No Nonsense

A pathbreaking history of how the Netherlands became a centre of neoliberalism.

‘Holland isn’t a country, it’s a business at best,’ the French author Houellebecq wrote in his bleak 2019 novel Serotonin. Internationally, the Netherlands has a reputation as a frugal nation. Yet this is a rather recent development. In the sixties and seventies, Dutch politicians built one of Europe’s most generous welfare states with high wages, a large social housing stock and heavy taxation. It is in the 1980s that Dutch politics underwent a neoliberal turn. Politicians presented themselves as managers and spoke of the country as an ailing business in need of restructuring.

In marked contrast to the Anglophone world, the Dutch reforms were depoliticized and sold to the public as ‘no-nonsense’ politics. With the rise of the Dutch 'Third Way' in the 1990s, reform also became more consensual, even involving trade union complicity. This consensus formed the start of the famed Dutch ‘polder model’, that offered the impression of compromise, hiding a more brash reality. In this first, path-breaking study of the Dutch neoliberal turn, Merijn Oudenampsen traces the long shadow it has cast over Dutch politics."Long viewed as a model of consensus and moderation, the Netherlands has in recent decades been rocked by waves of right-wing radicalism. In this highly engaging book, Merijn Oudenampsen makes that shift comprehensible by showing how neoliberalism took hold of Dutch politics and how it drove a decimation of the social safety net while expanding the privileges and subsidies enjoyed by corporations and asset owners. The definitive history of economic politics and policy in the Netherlands since the seventies, and a major contribution to the neoliberalism literature."
—Martijn Konings, author of The Bailout State: Why Governments Rescue Banks, Not People

"In this careful and insightful book Oudenampsen shows that, in the Netherlands, the greatest trick neoliberalism ever pulled was convincing us that it doesn't exist. How does a deeply political ideology mask itself as technocratic, consensual, pragmatic, and inevitable? Here we find answers that wind through Dutch politics, government, and intellectual history, in which technocrats, economists, and social scientists take center-stage. No Nonsense is necessary reading for anyone interested in the forms, reach, and effects of Western neoliberalism."
—Stephanie L. Mudge, author of Leftism Revisited: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism

"A master class in myth-busting, this book lays bare the triangulation and self-serving politicking that turned a social democracy into the Netherlands Inc."
—Quinn Slobodian, author of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of NeoliberalismMerijn Oudenampsen is a political scientist, specialized in the study of political ideas. For his PhD, he studied the ideas behind the rise of right-wing populism in the Netherlands. It was published as The Rise of the Dutch New Right (Routledge, 2021) and won the Choice Outstanding Academic Titles Award. Together with the historian Bram Mellink he wrote the book Neoliberalisme: Een Nederlandse Geschiedenis, which traces the history of neoliberalism in the Netherlands all the way back to the 1930s. He writes a column for the Dutch weekly De Groene Amsterdammer and is based in Amsterdam.