The Netherlands will cease to be Holland

The Dutch government has decided to cede the Netherlands as a reference term and plans to replace it soon by its official name – the Netherlands – in all promotional materials and positioning abroad, reported Thursday. the Adformatie marketing magazine. The detailed plan, developed with representatives of the tourism industry and entrepreneurs, will be presented by the end of the year.

For the moment, the Netherlands is positioning itself in "marketing" as "Holland", accompanied by an orange tulip. With the new strategy, the orange color will remain official, but the country will be seen as a country that participates in the creation of "innovative solutions to global challenges," said Adformatie.

The global repositioning also aims to remove the image of the country associated with the culture of drug use and the red light district in Amsterdam. "We want to present the Netherlands as an open, creative and inclusive country, we have modernized our approach," said a spokeswoman for the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, quoted by The Guardian.

The official name of the country will appear at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 and at the Eurovision Song Contest, to be held in May in Rotterdam, Holland. The football team will not be Holland either, as it knows all over the world, with the characteristic orange shirts.

From Holland to the Netherlands

The decision of the Dutch government is not unfounded, because technically, Holland is today only an important historical region located on the west coast and formed of two provinces, North Holland and South Holland.

The toponym could come from the words "holt lant" of the old Dutch, with which they described a region near Dordrecht and which were translated as "woodland".

For most of the Middle Ages, the Netherlands was a political entity governed by counts. In the 17th century, they were the key region of the Dutch Republic of the time. The Kingdom of the Netherlands appeared after the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, comprising at that time not only the current territory of the country, but also Belgium, Luxembourg and part of Germany.

RT