The mid-1950s produced a totally new phenomenon: young people who scorned the hard-won bourgeois lifestyle enjoyed by their parents and preferred to listen to a new form of popular music, drink beer and go out dancing. In 1956 Elvis Presley's hit number 'Heartbreak Hotel' swept America. The music was known as 'rock and roll' and was a hybrid form of rhythm and blues and country and western. It was the forerunner of today's pop music. Bill Haley's film 'Rock around the Clock', made in the same year, exported 'rock' around the world. The unrestrained dancing that accompanied the music horrified parents and political leaders. They thought it barbarous and likely to deprave and corrupt the innocent young. Four young British musicians calling themselves The Beatles also attracted worldwide fame and they were quickly followed by another British group, the Rolling Stones. The music of these groups marked the appearance of the generation gap. The children of the post-war baby boom had grown up into teenage louts who challenged the establishment and flaunted their long hair as a symbol of protest.

On 10 March 1966, Princess Beatrix, the heir to the throne, married a German diplomat, Claus von Amsberg, at a ceremony held in Amsterdam. The occasion triggered riots in the city, particularly featuring a group of young people who called themselves 'Provos'. The Provo movement had been initiated in 1965 by a student called Roel van Duyn to oppose capitalism and organise demonstrations against the atomic bomb. The effect of its protests was slight, but the movement became famous in the Netherlands and abroad for its 'white bike' plan to reduce the number of cars in the streets by providing bicycles that could be used by everyone free of charge. Light-hearted Provo campaigns of this kind frequently caused great embarrassment to the government. Many young people, especially students, adopted Provo's attitudes towards the hypocrisy of the affluent society and a new generation of progressive young people entered politics, taking with them Provo ideas to influence the agendas of the political parties. They are one of the reasons why Dutch social legislation is now among the most extensive and generous in the world.

Following the independence of the colonies, many people from those countries came to the Netherlands. Large numbers of Indonesian immigrants arrived in the 1960s, later to be followed by people from Suriname and the Antilles. This has helped to give the Netherlands its present highly multicultural society.