Come on now, you're an ESA member, one of your astronauts made history when he took part in the berthing of the first Dragon and shot the amazing photographs of the craft, not to mention that he has the best Flickr page in history. Sure that counts as having a space program, doesn't it?
I'm confused. How does draining the oceans turn the exposed land into the Netherlands? I thought one of the Netherlands' claim to fame was being below sea level. (Did all those world explorers have to wait for the tide to come in, or could they leave port at any time?)
And how do you think they got all that land that's below sea level? They built dikes to enclose large areas of shallow coastal water and then pumped the water out. I don't quite see your point about the tides.