Dutch Population Explosion

[Vnix]

The Netherlands at the end of February had an estimated 16,838,413 inhabitants according to the CBS

which is quite a lot for such a small region/country and this only happened relatively recently I mean in 1900 the population was just slightly north of 5 million, so how come this small country gained so much population while it also had a significant exodus shortly after WW2.

Also for some fun project for myself I want to work out how large the Netherlands could be population wise with a minimum of 85% of the population being ethnic Dutch (including Frisians, Indo's, Surinamers, White South-Africans).

Personally I think that if the verzuiling managed to get their people to have bigger families to prevent the protestants or catholics from 'taking over the country' this number could grow. Also could perhaps the trend of population growth be maintained post the 1950's? From 1900 till the 1950's the population went from 5.1 million to 10 million and from 1950's till the 2000's it went from 10 to 15.9 million.

My goal is to in a timeline retain Atjeh (Aceh) and Suriname and get a population of around 20 million ethnic Dutch in continental Netherlands, 5 million in Suriname and 7 to 10 million in Atjeh with a POD post January 1st 00:00h 1900. Native people (excluding Indo's) are not supposed to go beyond 0.5 million.

If this goal is ASB what would be a more reachable goal?

 

[fasquardon]

The Dutch are already a bit of a special case in Europe - hard to make a good case for them breeding even more. That said, if you figured out a reason to delay the drop in birth rates in the 70s, then the population by the modern day would be much higher.


fasquardon

 

[Vnix]

Since Dutch life was heavilly pillarized before and sometime after WW2, based on religioun. So pillarized in fact that catholics would not think of going to buy bread from a protestant baker.

During these times the catholics also had much higher birthrates than the protestants, could this be used by having some protestant minister becoming very popular based on his desire to prevent and catholic take-over and his desired means is getting larger families, somewhat like the modern Quiverfull idea. Which causes a backlash from the catholics in also going that route.

Then during the rise of fascism make it gain ground in the Netherlands also which then starts to stimulate the birthrate by subsidizing large families. And as such make it socially unacceptable for woman to have less children than say 7 or so.


So using a combination of Religious ideas on having large families and fascism stimulating it also?