[This article is a selection from Lecture 1 of Raico’s The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought.]
We can take a positive example and positive model of European development, and that is the Dutch experiment. The Low Countries— that is, today, the Netherlands and Belgium—had long benefitted from the legal system inherited from the Dukes of Burgundy who had ruled the area. These were rulers who governed in collaboration with the Estates-General. The Estates-General is a meeting of representatives of all of the estates, or in other words, legal categories of noble, commoner, and sometimes clergy. The Dukes of Burgundy and the acts of the Estates-General promoted an open commercial and industrial system based on the protection of property rights. Naturally enough, the Estates-General was constituted of representatives of the property-owning classes.
In the rise of the northern Netherlands—or the United Provinces or Holland, as we say—we have a near perfect example of the European miracle of decentralization in operation. First, the area had been a major participant in European economic, political, and cultural developments for centuries. By the time the Reformation came along in the sixteenth century, they were about as developed as the city-states of northern Italy, which were the most developed parts of Europe.
And as I mentioned, the herring fleet was famous and proverbial in Europe. They had herring boats that not only caught the herring but dressed them, packed them in salt, packed them in boxes, ready for delivery as soon as they got back home to Antwerp or Amsterdam. That is, at the end of the Middle Ages, an enormous capital investment. Now, what happened at a certain point is that the Habsburgs, when the Reformation came along, decided to deal with their recalcitrant subjects, mainly in what is today the Netherlands, who had the nerve to become Calvinists. Maybe even worse was that they had the nerve not to pay the new taxes that the Spanish monarchy required because of its imperialist plans and ambitions.1 The Spanish Netherlands were the most productive parts of the Spanish possessions. So, new taxes were introduced without the consent of the particular diets of the different provinces, and also the Spanish Inquisition was introduced to extirpate Protestantism.
This led to the revolt of the Dutch, the first war of national liberation in modern history. The revolt of the Dutch was a crucial, pivotal event in European history. What happened was that the Dutch, after a long, bitter, bloody struggle, succeeded in separating. By the way, it was another secession, just as with the American Confederate states. The Dutch didn’t want to take over the Spanish Empire. They just wanted to withdraw from the Spanish Empire, as the American colonists wanted to withdraw from the British Empire. And after a very long struggle of decades, the Dutch finally did. What they set up became a model for Europe for decades and was the first European economic miracle or “Wirtschaftswunder.”2
There was no king, there was no court. There was a united diet for all of the provinces, but each of the individual provinces—like Holland or Groningen or the other of the eight provinces—sent their representatives to this united diet who could not pass on anything until their principals at home had agreed to it. In other words, it was all highly decentralized. And it was basically ruled by mercantile elite, the burghers of Amsterdam, and so on, and the other towns. In a short while it became even more prosperous than it had been before. There were poor, of course—in what I’ll call Holland, it was a major province, so the whole country is sometimes called that. On the other hand, the poor were much better off than the poor virtually anywhere else in Europe.
Now, I say this is a perfect example of the European decentralized model in operation for a number of reasons. For one thing, one reason they had been able to defeat the Spaniards is that they had the support of other European countries, particularly Elizabeth I in England. In other words, if Europe had already been one huge empire, they could have easily crushed the Dutch. But since it was divided, they could call on other independent areas to support them, and that was the reason, eventually, why Philip II sent the armada against the English. Not only were they Protestant but they had given aid to the Dutch rebels. And now the new Dutch Republic is set up, it’s increasingly prosperous. It’s tolerant relative to the rest of Europe because two-thirds of the people are Protestants—Calvinists—and about a third is still Catholic. And the society is controlled by businessmen who generally don’t like to kill their customers for religious or other reasons. So, there was a general toleration, de facto more than by law. The Dutch printers were willing to print virtually anything, including what was in those days considered extreme—especially heretical works—considered heretical by one church or another.
The Dutch printers just cared for one thing: whether you settled your bill. They didn’t care what language. They’ll publish it in French and then it could be smuggled into France. So, Holland became a model that was recognized by everyone. Here is an American historian who wrote,
Both foreigners and Dutchmen were apt to believe that the Dutch Republic was unique in permitting an unprecedented degree of freedom in the fields of religion, trade, politics. In the eyes of contemporaries, it was this combination of freedom and economic predominance that constituted the true miracle of the Dutch Republic.3
One characteristic of the Dutch Republic was that they welcomed religious dissidents—philosophical dissidents also, like John Locke or Descartes—who lived there for a while. They welcomed the Iberian Jews, the Portuguese and Spanish Jews who had been thrown out and therefore set up important Jewish communities in Antwerp or most famously Amsterdam. And this is what one Amsterdam Jew named Baruch Spinoza wrote:
The city of Amsterdam reaps the fruit of this freedom and its own great prosperity and the admiration of all other people. For in this most flourishing state and most splendid city, men of every nation and religion live together in the greatest harmony and ask no questions before trusting their goods to a fellow-citizen, save whether he be rich or poor, and whether he generally acts honestly, or the reverse.4
In other words, this is a case of commerce producing tolerance, producing harmony, producing a willingness to interact, of course, for the mutual benefit. We’re not talking about a nation of altruists here, but what they discovered was the rule of peaceful interaction for the benefit of all, based on respect for private property.5 I suppose you know that this Jewish community of Amsterdam lasted for quite a while and contributed a great deal to the prosperity and fame of the Dutch. It lasted to around the time of Anne Frank, when it was put a violent end to.
I’m going to be talking next hour about how the Dutch model was observed and taken up by other Europeans. As I mentioned a few minutes ago, John Locke had to leave England, because of possible political persecution, and spent time among the Dutch and learned a good deal from them.
- 1
Raico explains in an aside that he makes a distinction between the Spanish Habsburgs and the Austrian Habsburgs, noting he has “great respect” for “the later Habsburgs of Austria-Hungary,” while the Spanish Habsburgs were significantly less praiseworthy
- 2
Raico is here comparing the Dutch economic comeback to the more famous German Wirtschaftswunder in the wake of the Second World War.
- 3
Koenraad Wolter Swart, “The Miracle of the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century” (lecture, University College London, November 6, 1967, http://www.dianamuirappelbaum.com/?p=583#.ZEb-DHbMJD9).
- 4
Quoted in Lewis Samuel Feuer, Imperialism and the Anti-imperialist Mind (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1989), p. 65.
- 5
In a sarcastic aside, Raico adds, “Incidentally, just a sideline, as you know, capitalism destroys culture. The free market is the enemy of any culture. That is why the Dutch, for instance, have never produced anything in the way of painting.” He continues unironically: “The artists used to create their paintings and have them sold in the grocery store next to the barrel of salted herring. It was a very bourgeois society. Jean Jacques Rousseau . . . hated the Dutch. He said if you go to Amsterdam and ask somebody the time, they try to charge you for it, which I don’t see anything wrong with, frankly.”
