The International City: What It’s Actually Like to Live in Den Haag as a Foreigner

Den Haag is home to more than 160 international organisations, including the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, Europol, and the OPCW. This makes it, per capita, the most internationally populated city in the Netherlands. What does that actually mean for the people who live here?

The diplomatic community

The core of Den Haag’s international character is the diplomatic and legal community centred around the Peace Palace and the international tribunal district around Churchillplein. These are people who arrived for defined postings and often leave when those postings end. They form a specific social world — international schools, expat clubs, networking dinners — that is real and quite separate from both Dutch civic life and the broader expat community.

The longer-term international residents

Below the diplomat layer is a larger and more interesting population — people who came for the international institutions and stayed, or came for other reasons entirely. The Expat Centre Den Haag handles the practical side of settling in. The international community is large enough that English functions as a working language in significant parts of the city.

What integration actually looks like

The Dutch are genuinely welcoming in a practical sense — efficient bureaucracy, English-speaking services, a tolerance tradition that is real even when imperfect. They are also quite direct in their social interactions in a way that people from more indirect cultures find surprising. The directness is not hostility. It is how Dutch people actually communicate.

The specific Den Haag character

Den Haag is more formal than Amsterdam and more international than Rotterdam. It has the quality of a city that takes itself seriously without being grand. For people who come from countries with significant state institutions, it feels familiar in ways that Amsterdam, which is primarily a commercial city, does not.