Netherlands

The Netherlands is a country that had to build its own floor.

A quarter of the Netherlands lies below the level of the sea, and almost all of it is below sea level because it was drained. Pump the water off a peat bog and the peat burns away into the air, and the ground sinks, and every generation's solution hands the next one a deeper problem. There is no original Dutch landscape underneath. There is only the version being maintained tonight, by pumps that are running while you read this.

Ground of that kind cannot be built by anyone alone. A dike protects the man who did not help raise it and fails where it is weakest. So the Dutch invented the machinery of compulsory cooperation, the water board, with its tax, its inspector and its court, eight centuries ago, and have been running the country that way ever since.

From a runway on the floor of a drained lake to a dike at Lobith where the Rhine crosses the border, Atlas Greaves travels a country that had to manufacture its own floor, and could only do it by agreeing with the neighbours.