People of Netherlands

Ethnic groups

Popular belief holds that the Dutch are a mixture of Frisians, Saxons, and Franks. In fact, research has made plausible the contention that the autochthonous inhabitants of the region were a mixture of pre-Germanic and Germanic population groups who in the course of time had converged on the main deltaic region of western Europe. There emerged from these groups in the 7th and 8th centuries some major polities based on certain ethnic and cultural unities that then came to be identified as Frisians, Saxons, and Franks.

The Dutch Republic originated from medieval statelets, and its legal successor, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, has attracted countless immigrants through the centuries. A strong impetus was the principle of freedom of thought, which engendered the relative tolerance that developed in the 16th and 17th centuries. These sentiments were—and are—most manifest in the prosperous commercial and industrial centers in the western provinces, which attracted many members of persecuted religious or political minorities. Among these were southern lowlanders, French Huguenots, and Portuguese Jews, along with many people who sought to improve their economic situation, such as Germans and non-Iberian Jews. In the 20th century, immigrants from the former Dutch overseas colonies added to the influx; they included Indonesians and peoples from the Moluccas and from Suriname on the northeast coast of South America. In recent decades, however, as Muslims from Turkey and Morocco arrived in large numbers, Dutch embracement of diversity has been more tenuous. At the beginning of the 21st century, not only did a virulent anti-immigrant movement emerge, but also the government required that immigrants pass a test in their country of origin relating to Dutch language and culture before they were allowed to enter the Netherlands.

Languages

The language in the whole of the country is Dutch, sometimes referred to as Netherlandic, a Germanic language that is also spoken by the inhabitants of northern Belgium (where it is called Flemish). Afrikaans, an official language of South Africa, is a variant of the Dutch spoken by 17th-century emigrants from the Holland and Zeeland regions. Apart from Dutch, the inhabitants of the northern province of Friesland also speak their own language (called Frisian in English), which is closer to English than to either Dutch or German. In the major cities especially, many people are fluent in several languages, reflecting the country’s geographic position, its history of occupation, and its attraction for tourists. English, French, and German are among the languages commonly heard.

The heritage of Dutch humanism

The considerable hospitality exhibited by the Dutch is perhaps to some extent rooted in the spirit of humanism that was typical of the Dutch Republic of the 16th to the 18th century. Figures such as Desiderius Erasmus in the 16th century and Hugo Grotius in the 17th century epitomize that spirit. It resulted in a rather pragmatic mode of thinking that has dominated Dutch bourgeois culture since the 16th century, coexisting with growing commercial acumen. Evolving Dutch society came to encompass a diversity of religious traditions, from rigid Calvinism and more-tolerant forms of Protestantism to conformist Roman Catholicism. Calvinism was always the religion of the national elite, while Roman Catholicism could be practiced only behind closed doors before 1798 (when all religions were pronounced equal before the law), and at various times certain sects were persecuted. In comparison with some of its neighbors, the Netherlands historically has shown a remarkable degree of religious tolerance.

In terms of formal allegiance, the present Dutch population can be divided into three almost equal groups relative to religion: Roman Catholics (the southern provinces of Limburg and Noord-Brabant are traditionally almost monolithically Catholic, but in terms of absolute numbers more Catholics live north of the great rivers than in Noord-Brabant and Limburg), Protestants (particularly the adherents to the Netherlands Reformed Church), and the nonreligious. The adherents of Islam have developed a wide range of institutions in the Netherlands and constituted about 6 percent of the population at the turn of the 21st century.

Secularization has made its mark in the Netherlands; the Christian Democrat parties of the center, whose political platform included planks such as public funding for religious education, had attracted more than 50 percent of the vote up to the 1960s, but in the 1990s they were ejected from government for the first time in the 20th century. Nonetheless, the educational institutions and political parties that evolved in the late 19th and early 20th centuries along denominational lines remain as potent as the more or less secularized parties and institutions that sprang from socialist and liberal movements. The “pillarization” of Dutch society—that is, the founding of separate institutions such as hospitals, schools, and periodicals by various groups—commands much less religiosity and devotion now, but these organizations are still central to education, political life, and public service.

These more or less converging societal groupings have not completely obliterated a range of age-old regional cultural distinctions. They are sometimes vividly preserved, as in the case of the northern province of Friesland, which proudly conserves the ancient Frisian culture. With more-recent immigration, new cultural groups are becoming significant.

Settlement patterns

Modern urbanization in the Netherlands took place mainly in the 20th century. In 1900 more than half the population was still living in villages or towns of fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. A century later this proportion had decreased to about one-tenth. There has, nevertheless, been a decrease in the city-proper populations of the large metropolitan centers. These inner cities are now becoming economic and cultural centers, their populations having spread outward in search of newer housing and greater living space in suburbs, new residential quarters of rural settlements, and new towns. In the 1960s and ’70s the authorities stimulated this development by subsidizing house building in a number of so-called growth nuclei and by moving several groupings of public offices from the western core area of the country to more-rural areas in the north, east, and south. More recently, however, government planning policy has aimed at again concentrating the population in and around the existing cities, especially in the western portion of the country.

In this part of the Netherlands, the bulk of the population is concentrated in the horseshoe-shaped urban core known as the Randstad (“Rim City,” or “City on the Edge”), comprising such cities as Rotterdam, The Hague, Leiden, Haarlem, Amsterdam, Hilversum, and Utrecht. Extensions of the Randstad stretch toward the east (Arnhem, Nijmegen) and the south (Breda, Tilburg, Eindhoven), thus forming the so-called Central Netherlands Urban Ring. Other urban centers are Groningen in the northeast, Enschede and Hengelo in the east, and Maastricht and Heerlen in the southeast. It is government policy to keep traditional towns and cities separated by strips of agricultural or recreational land.

Demographic trends

Exceptionally high fertility rates until the 1960s contributed to the Netherlands’ being one of the world’s most densely populated countries. Since then, trends have shifted, owing mainly to wider use of birth control pills (a consequence of growing secularization) and to the increased participation of women in higher education and the workforce. At the beginning of the 21st century, Dutch birth and death rates were both among the world’s lowest, resulting in a somewhat older society, with most population growth arising from immigration.

Emigrants exceeded immigrants by an average of almost 20,000 each year from 1947 to 1954. Thereafter the economy and labor potential of the more industrialized European countries attracted an increasing number of labor migrants from southern Europe, Turkey, and Morocco, so that the balance of in-migration and out-migration remained more or less static. From 1970 there was a continuous immigrant surplus, and in the early 21st century, one-fifth of the Netherlands’ population was made up of residents born abroad or with at least one foreign-born parent. In the late 1990s, with most other doors to immigration closed by government policy and the possibility of entry for family reunification largely expended, the numbers of applications for asylum were high. There was also an increase in the immigration of Dutch nationals from the Netherlands Antilles. Following legislation in 2001 that further tightened immigration restrictions, the annual number of asylum seekers fell, but the issue of immigration remained on the political forefront.

For many years prior to 1970, internal migration showed a constant flow from the more rural provinces in the north, east, and south toward the more strongly urbanized western part of the country. After 1970, however, the trend toward migration to the west was reversed. Subsequent emigration was mainly from Zuid-Holland and Noord-Holland (the most heavily populated provinces) toward Utrecht and the less densely populated provinces, where government regional policy stimulated industrial growth—Groningen, Friesland, Drenthe, Gelderland, and Zeeland.