Beneath consensual corporatism: traditions of governance in the Netherlands

Abstract

This article begins with a historical account of the various styles of governance in The Netherlands from the post–war period to date. That overview reveals the persistence of an underlying more traditional form of governance, that is, the tradition of consensual corporatism. Although conventionally believed to be an invention of the Catholic Church and subsequent political theorists, the present twentieth and twenty–first–century historical review of this corporatist style of governance leads to the conclusion that its historical roots are, instead, the age–old Dutch state traditions of tolerance, pragmatism and consensus. It looks as though the worn–out clichés of ‘images of the Dutch’ are indeed the fundamentally underlying core–concepts behind the Dutch style of governance. The ruling, merchant, partrician families of the Dutch Republic, in order to defend their international trade interests, in the midst of somewhat dogmatic Protestant preachers, were pragmatically tolerant of deviant ideas and groups and thus were able to reach a feasible compromise.

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