The International Den Haag Nobody Talks About
I arrived in Den Haag four years ago for a posting at the ICC. I expected a grey government town. What I found was something I still haven’t fully explained to people back in London.
The Scale Most People Don’t Know
Den Haag is home to more international organisations per square kilometre than almost anywhere on earth. The ICC. The International Court of Justice. Europol. The OPCW — the organisation that investigates chemical weapons use globally. Eurojust. Interpol’s financial crimes unit. The Permanent Court of Arbitration. More than 160 international organisations in total, plus the embassies of virtually every country on earth.
This isn’t a footnote. It shapes the entire character of the city. When you’re in the Bezuidenhout neighbourhood on a weekday morning, the people cycling past you are lawyers from Kenya, analysts from South Korea, investigators from Brazil. The coffee shop on the corner has a notice board in four languages. The school around the corner has children from 45 nationalities.
What Working Here Actually Feels Like
The ICC campus is its own small world. The building itself is extraordinary — all glass and steel on the edge of the dunes, designed to be imposing from certain angles and transparent from others. Inside, you work in English almost exclusively, with colleagues who have come from every continent. The cases we work on are the most serious crimes in the world. The commute takes twelve minutes by tram.
There’s an odd quality to working in international justice in a city that also has excellent Indonesian food and a beach twenty minutes away. Den Haag holds these things together without either cancelling the other out.
The Expat Community: A City Within the City
The international community in Den Haag is large enough to be its own city. If you don’t actively push against it, you can live entirely within it — English-speaking schools, international supermarkets, expat social groups, restaurants that cater to every nationality. I know people who have been here five years and barely speak twenty words of Dutch.
I made a different choice. By year two I was cycling to the Haagse Markt on Wednesday mornings, attempting Dutch with the stallholders, getting it wrong, trying again. The city rewards this. The Dutch are direct about language errors in a way that is actually useful — they correct you, you improve, and eventually they switch to Dutch with you rather than English, which is the real sign of acceptance.
Where to Actually Connect
If you’re new to Den Haag and want to get beyond the expat bubble, a few places worth knowing:
The Hague Humanity Hub on Fluwelen Burgwal: a co-working space and community for people working in international development, human rights, and peace and justice. Regular events, good coffee, the kind of conversations you came to Den Haag to have.
The Hague Tech on Waldorpstraat: where the city’s startup and innovation community meets. More international than you’d expect for a tech space, partly because so many of the international organisations are investing in govtech and legaltech.
Creative Mornings Den Haag: monthly morning events, free, always a mix of Dutch locals and internationals. Held at different venues around the city. Good way to meet people who are not from your specific professional world.
And honestly: the Haagse Markt. Not as a networking event. Just as a place where you shop alongside the actual city. It’s the most integrated place I know in Den Haag — where the diplomatic community, the Turkish community, the Surinamese community, the Dutch locals, and the students all occupy the same space on a Saturday morning and nobody is performing anything for anyone else.
What Den Haag Gives the World
There’s something specific about a city whose primary function is international justice. It attracts a particular kind of person — someone who believes that accountability matters, that institutions can work, that the world can be made incrementally better through law and negotiation. I don’t know if the city creates this belief or just attracts people who already have it.
What I know is that after four years here, I find it hard to imagine living somewhere that doesn’t take these questions seriously. Den Haag is not Amsterdam. It doesn’t have Amsterdam’s energy, its nightlife, its cultural mass. What it has is a seriousness of purpose that most cities lack entirely. And a beach. And the best Indonesian food in Europe.
