Oranje apocalypse?

Hard times ahead for the Netherlands.

This post is a little departure from the usual climate comms, but it’s related: it deals with the underpinnings of the Dutch relationship with future climate challenges. That’s a reminder that such challenges aren’t just a pull-lever exercise, even in the modern miracle that is the Netherlands. Climate policy, like just about every government policy, is not just about pulling lever x or y; it’s about a complex interplay of policy choices, added to an ever-evolving political, economic and societal backdrop. So the big message (apart from the Dutch facing big problems ahead) is simply that fixing the climate is not simple. Here goes:

Six years ago my family arrived in the Netherlands after having lived in Asia. We spent days wandering around our beautiful new home town of Delft, delighted at our good luck (even in the Dutch summer drizzle). And then autumn came and our smiles widened even further: seasons!

The four years that we spent in Delft were fantastic, packed with happy memories of a deeply fascinating country. By the time we moved on however, deep into the Covid time, I couldn’t shift the feeling that the country has got serious troubles up ahead. Here’s the short and simple version explaining why.

Let’s backtrack a little bit and focus on the miracle that is the Netherlands. It is an extraordinary place, almost entirely due to human ingenuity and hard work. Around a third of it is below sea level. It is prosperous and ordered, and its bicycle infrastructure leaves many green with jealousy. Amsterdam is a stunner, but the real jewels are the small towns: Delft itself, Gouda, Harlingen, Zwolle, Leiden, Haarlem, Dordrecht, Middelburg, Maastricht, Deventer. Smaller still: Veere, Brielle, Elburg, Grave, Hinderloopen. I could go on.

The natural side is pretty good too: islands like Terschelling, endless beaches backed by dunes, the Hoge Veluwe, Zeeland, Vriesland. Look at the history: the glorious half century of the Golden Age when the Dutch posed as a true world power. This tiny country’s colonies stretched from the East Indies to India to the Caribbean and both North and South America. It played an massively outsize role in the development of capitalism, early modern art, science (the microscope was invented a couple of canals away from our house in Delft) and – of course – modern football. This tiny patch of land is home to world-class companies, and even more astonishingly it is the world’s second biggest agricultural exporter. It also has one of the most distinctive brands in the world: orange, clogs, bicycles. Extraordinary!

How on earth did the modern Netherlands become quite such a thing? In overly simple terms 900 or so years ago people started having to solve problems together, and on this unpromising chunk of Europe composed of little more than marshes and river deltas, there were plenty of watery problems to solve. The resulting political system is known to the Dutch as their water democracy. It was egalitarian, efficient and consensual. There was no room for feudalism, for tyranny, for gross inequality, for special privileges. The way the Dutch feel about themselves today relates directly to water democracy, to this coming together and making the Netherlands together. 

I’m going to fast forward at this point to the present day, or at least 2019. The Netherlands was a great place to live, the Dutch were terrific, and the foibles were minor (although the aggression of its some of the drivers is appalling). But as somebody who worked on issues like climate change I kept asking myself how the place was going to cope with the continuing and worsening challenges posed by climate change. Take a look at this map:

The greyish bits on the western third of the country are all below sea level. The obvious challenges are rising sea levels and worsening storms (remember those big rivers like the Rhine and Maas draining mountains in the middle of Europe, then snaking across utterly flat land before emptying out into the North Sea). But others have been hidden, such as the increasing salination of farmland and the rotting of wooden foundation poles thanks to changing water tables. This would surely be a challenge for a country whose geography is most reminiscent of Bangladesh: in effect a continental river delta.

Not so, say the Dutch. Remember water democracy, and years decades centuries of experience in water management. Well yes. It’s a rich country and it has extraordinary expertise in dealing with water.

But in 2019 there were tensions. Every so often The Hague was brought to a standstill by the tractors of farmers who were claiming – red alert here – special privileges as they protested against measures to reduce nitrogen in the ultra-intensive agriculture sector. And there were continuing tensions over the lack of integration with large immigrant communities, notably from Morocco, who often absolutely did not feel part of the Dutch community (and frankly weren’t thought of as much by big chunks of Dutch society). Cohesion visibly frayed at the edges.

To me this emphasised the basic fragility of this remarkable place. Other countries such as Italy or Britain could cope with stiff, persistent historical downturns. They have strategic depth, space, resilience and robustness. The Netherlands doesn’t have that luxury thanks to its geography: it doesn’t cope with slow decline; it gets washed into the North Sea.

Challenges? Headwinds? Yes, but things to fix, to monitor. In general the Dutch are very aware of all this. But this was 2019, and then we had Covid.

The Dutch experience of Covid felt different. In the Netherlands there was friction between those who did what they were told and those who refused to (very Dutch). There was a tonne of rather surprising violence, and I remember the police trying to shut down Delft in expectation that it would be hit by the same riots that had been broiling across the country. There wasn’t that sense of pulling together, of communal solutions that we associated with the Dutch. Cohesion? Differences were emphasised, special privileges were claimed.

But there was something else. Water management is generally a predictable challenge that can be met with technocratic expertise and planning. Covid was fast moving and unpredictable. Yet the predominant response of government and many, many people we met verged on arrogance. Hey, we’ve got this, we’re Dutch, we know best. But they were just as clueless as the rest of the world, if not more so, and the belief they were uniquely wise meant they got more wrong than they got right.

And this is why I predict hard times ahead for the Netherlands, a country that we have loved living in so much. To keep going in the face of climate change impacts, of unpredictability and of relentless challenges will be difficult thanks to the country’s extraordinary geography. To do so requires more of the water democracy magic, of cohesion and unity, allied to both prosperity and an expertise that has been born from a humble understand of the power of nature. I was worried about this in 2019; by 2021 I became seriously concerned.

This is not a prediction of oranje apocalypse. Rather it is a (brief) personal analysis of both the challenges ahead, and of how difficult it will be to maintain the political, societal and economic underpinnings that have allowed the Netherlands to become perhaps the world’s most remarkable modern country. I think it’ll be hard, much harder than they think; I hope I’m wrong.  

I’m a journalist, author and think-tank-comms worker. I’ve lived and worked all over the world, and I’m currently in Italy. My free substack is aimed at unpicking a few thoughts about the world of environmental actions/communications/journalism, but I’ll branch out more broadly - probably looking at how to understand countries and places by getting out and walking around them. Get in touch at nicholaswalton99-at-gmail.com, or on X/Twitter @npw99 (and I might start up on Instagram as nicholaswalton99…).