Rodney Bolt

The Dutch population is 16.5 million – compared with 5 million Danes, 5 million Scots, 10 million Belgians, 41 million Spanish, 52 million English, 62 million French, 82 million Germans and 307 million Americans.

The Dutch character is inextricably bound up with the Dutch landscape. The Netherlands is so flat that even the black and white cows stand silhouetted against the skyline. Consequently the Dutch are used to distant horizons and lots of light. Openness, freedom and vision are fundamental.

Of all the European nations, the Dutch admire the Swiss. Their country is spotless, their banks unassailable and their personal bank accounts are secret

There is no one more likely to rouse the Dutch from their customary cheerfully benign state than a German. The Dutch see the Germans as arrogant, noisy, rigid and intolerant – everything in fact that the Dutch are not. They are wary of a nation that shows such a passion for living in forests. But usually they don’t even bother to try and explain. They simply do not like Germans

Telling a Dutch person that their language seems very similar to German is unlikely to benefit your relationship. Remarking that the two nations seem rather alike in many ways will probably get you thrown out of the house.

In the Netherlands itself, the inhabitants of the most southerly province of Limburg (whose capital is Maastricht) are saddled with the reputation of being stupid

“What happens when a person from Maastricht goes to live in Belgium?”
“The average IQ of both nations rises.”

conjugal rights, teenage abortion on request, and coffee shops that sell marijuana over the counter. The Dutch even tolerate people’s insistence on calling their country ‘Holland’, when Holland is in fact a province of the Netherlands. (Or to be precise North Holland and South Holland are two provinces of the Netherlands, so Holland on its own doesn’t exist at all.)

Visitors may gape at a rollerblader wearing nothing but a silver G-string as he glides through the Saturday morning shoppers, but the Dutch will walk by unruffled – even if, secretly, they are as shocked as everyone else. Tolerance is not simply a virtue, it is a national duty.

With 370 people for every square kilometre, the Netherlands is Europe’s most densely populated country.