EXPLAINING DUTCH CULTURE

Dutch tolerance and cooperation relate to water but do not, as is often said, come from living in low polders that frequently risk to be flooded. Polders are the result of a city culture that, in turn, derives from the culture of tribal groups canoeing around in the creeks and rivers here. They started to settle at dunes consisting of sand and pebbles transported from the mountains and deposited in the lowlands by those rivers. In their tiny dune villages, the tribal groups adjusted their typical culture of deliberation and cooperation to the new circumstances and some of them managed to survive by fishing in the water bodies and gathering and hunting at the seasonally drier lands. Gradually villages and towns developed on the higher sand dunes, while the marshlands were left uninhabited.

In later stages, agrarian societies developed in mainland Europe, with kings and emperors fighting wars with each other and subduing societies at the outskirts of their domains, including the present-day coastal provinces in the Netherlands. But their heavy armies, trained to battle on dry lands, found it hard to enter the wetlands. They either left the area to itself or met with losses and defeat if they tried to subdue the tribal communities here. Meanwhile the tribals interacted with the agrarian societies for trade and transport and acquired parts of those cultures that they found useful, while preserving key tribal traits. Their villages developed into towns thriving on maritime and river transport which, in turn, reinforce their capacities to defend themselves in military ways. The burgers of those towns also built the financial, technological and organizational capacities to turn the surrounding marshes and lakes into polders and start cultivating and inhabiting the new, fertile lands.

Unlike the European kingdoms and empires where hierarchy and intolerance was growing, in the towns of the Dutch coastal provinces tolerance, deliberation, cooperation, equality, freedom and independence were preserved. The group portraits of city guards and male and female regents of the seventeenth century, the Night Watch as the most famous one, tell the story of the relatively large equality and independence in the towns. This culture deserves not to be called ‘polder model’ but ‘burger model’. It is this burger model that is not the effect but the cause of collectively managing the polders.