King William I

The reign of King William I, as the restored prince of Orange was now called, was one of the most critical periods in the history of the Netherlands. During this quarter-century the adaptation of the country to the conditions and requirements of modernity moved in a complex and even contradictory way, guided by a monarch who in his economic policy was far more forward-looking than most of his fellow citizens but who in politics resisted the expansion of Parliament and the introduction of liberal principles. He was a 19th-century version of the “enlightened despot,” a man intent upon power not so much for its own sake as in order to serve the welfare of his country as he saw it.

The role of the States General—which continued to represent a general electorate of tax-paying citizenry—was strictly limited to the enactment of laws proposed by the government and to approval of a long-term budget; it was in no sense the representative of a sovereign people. The ministers of state were the agents of the king and responsible to him, not to the States General. Yet the basic structure of modern government had been created in the Netherlands; constitutional debate would be concerned with redistributing powers and responsibilities among existing institutions.

William I was at his best in confronting the problem of reviving the economic life of the country after the shattering impact of the long French occupation. He put the support of both the government and his own private fortune behind encoragement of commerce and, to a lesser extent, of industry. He sponsored the formation of The Netherlands Trading Society, a nominally private firm that undertook the important but costly and risky enterprise of reorganizing Dutch long-distance trade and shipping, particularly to the Netherlands East Indies, which England returned to Dutch sovereignty as part of the peace settlement. With the reopening of trade between the European continent and the wider world, the advantages of the Dutch position at the mouth of the great rivers favored the revival of the traditional branches of Dutch enterprise; but competition from the ports of other countries, notably from Hamburg and Bremen, as well as from Britain, remained strong. Only in the Netherlands East Indies did the Dutch have a clear advantage over their rivals.

The most difficult problem faced by the new regime in the Netherlands was the relations between Holland (which now became the everyday name for all the northern Netherlands, in Dutch as well as foreign usage) and Belgium. The king was passionately devoted to the preservation of a single state encompassing all the Low Countries, a unity lost in the revolt against Spain more than two centuries before and for the restoration of which he had paid by ceding most of the Dutch colonies (except the East Indies) to the United Kingdom. However, the sense of common nationhood, cultural and political, was quite weak among the people. The Belgians resented assuming a share of the burden of debt inherited by Holland; they were oriented toward industry, Hollanders toward trade. French was the language of the leading classes in the south, and the use of Dutch as the official language was bitterly opposed even by Flemings, who resented the Dutch version of the common Dutch-Flemish language. Most Flemings, as devout Roman Catholics, were hostile to the predominantly Protestant northern Dutch elite. William’s efforts to assume the control that Napoleon had possessed over the Belgian Roman Catholic Church met fierce resistance.

At the same time, the authoritarian character of William’s government, particularly the sharp censorship of the press in Belgium, aroused the antipathy of liberals to the regime. The result was the outbreak of the Belgian Revolution of 1830 and the proclamation of Belgian independence. William, supported by a majority of Dutchmen, who were angered by what they saw as Belgian ingratitude, was able to defeat the hastily organized Belgian army; but the European powers intervened to secure Belgian independence, although it was not until 1839 that a final settlement was reached and the last Dutch troops withdrew from Belgian soil. William, deeply despondent, abdicated the next year, leaving to his son, King William II, the task of coming to terms with the new situation.

William II and William III

The new king was not a man of clear ideas or strong will, but he was able to do what his father dared not even envisage—oversee the transformation of the Netherlands into a parliamentary, liberal state. When the crisis of the 1848 revolutions broke, first in France and then in central Europe, an alarmed William II turned to the leading liberal thinker, J.R. Thorbecke, to guide the change. A new constitution was written, largely modeled on the British (and Belgian) pattern, which gave effective supremacy to the States General and made the monarch a servant and not the master of government. The king died the next year, and the work of transformation continued under his son, William III (1849–90), who named Thorbecke prime minister. The constitutional monarchy was consolidated, even though Thorbecke stepped down in 1853 because of Protestant rioting against the reestablishment of a Roman Catholic hierarchy, with its archbishopric at Utrecht.

Gradually, over the next century, the scope of Dutch democracy was extended to include ever-broader sections of the Dutch population in the franchise; universal male suffrage was achieved during World War I, and suffrage was extended to women in 1919. During this period modern political parties took shape, organized along religious and ideological lines; the principal groups were formed by Calvinists (the Anti-Revolutionary Party), socialists, liberals, and Roman Catholics. Other smaller minority parties developed subsequently. The central issue of political controversy became the schoolstrijd (“school conflict”), which pitted the liberal (and later socialist) advocates of state schools against the combined Calvinist and Catholic parties, which demanded state support for private (“special”) schools equivalent to that provided to state schools. For several decades, liberals remained generally in control and made few concessions on the school issue. But when the Protestant leader Abraham Kuyper formed a coalition with the Catholics in 1888, the religious parties were able to gain power and to favor the special schools over the public schools. Their policy was assailed by the secular parties, the traditional liberals, the progressives, and the socialists. The liberals, however, were at odds with the other secular parties on other issues, notably economic policies and the extension of the suffrage. The liberals tended to be the most conservative party on economic issues and favored a restricted electorate; the progressives were vigorously democratic in outlook, as were the socialists, who also favored universal suffrage, protection of the right to strike, labor legislation, and other welfare measures.

These struggles between various ideologies—Catholic, Calvinist, socialist, and liberal—gradually resulted in the growth of the system of “pillars,” by means of which the country was split into more or less self-contained worlds, in which each group could live a largely separate life within the Dutch state. This distinctive political culture, known as “the politics of accommodation,” “pillarization,” or verzuiling, was to characterize Dutch public life for much of the 20th century, up to at least the 1960s.

Another major issue of the latter half of the 19th century was the role of the Dutch East Indies. Until the 1860s, the Dutch operated a highly profitable monopoly regime there called the “Culture System,” which had been introduced to force the production of certain crops for export. Its profits helped balance the Dutch domestic budget and allowed essential investment in transportation and public services. At the same time, private enterprise clamored for a share of the profits. Finally, there were humanitarian objections to the harsh conditions in the distant archipelago. As a result, the colony was opened up and deregulated, yet it continued to provide a significant part of Dutch national income all the way up to the outbreak of World War II.