The “Battlefield of Europe” is a lot calmer nowadays. Beatrice de Graaf writes about a technocratic society’s tendency to remove responsibility for accidents and dangers from citizens. The authorities claim their legitimacy not through high-flying rhetoric but instead through their capacity to protect. No one believes in any kind of divine imprimatur of monarchs anymore, although those guys have hung around. Mostly the modern government commands loyalty to the extent that it makes Dutch people safe.
The Palingoproer is a watershed moment for de Graaf. In English this is called “the Eel Riot,” when cops in 1886 killed 26 Amsterdammers over a dispute about rights to carry out the local pastime of “eel grabbing” on the Lindengracht. Made illegal for safety concerns, sportsmen refused to give up their game, slippery though it may have been. Better to gun down the townspeople than risk them falling into the canal.
Reading about this episode and how it denotes a modern, protective role for the state, I was reminded of a favorite novel, Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill. The protagonist Hans is a Dutch-born financier weathering a stormy marriage in America. There are vivid contrasts between rambunctious New York and the “ancient clotted continent” where Hans grew up. His friend and foil, Chuck Ramkissoon, is a Trinidadian of Indian descent, and a hustling NYC businessman/criminal.
Hans describes how his Dutch upbringing equipped him poorly for his New York marriage:
The pleasantness of my Holland was related to the slightness of its mysteries. There obtained a national transparency promoted by a citizenry that was to all appearances united in a deep, even pleased, commitment to foreseeable and moderate outcomes in life. Nowadays, I gather from the newspapers, there are problems with and for alien elements, and things are not as they were; but in my day–age qualifies me to use the phrase!–Holland was a providential country. There seemed little point in an individual straining excessively for or against the upshots arranged on his behalf, which had been thoughtfully conceived to benefit him from the day he was born to the day he died and hardly required explanation. There was accordingly not much call for a dreamy junior yours truly to ponder connections. One result, in a temperament such as my own, was a sense that mystery is treasurable, even necessary: for mystery, in such a crowded, see-through little country, is, among other things, space. It was in this way, it may be supposed, that I came to step around in a murk of my own making, and to be drifted away from my native place, and in due course to rely on Rachel as a human flashlight.
Hans might also be talking about pampered masculinity, but that’s another blog post altogether.
Anyway, I had occasion to glimpse the “foreseeable and moderate outcomes” that the Dutch have imposed on themselves during my trip to Zeeland last year. I left the hotel early one morning for a jog and noticed a bike path sign. I stopped to check it out, thinking it notable to be finding myself on a bike route. After all, in my homeland the instinct to get on a bike can be quite dangerous without fairly deliberate planning to avoid traffic, hills, stretches of undeveloped terrain, etc.
But the sign that I saw that soft Dutch morning didn’t indicate where the bike route was. It listed all the local bike routes, which seemed coterminous to me with all the asphalted ways of moving. I beheld one piece of a fastidious, well-signposted network of wheeled leisure that covered a whole country. Moving around the Netherlands seemed like a kind of big scavenger hunt, with the rules carefully delineated and the wayfinding as safe as practicable.
In that instant I got a vision of a country that frowns on eel races, that has circumscribed the most sensible way from Point A to Point B, and subjected its people to a thoroughgoing domestication. It seemed very nice.
Further Reading:
Beatrice de Graaf, Crisis!, Prometheus, 2022.
Joseph O’Neill, Netherland, Harper Perennial, 2008.