During the first half of the reign of Queen Wilhelmina (1890–1948), the political situation remained fundamentally unchanged. The major parties came to recognize that the school struggle interfered with the solution of other problems. An agreement in principle was reached on the eve of World War I, by which the secular parties accepted state support for religious schools on a basis of equal funds in exchange for enactment of universal male suffrage. When war broke out in 1914, the Netherlands, which had declared its neutrality, put aside the proposed reforms in order to concentrate on the immediate problem of maintaining the country’s livelihood in the face of blockades. The “Pacification,” as the compromise was called, was adopted in 1917 and put into effect after the return of peace. The war years saw almost all political controversies set aside, while the government took unprecedented action in maintaining trade and guiding economic life. Although spared the horrors of combat, the Dutch had to maintain a large standing army, and mutinies broke out among the soldiers in 1918.

The century from the restoration of Dutch independence in 1813 until World War I saw fundamental transformations of Dutch life. The economic base was modernized; the role of agriculture diminished, with most Dutch farmers producing dairy, meat, and horticultural products for the market; and trade and shipping were revived in the face of fiercely competitive conditions. But most important was the rise of industry—first textiles in the eastern provinces, then coal in the southeast, and finally modern manufactures, notably the great Philips electrical products factories at Eindhoven. Rotterdam became one of the world’s busiest ports and the center of chemical and other industries. These changes were paralleled in society by the gradual extinction of pauperism, the domination of middle-class businessmen and professional men, and the gradual improvement of the conditions of working people and farmers, especially after the mid-19th century.

Although religious freedom in the Netherlands was generally as great as anywhere else in Europe, orthodox Calvinists faced major difficulties, especially during the first half of the 19th century, when they protested against the modernizing ideas of the mainstream Calvinist Reformed (Hervormde) Church; their efforts to create independent religious communities met with sharp resistance from the government. Some of the Gereformeerden (the older name for “Reformed” used by the conservatives) emigrated, many of them to the United States; however, in the second half of the century, this group prospered at home and took its place at the heart of the pillarized Dutch system.

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The cultural life of the Netherlands remained very largely confined within national boundaries; Dutch thinkers, writers, and artists responded strongly to influences from Germany, France, and England but themselves had little impact abroad. Dutch scientists maintained a respected position for their country; Hugo de Vries was one of the principal founders of the science of genetics, while the physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz contributed greatly to Einstein’s theories of relativity. Dutch artists were generally imitative; although The Hague school of Impressionists displayed great gifts, only Vincent van Gogh, who spent most of his active life in France, achieved world reputation. Dutch literature ran parallel to main currents abroad; the Réveil early in the century was a movement of intensely religious romanticism with strongly conservative ideas, while Eduard Douwes Dekker (pseudonym Multatuli) in mid-century expressed the moods of social criticism with great power; the movement of “Men of the ’Eighties” (Tachtigers) brought to the fore an emphasis on aesthetic values and spirituality; and early in the 20th century, a literature of social protest reemerged.

World War II

At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the Dutch sedulously maintained their neutrality, although their sympathies lay overwhelmingly with the Allied powers. Nonetheless, when Nazi Germany undertook the campaign against France in the spring of 1940, its forces struck not only against Belgium in order to outflank the French defenses but also against the Netherlands. The Dutch land armies were overwhelmed in less than a week, and the government, accompanied by Queen Wilhelmina and the royal family, withdrew to England, where they formed a government in exile.

Much of the work of public administration and civil government under German military occupation was continued by Dutch organs of state, which made some effort to buffer German political repression, deportation of Jews, and forced employment of Dutch labor in Germany. A resistance movement sprang up, which, with the exception of the Dutch Nazi collaborators, spanned all groups from the conservatives to the communists. The Germans retaliated by executing Dutch hostages for such measures of resistance as the strike of Amsterdam dockworkers against the seizure and deportation of Dutch Jews to extermination camps in Germany. Some Jews were able to “go underground” (into hiding) with the assistance of friends, but the large majority were taken away to their deaths. In the final phases of the war, particularly after the Allied failure to capture bridgeheads across the rivers at Nijmegen and Arnhem, the Dutch suffered from severe food shortages, and, during the last months before liberation (May 1945), they were near famine (the so-called Hunger Winter).

The late 20th century

After the war many aspects of Dutch life changed dramatically. Wilhelmina and her government returned from exile to reestablish a regime more strongly democratic than ever before. Anticipating the characteristic difficulties of postwar reconstruction, the government, industry, and labor agreed upon a plan for industrial and commercial expansion, with avoidance of the rapid expansion of prices or wages that would bring a threat of inflation. The plan worked effectively for more than two decades, and the Dutch were able to avoid drastic inflation until the breakdown of such corporatist consensus in the 1960s.

Dutch industrialization moved forward with speed and depth, expanding to include the large-scale production of steel, electronics, and petrochemicals. Putting aside the policy of neutrality as a failure, the Netherlands entered vigorously into the postwar Western alliances, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the various organizations of European unity (the Common Market; later the European Community within the European Union); however, its influence was limited, even though it joined with Belgium and Luxembourg in a closer union (Benelux). Indonesia, where Dutch authority was reestablished after wartime occupation by Japanese forces, soon became the scene of a nationalist revolution. After some hesitation as well as bitterness, the Dutch were obliged to grant it full independence. In the Caribbean area, the Netherlands Antilles remained part of the Dutch kingdom, although no longer under the authority of the government at The Hague, and in 2010 it ceased to exist as a political entity as its constituent units achieved various degrees of independence within the Dutch kingdom; the island of Aruba had gained an autonomous status within the Antilles in 1986. Surinam became independent in 1975 and was renamed the Republic of Suriname in 1978.

Dutch political alignments since the mid-20th century have evolved only gradually and until the 1990s were always dependent on the Christian Democrat parties of the center. The first postwar governments were dominated by an alliance of the Labour and Catholic parties, which continued until the Labour Party went into opposition in 1958. Thereafter, with the exception of 1973–77, when the country had a left-led government, and 1981–82 and 1989–91, when it was ruled by a center-left coalition, governments were formed by center-right coalitions. After the early 1980s the government was faced not only with recurrent economic problems but also with the emotion-charged issue of siting U.S. nuclear cruise missiles (as part of the NATO defense strategy) in the country. It finally reached the decision in 1985, against widespread popular opposition, that 48 missiles would be sited by 1988. The issue was dissolved by the subsequent ending of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

During the 1960s the generally peaceful mood of Dutch public life was broken by rioting of youth and labor groups, especially in Amsterdam. The most difficult crisis affected the royal family. The marriage (1966) of Princess Beatrix, the heiress to Queen Juliana (who had succeeded Wilhelmina on her abdication in 1948), to a German diplomat aroused acrimonious debate. The unsanctioned marriage of Princess Irene to a Spanish Carlist prince had already come as a shock even to Roman Catholics, but it was less difficult politically because she lost her right of succession. Juliana’s husband and consort, Prince Bernhard, was involved in a bribery scandal and withdrew from public office. Juliana abdicated in 1980 and was succeeded as queen by Beatrix.

By the 1970s Dutch politics, like Dutch society in general, had largely ceased to practice what was strictly defined as pillarization. Pillarization had received official confirmation in the Pacification of 1917 and removed most of the tinder from Dutch politics, but it also kept ordinary Dutchmen ideologically separated from each other to a greater degree than in most other Western countries. Yet, because the leaders of the pillar organizations worked well with each other and the right of each pillar to exist and function was unquestioned, public life generally ran smoothly.

In the 1960s the system began to disintegrate. New radical political parties were formed, and, in the face of rapid secularization of the vote, the various Christian parties joined together in the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA). However, the religious vote has continued to decline, and in the 1990s there were “purple” coalitions for the first time, between the (red) Labour Party and the (blue) Liberals (conservatives). The Communist Party, once influential beyond its small numbers, disbanded in 1991. The far-left groups joined with environmentalists to form an electoral group called Green-Left, which garnered about 5 percent of the vote beginning in the late 1990s.