How did the Netherlands become socially Liberal as a nation?

Ok, I got more upset at the answers than at the question, but I'm still having some doubts as to wether this is a serious question or not. Anyway, the answer to this question would more likely be a book than just a paragraph or two, but let me try anyway...

Holland has had two major threats over the centuries, water and foreign invaders. Let me start with the foreign invaders. First it was the Romans, then Vikings, then the Spanish, followed by the French and most recently the German nazi's (I've left some out but you get the point). We fought all of them and (with some help) beat all of them and (re)gained our freedom and independence. Because of this we are a nation of liberty loving people.

Our strenght has always been trade. To be good traders you have to be open to other people and other ways of thinking. Because we love freedom and are open to other ways of thinking we have also always opened our country to other peaceful people who were persecuted elsewhere.

Now the water. Because of the threat of water we've learned to work together and be pragmatic. If you don't have enough land, you make some more, but you can only do that if you can trust each other and work together.

Now, we are not lax at crime, we just believe that you cannot ever defeat all crime so it makes more sense to focus your energy on the serious crime that actually can be fought without crimilazing people who aren't really hurting anyone just for the sake of it. Therefore we try to make rules that make sense and we believe that locking people up in prison and giving them a criminal record just because they like to smoke a joint for instance doesn't make sense.

We also believe that children should go to school and shouldn't be allowed to just go sail around the world on their own for a few years whenever they feel like it. Children are not adults. Adults can go sail around the world if they want to in our country, children can not, in general, because our law says they have to go to school.

Anyway, I have to go now, I'll probably expand on this later.

Well, you need to be careful about what assumptions you make. i can tell you for certain, by the way, that the dutch were NOT all germans during the war. saying, that is like the worst insult you could make against them.

you need to realize that holland is not as lenient as you think when it comes to drugs etc. yes it is legalized but the Dutch police force is very strict and in close contact with Belgian, and German police forces. The border between Holland and Belgium is probably the only one that still undergoes security checks.

the drug laws in holland are also very strict, the only drug legalized there is Marijuana and you may not have more than one marijuana plant in your residence, you also can't have more than 3 grams on your person at all times and you can only smoke inside a registered coffee shop or your own residence. other drugs like X, speed, shrooms are completely illegal and if they are found in your posession you can be arrested and fined.

the dutch however, have always been known for their liberal rulings, especially compared to more conservative countries like france, and the U.K. they were some of the first to break away from the roman catholic church and 'embrace' the protestant faith. and they still manage to rake up controversy as they are officially pro-choice and they have ruled for euthanasia.

you must consider thought that holland, like belgium and other smaller countries in Europe have often been ruled over by foreign countries like Spain, the U.K., Germany etc. which is probably why they enjoy being so different from other european countries.

Liberal. The extra we end up that black-and-white conservative pondering is a fallacy the extra persons start to consider in a enormous snapshot, nuanced manner and ta da their minds open. Presto a different "liberal"

Nah. That's just for the tourist posters (like the clogs and silly hats). Outside the main cities the Dutch are the same old die-hard puritans they always have been. And remember -- "They vos all of zem nazis during ze war".

Who else but the Dutch could legalise dope cafes, then make it illegal to smoke tobacco in them? Rule 1: You can do whatever you like as long as you don't enjoy it.

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Keshia:

Yes, a significant number of them were 'nazis durink ze war', and as for talking about 'more conservative countries such as the UK' - you are comparing the nation which gave you the 'mother of parliaments' with the nation which gave us the Dutch Reformed Church and the Boers, and places like Surinam and some really violent cess-pits in the Dutch West Indies.

When I first went to Amsterdam to traffick in drugs years ago, the wonderful strict Netherlands police were selling all their dope out of the Milkweg, to the point where the other coffee shop owners had put a 'contract' out on the place for some hundreds of thousands of guilders. They were tired of getting busted every time the police wanted more stock.

The constitution of the UK is largely based on events which occurred in 1688, when a Dutch politician and member of their royal family, conspired with dissatisfied elements in the British government to launch a foreign invasion of the UK and a coup.

The legacy of King Billy is not forgotten, which you should mention if you are then going to talk about the Dutch being 'ruled by Britain'.

In my opinion, the Netherlands is a modern-day picture of what happens when you say God is dead and you dismiss the family value of one man & one woman together, as the continuity in the social structure. Any society which forsakes the Creator of human dignity, will fall apart.

In the Netherlands, lgbt-politics has largely come to be reduced to the question of a perceived lack of tolerance toward homosexuals among Muslims. The discourse that is put forward is one in which native Dutch citizens are construed as tolerant while society’s cultural ‘others’, especially Muslims, are represented as intolerant. Homophobia is construed to be alien to Dutch, modern, secular, society. The structural heteronormativity of society has almost completely disappeared from the movement’s discourse and from the struggle, while the question of Islam and tolerance has taken front-stage.

The Slovenian philosopher and sociologist Slavoj Zizek argues that tolerance constitutes a mystifying discourse veiling what is really at the heart of political and social struggle. There is good reason, Zizek argues, that someone like Martin Luther King didn’t make use of the concept. The struggle against racism is not a struggle for tolerance, but for social, economic, political, and cultural rights, and for changing unjust and undemocratic power relations. Zizek makes a parallel with feminism, asking if feminists struggle to be ‘tolerated’ by men. Of course not – from this perspective the concept of tolerance even becomes rather ridiculous.