I'm not Dutch but, in 1976, my family moved to the Netherlands. Though my new classmates were only seven, most cycled to school alone. Later our town got “coffee shops” that sold dope legally.
I left Holland aged 16 but in 1999 I returned to spend a winter researching a book, and got addicted to a new TV show about some idiots locked in a house together. Yes: the Dutch had invented Big Brother. In 2001 they pioneered legal gay marriage and euthanasia.
In my youth, the Dutch thought of themselves as a “guide land“: a sort of advanced model for dimmer countries to follow. I thought this was absurdly smug but now I see they were right. The Dutch invented much of the world of 2013: bicycles in cities, legal soft drugs and gay marriage. I suspect their next scheme to go global will be legal euthanasia.