What New York City taught me about Dutch values

The Dutch apparently had no idea they had values.

Years ago, I was in the Netherlands with some other progressive journalists and think tankers, talking to various people on the Dutch center-left about the problems of the world.

At one point the group was meeting with one of the junior PvdA ministers in the fourth Balkenende cabinet, and he said that immigration is a more challenging issue for European social democrats than for Americans. His explanation was that America has a streak of explicit propositional nationalism to it — Superman can talk about “truth, justice, and the American Way,” but there’s no Dutch Way.

I was genuinely taken aback by this and said to him of course there’s a Dutch Way.

He didn’t know what I was talking about, so I told him that I was taught in school very specifically that New York City’s traditions of tolerance and diversity are Dutch values that were passed down to us by the settlers of New Amsterdam. We’re not, like, running around speaking Dutch in New York and certainly not promoting an ethnic state of Dutch-ancestry people. But we celebrate our understanding of Dutch culture and Dutch values, and if we can tell wave after wave of immigrants to New York that they are welcome in the city for Dutch reasons but also must learn to practice open-mindedness and tolerance for Dutch reasons, then surely they can do it in the Netherlands!¹

This guy probably thought I was putting him on. Dutch values in New York? So I started talking like crazy conspiracy guy about how the Mets wear orange and blue because the Dodgers wore blue and the Giants wore orange, and orange and blue are the colors of the flag of New York City because those are the colors of the Netherlands. The Knicks, too, wear orange and blue. And of course, Knicks stands for Knickerbockers, which is some kind of long-obsolete ethnic term for people of Dutch ancestry.

Meme courtesy of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”

The only American president not to be a native English speaker was New York’s own Martin Van Buren, a native Dutch speaker. Brooklyn is named for Breukelen in Utrecht, and Harlem is named for Haarlem in North Holland. New York defines itself as somewhat distinctive from the rest of the United States of America and chooses to do so specifically with reference to a certain notion of Dutch-ness.

I don’t think he bought it.

This was an interesting experience for me, though, because it was a powerful reminder of the extent to which these national or sub-national identities are simultaneously very real and also totally made up.

Imagined communities

There are such things as historical facts. But the idea of history is linked to the idea of storytelling. Good history should be accurate (or at least avoid inaccuracy), but it also involves narrative choices that are beyond questions of fact.