast-track stiff justice for rioters, and police are busy scanning camera images to round up the Rotterdam culprits, the Netherlands has recently been seen by organised crime as a “low-threshold” entry point to Europe.

The current struggle with organised crime has laid bare gaps in policing capacity, and a sense that a liberal but illogical weed policy is not helping (because smoking weed is tolerated, but growing it commercially is a punishable crime). Young men are apparently attracted to act as “collectors” of drug shipments in containers at Rotterdam harbour or criminal errand boys, and there’s a desperate need to offer other opportunities to certain groups of young people — something that has been recognised by the new mayor of Utrecht, Sharon Dijksma.

The recent violence in Rotterdam cannot, therefore, be dismissed as mere hooliganism. As the authorities launch an official investigation into the gunshot wounds sustained on Friday night, and police forces are deployed across cities to stop-and-search as bars close at 8pm, this isn’t a time to sit back and dismiss the rioting as an “orgy” of criminal activity. It’s time to sift through the ashes.

Almost five years after Britain voted to leave the European Union, the bloc faces an existential question: which, if any, of the remaining 27 countries will be next?

European cohesion is threatened by a range of serious issues; some internal, some external. Mass migration and the challenge it poses to integration remains the most daunting challenge. Last year may have seen a lull in migrant crossings as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, but they are ramping back up, largely from Libya. (Indeed, it is surely only a matter of time before politicians fall prey to their usual smoke and mirrors rhetoric about the “benefits” of mass migration in the context of an ageing population, without much credence given to concerns for cultural integration or assimilation.)

Meanwhile, the EU remains plagued by recurrent tensions over its pandemic response, particularly in regard to vaccine distribution. The European Recovery Fund also had a shaky path to approval, which left many member-states dissatisfied.

But will another member state leave? If you believe the bookies, the odds-on favourite is Italy (available at 3/1) — followed by Greece (6/1) and France (8/1). But as the Brexit referendum demonstrated, the bookies don’t always make the right call — and it would be unwise to rule out the country sitting in fourth place: the Netherlands (12/1). In fact, I believe it’s a strong contender. 

Of all the EU-27 countries, I am most familiar with the Netherlands, where I served as a Member of Parliament from 2003 until 2006. One of my strongest memories of that period was my first trip, along with some of the freshmen Dutch legislators, to the European Parliament in Brussels. Compared with our modest parliament building, the EU building was grand and impressive.

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At lunch, which started as early as 11.30am, we were welcomed with trays of tall flutes filled with the best champagne. We were then served a lavish meal, accompanied by bottle after bottle of wine. This “working” lunch went on until 3.30 p.m.

The week after, back in the national Parliament canteen with its modest assortment of sandwiches, my Dutch colleagues and I were obsessed with one question: who paid for this scandalous extravagance? In the years since, the Dutch have continued to question the financial benefit of remaining an EU member — and it’s not hard to see why.

In 2018, for example, the Netherlands contributed €4.845 billion to the EU; but in return, Brussels spent only €2.470 billion in the country. The European Union’s own website claims that “the EU budget doesn’t aim to redistribute wealth”; in the Netherlands, that doesn’t seem to quite add up.

Over the past decade, the Dutch, who are notoriously frugal, have become increasingly frustrated with the frivolity of EU spending. Exacerbating this irritation is the fact that the Netherlands is the largest net contributor to the EU budget per capita. Meanwhile, the Dutch parliament is grappling over how to afford the maintenance of the equivalent of their NHS and the rising costs of healthcare for an ageing society. Dutch health authorities estimate healthcare spending will double between 2020 and 2040, to €200 billion euros per year, up from €106 billion in 2019.

More important, though, are questions pertaining to national sovereignty and control over sensitive political issues. Every Tuesday morning, I and my fellow MPs would gather to debate both domestic and international issues. Naturally, these discussions sometimes became heated — but this principally occurred when we were told that a decision had to be made by an anonymous, faraway EU official, rather than by us.

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Increasingly, we found that we didn’t have the last word on many of the issues that mattered most to us: immigration, terrorism and agriculture, among others. Nor was this feeling confined to the Dutch political class. When, in 2005, EU countries were presented with the prospect of creating a bloc-wide constitution, only two countries held a referendum that ultimately rejected the proposals: the Netherlands and France.

True, there are still glaring differences between the UK and the Netherlands that make “Nexit” seem impractical. The UK wisely never joined the monetary union, while the Netherlands was among the first to adopt the euro two decades ago. Not only do they share a currency with much of the continent, the Netherlands is also more dependent on the single market than Britain was. And then there’s the fact that the United Kingdom is the sixth-largest economy in the world, while the Netherlands trails a distant 17th (with four other European Union countries ranking higher). While the Dutch see their country as the gateway to Europe, they are not their own island, separated by a Channel, apart from the rest of Europe.

Yet, since I left office, the frictions between the EU and the Netherlands have only worsened. This month, I&O Research, a research agency for the Dutch government, released a report that showed “a larger proportion of the Dutch are still dissatisfied (43%) than satisfied (37%) with what the European Union is doing”.

And while this same report confirmed that there is still nothing close to a majority for “Nexit” — a position with adherents only among the populist FvD and PVV parties — it did reveal that “in a referendum on whether the Netherlands should remain a member of the European Union, 61% would now vote for ‘remain in the EU.’” Less than a year ago, the figure was 72 percent. That is a striking decrease of support for the EU. The 61% figure is also striking for another reason — it’s lower than the proportion of Brits who supported Remain a year before the Brexit vote (66%). And we all know how that turned out.

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Context was everything in the UK five years ago. We forget now how unlikely Brexit seemed to most commentators — until the first, stunning results came in from northern English cities such as Sunderland.

Today, the context has shifted for one fundamental reason. Brexit has happened, and it has not been the unmitigated disaster that so many Remainers predicted. On the contrary, the UK’s superior vaccine strategy — nimble where the EU’s was lumbering and bureaucratic — provided a better advertisement for “taking back control” than anything in the original Leave campaign.

Could watching a successful exit by the UK push the Dutch population further in this direction? Don’t rule it out.

Except, of course, that there are large stretches of the world where the idea that men might legally marry men, or women legally marry women, continues to be seen as abhorrent, grotesque, immoral. The list of countries that license same-sex marriage is a highly distinctive one. All of them, with the sole exception of Taiwan, are culturally Christian. All of them, to a greater or lesser extent, have witnessed a decline over recent years in church-attendance. In many of them, indeed, this decline has been precipitous.

The temptation, then, might be to cast the legalisation of same-sex marriage across much of the West as a decisive repudiation of Christian assumptions. If countries like Sweden or Canada have blazed a trail yet to be followed by countries like Iran or India, then that, so the presumption goes, is simply because the decline of religion has further to go in the non-Western world. How long, though, can its ultimate collapse be put off? Reason, progress and tolerance, it might be hoped, cannot forever be bucked. Surely, then, given time, we shall see bearded couples cutting wedding cake in Qom?

What, though, if the prevalence of same-sex marriage in culturally Christian countries is due less to the repudiation of Christian assumptions, and more to their enduring influence? What if it is in truth a bloom with roots deep in a very particular seed-bed? Even in the bedroom, after all, we are shaped by the past. Much that we take for granted is relative, and much that we assume to be “human nature” is in truth the result of decades, centuries, millennia worth of cultural weathering.

The category of “homosexuality”, far from being something that has been universally recognised, is of very recent origin. Like “television”, it is a portmanteau word coined to define a concept that would have baffled previous generations. Although formed out of Greek and Latin, neither the Greeks nor the Romans had a word for it. Suetonius, in his biographies of the Caesars, noted as interesting foibles that Claudius only ever slept with women, and Galba only ever slept with men — but he did not dwell upon it.

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To the Romans, a preference for fucking males over females no more defined a man than did a preference for brunettes over blondes. The sword-stab of a penis was, of course, precisely what the female body had been shaped by the gods to receive; but the male body, too, was not lacking in orifices. A thrust or two, deep and quick, like the stabbing of a sword into the guts, and the business was done. Whether into the vagina, the anus or the mouth, it made no real difference — just so long as it was masterful.

Only one crucial qualification, one crucial safeguard, had to be respected. Free-born Romans, male and female both: these were strictly, absolutely off-limits. Conversely, it was the duty of slaves to serve a master’s every conceivable sexual need. They knew, as a matter of course, that the threat of rape might be realised at any moment.

All of which, of course, is liable to seem unfathomably alien to us. Why, though, do we find it shocking? Because, over the course of the centuries, Christian teachings on sex and marriage served radically to rewire the sexual imaginings of the ancient world. Paul, as a Jew, believed that every human body was created in the image of God, and therefore to be respected as such. Nevertheless, on his conviction that to rape was to offend against the divine, he put a novel spin.

The only acceptable sexual relationship, he argued, was one in which a man played the part of Christ, and the woman the part of the Church — which in turn left the head of a household no leeway to force himself on housemaids or pageboys. For Roman converts to Christianity, this required a radical recalibration of their most fundamental assumptions about sex. It was a recalibration from which we, in the West, have never turned back.

Something else, however, followed from Paul’s insistence on marriage between a man and a woman as the only acceptable sexual relationship. Almost incidentally, in his letter to the Romans, he paired men sleeping with men and women sleeping with women as comparable actions. Here was an acorn from which a mighty oak was destined to grow. Never before had the category of same sex relationships been defined in quite this way: as a unity.

It is the measure of how novel it was that it took centuries even to coin a word for it. The word “sodomy”, which began to be used in the 11^th century, signified not what we call “homosexuality”, but rather a deviant sexual act. It might just as well refer to anal sex between a man and a woman as to anal sex between two men, or indeed to bestiality, or to masturbation. It was a sinful act that, by definition, required from the person who committed it a surrender to sin. That was why it stood condemned.

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Then came Darwin. The functioning of natural selection, as developed in The Origin of Species, depended on reproduction. The mating habits of humans were therefore no less legitimate a field of study than those of the birds or the bees. Here, for scientists, was a licence to investigate the entire range of human sexual behaviour. In 1886, when a German psychiatrist named Richard von Krafft-Ebing published a survey of what he termed “pathological fetishism”, the sheer scope of his research rendered his book a focus of interest far beyond the scholarly circles at which it was aimed.

One word in particular stuck out. Homosexualität had originally been coined in 1869, to serve the writer of a pamphlet on Prussian morality laws as shorthand for sexual relations between people of the same gender. This, of course, was precisely the category of behaviour that Paul, in his letter to the Romans, had so roundly excoriated, and which the Church had come to define as “sodomy”.

Nevertheless, in the 19th century as in the Middle Ages, the word had remained a slippery one. Now, though, with the precision of an anatomist pinning down a kidney for the benefit of watching students, Krafft-Ebing had succeeded at last in identifying with a single word the category of sexual behaviour condemned by Paul.

Only a medical man, perhaps, could have done it. Krafft-Ebing’s interest in same sex relations was as a scientist, not a moralist. Why — in seeming defiance of Darwin’s theory — did men or women choose to sleep with people of their own sex? The traditional explanation, that such people were lustful predators whose failure to control their appetites had led them to weary of what God had ordained as natural, increasingly appeared to psychiatrists inadequate. Much likelier, Krafft-Ebing believed, “homosexuals” were the victims of an underlying morbid condition.

Whether this was to be viewed as something degenerative, an ailment passed down the generations, or as the result of an accident suffered in the uterus, it was clear to him that homosexuality should be regarded, not as a sin, but as something very different: an immutable condition. Homosexuals, he argued, were the creatures of their proclivities. As such — Christian concern for the unfortunate being what it was — they deserved to be treated, not with contempt, but with generosity and compassion.

Most Christians, it is fair to say, were unpersuaded. Yet if Krafft-Ebing’s research represented a challenge to Christian assumptions about sexual morality, then so also were they a fortification of them. His conclusions were not nearly as clinical as either his critics or his admirers cared to think. Raised a Catholic, he took for granted the primacy of the Christian model of marriage. The great labour of the Church in fashioning and upholding monogamy as a lifelong institution was one that he deeply valued.

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“Christianity raised the union of the sexes to a sublime position by making woman socially the equal of man and by elevating the bond of love to a moral and religious institution.” It was not despite believing this, but because of it, that Krafft-Ebing, by the end of his career, had come to believe that sodomy should be decriminalised. Homosexuals, he ringingly declared, might be no less familiar with “the noblest inspirations of the heart” than any married couple. Huge numbers of them, inspired by his researchs, duly wrote to him, sharing their most intimate yearnings and secrets. It was on the basis of this correspondence that Krafft-Ebing was able to arrive at a paradoxical conclusion. The sexual practice condemned by the Church as “sodomy” was perfectly compatible with the ideal that he saw as Christianity’s great contribution to civilisation: lifelong monogamy. Homosexuality, as defined by the first scientist ever to attempt a detailed categorisation of it, constituted the seamless union of Christian sin with Christian love.

In cool and dispassionate language, Krafft-Ebing served to put the seal on a revolution in the dimensions of the erotic without parallel in history. Paul, by twinning men who slept with men and women who slept with women, had set in train a recalibration of the sexual order that now, in an age of science, attained its apotheosis.

But “homosexuality” was not the only medical-sounding compound of Greek and Latin to which Psychopathia Sexualis introduced the world. There was a second as well: “heterosexuality”. All the other categories of sexual behaviour that Krafft-Ebing had identified — sadism, masochism, fetishistic obsessions with silk, or mourning ribbons, or gloves — were mere variations of the one great and fundamental divide: that which existed between heterosexual and homosexual desire. Categories which had taken almost two millennia to evolve were now impregnably defined. Soon enough, people came to forget that they had ever not been there.

All of which, for the Churches today, presents an agonising dilemma. Should homosexuality be condemned as sodomy or praised as love? Should same-sex marriage be slated as an abomination against God’s creation or cherished as a sacrament? Should an entire conceptualisation of sexual behaviour, unyoked as it has been from the theology that gave it birth, be repudiated by Christians as a bastard mutation or embraced as their own?

None of these questions is easily answered. Among those who take them seriously, they have ensured endless and pained debate. Among those who do not, they have provided confirmation that popes and pastors are not merely irrelevant but malign. Certainly, seen in the broad perspective of Christianity’s history, there is nothing paradoxical about the legal blessing given by so many Christian countries to an innovation that has put churches painfully on the spot. Nor does it seem very likely that there will be same-sex marriages in Qom any time soon.

“We stand here tonight … among the rubble of what was once the grandest and most beautiful civilization the world has ever known.”

On 20 March, an exhilarated Thierry Baudet, the 36-year-old leader of the Dutch Forum for Democracy (FvD), addressed an ecstatic crowd with a message of decline and a promise of resurrection.

“We are being destroyed by those who should be protecting us. We are being undermined by our universities, our journalists. By the people whose art is subsidized by the state and those who design our buildings. And especially by those who govern us […], people who haven’t read a book in their lives, have no idea what the long-term issues are, [and who] time and time again, in a strange mix of incompetence and cynical self-interest, make the wrong choices. But not for long!”

The populist rhetoric is now familiar in the Netherlands. It was the size of Baudet’s win that was the surprise. The FvD party, with its anti-immigrant, anti-EU and anti-liberal far-Right agenda, won some 17% of the votes in the provincial elections, more than any other party – something that is all the more remarkable given it has only been in existence for two years.

It is interesting too, in what it says about how the populist message is shifting.

Over the past 17 years, the political landscape in the Netherlands has become volatile and fragmented. The seeds of change were planted in the late 1990s by politicians such as Frits Bolkestein, of the Right-liberal VVD, who was among the first to question the country’s long-standing multicultural approach to immigration.

Then Pim Fortuyn, in the early 2000s, managed to associate a blanket rejection of non-Western immigrants, particularly Muslims, with the defense of progressive values like tolerance, gender equality, free speech, and gay rights — values, moreover, that he redefined in nationalist terms as quintessentially Dutch. Fortuyn was the founding father of a homegrown, Dutch brand of xenophobic populism that now represents more than a fifth of political opinion.

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He was murdered, in 2002, shot by a Dutch environmental activist who declared him to be a “threat to Dutch society’. Then, two years later, in November 2004, filmmaker Theo van Gogh — professional provocateur and a ruthless critic of Islam, too — was killed in broad daylight in Amsterdam by a 26-year-old Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent. The murders solidified the notion — among the public and a segment of the intelligentsia — that the country’s immigration policies had failed and that the presence of “unintegrated” foreigners was a problem that called for a drastic solution.

Enter Geert Wilders’s far-Right Party for Freedom (PVV) with its folksy, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim style of populism. At the last Dutch parliamentary elections, in 2017, Wilders’s party achieved an unprecedented 13 percent of the vote, good for 20 seats and becoming the second-largest party after Rutte’s liberal VVD. At those same elections, Baudet’s party, barely six months old, won a surprising two seats.

Two years on, the FvD’s growth has come partly at the expense of Wilders’s PVV. But transfer votes from Wilders alone don’t account for Baudet’s meteoric rise. So where is the new support coming from?

Wilders and Baudet do share some central positions. Both, for example, have called for a radical stop to immigration from non-Western cultures. Both believe that Islam is incompatible with Dutch values and traditions. Both decry the domination of Dutch institutions by Leftist elites. And both seek to tap into a widespread anxiety among some sectors of the Dutch population that their culture is under serious threat.

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But in his personal style and cultural background, Baudet is Wilders’s polar opposite.

Wilders was born in 1963 in the southern province of Limburg and raised a Roman Catholic; his mother is of Indonesian descent. A career politician in Rutte’s VVD, he broke with that party in 2006 to found the PVV, convinced that the VVD did not sufficiently acknowledge the threat of Islam and immigration.

Baudet’s biography could not be more different. Born into a non-religious middle-class family in Haarlem, half an hour from Amsterdam, he attended his hometown’s prestigious Gymnasium and went on to read history and law in Leiden. In 2012, he earned his PhD in Law with a thesis co-directed by Roger Scruton.

Baudet has cultivated a public image as a witty and charming provocateur. He proudly claims to hate modern art, contemporary classical music, and contemporary architecture. In his free time, he plays classical piano. He sleeps little and reads widely. He’s written several books, including a novel.

He is not your standard Right-wing populist. He calls himself a “romantic conservative”. In fact, his worldview is deeply elitist, with elements reminiscent of José Ortega y Gasset’s reactionary 1929 classic The Revolt of the Masses.

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The problem, in Baudet’s eyes, is not that there is an elite. The problem is that the current elite is ignorant, incompetent, immoral, and weak. It needs to be replaced. Baudet’s view of the world is decidedly Darwinian: we should trust our instincts. Life is a struggle. Strength is what counts. Those who are not ready to fight are bound to be conquered. It’s the West against the rest.

Baudet likes to use Scruton’s term oikophobia, the repudiation of one’s own cultural inheritance, to diagnose the pathology of the Netherlands’ political and cultural leadership. Suffering from “a spiritual disease,” he claims, the country’s elites have been wilfully weakening Dutch political sovereignty by selling out to a faceless, bureaucratic European Union.

At the same time, they have allowed Dutch national culture to be “homeopathically diluted” through the ever-increasing influx of non-integrated non-Western refugees and immigrants. They have undermined the country’s defense mechanisms by suffocating it under a blanket of leftist illusions, numbing bureaucracy, and political correctness.

To the Left, the statements sound worryingly close to fascism. What concerns the liberal-Right is the ease with which Baudet dismisses the foundations of liberal democracy — including parliamentary politics.

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But for much of the population, his words are a breath of fresh air in a political climate where neoliberal technocracy, closed-door coalition negotiations, a culture of compromise, and politicians’ embarrassing slip-ups have undermined people’s faith in their leaders. It’s a message that resonates with Wilders’s voter base: the disgruntled white urban working class and conservative rural voters. To them, Baudet appears to offer to a chance to take back control.

His sophisticated, provocative image as a dangerous dandy who is not afraid to say what he thinks is also broadening his appeal to more educated voters. In particular, the FvD is gathering an enthusiastic following among university students, especially men, who are tickled by the idea that they would make far better national leaders than the current political class.

Today’s leaders, according to Baudet:

“no longer believe in the Netherlands. […] Not in our language […] not in our arts, in our past. They no longer believe in our holidays, our heroes.”

Today’s heroes are Baudet and his army. If things had not gone so badly, he said:

“I would have never entered politics. But we have been called to the front because it’s necessary. Because our country needs us. […] Today, we have chosen to go to battle again. To dream, to hope, to fight again.”

Such fighting talk is a far cry from Wilders’s one-man-show, which seems to have run out of steam after 13 years of not achieving very much policy-wise.

Baudet, by contrast, has a very specific platform of ideas. These include replacing the current system of political appointments to public or semi-public management positions with an open application process, moving to direct mayoral elections, and bringing in binding referendums on important political issues. Some of these measures, including directly elected mayors, have been long demands of the liberal Left. The call for referendums, meanwhile, cleverly taps into widespread discontent with the way the Dutch government adopted a referendum law in 2015, only to abandon it after it saw itself forced to ignore the results of the consultations.

He is outspoken, too, on environmental policy. Baudet is opposed to any efforts to counteract climate change, which he sees as a “masochistic heresy fed by guilt”, “a secularised belief in the Deluge” that will “not only mean the total collapse of our economy but is also meant to further hurt our spirit and self-confidence”.

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This element of his platform, too, represents an electoral option that no other party has dared to offer. Although the Dutch economy has had a better recovery from the Great Recession than most other EU countries, the government’s climate policy has resulted in a significant increase of household energy bills.

So what happens next? If parliamentary elections were held today, polls suggest, the PVV and FvD would together win 22% of the vote, which in the Netherlands’ almost fully representational system would correspond to about 34 of the 150 seats in the Second Chamber —an absolute record, and a far cry from the one or two seats that radical Right parties would win until 20 years ago.

Will the other Dutch parties be willing to govern with Baudet and his crew, given that his party is most likely to become the largest in the Senate chamber? Prime Minster Rutte has trouble enough as it is keeping his four-party, centre-Right coalition together.

Some propose a principled cordon sanitaire, refusing any gesture that could be seen as legitimating radical-Right positions. Others remember how attempts to form a parliamentary coalition with Wilders’ party several years ago were sabotaged by Wilders himself, when he refused to adhere to the Dutch political culture of compromise.

Baudet, however, has said he understands that entering a coalition will require concessions. Perhaps in anticipation of this next phase, he appears to have modified his position on the Netherlands’ relationship with the EU. For many years, he openly advocated for the country to leave. (“After #Brexit we should have #Nexit,” he tweeted in May 2016.)  Yet when, on 2 April, Wilders’ party proposed a parliamentary motion for Nexit, the FvD’s two deputies voted it down. The FvD continues to be sceptical about Europe but says that the voters, not the parliament, should make decision to stay or leave, through a referendum.

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Baudet is clearly determined to keep his momentum. “We are building a party with its own educational institute,” he said on 20 March. “We will educate a new generation to replace and defeat our current leaders. … So that we may finally rule our own country once again.”

But the volatility of Dutch electoral politics today makes for rapid rises and equally precipitous falls. Quick expansion carries risks — and so does assuming actual government responsibilities, whether it’s at the local, provincial, or national level.

Fortuyn’s party collapsed as quickly as it was born. Wilders’ PVV, unable to deliver, has passed its peak. Baudet, though, seems to have learned from the organisational failures of his populist predecessors. Still, the day-to-day of governing — if his party gets that far — will prove a crucial test.

But given the ascent of nationalist Right-wing movements elsewhere in the world and the Left’s relative impotence in the face of their rise, Baudet, even more than Fortuyn and Wilders, looks set to enjoy the advantage of a strong global tailwind.

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By Peter Franklin

The irony is that the single greatest enabler of globalisation is not the EU or the WTO or any other political institution, but something that no one controls or organises – the English language.

Nothing would do more to dissolve distinctions of nationhood and culture than the spread of a universal language. Artificial languages, such as Esperanto, were invented with this purpose in mind; but it is English, the maddeningly eccentric language of an insular people, that has come closest to achieving the dream.

In a report from the Netherlands for the BBC, Anna Holligan provides a startling example of how English is “besieging” non-Anglophone cultures.

Of course, one could argue that Dutch culture is Anglophone:

“The Netherlands has one of the world’s highest levels of English proficiency among non-native speaking countries, second only to Sweden, according to the latest EF English Proficiency Index.”

Impressive, but is it going too far? A contentious issue is the use of English in the country’s higher education system:

“So extensive is the spread of English in Dutch universities, a group of lecturers has predicted a looming ‘linguicide’ and demanded the government in The Hague impose a moratorium banning universities from creating any additional English language courses until an official impact analysis has been conducted.

“Sixty per cent of masters programmes offered at Utrecht University are in English. At the highest honours level, virtually no courses are taught in Dutch.”

Some Dutch academics fear for the future:

“‘It’s our identity, Dutch,’ complains Annette de Groot, professor of linguistics at the University of Amsterdam.

“‘What happens to the identity of a people of a country where the native language is no longer the main language of higher education?’”

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Of course, much of this is a matter of necessity. Scholars need a command of English to access and contribute to leading academic journals and conferences. Furthermore, there’s nothing new about an international language of scholarship. The universities of medieval Europe taught in Latin and the great thinkers of the age used the language to exchange ideas – and continued to do so into the modern age. That didn’t erase national languages or identities – quite the opposite, in fact.

There is, however, a big difference between the academic use of English now and Latin back then. Higher education is no longer the preserve of a tiny band of ecclesiastical specialists. Today, entry to the professions and a growing range of trades depends on a degree. Therefore the anglicisation of higher education affects a substantial part of society, not just a scholarly elite.

The emergence of an “over-class” that literally speaks a foreign language (for professional purposes) can only exacerbate divisions between the ‘somewheres’ versus ‘anywheres’, nationalists versus globalists. Even in countries like the Netherlands, where most people speak some English, there’s a much wider range of proficiency (and, therefore, potential for social exclusion) than in a nation where English is the mother tongue.

Fortunately, two things are now working against the trend towards global English: Firstly, Brexit – which may stop the slide towards English as the language of the European Union; and, more importantly, technology. Translation software is getting better all the time – and, with any luck, it will make a command of any language, other than one’s own, unnecessary (except for language scholars, of course).

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It is very much in the globalist way of thinking to ‘celebrate’ diversity. However, by definition, there can be no diversity without difference and no differences without a degree of separation. Different languages help to give nations their own ‘headspace’, a distinct cultural environment from which they can make their own unique contributions to the wealth of human civilisation. 

Forcing the world’s most fertile minds to express themselves in the same language may aid communication, but at the cost of originality.

Those would be good guesses, but as Frank Viviano reports for National Geographic, the correct answer is somewhere much smaller, colder and darker – the Netherlands:

“The Netherlands is a small, densely populated country, with more than 1,300 inhabitants per square mile. It’s bereft of almost every resource long thought to be necessary for large-scale agriculture. Yet it’s the globe’s number two exporter of food as measured by value, second only to the United States, which has 270 times its landmass. How on Earth have the Dutch done it?”

There’s some pretty intensive agriculture involved; not least within the country’s “extraordinary greenhouse complexes, some of them covering 175 acres.” However, Holland is also putting a great effort into combining productivity with sustainability – a challenge of global significance. Viviano quotes Ernst van den Ende of WUR (“widely regarded as the world’s top agricultural research institution”):

“Put in bluntly apocalyptic terms, he says, the planet must produce ‘more food in the next four decades than all farmers in history have harvested over the past 8,000 years.’

“That’s because by 2050, the Earth will be home to as many as 10 billion people, up from today’s 7.5 billion. If massive increases in agricultural yield are not achieved, matched by massive decreases in the use of water and fossil fuels, a billion or more people may face starvation…”

From the unlikely vantage point of a potato field, Viviano looks into the future and shows how technology could save the day:

“…Dutch farmer Jacob van den Borne is… monitoring two drones—a driverless tractor roaming the fields and a quadcopter in the air—that provide detailed readings on soil chemistry, water content, nutrients, and growth, measuring the progress of every plant down to the individual potato. Van den Borne’s production numbers testify to the power of this ‘precision farming,’ as it’s known. The global average yield of potatoes per acre is about nine tons. Van den Borne’s fields reliably produce more than 20.”

However, productivity is as much about reducing inputs as increasing outputs:

“Almost two decades ago, the Dutch made a national commitment to sustainable agriculture under the rallying cry ‘Twice as much food using half as many resources.’ Since 2000, van den Borne and many of his fellow farmers have reduced dependence on water for key crops by as much as 90 percent. They’ve almost completely eliminated the use of chemical pesticides on plants in greenhouses, and since 2009 Dutch poultry and livestock producers have cut their use of antibiotics by as much as 60 percent.”

The idea that modern agriculture means copious use of artificial herbicides, pesticides, fertilisers, antibiotics and fossil fuels is increasingly out of date. Advanced technologies mean that we can reduce or eliminate our dependency agricultural poisons and pollutants.

Examples include the drone-enabled precision farming described above, and also biological pest control (using bugs to eat other bugs), geothermally heated greenhouses, and various forms of hydroponics. That of course is before we get to the potentially transformative impact of agricultural robots. But what about the fraught issue of genetically modified organisms? Is GM a necessary ingredient in the productive-but-sustainable future (as Chris Bullivant argued)?

Perhaps not. As Viviano explains, the Netherlands exports $1.7 billion worth of seeds every year, without marketing GMO products. Using the latest conventional plant breeding techniques they can develop productive new varieties much faster and more cheaply (and less controversially) than if they used transgenic techniques.

In summary, both the anti-greens and the extreme greens are wrong: we don’t have to ride roughshod over nature, nor do we have to turn our backs on modernity. Instead of treating the soil as a mere substrate for our chemicals or sentient animals as if they were mere machines, we can use technology to feed the world without wrecking the planet.

The UnPacked podcast

If you enjoy Peter Franklin’s daily guide to the best thinking in global media then you might also enjoy the UnPacked podcast.

We launched this a couple of months ago as a weekly discussion of three of Peter’s posts.

Last week we decided to change the format and rather than group three topics and discussions within one weekly podcast, we’re now offering you shorter, more frequent briefings with just one topic each time.

Hopefully, if your time is short, this will allow you to more easily listen to the key subject areas of most interest to you.

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