The Low Countries. Jaargang 6

Society

Test Lab Holland
The Netherlands in Perspective

In 1987, William Z. Shetter's The Netherlands in Perspective: The Organizations of Society and Environment was published. In his foreword, the author, now professor emeritus of Dutch at Indiana University, Bloomington, writes that ‘the book offers a picture of the contemporary Netherlands by examining one by one the most important components that make it what it is’. He concludes his foreword by sighing: ‘presenting an entire country “as it is” is an impossible task.’ Dutch society, like any other, evolves so rapidly that a book like The Netherlands in Perspective is to a certain extent unavoidably outdated as soon as it arrives in the bookshop - hence the bold promise made by the author that ‘both author and publisher (...) are resolved to keep the picture up to date by undertaking a revised edition every few years’.

So finally, at the end of 1997, The Netherlands in Perspective: The Dutch Way of Organizing a Society and its Setting appeared. This revised, updated and streamlined version of Shetter's book was published by the Netherlands Centre for Foreigners, an organisation whose many projects and activities are an attempt to promote the social position of minority groups in the Netherlands. The publication of The Netherlands in Perspective serves this objective perfectly, since Shetter's target readership is really two-pronged: he aimed to write not only a textbook for students of Dutch abroad, but also a guidebook for foreigners living and working in the Netherlands.

Shetter himself calls this new edition a ‘mixture of the older and the newer’. He has completely updated his earlier material and reduced the number of chapters from 27 to 20. The result is a considerably shorter but more tightly structured and accessible ‘handbook’ for anyone interested in learning more about Dutch society ‘as it is’.

Shetter's point of departure is the same as it was ten years ago: ‘a conviction that seeing any society “truly

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in perspective” can only be done successfully by someone who can view it from the detached vantage point of the outsider’. To this he adds that the Dutch, as they themselves readily admit, are ‘notoriously poor at presenting their country and its society’. The ‘Dutch state’, moreover, has never been a highly developed concept throughout the nation's history, although Shetter's approach to this problem is a bit more nuanced. In his chapter on National Identity, he staunchly affirms the existence of a Dutch sense of togetherness. This originated in a ‘shared experience of history’, Shetter claims, such as the nation's attempt to deal with the traumatic occupation during the Second World War or with the loss of its Indonesian colony.

He begins his book with the problem of stereotyped images abroad. In school textbooks, the Netherlands appears on maps as a further undelineated and shapeless bit of northwestern Europe. The role of windmills, the percentage of land lying below sea level, the size of the dikes and of the tulip industry are invariably exaggerated. Besides that, the country is chiefly known for its permissiveness. It's heaven or hell on earth - depending on the taste and intentions of the foreign beholder - crawling with sex, drugs and crime. Otherwise there's not much happening in this rather odd country; in 1993, Keesing's Record of World Events contained only 33 articles in which some sort of ‘newsworthy’ aspect of the Netherlands was highlighted. The Netherlands scored roughly as high as Uzbekistan.

So an author whose goal is ‘to present the Netherlands as the complex modern society that it is’ really has his work cut out. And Shetter is convinced that the Netherlands has something to offer; it's ‘a highly urbanized society’ that ‘can perhaps provide a model for the future of a rapidly urbanizing world’. He calls the Netherlands a ‘social experiment, a society in a constant process of evolving and adapting new forms’. And herein lies the Netherlands' strength. The developments?

In brief, clearly written and well constructed chapters, Shetter investigates many different aspects of Dutch life: landscape planning and the related struggle against the water, the administrative division of the land, the location and significance of industry and agriculture, environmental and traffic problems. Time and again, one is struck by Shetter's choice of a point-by-point, systematic approach. When the discussion turns to the Randstad, he immediately clarifies the term: ‘a string of cities - eight of the 21 municipalities of over 100,000 population - forming a crescent-shaped region around a more or less open center.’ After a general explanation of the geographical details and divisions of the Randstad, he zooms in on the four urban centres: Utrecht, The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Here his presentation is visually supported by maps and aerial photos as well as by cartoons (the latter to expose the rivalry between Amsterdam and Rotterdam). So that in addition to providing relevant facts and figures, the book also highlights some historical and psychological background. Shetter uses the same approach in his surveys of the media, the political parties, education, literature and the world of clubs and associations.

In his foreword, Shetter notes that a great deal has changed in the Netherlands since the book's first printing. The country is ‘fuller’ than ever (see the discussion of immigrants in the Netherlands in the chapter on The Ethnic Heritage), the political balance of power has shifted since the elections of 1994, when the Christian Democrats (cda) moved into opposition for the first time in their history, and the international context has undergone a profound change following the fall of Communism. It was the author's task to work all these developments into The Netherlands in Perspective.

One striking difference between this edition of the book and its predecessor can be found in the chapter about The Dutch Language. According to Shetter, the Dutch exhibit a remarkable indifference when it comes to their mother tongue. They are keenly aware that Dutch is only a ‘minor’ language, and they are convinced that in contacts with other countries they are the ones who must adapt. Now that the European Union is becoming more of a reality, the author has noticed a shift in this attitude. The Dutch are deeply involved in a debate about the future of their language - and by extension of all ‘minor’ languages - within the framework of the steadily advancing unification of Europe.

In a separate chapter, Shetter also pays considerable attention to Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, ‘the original heartland of Dutch culture’. Here Shetter reveals a profound awareness of the differences between the Dutch and the Flemish mentalities. He provides a lucid explanation of Belgium's language question and points to the years of Flemish

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struggle for emancipation from French-language domination as the reason for Flanders' more acute ‘language consciousness’. He deals in passing with a few stubborn myths, such as the claim that there was more Nazi collaboration in Flanders during the Second World War than in the Netherlands. And he also provides a full description of mutual stereotypes: Flemings deride the Dutch for their ‘miserliness and narrow-minded smugness’, the Dutch are of the opinion that the Flemings make ‘a vaguely outlandish attempt to speak Dutch’. Yet Shetter concludes that there is an unmistakable cultural solidarity between the two, the high point of which was the establishment of the Dutch Language Union in 1980. This supranational union bears responsibility for all cultivation and advancement of the language and the literature in the Netherlands and Flanders.

The Netherlands in Perspective is a book of many virtues and few shortcomings. This last category is mainly a matter of details, as when the Dutch policy on euthanasia and drugs is disposed of in a few sentences with remarkable diffidence. On the other hand, far too much attention is paid to these aspects of Dutch life in other publications. For that matter, Shetter describes his book as ‘not yet another “guidebook” to the Netherlands, but a selective presentation emphasizing what is characteristic’. For Shetter, as we said before, what is ‘characteristic’ is the way Dutch society continues to adapt and evolve. Thus he regards Erasmus as a kind of ‘quintessential Dutchman’. Erasmus filled his books with practical advice, refused to choose sides in the religious disputes of his age, had a preference for peaceful consensus, and was both estranged from his native land and strongly international - exactly the characteristics that make the Netherlands such an interesting test laboratory.

filip matthijs

Translated by Nancy Forest-Flier.

William Z. Shetter, The Netherlands in Perspective: The Dutch Way of Organizing a Society and its Setting. Utrecht: Nederlands Centrum Buitenlanders, 1997; 224 pp. isbn 90-5517-079-8.