No Nonsense

Holland isn’t a country, it’s a business at best, the French author Houellebecq wrote in his bleak 2019 novel Serotonin. Internationally, the Netherlands has a reputation as a frugal nation. Yet this is a rather recent development. In the sixties and seventies, Dutch politicians built one of Europe’s most generous welfare states with high wages, a large social housing stock and heavy taxation. It is in the 1980s that Dutch politics underwent a neoliberal turn. Politicians presented themselves as managers and spoke of the country as an ailing business in need of restructuring.

In marked contrast to the Anglophone world, the Dutch reforms were depoliticised and sold to the public as ‘no-nonsense’ politics. With the rise of the Dutch 'Third Way' in the 1990s, reform also became more consensual, even involving trade union complicity. This consensus formed the start of the famed Dutch ‘polder model’, that offered the impression of compromise, hiding a more brutal reality. In this first, path-breaking study of the Dutch neoliberal turn, Merijn Oudenampsen traces the long shadow it has cast over Dutch politics.