Map of Amsterdam, c.1572
Book Details
Russell Shorto
AMSTERDAM
A history of the world's most liberal city
368pp. Little, Brown. £25.
978 1 4087 0347 2
US: Doubleday. $28.95.
978 0 385 53457 4
Toil, trade and capitalist indifference: the making of a very liberal city
PHILIPP BLOM
After the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh at the hands of a young Muslim extremist in 2004, an eerie political and cultural spectacle took place in the Netherlands. Like the bank of fog over the North Sea a new attitude swept over the country, seemingly blotting out the great Dutch tradition of tolerance and liberalism almost overnight. Right-wing populists were sitting in parliament, the man and the woman in the street seemed to have changed their stance toward foreigners, and the country's administration not only created new legal hurdles for migrants, but also interpreted existing laws and regulations in a more restrictive way.
A set of attitudes that had defined what it meant to be Dutch for generations, and very possibly for centuries, appeared to have collapsed, owing to a single hate crime. One of Europe's most inclusive and open societies was shutting the gates. Amsterdam, writes Russell Shorto in his Amsterdam: A history of the world's most liberal city, was at the heart of this disturbing change: "A city famed historically for championing the notion of tolerance now seemed to be charting odd new frontiers of intolerance".
The tide of exclusion and nativism in politics did not last. The star of Geert Wilders, the flamboyant ultra-nationalist leader of the Party for Freedom, is sinking; in the 2012 elections his party lost nine of its twenty-four parliamentary seats. Most of the electorate has recovered its liberal attitudes to social questions such as migration and pluralism. A pervasive culture did not succumb to a sudden attack of intolerance, after all.
As Shorto reminds us, it took centuries of toil and trade to make this culture. Toil, because the coastal regions of the Netherlands were frequently constructed rather than owned by any overlord, the fruit of a collective effort to drain swamps, build and maintain dykes, to keep the land dry and the water out. Around 1500, only 5 per cent of the land was owned by aristocrats, while more than 45 per cent belonged to farmers who democratically pooled their resources to build and maintain dykes and ensure their common survival. This, Shorto contends, created a strong ethos of communitarian and egalitarian labour as well as of individual rights, with practical contributions valued over beliefs.
Trade is the other great component which Shorto, and others before him, identify as an important constituent of what was to become known as Dutch liberalism. Again, a communitarian ethos reigned, and again, with a pragmatic interest at heart. The great ocean voyages in pursuit of exotic spices and other precious goods being hugely expensive to mount, a stock market was set up (the first in the world) to trade shares in these endeavours and to allow shareholders to partake of the expected profits. From hugely rich entrepreneurs to a widow with a few guilders to spare – everybody could and did buy into this budding capitalist dream. Trade, however, also necessitates tolerance. In a city in which Protestants, Catholics and Jews were doing business with Muslims and others abroad, it was best to ignore disagreements about revealed truth and concentrate on the day-to-day.
With great narrative flair, if not always entirely convincingly, Shorto ties this particular social climate from which modernity would grow to the history of Amsterdam. Here I must declare an interest as the translator of Geert Mak's Amsterdam: A brief life of the city (1999). Perhaps inevitably, Shorto uses much of the same source material, as well as a similar approach to storytelling.
In contrast to Mak, who lets the development of the city's mentality emerge with all its contradictions, Shorto is a man on a mission. His aim is nothing less than to prove that the "tattered, ancient, much misunderstood word 'liberalism'" is a concept that was "born in Amsterdam" and then exported, via William of Orange, to Britain and as well as, with the initial Dutch settlers, to New York, formerly New Amsterdam, a city to which one of Shorto's previous works is devoted.
The narrative occasionally groans a little under the obligation to prove this claim, but the author presses on: "What is the status of liberalism now, how has it been misconstrued or overextended, in what sense is it elemental to Western values, and what is its future?" It is perhaps impossible for a work of narrative history to do justice to questions of such complexity; Shorto's argument frequently remains mired in assertions. But the author is a perceptive observer of his adopted home and often draws together salient points about the nature of the city's liberal culture.
Dutch tolerance was never "nice". It was, as Shorto remarks, built not on admiration or even celebrating difference, but precisely on indifference, on letting others live their lives regardless of what one might think of their practices and beliefs, as long as they did not interfere with the business of society and of business itself. It was a shoulder-shrugging tolerance. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Amsterdam's liberalism exercised a decisive influence on European debates through its print shops, from where a constant stream of writing by such heretics and dissidents as Spinoza, Descartes, La Mettrie, Holbach and Diderot flowed across the borders. But inviting persecuted thinkers, as well as Huguenots and Jews, into the city was a result not of humanitarian sentiments but of a shrewd appreciation of the fact that encouraging diversity, attracting expertise and trading networks, establishing strong civic institutions and lowering ideological thresholds would all yield sound economic assets.
Shorto is also fascinated by the related and very Dutch idea of a moral laissez-faire, which expresses itself in the current practice of "gedogen" – that is, tolerated, technically illegal activities such as the sale of cannabis in coffee shops. Despite countless outlets throughout the Netherlands, this practice remains against the law, but the law is not enforced unless substantial abuse is seen to occur. As a result, café owners are careful to observe the delicate agreement that keeps them in business.
Shorto's impressionistic anatomy of Amsterdam's liberalism is a hymn to a great city as well as a plea for an unfashionable though intriguing thought: a cultural geography of mentalities. Liberalism, after all, is a coastal phenomenon, or more precisely, a phenomenon linked to mobility, trade and cultural exchange, all of which are associated with coastal cities. Trade demands a constant stream of information and technological advance, arbiters and institutions, individual liberties and enforceable contracts. Land wealth, by contrast, tends to bind people to one place, isolating them from cultural exchange and making their communities more likely to be conservative. The political geography of the United States bears testimony to this divide.
Russell Shorto was born in Pennsylvania and much of his argument seems to be addressed to an American audience, with its ongoing debate about the meaning of liberalism in the apparently eternal triangle marked out by Chicago school economics, Ayn Rand libertarianism and New Deal liberals.
There is perhaps no more important social conversation to be had in a country in which the very word "liberal" has become an insult – but as the illiberal turn in the Netherlands has demonstrated, it is a debate in which Europe must also engage. Larry Siedentop's recent appealing if selective argument rooting liberalism in Christianity in Inventing the Individual (reviewed in the TLS, April 11) is a counterpoint to Jonathan Israel's passionate advocacy for the liberalism of Spinoza and the Radical Enlightenment, two positions marking the polar opposites of such a debate. The provinces of the Netherlands were an important focus of both the theology of individuality and the dispersion of rationalism and atheism. In the effort to redefine a European liberalism, a history of Amsterdam may be a useful starting point.
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