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This chapter examines whether there is a causal relationship between the recent changes in Dutch multiculturalist policies and the decline of the Dutch welfare state. During the post-war years, the Dutch built one of the most generous welfare states in Europe and adopted a strongly multiculturalist Minorities Policy, which reflected an extension of their approach to historic diversities, known as pillarization. During the 1990s, however, the Netherlands reduced the scope of its welfare state and shifted away from multiculturalism. It is argued here that the corrosive effects of MCPs did not contribute to the decline of the Dutch welfare state. On one side, restructuring the welfare state reflected economic and ideological trends common to Western democracies, and there is little evidence that issues of immigration or multiculturalism played a role in the political shift. On the other side, the shift away from the traditional approach to multiculturalism was driven by concern that the approach was contributing to the exclusion of minorities from the economic and social mainstream of Dutch society, and not by concerns about the impact of multiculturalism on the welfare state.

Historically, both Belgium and the Netherlands are archetypes of ‘consociational democracies’. These are characterized by broad multi-party coalitions, numerous power-sharing devices, and fragile checks and balances in order to ensure due influence for all relevant parties and minority groups. Hence, the overarching logic of these consensus democracies seems to represent an obstacle to a process of presidentialization.

However, we argue that the need for strong leadership resulted in more prominent and powerful positions for the (parliamentary) party leaders and Prime Ministers. We present evidence of a process of presidentialization that gained momentum a decade earlier in the Netherlands (from the 1970s onwards) than it did in Belgium (from the 1980s).

It is interesting to note that the increased autonomy of Prime Ministers is not due to constitutional amendments, but tends to be linked to the increased decision-making role for the inner cabinet, the professionalization of the Prime Minister’s Office, and the growing attention the audiovisual media give to the Prime Minister.

Similarly, parliamentary party leaders in The Netherlands and extra-parliamentary party leaders in Belgium grew stronger through an accumulation of power and resources at the leader’s office, personalized campaigning and a centralization of control over inner party selection procedures, and party leadership selection.

The Netherlands has moved from being a comparatively closed society in the 1950s towards a relatively open one around 2000. Analysing occupational class mobility for men and for women in the labour force between 1970 and 1999 on the basis of 35 surveys, a clear downward trend in total social reproduction is found for men (–1.6% per year) and for women (–1.1%). No convincing evidence of a trend reversal has been found. This general trend towards more social fluidity is also replicated in the partial analysis, where the trends towards more openness do not only apply to the ascriptive parts of the status attainment patterns (fathers promoting their children’s educational and occupational outcomes directly), but also to the achievement part (the partial association between education and occupation). The last finding contradicts common theories. A possible explanation is that, over time, educational credentials have lost some of their discriminatory power.

This chapter describes how governments in Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden responded to the threat of unemployment from the first oil crisis in 1973 until they gave priority to objectives other than full employment in the 1970s (Denmark and the Netherlands), 1980s (Austria), or early 1990s (Sweden). Domestic political circumstances mattered greatly to the policy choices governments made. The Danish and the Dutch political systems were already in a state of transition by the early 1970s: new parties had emerged, the relationship between unions and employer organizations had become strained, and the ideological consensus of the 1950s and 1960s had come to an end. The Austrian and Swedish political models, on the other hand, were still intact. The chapter also considers the role of economic circumstances, central banks, wage bargaining institutions.

This chapter is concerned with the labor market policies that governments in Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden pursued after the emergence of high unemployment. It attempts to explain why these countries followed different reform paths, and why political conflicts over labor market reform played out differently. In the 1990s and 2000s, Denmark and the Netherlands made a series of reforms in the areas of unemployment insurance and active labor market policy, introducing a model of labor market regulation that has become known as “flexicurity.” The chapter's main argument is that this was a result of two factors: the early onset of unemployment and the renegotiation of postwar political arrangements in Denmark and the Netherlands that began in the 1980s. Political circumstances and economic policy choices in the 1970s and 1980s continued to matter to labor market policymaking in the 1990s and 2000s.

This chapter explores the perhaps most significant votes on Europe so far: the referendums on the European Constitutional Treaty in 2005. The chapter examines the two failed referendums in France and the Netherlands and addresses the questions: Why did the French and the Dutch reject the Constitutional Treaty? Why did the governments fail the task of convincing voters? What was the role of the campaign? Based on systematic research of the campaigns and analyses of the survey data, this chapter provides a comprehensive account of campaign dynamics and voting behaviour in these referendums that ultimately led to the downfall of the European Constitution. The analyses show that the campaigns played an important role in framing certain issue attitudes, such as social issues in France and culture and identity concerns in the Netherlands. These no‐votes thus reflected concerns over specific aspects of European project rather than simply anti‐EU sentiments and protest voting.

The Netherlands departed from the Bismarckian social insurance tradition by combining flat-rate public basic pensions with quasi-mandatory, funded occupational pensions with near universal coverage. The emergence, expansion, and reorganization of occupational pensions show their close integration with the public pension scheme. Many efforts helped expand and improve coverage through collective agreements by employers and trade unions. Short case studies of pension funds in the public and private sector highlight the core features of the Dutch system as well as its institutional variation. In the wake of the financial crisis, occupational pensions were scaled back since these defined-benefit (DB) pensions were threatened by underfunding. Current debates question the future viability of the Dutch system in an era marked by both demographic ageing and volatile financials.

Ardent Calvinists and refugees from the south blamed Holland for the loss of Flanders and Brabant; did not Holland's merchants batten on trade with the foe? Leicester thus found support for a more centralized government, but only briefly, for he lost credit by slighting local privileges. When he called on true patriots to rise up against Holland's urban oligarchies, there were only minor plots here and there; the more dangerous legacy of Leicester's brief tenure was a rash of garrison mutinies, but even this was manageable for a wealthy province. Meanwhile, Leicester's partisans promoted the novel doctrine of popular sovereignty. In response, Gouda's town attorney asserted that the urban oligarchies had ruled, through the states, since time out of mind. This was not a theoretically interesting answer, but it satisfied the needs of a nascent republic.

This chapter examines data describing the time that people spend in each of the many activities that make up their day. It focuses on data from the late 1980s and early 1990s, and from the early 2000s, for Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the USA. It considers patterns and changes in non-work activities that are classified into several major groups. It then raises questions such as: how do patterns of work activities differ over the week, and over the day, in the EU and USA? Would market work in the EU look the same as in the USA if Europeans had the same patterns of daily and weekly market activity as Americans?

Presents improved estimates of the cost of living and the real wages of labourers in the western part of the Netherlands. The results show that even in this relatively dynamic economy there was a decline in real wages during the Early Modern Period.

In the Netherlands, the reforms in unemployment provision of the past three decades amount to a levelling of rights and statuses within a still two-tier unemployment provision system. On the one hand, unemployment insurance, which until the mid-1980s was only open to some categories of employees, has been opened up for the large majority of the dependent labour force. On the other hand, since regulations of unemployment insurance have been tightened and benefits duration limited, the risk of dependence on flat-rate and means-tested social assistance has become a reality for the large majority of Dutch employees too. The result is a system that combines Bismarckian and Beveridgean features, and is now composed of a relatively short-term, wage-replacing insurance and a flat-rate social assistance scheme that is open to nearly all employees, increasingly funded through taxation rather than contributions, and run almost exclusively by central state institutions.

Holland's Baltic trade flourished as never before, and skilled immigrants helped revive local industries. But prosperity raised a political issue: should Holland trade with provinces loyal to Spain? The more Holland's leaders pushed for free trade, the more confederates in the Union of Utrecht saw them as selling out the cause to boost profits. Meanwhile, Holland upheld the public supremacy of the Reformed religion. Yet Reformed religion embraced two theologies. One, based in Geneva, required a church free of state control; the other, based in Zurich, sanctioned governance of the Church by magistrates. Most Holland clergy preferred the former view, while magistrates favored the latter. Thus several towns had major conflicts over appointment of preachers; at the provincial level, each side ignored the other's pronouncements on church governance.

This concluding chapter presents a synthesis of the discussions in the preceding chapters. It is argued that in no country that engaged in ‘straight’ work-sharing (i.e., decreasing the workweek from, say, forty to thirty-five hours) created extra employment. In all countries there were and still are forces pushing for some form of work-sharing. However, the exact implementation is an equilibrium phenomenon that largely depends on a complex set of factors ranging from institutions, the size and international positioning of the country (contrast Sweden, a small open country, and France, a much bigger country with ambiguous feelings vis-à-vis globalization); the centralization or decentralization of union-firm bargaining (compare Germany, with industry-level bargaining, versus France, with relatively weak unions); and family preferences (contrast the Netherlands, where a significant proportion of citizens prefer women to take care of children, versus Sweden, where men are virtually mandated to take parental leave).

The Dutch chapter demonstrates that social pacts are the standard operating procedure in times of crisis in the Netherlands. After the early Wassenaar agreement, pacts became the institutional alternative to state intervention. The chapter calculates that eleven of the thirty years since 1980 have been covered by pacts on wage moderation, and in non-pact years there has been a fair amount of coordination as well. By contrast with other weaker forms of social pacting studied in other chapters in this volume, this analysis confirms the picture of the Netherlands as a coordinated market economy of the corporatist variant, characterized by a high degree of mutual cooperation between unions and employers, and regular consultations with the government. But the chapter also reveals that coordination and consultation cannot be taken for granted, but are occasionally rewired to meet new conditions via conflict and tough bargaining over diverse interests.

This chapter draws together the implications of the previous chapters in order to investigate the size of the Roman economy at its maximum extent. If one takes Roman Italy as being comparable to the Netherlands in 1600, then the Roman Empire as a whole is comparable to Europe as a whole. The putative advantages of the early modern Netherlands over Roman Italy are less clear than their advantages over the Roman Empire as a whole. Roman Italy was heavily urbanized, and it is probable that the proportion of the labor force in agriculture there was less than 50 percent. Rome did not have a bond market, but it had a more sophisticated financial system than the Netherlands. The comparability is enhanced by noting that neither the Netherlands nor Rome had an industrial revolution.

Against the traditional view that this period saw conflict and political breakdown, this section argues that the Reich was stabilised under Ferdinand I and Maximilian II. The Reichstag, the Kreise, the Reichskammericht, the Reichshofrat now matured as institutions. The Reich was united by the threats posed by France and the Ottomans, by the revolt of the Netherlands and the French religious wars. The emergence of Calvinism and conflicting interpretations of the Peace of Augsburg slowly disrupted the political equilibrium. By 1600 the Reich under Rudolf II was in serious political crisis. Problems within the Habsburg dynasty itself contributed further problems: disputes over the succession and how to deal with the rising tide of Protestantism in the Habsburg lands. Under Emperor Matthias from 1612 the Reich edged closer to a major crisis. Even so, the debate about the constitution in German public law writings around 1600 and the strength of irenicism and patriotism reveal tendencies that were to provide the foundations for a new unity after 1648.

This chapter gives an overview of how work-sharing was implemented in the Netherlands. It shows that its employment effects were limited. However, work-sharing in the early 1980s was responsible for an unprecedented level of part-time employment in the Netherlands. This chapter is organized as follows. First, it discusses how work-sharing was implemented in the Netherlands. It then discusses the employment effects of work-sharing, especially regardng part-time employment. The influence of public policy and social values on labour force participation is considered.

If William of Orange's grand strategy for the Revolt was, as has been argued, frustrated by fractious provinces, wealthy Holland should get the blame. Yet Holland had a rival strategy, more workable than Orange's. Militarily, the priority was to defend Holland's borders first, and only then extend protection to neighboring towns. The States of Holland kept control of the purse strings (limiting the authority of the States General), and the eighteen towns represented in the provincial parliament managed to preserve consensus on the aims of the war. It was thus a province that gave birth to a nation, the United Provinces; this is why foreigners (not Dutch people) commonly refer to the whole country as “Holland”.