DUTCH: PROGRESSIVE OR PERVERSE?

Globe Gasps But Residents Yawn At Laws

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands -- What is it about the Dutch?
They sell marijuana joints and hashish-laced "space cakes" in specialty
shops. Prostitutes stand brazenly in lingerie under soft neon light on
display for window-shopping customers and tourists. And the country lets
its doctors kill patients who want to die.

Sex shops and dope-selling "coffee houses" are overtaking wooden shoes and
windmills as popular images of Holland.

In the past year, parliament enacted laws legalizing brothels and
regulating the sex trade; sanctioning gay marriages and investing those
unions with full rights; and approving euthanasia conducted under strict
guidelines. Now there is talk of prescribing suicide pills for the elderly.

Some call the Dutch pioneers of progressiveness. Others wonder if they're
degenerates.

The Vatican described the gay marriage law as "a grave attack on the
family," and its newspaper denounced the euthanasia bill, wondering how
"such a macabre choice can be seen as `civil' and `humanitarian.'"
Germany's liberal Greens Party called the euthanasia decision regrettable.

Yet, while all these laws attracted worldwide attention, their evolution
was so gradual the Dutch hardly noticed when they were finally adopted and
quietly went into force. All were debated for decades, then carefully
crafted into bills reflecting a broad consensus.

Why is a country of 16 million people, one of the smallest and least vocal
in Europe, at the forefront of liberal legislation?

The Dutch say they are just as conservative as other Europeans, only more
sensible about dealing with alternative lifestyles, employing an art of
pragmatism drawn from deep in their history.

Decriminalization gives authorities greater control of activities that
happen anyway, they argue. After the Netherlands overturned a widely
ignored 1912 ban on brothels last year, these houses became taxpaying
establishments required to give standard employee benefits. The law also
was designed to weed out illegal immigrants, underage girls and forced
prostitution.

Euthanasia traditionally accounts for about 3,500 deaths a year in the
Netherlands, a rate the Dutch say is secretly matched in other countries.
But the law passed in April firmly regulates the conditions under which
doctors may help patients end their lives.

Historian Han van der Horst says the Dutch have long followed the rule of
"the sovereignty of one's own domain" - in other words, live and let live.

Today, only a few miles from the wide-open cities of Amsterdam and
Rotterdam is a broad Bible belt, where shops are closed Sunday and where a
fundamentalist Christian organization claims the bulk of its half-million
members.

Such coexistence is a product of the historical divide between Roman
Catholics and Protestants, a defining feature of the Netherlands' creation
as a nation in the 16th century.

In the Calvinist north, Catholic churches were outlawed but were ignored as
long as the exteriors did not look like churches. It was understood no one
would peek inside, thus allowing an unwritten freedom of worship.
Portuguese Jews fleeing the Inquisition also were welcomed - as long as
they contributed to the booming Dutch economy.

This blind-eye policy, what the Dutch call "the expediency principle," is
still a hallmark of Dutch jurisprudence. The sale of hashish and marijuana
is illegal, but 850 coffee houses sell marijuana joints or 5-gram packets
of hash without fear of prosecution if they do not sell liquor, too.

Such tolerance doesn't extend to dealing in hard drugs. Police say 17
percent of inmates in Dutch prisons are serving time for drug offenses

The government runs awareness campaigns and education programs to
discourage drug use. Despite the easy availability of drugs, a 1997 study
by the Center for Drugs Research at Amsterdam University said marijuana
usage is twice as high in the United States as in the Netherlands.

Prostitution - female and male - has a history here. In the 17th century, a
thriving sex trade serviced Amsterdam, then the richest city on Earth and
the hub of a shipping and colonial empire that stretched from the Americas
to southern Africa and the East Indies.

Brothels, madams and buxom women were common themes in sermonizing genre
paintings by Dutch masters. Handbooks and guides were published, sometimes
thinly disguised as moralizing tracts, that told customers exactly what
they wanted to know.

Boris Dittrich, a lawmaker who was a primary mover of the liberalization
bills, says tolerance came naturally to a mercantile nation such as the
Netherlands.

"Historically, the Dutch were sailors and merchants who traveled the world.
They came back with new ideas, new products, new ways of seeing things," he
said in an interview. "At the same time, we were a people of the clergy, a
very religious people. We had to find a way to live together."

For information online: Netherlands Board of Tourism: www.holland.com/uk/.

In the news

May 11: In a case that dramatized Europe's illegal immigration crisis, a
Dutch court convicts seven men in the deaths of 58 Chinese migrants who
suffocated in a truck container while seeking a better life in Britain.

CAROLINAS

CONNECTION

GOING SHOPPING: SouthPark mall is owned by Rodamco, a Dutch real estate
mutual fund.

DOING BUSINESS: In 1999, nine Dutch firms were located in Charlotte, and an
additional six were in counties surrounding Mecklenburg County.

TO LEARN MORE: Readers wishing to know more about Netherlands' economy and
trade may phone the Charlotte office of the federal International Trade
Administration at (704) 333-4886.