Look at a photograph of Gijs van Hall from 1957, the year he became mayor of Amsterdam, and you might well consider it a generic image of any politician in the Western world in the 1950s: white, male, middle-aged, besuited and bespectacled, hair slicked back, in every sense an establishment figure. Although mayors are appointed rather than elected in the Dutch system, his selection probably pleased the vast majority of residents, for beneath the image lay substance. Van Hall was a genuine war hero, who together with his brother Wally van Hall had been the heart of the Dutch resistance. And—useful in a time of rebuilding—he was a banker with contacts in the financial world in the United States. Moreover, politically he was a social democrat, so he embodied the dual-liberalism ideal. When he became mayor, Van Hall set about an adventurous building campaign in the city. His goal was to give businesses room to grow while maintaining the city’s commitments to its citizens via the welfare state programs that had come into force. The 1950s were about casting off the wartime era and pushing toward the future. The city needed to expand. It had to finance new housing and roadways. It lashed itself to the forces that were coming into their own: cars, television, advertising, consumerism. There was an ecomomic boom: industry took off; wages nearly doubled in the course of the decade.
Van Hall’s program worked for a while. And then it crashed. And the crash—the story of a good man’s fall, which is also the story of how Amsterdam became what it is known for today—mirrored the difficult trajectory that the whole Western world followed from the postwar era to the latter part of the twentieth century: from black and white to color, from double-breasted suits to bell-bottoms.
If the distinguished, decorated establishment figure of Mayor Van Hall represented one side of what would become a colossal culture clash, then in the other corner was a seventeen-year-old boy from The Hague named Roel van Duijn. In 1960, on learning that the government was going to allow American nuclear weapons to be stored on Dutch soil, Van Duijn and a couple of his friends sat down in the middle of a busy intersection and blocked traffic. “I thought, we just finished the Second World War—we don’t need a third world war, with even worse bombs,” Van Duijn, now seventy, told me as he reminisced in his neat little garden apartment in Amsterdam’s Slotervaart section. He and his friends were arrested. When he got out of prison, he headed to Amsterdam, protested there, and got arrested again. Why Amsterdam? “Amsterdam was still very much wounded by the war,” he said. “So it was the center of critical thinking about racism and fascism.”
Indeed, in Amsterdam, an artist named Robert Jasper Grootveld was already involved in related activities, though on the face of it the connection may have been hard to see. Grootveld’s father was an anarchist who had instilled in his son the evils of the consumerist system. Grootveld focused his attention on the cigarette. Tobacco, he believed, was the root mechanism through which global corporations made slaves of ordinary people. (The fact that he was himself a chain-smoker apparently enhanced his zeal.) In a space near the Leidseplein in the city center that had been donated by a local businessman who liked his message, Grootveld started doing what today would be called performance art. He dressed himself like a kind of mad twentieth-century version of an American Indian, painted his face, and pranced around a fire. Students and others came to watch and participate. Grootveld led them in a chant that went something like “Ugge-ugge-ugge!” It was meant to sound like a smoker’s cough.
Where Van Duijn was personally shy and bookish, Grootveld was a flamboyant exhibitionist, but there was an overlap in what they believed. The victory of capitalism over Nazism had transformed society in fifteen-odd years into a herd of “despicable plastic people,” as Grootveld said. This was true throughout the West, but in the Netherlands the irony was that the blending of the two strains of liberalism had helped to turn the capitalist-labor conflict, which at least had had some spice in it, into a bland mono-class, all the members of which ended their workday vacantly gazing into the blue light of their televisions, then went to bed dreaming dreams of the products they saw advertised there.
Van Duijn, the theorist, got his initial inspiration from late-nineteenth-century anarchists, writers like Mikhail Bakunin, but he was disappointed to find their philosophy out-of-date. He got a job at the Amstel brewery, hoping to pick the brains of workers in order to jump-start a proletariat revolution, but learned that they were not interested in revolt. “I realized that the working class and their employers all had the same aim: economic growth, nothing more,” Van Duijn told me. “We thought, we need to look beyond, to a politics of freedom and creativity and playing. So I started looking for which class would support a revolution in society.” He found it, and a new word was coined: provotariat. The provotariat were young people who had come of age since the war, who had no vested interest in the system that had come into being, who saw it as a threat to individualism and creativity, and who wanted to provoke a change of consciousness.
There is an odd little statue in the middle of the Spui, a public square in central Amsterdam. The skinny bronze image is of a young boy; it’s called Het Lieverdje, “The Little Darling.” It was cast as a monument to Amsterdam’s street urchins and unveiled in 1960 by Mayor Van Hall’s wife. In 1964, after Robert Jasper Grootveld had, on one particularly rambunctious night, burned his antismoking temple to the ground (and been arrested for it), he moved his happenings, as they quickly became known, to the square. The fact that Het Lieverdje had been built with donations from a cigarette company made the statue, for him, the logical new center of his theatrical world. Every Saturday at midnight, beginning in June 1964, Grootveld performed at the statue’s base. First a dozen or so people watched. Eventually the crowd grew into the thousands.
Roel van Duijn showed up at one of the happenings with copies of an alternative magazine he had typed and printed himself. It was long and skinny, and the cover showed a brick wall with the name scrawled on it graffiti style: Provo. Provo was short for provocation. Van Duijn’s experiences with the authorities reinforced what he and others had already understood: while officially there were such things as civil rights in the Netherlands, in practice the authorities were like the regents who ran the city in the seventeenth century: they could do more or less as they pleased, and they did whatever it took to maintain their society and their power. Such was the case elsewhere, of course. This was precisely the time of the Selma to Montgomery marches in Alabama, where state troopers used clubs and tear gas on civil rights marchers. In Amsterdam the reaction to abuse of power had its own local inflection, which had to do with the disconnect between what young people believed to be the Dutch heritage of liberalism and the reality of sometimes brutal police action, including arrests, beatings, and searches without due process. The authorities had to be provoked to show their true nature. That was the thinking behind Provo the magazine and Provo the movement.
For it quickly became a movement, blending with Grootveld’s happenings. Saturday, midnight: University students gathering around the statue—and he appears, headdress, war paint, a wig, a woman’s fur coat; he dances, starts to sing about the nicotine hell god. The kids laugh, chant: Ugge-ugge. Someone is pounding a drum. And here come the police, slowly rolling in on motorcycles, nightsticks at their sides. Kiki Amsberg, my former landlady, took part along with her husband. They watched from the terrace of Café Hoppe—one of the oldest in the city, dating to the seventeenth century. “We stood there watching and laughing at the police,” she said. “They had no clue how to deal with this. Then suddenly, the police went into action. They turned and went into the crowd and started lashing people with a bullwhip, and people ran in panic.”
Upstairs at his house, in his tiny library, Roel van Duijn slid something out of a plastic sleeve to show me. It was the first number of Provo, which he had pounded out on his Erika typewriter, dated July 12, 1965. If someone were to compile a top ten list of 1960s artifacts, this first edition of Van Duijn’s homemade rag might well be on it. Its narrow pages are packed with angry, playful, absurdist rant. Van Duijn turned to a page and showed what I had asked to see. In every copy of the first number he had taped a couple of toy gun caps—the little strips of paper with pellets of explosive that make a pop when struck. “Grab a hammer and start the revolution in your own life with a bang!” his text said. “That got me arrested too,” he informed me.
The authorities did not understand the happenings, which of course was the point. People were beaten and hauled off to prison for such nonoffenses as laying flowers at the foot of the Lieverdje statue. One of the most famous provocations involved a female coconspirator handing out raisins to people in the crowd. She went to jail. Grootveld played other games, too, to provoke the authorities. He scrawled a giant letter K (for cancer) on cigarette posters around the city. He substituted packs of faux-marijuana cigarettes for regular ones in Automat machines. He invented something called the Marihuette game, one version of which involved having participants in his happenings roll cigarettes that contained something other than marijuana or tobacco and smoking them in front of policemen; the objective was to get arrested for doing something legal.
While Grootveld ran the show and drew crowds, Van Duijn sought ways to harness the energy. Provo announced a series of “white” initiatives. The most famous was the White Bicycle plan. The automobile having been declared tobacco’s demon twin, Provo decreed that the city of Amsterdam should banish cars and make a fleet of white bicycles freely available to all who wanted to use them. They would be available, unlocked, at points around the city; residents would hop on one, ride it to their destination, and leave it there for the next person. The Provos purchased the first fifty, painted them white, and presented them to the city. Whereupon the police confiscated them.
As a pointed follow-up, the Provos declared their White Chicken plan. Kip (chicken) was Dutch slang for a police officer; the plan called on the city to make the police into true servants of society by providing them with supplies of condoms, Band-Aids, and fried chicken drumsticks to distribute on their rounds. (The White Chicken plan did not fly.)
By the summer of 1965 the Provo phenomenon dominated Dutch news. Provo declared Amsterdam “the Magic Center,” the place from which a new consciousness would come into being. And Spui Square was the center of the Magic Center. Curiously enough, the square sits just in front of the Begijnhof, a little courtyard nunnery that dates to the period of the city’s first fame, in the aftermath of the so-called miracle of Amsterdam, so that testaments to the two periods of the city’s international renown—medieval piety and flower-power revolt—stand side by side.
The crowds at the happenings had by now grown exponentially. “Youngsters started to show up in Amsterdam from other parts of the country,” Van Duijn said. “All of a sudden they had long hair. It was so surprising to see. This was 1965—you didn’t see this sort of thing in Berlin or Paris until 1967. It still surprises me, because after all there were only ten or twelve of us doing this.”
As the happenings swelled and the international press swept in to report on the curious youth movement under way in Amsterdam, the participants—who included members of the still small antiwar and anti–atom bomb movements as well as anarchists, beatniks, artists, and droves of generally disaffected young people—were more vigorously attacked by the authorities. Some spent a month or more in prison for nonexistent offenses. The police violence led the Provos to focus their attention on the mayor. “Van Hall ten val!”—Bring down Van Hall!—became a Saturday night chant. Steadily, Gijs van Hall, the hero of the resistance, was sucked into a cross-generational vortex.
No one knew at the time that Van Hall was to some extent caught in the middle; like Amsterdam officials of earlier centuries, he was trying to mediate between free expression in his city and distant superiors—in this case the national government in The Hague—who wanted the nonsense to end. And few of the young people knew or cared about Van Hall’s valiant past. “In fact, he was a brave man,” Van Duijn told me as we chatted in his apartment. “But I didn’t know this then. I didn’t know his part in the resistance. It was probably good that I didn’t know because then I would have had respect for him. And the fact was, as mayor, he was patronizing, he considered us to be evil, trash. He was like the father and he wanted us to shut up.”
One of Robert Jasper Grootveld’s chants was Klaas komt! Klaas is Dutch for Saint Nicholas, the forerunner of the modern Santa Claus, who has his own holiday in the Netherlands. “Klaas is coming!” started appearing as graffiti around the city. It prophesied, apparently, that the end of the corrupt establishment was at hand and a time of peace and love and magic would soon follow. The crowds loved the chant, and may have believed it, but people were stunned when Klaas actually did arrive. In 1966 young Princess Beatrix announced she was marrying. Her fiancé was Claus von Amsberg, a German nobleman who had been in the Hitler Youth and served briefly in the Nazi army during the war. Grootveld’s happy-times prediction seemed to flip upside down. Provos considered the Dutch monarchy the epitome of the reactionary old guard; that the princess was going to marry a onetime member of the occupying power, and that his name collided with that of their supposed magical savior, was a provocation of the Provos. Something had to be done.
The White Rumor plan went into effect as the royal wedding neared. People heard that the Provos were going to put LSD in the drinking water prior to the ceremony; they were going to spread lion dung along the parade route to make police horses bolt. The wedding was going to showcase Amsterdam, and the Netherlands, to the world. Mayor Van Hall and the authorities in The Hague couldn’t afford trouble. They lined the route with twenty-five thousand police officers.
There were also rumors of Provo bombs being set off. These rumors turned out to be true, but they were smoke bombs. Many of the police were from outside the city; in the confusion, and with their edginess, as white plumes of smoke went up they started clubbing people seemingly at random. The pictures on TV were less of the royal couple in their gilded coach than of street chaos.
The wedding marked a turning point in the Provo movement: a critical mass of Amsterdammers in effect joined Provo. Many had understood the feelings of anger at the idea of the wedding in a city that had suffered so much at the hands of the Germans. Eighteen city council members had voted to boycott the ceremony. Now on television people saw the official overreaction.
Gijs van Hall—who had been considered a tyrannical beast by the Provos and a timid nonleader by officials in The Hague—was forced out of office soon after the wedding. With him went the old order. In a flash, Provo had won a strange kind of respect. “There came a breakthrough,” Van Duijn told me. “People started to get the joke. The smoke bombs were not to hurt anybody but to make the TV picture go white so people couldn’t see the royal wedding. They understood the nature of Provo. Suddenly we were getting invitations to speak, in London, in Paris, in Prague. I gave a lecture in Ljubljana on Provo and ecology. It started to spread.”
It spread most decisively in Amsterdam itself. Historian Hans Righart calls 1966 the rampjaar, the disaster year, echoing the term for 1672, when war brought the golden age crashing down. In the rampjaar of 1966, Provos won five seats on the city council. One of the nation’s still existing political parties, D66 (as in “Democrats 1966”), came into being on a platform to bring a truer form of democracy. Every institution felt its foundations tremble. Journalism had previously been staid and self-stifled; seemingly overnight, it changed, became aggressive, investigative.
The decade culminated in Amsterdam with two events in the spring of 1969, one that shook the city internally while the other rebranded Amsterdam globally as the liberal capital of the world. The first began with students of the University of Amsterdam demanding a say in all university matters; when the president rejected the demand, seven hundred students staged a sit-in at the Maagdenhuis, the central administrative building of the university (which happened to sit directly opposite the Lieverdje statue). As was the case with similar sit-ins elsewhere, the action brought home to many the starkness of the generational divide.
The second event took place in Suite 902 of the Amsterdam Hilton. In the three years since the wedding of Beatrix and her German beau, the rest of the world had caught up with Provo Amsterdam. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the My Lai massacre, and the crushing of the Prague Spring had shaken the foundations of things. The Summer of Love had come and gone. The Beatles had produced Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, and the so-called White Album.
Beatles fans started to get nervous when John Lennon diverted his attention away from the group to focus on atonal musical projects with Yoko Ono. After their marriage in Gibraltar, in March 1969, John and Yoko began their honeymoon in Paris, where they had lunch with Salvador Dalí (they played a screechy song for him, and he turned the tables by biting the head off a grilled bird) and met a Dutch record producer named Hans Boskamp. Vietnam, war, and peace were on their minds; they wanted to harness the international media attention their wedding had attracted. Boskamp suggested that Amsterdam, the city of Provo and the happenings, was the place to demonstrate. “That’s a good idea,” Boskamp remembered Lennon saying. “You look for a good hotel and we will do the rest.” So Lennon and Ono hopped in their white Rolls-Royce and drove to Amsterdam.
From March 25 to 31, they occupied a suite at the Amsterdam Hilton. They taped handmade posters to the windows—BED PEACE, said one; HAIR PEACE, said another—and announced that a happening was going to happen in their bed. Whereupon the Amsterdam police, fearing this might involve a public display of lovemaking, issued a notice: “If people are invited to such a ‘happening,’ the police would certainly act.”
But that wasn’t the plan. Instead, John and Yoko reinvented the sit-in by stitching it to the honeymoon concept and inviting the world press corps. Jan Donkers, then a young correspondent for VPRO radio who would go on to become a renowned Dutch pop journalist, remembered getting a call from someone at EMI Records: “We told them we had a radio program every Friday evening. Could we broadcast live from their bedroom for a whole hour? They said yes! Incredible.” Thus Donkers found himself not quite in bed but sitting on the bed with the newlyweds. In his answers, Lennon said the bed-in concept was “the most effectual way of promoting peace that we could think of.” But people didn’t seem to want to dwell on Vietnam. A listener asked if Lennon had seen the musical Hair. “I thought it was crap, but I thought the idea was all right,” Lennon replied. “We walked out after the nude bit.” Someone else asked, “At what frequency are you vibrating in Amsterdam right now?” He shot back breezily, “Oh, about two million frequencies per second. Watch out!” Donkers told me his main impressions during the hour were of how insistent Ono was to be heard and how relaxed and funny Lennon was. Lennon held himself back while Ono gave a long, windy statement about peace and cosmic energy; he waited a beat and said with his Liverpool twang, “She’s foreign, you know.”
A month later, Lennon enshrined it all in the lyrics of “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” which the Beatles released as a single a month after that:
Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton,
Talking in our beds for a week.…
The bed-in, which brought journalists from all over the globe, didn’t do much for world peace but it may have been just the thing to cement Amsterdam’s reputation as the center of the new liberalism. The energy of the 1960s got fused into the city even as the decade itself was passing. By the time John and Yoko checked in to the Hilton, the Provo movement was already officially dead. Provo’s purpose had been to irritate the establishment. By 1967 both the police commissioner and the mayor had lost their jobs amid controversy over their handling of the provocations, leaving the Provos bereft of their antagonists, and, as a kiss of death, some establishment types were now signing on to the Provo program. (After a former government minister openly offered his support, Van Duijn said that if the minister had really wanted to support the movement he would have cracked down on it.) The leaders held a meeting to dissolve Provo. Within months after the bed-in, meanwhile, Paul McCartney announced that the Beatles were breaking up and everyone turned the page on their wall calendars. The 1960s were over.
But in Amsterdam, the 1960s didn’t end. Roel van Duijn became a member of the Amsterdam city council in 1969; he remained in city government for the next thirty years. Other colleagues from the time also joined the establishment. Some former Provos accused them of selling out, but Van Duijn said he wanted to be part of “the mechanism for change.” Indeed, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that rather than former Provos becoming establishment, the city’s establishment became Provo. Hans Righart argues in his aptly titled book The Endless Sixties that the Netherlands changed more after the 1960s than it did after the Second World War. Put slightly differently, the 1960s extended and sped up the process of change that the war had brought about. And that was especially the case in Amsterdam. In the 1960s, as Jan Donkers said, “The counterculture became Amsterdam’s dominant culture. And it’s still that way.”
Symbolic of this, because it is part of the city’s structure, was the Provos’ White Bicycle plan, which spawned what is today probably the most sophisticated urban bicycle system in the world, with bike lanes, bike traffic lights, bike parking garages, and an elaborate system of cyclist etiquette (which, Provo style, many Amsterdammers ignore). The implementation of the White Bicycle plan can be traced to one man: Luud Schimmelpennink, a former Provo who conceived of the plan and went on to become a member of the city government. His ideas and effort also helped to initiate urban bicycle programs in cities around the world.
Other ideas that were radical when Provo floated them have since become commonplace in Amsterdam and elsewhere. The White Chimney plan sought to impose fines on polluters—which is what the emissions trading or “cap and trade” system for managing pollution does in a more sophisticated way. In the 1970s, Roel van Duijn rose to the position of alderman responsible for energy policy; he proposed that the city explore the possibility of using windmills to create energy. “People thought I was mad,” he told me. “They said, ‘Do you want to take us back to the Middle Ages?’ But this is exactly the spirit in which society is working today.”
Then, too, Amsterdam’s late-twentieth-century liberalism did not spring whole cloth from its homegrown 1960s counterculture movement. It came out of the city’s entire, unique history: its battles against water, the protocapitalist culture that developed against the backdrop of feudal Europe, the nonideological brand of tolerance that took hold at least as far back as the sixteenth century, when the city became a magnet for people from a variety of new religions whose chants and rants and dances would have gotten them burned as witches in other places.
Indeed, by the later twentieth century, that kind of religious freedom was itself able to evolve in the direction of freedom from religion. Maybe the most profound post-1960s transformation in the city was in the role that religion played in people’s lives. In the city of the miracle of Amsterdam, in what had been one of Europe’s most devout societies, people simply stopped going to church. A single set of statistics tells the story. In 1900, more than 45 percent of Amsterdammers identified with Dutch Protestantism, the Christian denomination for which their ancestors had fought a war of independence against the Spanish empire. By 1971, only about 18 percent considered themselves part of the faith. In 2000, the number was 5 percent. If liberalism is, as many of its adherents and detractors alike have said through the centuries, a force that ultimately stands in opposition to religion, or as an eventual replacement for religion, then here too Amsterdam seems to be leading the way.
The implementation of the social welfare state after World War II also brought sharp and nearly instantaneous changes. People suddenly got subsidies: unemployment payments, sick leave. Jobs came with built-in pensions. There is a relationship between the rise of the welfare state and the steady unchurching of the city and the country, as the welfare state took over some of the security-blanket functions that churches had provided. And many people found this to be a positive development. Jan Donkers, for example, told me how throughout his childhood in North Amsterdam his devout Catholic grandmother kept three statues of saints on her living room mantel. Then she started getting welfare checks of forty guilders a month. The next time he went to her house, he said, he saw the statues outside next to the trash. “She said, ‘What has the church done for us, apart from anointing German tanks when they came? Churches didn’t buy bread for us. The Labor Party did.’ ”
Whether via the countercultural revolution, secularization, or the social welfare state, Amsterdam came out of the 1950s and 1960s with a renewed commitment to its liberal heritage. The Dutch American historian James Kennedy argues that this was due less to a full-throated avowal on the part of the city leaders of what the new liberalisms meant than to a historic willingness to compromise, to allow alternative voices to be heard. In other words, the politicians who ran the city in the aftermath of the 1960s were not all leftist radicals; rather, thanks to the polder model that was part of their makeup, they somewhat passively allowed their city to be a breeding ground for causes and ideas that were still anathema elsewhere.
Of course, this passive allowing implies the existence of those who were being allowed, those who were forcing the new: the Benno Premselas and Roel van Duijns. The city has always had a rich array of radicals and rights promoters. But the passive character of Amsterdam’s tolerance remained apparent in the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, when it continued to unfurl the liberal banner, extending rights and freedoms on a scale unequaled in other cities. Its drug policy evolved against a backdrop of passive allowance: when marijuana first came to prominence in the 1960s, there was no built-in moral condemnation of it on the part of the government, as there was in many other places. As Provo gave way to the wider hippie culture, radio show hosts began to list prices of various types of marijuana and hashish available in the city. With drugs becoming more prevalent, the Dutch Department of Justice employed gedogen, the uniquely Dutch approach to tolerance: hard drugs like heroin were seen as an intolerable danger, but officials started to float the idea of decriminalization for soft drugs like marijuana. In 1973, three political parties, including D66 and the Labor Party, ran on a platform that advocated treating marijuana in the same way as alcohol.
The problem with legalizing pot turned out to be less local public opinion than the fact that the Netherlands had neighbors: the country would face censure from international organizations. (Plus there was some fear that hippies from around the world would come flocking in, which of course they did.) So gedogen held sway. Since police cracked down on drug dealing in the streets, another way was found. Every Amsterdammer or visitor to the city knows the difference between a coffee shop and a café. Historically, the distinction was that cafés had licenses to sell alcohol. Because coffee shops basically just sold coffee, there was no reason for police to pay attention to what went on in them. Thus, the pot trade moved indoors, and the Amsterdam coffee shop developed its own hazy mystique. The first coffee shop, according to some, was Mellow Yellow, a former bakery on the Weesperzijde, which was started in 1973 by a twenty-three-year-old named Wernard Bruining. Thirty years later, he told a reporter that Mellow Yellow wasn’t about profit but about “clear and fair trade, and bringing people together through a joint. We were hippies. The world would be better if people were smoking dope.”
The coffee shop idea worked, as far as the city leaders were concerned. Liberalism as an ideal—allowing people free exercise of their rights to pleasure themselves—did not feature much in official deliberations on the topic. The coffee shop concept was an expedient: it managed the inevitability of soft drugs; it contained their use; it provided for a measure of control. Technically, pot was still illegal, but provided coffee shops didn’t advertise and didn’t permit hard drug use, gedogen ruled. Thus came the golden age of ganja Amsterdam, the spliff center of the universe, the place to which latter-day hippies would flock to sit in stoned public contentment listening to Pink Floyd before boarding the Magic Bus from an office off Dam Square to ride the Hippie Trail to India and other points east. By the 1980s the city contained somewhere around fifteen hundred coffee shops. You could buy (and still can) Super Palm, Honey Yellow, Orange Bud, Black Bombay, Indian Cream, Burmese Kush, and a hundred other varieties, as well as Dutch brownies and space cake.
Prostitution followed a similar trajectory, with the difference that the perception of it as inevitable and thus to be tolerated goes back practically to the city’s founding. In the case of prostitution the containment idea centered on two fronts: isolating it to specific neighborhoods (there are a couple of small red light districts in addition to the main one, De Wallen) and moving it off the streets and behind windows. The first prostitute windows—in which women displayed themselves to the public—appeared in De Wallen in the 1960s. There are several hundred windows today, as well as prostitutes who work in brothels. By the 1980s prostitutes had organized themselves. An advocacy group, called the Red Thread, came into being. Prostitutes wanted legalization of the trade. They wanted to change the mind-set that saw them as fallen women in need of reform and to be thought of simply as workers doing a job.
The year 2000 was a watershed for the kind of liberalization for which Amsterdam in its recent guise has become famous. It came about as a result of another of the Dutch convergences of social and economic liberalism. The governing coalition of parties included the main social liberal party, Labor, as well as two economic liberal parties, D66 and Liberal. Working together, and operating from different philosophical perspectives, they passed a slate of laws that extended civil liberties in several directions. Prostitution, gay marriage, and euthanasia were all legalized. This particular series of legalizations runs against the argument that Dutch tolerance is simply passive acceptance, for these decisions were made expressly to advance freedoms and rights. Same-sex marriage was a recognition of the equal rights of homosexuals, euthanasia of the right to die with dignity. Economic liberals argued for the legalization of prostitution on the grounds that citizens should have the right to practice a trade for which there is a market. Social liberals believed that legalization of prostitution would bring regulation, which would protect the prostitutes and their clients.
The business of prostitution did indeed become more normal. Some prostitutes are members of the FNV, one of the largest Dutch trade unions. The Red Thread offers advice on its Web site to sex workers, including tax help: “As a freelancer you may deduct the cost of condoms and transportation. Unfortunately, clothing and personal care costs are not deductible.”
Many of the problems that plagued the business for centuries remained, some of them exacerbated by legalization. Amsterdam became a center of human trafficking. Likewise, the advent of coffee shops and the decriminalization of marijuana didn’t erase problems associated with drugs. In a number of ways, the Dutch in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have served as a scientific test case for the possibilities of radical liberalization of laws related to social behavior. One conclusion is that it’s difficult to legalize something that the rest of the world does not allow without becoming a front for organized crime. As a result, Dutch politicians began to retreat from the liberal excesses. The numbers of coffee shops and prostitute windows were cut back, and Amsterdam and other municipalities began to take firmer steps to regulate the businesses.
Yet you didn’t hear many Amsterdammers demanding that these businesses be stopped altogether. Job Cohen, who was mayor of Amsterdam from 2001 to 2010, told me that the answer to the problems caused by legalizing or officially tolerating the sex and drug trades was to better regulate. “In Amsterdam freedom is an ultimate value,” he said. “People come here because they have the feeling that they can do anything they want. That is our history, and we have to protect it.” As a result, you could find, in the wake of the city’s 2008 prohibition on cigarette smoking in public places, signs such as this in coffee shops: “In compliance with new Dutch laws we have disallowed tobacco smoking in our bar. Cigarettes, blunts, and joints mixed with tobacco must be smoked outside. Pure marijuana joints can still be smoked indoors, as can pipes and bongs that do not contain any tobacco.”
The curious flip side to Amsterdam’s famously liberal approach to soft drugs is worth mentioning. The Dutch have one of the most restrictive attitudes in the world when it comes to prescription drugs. There is an innate mistrust of the pharmaceutical industry; the Dutch are deeply conservative when it comes to surgery. Doctors, amazingly, are disinclined to prescribe medicine. Prescription rates for antidepressants for young people, for example, are about one-third what they are in the United States. Several times I’ve gone to my doctor with physical complaints, only to have her write me a prescription for aspirin.
Something similar—a conservatism lurking beneath the infamous liberalism—applies in the approach to sex. The society that once brandished a prudishness that Aletta Jacobs, Bernard Premsela, and Benno Premsela fought against has not only legalized prostitution but developed one of the frankest of perspectives on all matters sexual. Birth control is presented to teenagers as a matter of course; the famous “double Dutch” method—girls taking birth control pills and boys using condoms—has resulted in one of the world’s lowest rates of teen pregnancy and one of the lowest rates of abortion. The conservatism comes in in this way: sex is viewed as a matter not of secrecy but of health and normalcy. You see the same view reflected at the movies, where films that have R ratings in the United States for sexual content are open for all ages in Amsterdam. The flip side: a PG-13 film in the United States might be rated for adults only in the Netherlands, where movie violence that Americans think unexceptional is considered something to shield children from.
In January of 2000, the Dutch writer Paul Scheffer, a prominent member of the Labor Party, published an article in the NRC Handelsblad, the country’s leading newspaper, called “The Multicultural Drama.” Beginning in the 1980s, multiculturalism—meaning an effort both to promote more diversity in society and to support the distinctness of different subgroups—had become the new incarnation of the tolerance the Dutch had shown, and in some sense invented, in the seventeenth century. Multiculturalism—which was prevalent throughout Europe—had led, beginning in the 1970s, to a broad open-door immigration policy. The Dutch had built attractive processing centers for refugees, with swimming pools, tennis courts, and laundry services.
But Scheffer pointed out that multiculturalism was not building a new Dutch society, enriched by immigrants who blended in and added their talents to the whole. Instead, it had created an immigrant underclass that was becoming an unsupportable economic burden, whose members had little awareness of the values of the society that was sponsoring them and in some cases were openly abusive of the very values that had allowed them to settle there. Part of the problem was ideology. Multiculturalism, in this definition of the term, holds that all cultures are equal and should be treated equally; therefore it would be wrong to give preference to one language or way of doing things, even if it was that of the culture in which newcomers had chosen to live. But there was also a distinctly nonideological reason for the failure of multiculturalism. Newcomers were encouraged to keep their language and traditions not necessarily out of a pie-eyed sense of equality of cultures but because officials considered them “guest workers” who would eventually return to their home countries. The failure was also due to lack of follow-through. There was no master plan for integrating new arrivals. In its absence, the outdated pillar system, in which different groups had their own schools, neighborhoods, and media, reassserted itself. Immigrants moved into ghettos. Their children went to what were unashamedly called “black schools.” With little to encourage or force them to learn the Dutch language or culture, they became second-class citizens.
Scheffer’s article hit a nerve because these were things that were much on people’s minds, but multiculturalism had been considered too politically correct to challenge. Now that it was in the open, a national conversation began. When the 9/11 attacks occurred in the United States, the conversation became a furious debate about immigration, Islam, and Dutch identity.
One of the many people who had come through the refugee processing centers was a young Somali woman named Ayaan Hirsi Magan. She had had a hard life in Somalia and Kenya, was subjected to female circumcision at age five, and eventually fled an arranged marriage—it was to hide from her husband that she changed her name to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The Netherlands struck her as a bewildering paradise. She learned Dutch, enrolled as a student at Leiden University, and became entranced by her study of the Enlightenment. “I came to realize how deeply the Dutch are attached to freedom, and why,” she wrote. “Holland was in many ways the capital of the European Enlightenment. Four hundred years ago, when European thinkers severed the hard bands of church dogma that had constrained people’s minds, Holland was the center of free thought.”
On Amsterdam’s Leidseplein, opposite many of the bars and clubs that make up the city’s nightlife district, is a debate center called De Balie. Hirsi Ali went there one night in November 2001, just after the 9/11 attacks, to hear a panel debate the question “The West or Islam: Who Needs a Voltaire?” The Dutch speakers took the position that the West, with its gaze narrowly focused on satisfying its consumerist cravings while vital issues were at stake, needed a new Voltaire, a new Enlightenment prophet. Hirsi Ali stood up and took the opposite position. “Look at how many Voltaires the West has,” she said. “Don’t deny us the right to have our Voltaire, too. Look at our women, and look at our countries. Look at how we are all fleeing and asking for refuge here, and how people are now flying planes into buildings in their madness. Allow us a Voltaire, because we are truly in the Dark Ages.”
Within two years, Hirsi Ali had risen to become a member of the Dutch parliament and a fixture on television, as Amsterdam, and the world, debated the issues of immigration and Islam. She highlighted outrageous features of Dutch multiculturalism, such as the fact that while well-intentioned liberal Dutch observers criticized African countries for allowing female circumcision, the same barbaric practice was being conducted in immigrant communities in Dutch cities. As she drew ire—from Dutch liberals and from some Muslims—she was emboldened, becoming a critic of Islam as a religion and way of life and of the West for not standing up to what she said were threats to liberal culture inherent in Islam.
Hirsi Ali found an unlikely ally in Theo van Gogh, great-grandson of the brother of Vincent van Gogh, a filmmaker and artist whose mission, like Robert Jasper Grootveld’s, was to provoke the establishment (but with the distinction that Van Gogh declared that chain-smoking was healthy). Van Gogh wanted to attack multiculturalism. He and Hirsi Ali collaborated on a ten-minute film, Submission: Part 1. It shows a young Muslim woman in the act of prayer. She is dressed head to toe in traditional costume, except that the middle of her body is exposed and covered with verses from the Quran. As she prays, we hear a series of stories told by different women who have suffered rape and other forms of outrage from men and yet, under Islamic law, must remain submissive.
The film was meant to be provocative, but when it aired on Dutch television it didn’t get much immediate attention. Then on November 2, 2004, Van Gogh was shot to death as he was bicycling down the street near his home just off the Oosterpark. After firing eight bullets into him, Mohammed Bouyeri, a twenty-six-year-old Dutch Moroccan who had grown up in Amsterdam, slashed Van Gogh’s throat, then stuck a five-page letter to his chest with the knife. It was a death threat directed at Hirsi Ali and an Islamist rant directed at the relativist, godless West.
Hirsi Ali went into hiding and became an international sensation. 60 Minutes profiled her; Time named her one of the hundred most influential people in the world. Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens lionized her as a champion of the Enlightenment arisen from the darkest regions of Islamist Africa. In the Netherlands, where she didn’t shrink from the attention but used it to further her strident attacks on Islam, she became too controversial to be endured. In 2006, Rita Verdonk, then the minister for integration, revoked her passport, on the grounds that she had lied about her refugee status when she sought admission to the country. She was no longer a Dutch citizen. The furor over her actually brought down the Dutch government. Meanwhile, Hirsi Ali accepted an offer to become a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and promptly stepped away from the aftermath of the explosion she had touched off.
Not long after, I had lunch with Hirsi Ali in New York, in order to interview her for a magazine article. She was every bit the poised, arresting fashionista she had been made out to be. And she was in a sense a near-perfect advocate for Amsterdam and its liberal tradition. You could feel the strength of the grasp that her outsider’s perspective gave her on the worth and meaning of the liberal tradition. She insisted that the commitment to reason and individual freedom that Amsterdam had fostered is more vital than ever as a weapon against religious superstition. “The West was saved by the fact that it succeeded in separating faith and reason,” she told me. “The only way to stand up to radical Islam is to revive the message of the Enlightenment, to make Europeans and Americans remember that their modern society didn’t just fall out of the sky. There is a long history of struggle that led to this complex functioning society. And religion, including Christianity, has most of the time hindered that.”
I found myself agreeing with her in large part. Religious absolutism has been a huge force for ill. I agreed that the separation of church and state is fundamentally important. I think we all need as many Voltaires—and Spinozas—as we can get. But Hirsi Ali’s attack on Islam itself, and on all who practice it, was too much for me. And it was too much for the little world of Dutch politics through which she rose to fame. She seemed to long for a culture clash, on a biblical scale, as it were.
Amsterdam, meanwhile, reeled from the Van Gogh murder. People wondered if militant Islamism was about to break out into mass violence. If multiculturalism was wrong, what, people suddenly needed to know, was the right way to integrate, to adapt Western society to an ever more interconnected world? The city was so shaken, down to the level of individual households, that on the very evening of the assassination Mayor Job Cohen called for a mass gathering on Dam Square. At first he had thought to hold a silent vigil, but on learning that Van Gogh had detested silent vigils he made it a “noise vigil” and asked people to bring noisemakers.
Thousands streamed into the place that was the site of the medieval dam that gave the city its name. Many carried not only noisemakers but signs disparaging Cohen for not having foreseen the rise of militant Islam. In fact, in its multicultural heyday, the city had fostered the ghettoization of Muslims and subsidized Islamist organizations, which taught that women were naturally inferior and that Jews were enemies. People said you could almost feel the collective consciousness changing during the vigil, as people woke up to realize the scope of the failure of multiculturalism.
After the demonstration, a fascinating two-man team went to work: Cohen, the Jewish mayor, and Ahmed Aboutaleb, a city alderman who had been born and raised in a Berber village in Morocco. Aboutaleb was the son of an imam; he had emigrated to the Netherlands at age fifteen. Together, the Amsterdam Jew and the Amsterdam Muslim conducted a series of gatherings, sounding out the city neighborhood by neighborhood. “We operated as a kind of couple,” Aboutaleb later told me. “It was a kind of city therapy.” To neighborhood groups and the media, the two men offered different but complementary messages. Cohen stressed that non-Muslims had no reason to feel threatened by Muslims: investigations indicated that the young man who had killed Van Gogh had acted alone. In a way that Cohen himself couldn’t have gotten away with, Aboutaleb used the occasion to push the city’s Muslims to do more to integrate. Speaking at a mosque, Aboutaleb declared, “Whoever doesn’t want to go along with Dutch society and its achievements can pack his bags.”
At some point, Cohen, when asked to define his strategy, used the phrase de boel bij elkaar houden, which translates roughly as “keeping things together.” Some ridiculed him for what sounded like a wishy-washy philosophy of governing. It fed into the rhetoric of Geert Wilders, the far-right politician who was using the furor over the murder to push his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim agenda. After it became known that Cohen and Aboutaleb had drunk tea in mosques with groups of Muslims, Wilders turned “tea drinking” into an epithet: Cohen personified the ever-weakening West, kowtowing to an ascendant, aggressive Islam.
But Maarten Hajer, a political scientist at the University of Amsterdam, put it in a different context for me. “Tea drinking is the form of socializing in these communities,” he said. “And while Cohen was doing that, he was also standing up for gay rights. In that sense, ‘keeping things together’ becomes a very meaningful phrase.”
In the aftermath of the Van Gogh killing, Time named Cohen a “European hero,” and in 2006 he came in second in a World Mayor contest. Both Cohen and Hirsi Ali, then, were lauded internationally for their very different ways of answering questions about immigration and integration, in particular the question of Islam in the West. In the years after the furor over the death of Theo van Gogh, even as immigration receded from the agenda in many places as the cutting issue of the day, and as Cohen ran for prime minister, lost, and retired from politics, people in Amsterdam continued to puzzle over the conflicting approaches that Cohen, the conciliator, and Hirsi Ali, the Enlightenment firebrand, personified. Which was the better path? More broadly, what—for those who believe in liberalism, not just in terms of immigration but in all respects—is the way forward?
Maybe the best response to such a serious question is to begin at the level of the ridiculous. Every city has its bad art. In Amsterdam and other Dutch cities, up until 1987 bad art held privileged status: it was funded by the public. Through the Beeldende Kunstenaars Regeling (BKR), or Fine Arts Subsidy, the government paid virtually anyone who applied and said he or she was an artist—three thousand people at the program’s height—a living wage, which totaled $70 million a year in public funds. In exchange, the artist had to produce three works per year for the government. Most of the works—hundreds of thousands of them—were stored in warehouses, for an additional curiosity of the BKR was that the artworks submitted could not be sold. Since generally speaking artists are not keen to have their work sit in storage but also since some of the individuals partaking of the system were not so much dedicated artists as scammers, many pieces were mockeries of the process: people sent in items of household trash and called them sculpture.
The BKR is an example of the socialism-gone-wild comedy that set in in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities as the lowercase-l liberalism of the late twentieth century reached its absurdist low point. With the laudable intent to spread rights and freedoms as far as possible, to see just how far their commitment to liberal ideals could go, the Dutch created some systems that were truly worthy of parody. Maybe most ridiculous was the phenomenon of kraken, or squatting. In 1971 it became legal to break into an empty building and take up residence in it, and by the 1980s it was a rite of passage for groups of young people to take over a building and set up a neolithic existence in it (without electricity or running water). The squatting phenomenon, combined with the declawing of the police after the Provo period, produced absurdist street theater performances, in which a battalion of officers, in full riot gear, would show up outside a squatted building (its windows festooned with anarchic messages), making noise and brandishing their shields, while the kids inside would sneer from the windows. Then the police would go home.
Squatting was finally declared illegal in 2010, as part of the general official retreat from the lunatic horizon of liberal policy. By then, of course, the image of the city was well entrenched. A 2008 piece on Fox News’s O’Reilly Factor that became a minor cult classic in Amsterdam used the city as a warning to the United States, in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s first election victory, of what liberalism portends. Conservative commentator Monica Crowley, in conversation with host Bill O’Reilly, declared that the Dutch were engaged in “experimentation with social tolerance, free love, free drugs” and concluded: “Amsterdam is a cesspool of corruption, crime, everything’s out of control—it’s anarchy!” O’Reilly agreed, saying, “Every questionable person in Europe heads to Amsterdam because it’s all there!” A twenty-five-year-old Dutchman named Robbert Nieuwenhuijs responded with a video that swept the Internet, putting the lurid claims of the commentators over images of ordinary life on the city’s streets: people cycling, riding boats on the canals, kids playing. And he added some statistics for perspective: 40.3 percent of Americans have used cannabis, while only 22.6 percent of Dutch people have; drug-related deaths in the United States are 38 per million people, in the Netherlands 2.4 per million.
In fact, people in Amsterdam had long been aware of the truth embedded in the surreal exaggerations of the Fox News report. What the report ignored—what gets lost in the hippie-hazy image that the city has in the outside world—is the other side of its liberal tradition. In many ways Amsterdam still stands at the forefront of the advance of civil rights. In 2001, Job Cohen, shortly after becoming mayor, performed the world’s first same-sex marriage—or actually four marriages, since he had arranged to have four couples standing ready at the moment the law went into effect, to make sure his city maintained its position at the vanguard of civil rights.
The social welfare system similarly reflects a real commitment to individual rights, one that may not be well understood elsewhere. Like the Fine Arts Subsidy, it was in the past subject to widespread abuse, with people making fake claims for sick leave and the like. But it has had several overhauls, and it works. Even through the economic crises of the early twenty-first century, Amsterdam has found ways to manage its blend of economic and social liberalisms. As an outsider, I was at first bewildered by the social welfare system, then slowly I became a fan. I will never forget my confusion on first receiving a payment for kinderbijslag, a quarterly child subsidy, simply because I had children. Or vakantiegeld: vacation money, 8 percent of one’s annual salary, which every working person receives in the spring, to help finance the cost of holiday travel. Again, such forms of assistance take place within the context of a capitalist culture; they are meant not to dissolve individualism but to give individuals some solid ground beneath their feet. I have found that, mostly, the idea works: you run your own life yet you feel that you are not entirely alone; you are a part of something. Sitting one chilly afternoon in the pleasantly dark recesses of Café Scheltema, a journalists’ hangout since the days of the Nazi occupation, the Dutch writer Geert Mak contrasted for me the American and Dutch approaches to freedom. “My American friends say they live in the best country in the world, and in a lot of ways they are right,” he said. “But they always have to worry: ‘What happens to my family if I have a heart attack? What happens when I turn sixty-five or seventy?’ America is the land of the free. But I think we are freer.”
Freer … because you’re not alone. That is the story that Amsterdam tells. Working together, we win land from the sea. Individually, we own it; individually, we prosper, so that collectively we do. Together, we maintain a society of individuals. For an American, raised on a diet of raw individualism, it remains a bit of a challenge to parse that logic. Another Dutch friend, who happens to be an expert on water management, drove home the differing sensibilities when he told me that the fable of Hans Brinker, the little Dutch boy who sticks his finger in the leaking dike to save the city and is rewarded for his heroism, is completely incomprehensible to the Dutch themselves. As it happens, it’s not a Dutch tale at all but was written by an American in the nineteenth century. Carving their city out of the effluvial medieval muck necessitated a high level of cooperation among individuals, a communal sensibility that is evident today in the social welfare system. This is why, according to my friend, the fable doesn’t work for the Dutch. “The heroism in the story,” he said, “is purely American.” Dike building and dike repair are communal enterprises; were the Dutch to construct such a fairy tale, the “hero” would probably be the town water board.
And yet, Amsterdam also goes far in the other direction, farther than any other place on earth. If maintaining individual freedom means treading a line between chaos and control, Amsterdam has shown a strong preference for erring on the side of chaos.
Amsterdam’s history is so specific, so bound up with water, that its approach to individual freedom is different from that of most of the rest of the Western world. Still, many of us have long believed that the basic elements of liberalism are universal, and necessary for the future. But the future is shifting. Western democracies make up only a small portion of the world, and experiences with “nation building” have not had great success in transplanting democracy, for example, to regions that have never known it. And the political scientist Francis Fukuyama has argued that societies that have the concept of preserving individual liberties as part of their foundation are now at a crippling disadvantage. Fukuyama points to China and Singapore as examples of governments that operate without checks on power or accountability to the people—two hallmarks of liberal government—and whose orientation is not toward preserving individual freedoms but rather toward pushing the nation forward. Such countries are able to act faster to adapt to changing global situations, while Western democracies engage in congressional debates, parliamentary procedures, and media investigations, slowed by institutions whose noble founding goal was to ensure liberal values.
If liberalism is under threat in some places, then surely testing grounds for expanding individual freedoms are all the more vital. By the standards of world cities today—New York, London, Istanbul, Paris, Mumbai—Amsterdam is a pokey place. It is small in population; in terms of geographic area you could tuck the whole of it into a corner of Shanghai or Karachi and it probably wouldn’t be noticed. It has no skyscrapers. But the advantage of a modest skyline is the seemingly limitless horizon.