Netherlands

Without its defences, much of the Netherlands would be under water. A large part of the country lies below sea level, and over a thousand years its people have drained, diked and pumped the land dry, creating polders. A whole province, Flevoland, was reclaimed from the former Zuiderzee in the twentieth century. The Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt reach the sea through a shared delta, guarded since the flood of 1953 by the Delta Works, a chain of dams and storm-surge barriers.

In 1568 the northern Low Countries rose against their Habsburg ruler, the king of Spain, in a revolt that lasted eighty years and created the Dutch Republic, a federation of merchant towns rather than a kingdom. In its seventeenth-century Golden Age Dutch ships traded from Japan to the Caribbean, and Rembrandt, Vermeer and Frans Hals painted for ordinary burghers. The Kingdom of the Netherlands was founded in 1815, and Germany occupied the country during the Second World War.

Dutch public life runs on negotiation; the ‘polder model’ of consensus between government, employers and unions is named after the shared work of keeping the land dry. Cycle paths join almost every town. Rotterdam’s port, at the mouth of the Rhine, handles goods bound for Germany and the rest of the continent. For so small a country, the Netherlands exports food on a huge scale, from cut flowers and bulbs to greenhouse vegetables, and it also makes the machines used to print advanced microchips.