The Den Haag Nobody Puts on a Postcard
There is a reception this Thursday at the ICC. Visiting African delegations, a few hundred people, drinks in one of the formal rooms with the long windows that look out toward the dunes. I have been to perhaps thirty of these in four years. I still find them remarkable — not because of the guest lists, but because of what they reveal about the city hosting them.
Den Haag is two cities. There is the one in the tourist literature — the Mauritshuis, the Binnenhof, the beach tram to Scheveningen. That city is real and worth your time. But underneath it, and in some ways more interesting, is the other one: a city of international lawyers, diplomats, analysts, peacekeepers, prosecutors, and humanitarian workers, living quiet professional lives in Bezuidenhout and Benoordenhout and Archipelbuurt, eating at the Surinamese place on Hoefkade on Tuesday evenings, cycling past the Peace Palace without looking up because they have cycled past it a thousand times.
I am one of them. I have been one of them for four years. Here is what that Den Haag looks like from the inside.
The International Zone
The ICC sits on Oude Waalsdorperweg, at the northern edge of the city near the dunes, on the site of a former military barracks. Around it, in various configurations of glass and concrete and purpose-built seriousness, are the Peace Palace, Europol, Eurojust, the OPCW, and over a hundred other international organisations that most visitors to Den Haag have never heard of and walk past without noticing.
The city is sometimes called the legal capital of the world. This is not marketing — it is geography. More international organisations are headquartered here than almost anywhere else on earth, and they employ thousands of people who have come from Lagos and Nairobi and Brussels and Tokyo and stayed because Den Haag turned out to be a reasonable place to build a life. Quiet, orderly, cheaper than Amsterdam, fifteen minutes from the sea.
What this creates
Walk through Bezuidenhout on a Wednesday morning and you will hear four languages before you reach the tram stop. The neighbourhood runs east of the city centre toward the ICC and contains a particular concentration of international-sector residents: people who work at the Court or at Europol or at one of the smaller organisations in the zone, who have settled into the kind of quiet, functional domestic life that international careers eventually produce.
There are Indonesian restaurants that have been there for decades, because the Indonesian connection to Den Haag is older and deeper than the international institutions — the colonial history is everywhere in the city if you know to look for it. There are African grocers. There is a Lebanese bakery near Hoefkade that I have been going to since my second week in the city. There is, in the evenings, a particular quietness to the residential streets — people who have spent their days in serious rooms tend to go home and close the door.
The receptions
The reception circuit in international Den Haag is its own social world. There are perhaps five hundred people in this city who attend the same events in rotation — embassy dinners, NGO launches, ICC courtroom visits for visiting delegations, farewell drinks for colleagues rotating out to the next posting. You see the same faces in different rooms every few weeks. Conversations begin in the middle because you have been having them, in various configurations, for years.
This Thursday’s reception is for African delegations — state representatives, some NGO people, a few academics. I will know perhaps a third of the room from previous postings in Brussels or London or from the ICC itself. Tunde from Europol will probably be there. We will stand near the drinks table and have the conversation we always have at these things, which is whether the food is better than last time. It rarely is.
These events are not glamorous in the way that outsiders sometimes imagine international institutions to be. They are professional gatherings in well-lit rooms, with good wine and slightly too much ambient noise. The glamour, if there is any, is in the specificity of who is in the room and what they know about the world — which is different from celebrity and more interesting.
Why Den Haag works
I came from London via Brussels. Both are international cities in the way that large cities become international by accumulation — millions of people, layers of community, the cosmopolitanism of scale. Den Haag is international in a more deliberate way: it was chosen, repeatedly, as the place where international institutions would locate themselves, which means it has been building the infrastructure for this particular kind of resident for decades.
The result is a city that is easy to arrive in without a local network and still feel, reasonably quickly, like you belong somewhere. The English is good everywhere. The international school system is comprehensive. The housing is expensive by Dutch standards and cheap by London or Brussels standards. The sea is accessible by tram.
What it is not is Amsterdam. It is not trying to be. The bars close earlier. The energy is quieter. The people who live here have generally decided that they would rather have a garden than a nightlife, or at least that the tradeoff is acceptable. I have found, four years in, that I agree with them.
Where to find this Den Haag
Walk Bezuidenhout on a weekday. Have lunch near Hoefkade — Surinamese, Indonesian, Lebanese, take your pick. Walk past the Peace Palace on a Tuesday afternoon and watch the tour groups photograph it while the people who work inside walk past without breaking stride. Take tram 1 to the end of the line at Scheveningen and watch who gets off.
The postcard city is there if you want it. But the city underneath it — the one that houses the world’s international legal infrastructure and the people who run it — is more interesting and entirely accessible. You just have to look slightly past the obvious.
James Okafor is a lawyer at the International Criminal Court and writes about expat life, the international city, and Den Haag’s less-visited corners for Journallo.
