what does "free" mean anyway?

Both Andra and Mia made some really interesting points about the post-indepedence eras in the countries they're been blogging about, and how long it took for them to be considered really "free," or even if they are now.

Andra asked:
Laura and Mia: Do you think that your respective countries have gained full and complete independence? Does Ireland still depend on England? Would they be able to do anything if England decided they wanted to occupy Ireland again? Laura, how long did it take for the Netherlands to get on their own two feet and get rid of all Spanish influence? How did they do so? I see more hope for both of your regions, but Latvia is in a very scary position and might be for some time.

I can't answer all of that in one post, but let me try to say something that vaguely relates, at least. Skipping ahead a couple hundred years, I'll tell a little story. In December 1794, the revolutionary French armies crossed the frozen rivers of Brabant to attack the Dutch Republic. During the first days of January, 1795, they crossed the Maas and the Waal and entered Dutch territory. Wherever the French troops came, towns and villages fell into their hands. On January 16th, the strong town of Utrecht opened its gates to the invaders. On the evening of the next day, the States General, assembled in the Hague, decided that under the circumstances further opposition was impracticable and that surrender was the only possibility. At midnight of the next day, the 18th of January, William V, the last hereditary Stadholder of the Republic of the United Netherlands, left the country and fled to England. And after only a few weeks, the Republic had ceased to exist, having been replaced by the "Batavian Republic," a political dependency of victorious France. So all of the hard work that had taken centuries to build, the revolt against the Spanish rule and finally the independence of the Dutch Republic was for nothing?

As van Loon says, "if there was occasion for surprise, it was the fact that the Republic had managed to exist as long as it had." And this is where the free/not free debate comes in, where I wonder about the effects of the long and difficult battle for independence on the fledgling nation. Although "for many years it had been on the road towards political and economical bankruptcy," even though it seemed time after time over the years that the Netherlands couldn't exist when not under the thumb of the Spanish or another colonizing European power, somehow it always managed to stay afloat as a country in its own right. That doesn't mean there weren't scars from the years of oppression, as Mia says ("Ireland governs itself, but will it ever be free of English influence?") and I think all of us have found in our research, and I want to go into that in greater depth. But, no matter how weak the Republic was at any point, even when "dependency upon France seemed to most citizens preferable to independence under the old national system of government," (The Fall of the Dutch Republic, 3), the very fact that it had spent centuries fighting for its independence seemed to draw the people together towards a common purpose, or at least from a common history. In that way, maybe complete independence and complete removal from past sufferings isn't the goal? This is just me being a midnight ponderer (actually, it's a bit later than midnight) like someone else we know likes to call herself, but I'm starting to think that maybe it's best that the Netherlands reflect upon their shared history and draw upon that as a source of strength, not as a handicap.