Most of the Dutch ‘black’ are not asylum seekers but migrants from former colonies (Indonesia in the early fifties, Surinam in the late seventies) and workers from Turkey and Northern Africa who staid and eventually shipped their families in.
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You mean they pay their fair share for what they receive. It seems to be a concept that many Americans, especially those in the top 1% want to shirk and work overtime to convince others that such a mentality is normal.
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Perhaps it would be interesting to see what the US tax rate would look like if you include the average cost for health care in the US.
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There is a racism problem here, and it deserves attention and effort. I believe it’s not as “profound” as in Real America, but though I’ve lived in both my experience as a white man means I ought not to judge.
But it’s ridiculously alarmist to call Sinterklaas a “horrifying yearly celebration” regardless of how you feel about Zwarte Piet. That would be like saying Easter is horrifying if some Americans celebrated it with confederate flags. Problem? Yes. Horrifying display of a broken culture? Not quite.
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If anything, the lively discussion in the Netherlands is a sign of a culture coming to terms with something it never really thought about before. Racism in Europe tends to come from lack of diversity in the more racist regions.
I live in Munich, and unlike the rest of Bavaria Munich is very cosmopolitan, mainly because it has the highest per capita number of foreigners (compared to Cologne, Berlin and Hamburg – Frankfurt is even higher, but only a third as large). Once you get out of the city and head into the Outback, though, the background level of xenophobia jumps up off the charts. Anyone who doesn’t use the same dialect as they do is suspect. That’s why the AfD is strongest where there are no refugees, no immigrants. Saxony could be the setting for a remake of Deliverance, if you ask me.
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but still with a huge gap between rural and urban regions. Leipzig and Dresden are very different to, say, Bautzen.
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It appears that most of the countries whose cultures progressives admire (and to which some of the more unhinged threaten to relocate if Republicans win) are significantly whiter less diverse than the USA.
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Hah, I lived in Munich briefly and remember distinctly a visit to the zoo, where we first encountered people from outside the city. It felt similar to the experience of returning to the US via Atlanta, and first leaving the international terminal for the domestic area.
As with America, the problem isn’t that the melting pot has failed, it’s that it is unevenly distributed.
I’m an American living in the Netherlands (3 years now) so I’ve been through the weird transition and the process of coming to grips with the pluses and minuses of Dutch culture, government etc.
First off: All of the positive points mentioned in the article are true, and really do make this a lovely place to live if you’re seeking a more sane, balanced life compared to working in say San Fran or NYC.
There’s a cost to that though. Sure there’s the taxes, but there’s a shift in the way society structures itself that can be a bit of a shock to Americans. The best example I found was how almost nothing here is open 24/7, and even worse most shops and businesses close by 6pm most weekdays, and are closed most Sundays. No one wants to work long shifts, or late nights, because they want to be at home. So the country closes up shop in the evening almost every day. It’s insanely frustrating at first when you want to get something on the way home from work, or after 5pm on a Saturday, but this cultural attitude of not working beyond the 9-5, means everything is built towards that balance.
This is also why you don’t see the crazy entrepreneurial advances coming from the Netherlands. The idea of working insane hours for a startup is pretty foreign here. If you want to get insanely rich by working like crazy on some idea, this isn’t the right place. Taxes, labor laws, and general culture are against the practices that gave us Apple, Facebook, Microsoft etc.
Again, wonderful place for balance. That’s what I came seeking, and I couldn’t be happier.
But the system and culture is definitely tilted. Most of this is because it’s an insanely homogeneous country. I have lived in rural Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Michigan and Texas, and this is the whitest place I’ve ever been. This creates a culture of passive racism, mostly because most people I’ve met have never been confronted over it. It’s like how young MRA folks just can’t understand that what they say/think/do is sexist, because it’s not how they mean it, and they’ve never personally experienced the negative consequences so they just can’t conceive that what they are doing is wrong… and like anyone confronted with this the first time, they lash out and get oddly defensive over stupid things (Zwarte Piet).
And right now the country is having to deal with a large influx of non-Dutch in the form of Syrian refugees, and like the rest of Western Europe, there’s a lot of anger and confusion trying to deal with race, culture and religious issues that simply didn’t come up before.
The Dutch generally confuse “We’ve never had to deal with these groups/issues/themes before” with “We don’t have problems because we’re so open minded!” Again, it’s not malicious, or even very targeted. It’s just that they’re having to face it finally and it’s uncomfortable.
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There is a trend here in Norway toward idealogical decisions to sell off state enterprises. We already have privatised electricity. How they justified that I’ll never know because well over 90% of it is hydro-power which can hardly be said to be subject to competition, after all you can’t really make more of it. And the result is that they sell electricity cheap in the summer to other countries running the reservoirs down resulting in a high market price in the winter for us consumers.
Now there are serious proposals to privatise the railways. Never mind that one need only look across the North Sea for a shining example of why this is likely to be a bad idea.
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Oh, one more thought I had - two things to note about this successful liberal society:
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Their immigration laws are MUCH, tighter than the US,
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Their citizenship laws are INCREDIBLY different than the US.
With a system such as this, one has to control and integrate any new comers into the system so they start adding to it, not drain from it. If the US were to adopt something like this, we can’t have “illegals” any more, we need to get them into the system to become part of it. Millions living in the shadow won’t work.
Also, if we do that, we probably are going to need to change the way we issue citizenship. Jus soli is practiced mainly in the Americas, with few countries practicing it out side of the New World, and most of them have limits, i.e. one parent must be a citizen of that country for the child to be a citizen.
Jus sanguinis, citizenship by blood, is what most countries and most of Europe practice, including the Netherlands, though they do have a naturalization process.
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I feel like I see some undefended assumptions in this thread:
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Higher taxes is prima facie bad. Generally higher taxes don’t correlate with disposable income. Obviously if the government raises your taxes 0.5% you’ll have less money to spend next year. But if you compare a country were taxes are at 30% to one where they are at 60% you don’t see much of a difference in people’s ability to spend money on what they want to spend money on. I don’t understand why people think high taxes are a “cost” of living in that society since they don’t really “cost” you.
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Yes they are prosperous but they are racist; yes they are prosperous but they are homogenous. If the point is that we shouldn’t act like the Netherlands is perfect, point taken. But sometimes I feel like this veers into the idea that somehow their prosperity results from their homogeneity, or that the same kind of economic system wouldn’t work without a racially homogenous population. If anyone wants to honestly defend this idea I’d like to see it spelled out. Instead it comes across as innuendo.
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One of the foundations of the concept of the U.S. is that we choose to take on the rights and responsibilities of being a citizen; it’s the group equivalent of choosing your spouse over the family you were born into.
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It’s the same here, and I think it’s great. You have to make sure you do your shopping on time, but that’s not too difficult to get used to (at least where I am, there’s a high concentration of medium-sized supermarkets rather than a few very large ones, and some supermarkets are open until 10pm). I figure that considering the relatively low salary of supermarket employees, the least I can do is support more friendly hours.
I think the US entrepreneurial culture is great for some people, but from my perspective, it looks much less suitable for most of us. I heard from a Finnish friend that they had an alternative slogan – “Nokia: Dividing Families”. It’s also a reason why I don’t think that the size of the gender wage gap necessarily says anything definitive about inequality. Of course some factors are related to sexism, but others are because not everyone sees a high income as something to aim for. There are often other more important considerations in people’s decision making than their career progress. Where women can’t decide that they would actually like to focus on success in a demanding career and come against unfair obstacles and bias (or men can’t have more family friendly hours or stay at home), that definitely needs to change, but you can’t necessarily say that because women in one country earn more on average, they have a better or more equal life. A year or so ago there was a survey that showed that on average, German women would prefer that their male partner earned more than them. While they may also believe that women in general should earn about the same as men in general, the individual preferences are often going to trump more general ones.
That would only make sense if you were not a citizen until you attained majority and then applied for it. Jus solis is pretty much the opposite: you are automatically a citizen at birth regardless of your (obviously) or your parents’ wishes.
As others pointed out, it’s not utopia - they do have Geert Wilders to deal with.
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Either method though would work the same for immigrants, they become citizens through the naturalization process, choosing their citizenship (even dual wielding). My mother-in-law tried to get my kid Polish citizenship, but the bureaucracy wore her down.
Anyway, the my point is that when people compare the US to smaller, more homogenized countries, with stricter regulations, they are forgetting some of the practicalities of up-scaling and dealing with the different demographics. If citizenship affords you certain entitlements, then one is going to have to monitor and control how citizenship is issued, lest you have more people taking that the system can support.
I don’t have a problem with the concept of Jus solis. But, while jus solis worked fine for awhile, jus sanguinis might be required in the future if we emulate some of these European nations. Or at the very least, have some restrictions, such as the UK.
Unlike the rest of us here or the writers of Boing Boing? Wot?
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Isn’t all of Germany about the size of the US state of Wisconsin? Your “outback” is like an hour drive outside of the city…
Well, once the GOP control a couple more state legislatures, they’ll be able to repeal the 14th amendment.
Montana, apparently.
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