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

civil society
government officials and politicians would have to focus less exclusively
on ‘polder institutions’ and the forms of co-operation associated with
them, which may increase the chance of ‘technocratisation’ and depoliticisation.
The rigidity can be broken down by employing broader, more easily
accessible platforms, which offer the advantage of being able to represent
the voices of larger groups of citizens and a wider diversity of interests.
This offers opportunities for articulating other, non-technical interests and
concerns. Moreover, this kind of platform would fit in with the logic of
action of civil society organisations, which could join in at the instant that
they see this as being important for the furtherance of their aims.
Adopting this kind of approach, in which the rigidity of the relationships
between Dutch politicians and government officials, on the one hand, and
civil society, on the other, would also be in line with developments taking
place at the European level, where single-issue coalitions of diverse organisations
are also being formed. One example is the continuation of the
debate on Services of General Economic Interest (Dekker and Brandsen
2007). Although the European Commission’s Green Paper elicited few
reactions from Dutch civil society, that situation later changed – partly
under the influence of the controversy surrounding the Services Directive.
The relationship with Services of General Interest was one of the main
focus areas. Several organisations and groups of organisations formulated
their own proposals on this subject, and some organisations lobbied
actively in a bid to mobilise other organisations.
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First, these initiatives offer a counterweight to the positions and proposals
of the European Commission and the European Council. The social democratic
pse party in the European Parliament even went so far as to formulate
it explicitly in terms of ‘confrontation’ (pse 2006). Secondly, a number
of these proposals assign a specific role to (national) civil society organisations
in the implementation and evaluation of the directives.
Civil society organisation input in the decision making process is also
becoming less and less an exclusively national or ‘Brussels’ affair, as more
and more cross-border coalitions are formed and initiatives launched
focusing on specific issues. The result is what Bartolini (2005) called the
new ‘stratarchic imprint’ in the political system of the eu – a system that
is increasingly open and which adopts a positive attitude to such transnational
coalitions. This fits in with the reality of the eu as a multi-layered
system within which there are many different internal relationships. This
again supports the call for a greater openness on the part of Dutch politicians
and government officials not to remain trapped in the rigidity of the
traditional ‘polder structures’.