Rediscovering Europe in the Netherlands - St Antony's College ...

ediscovering europe in the netherlands
referendum, the current issue is no longer just whether and how referenda
can contribute to the legitimisation of Dutch eu policy, but also whether
their use – either across the board or specifically for European treaty
reforms – can reasonably be ignored in the future.
However, the referendum on the Constitutional Treaty on 1 June 2005
revealed a number of obvious shortcomings. It is a well-known fact that
citizens and politicians are not only focused on the issue they are voting
on, but they were influenced by more or less related issues. The referendum
on 1 June 2005 functioned as an (unforeseen) outlet for latent
dissatisfaction with European policy decisions, which had been imposed
on the population as faits accomplis, such as earlier Treaty amendments,
eu enlargement and the abolition of the guilder in favour of the euro.
The public felt that they ‘finally’ had an opportunity to express a view on
Europe and logically, they also incorporated their broader assessment of
European co-operation and associated points of conflict into their vote
(Aarts and Van der Kolk 2005, 183-206). Other factors not even related to
Europe played a role as well.
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On the other hand, the referendum did at least put the Constitutional
Treaty into the spotlight, which no similar political moment or substantive
issue had ever achieved before. Even the Treaty of Maastricht – which was
in substantive terms much more important than the Constitutional Treaty
– aroused only a fraction of the public interest that the Constitutional
Treaty generated. In this sense, the referendum was more successful than
any of the other political strategies in the area of eu policy. The turnout for
the referendum was twice as high as the previous European Parliamentary
election. Van Gunsteren (2005) even goes so far as to argue that this lively
debate was just a first step in the creation of a European public space.
However, the experiences with the referendum on the Constitutional
Treaty in the Netherlands provide only a limited picture of the instrument’s
true potential, precisely because it was without precedent. Based on
international experience, it can be concluded that citizens – once they have
grown accustomed to certain forms of direct political participation – tend
to inform themselves better and more regularly about the political process
in general and about the referendum issue in particular (Benz and Stutzer
2004: 31) than in other voting situations. This means that at least some of
the problems which dogged the referendum were due to a lack of familiarity
with the instrument. If referenda were to happen more regularly then
the public debate would eventually focus its attention more on the
substance of the issue. At the same time, politicians would learn from the
experience with referenda, which would eventually force them to display a