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

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strengthening the legitimacy of dutch eu policy: conclusions and recommendations tensions. In particular it is the eu member states with a fairly fragmented and decentralised political system (such as the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium), where politicians and administrators have invested a great deal of energy since the 1990s in optimising eu policy co-ordination at the internal, national level in the ever-more complex and multi-level eu governance system. They have proved to be much less willing to develop a communicative discourse which informs the national news media and national citizens in accessible terms about the why and how of specific policy choices, let alone involving them in the drafting or assessing of possible alternatives. Many of them talk and act as if they are still in full possession of the traditional competences of their national states and as if national channels of political legitimisation are barely relevant in the eu system. In doing so, they wrongly support the idea among many citizens that the eu is more of a threat – or a utopia – than a political reality which has been connecting democratic channels of representation and accountability for several decades. In the Dutch context, the traditional orientation towards legitimisation via output has been accompanied by strong preferences for economic rather than political integration and for the classical ‘Community method’ of decision making in the eu. This orientation is also reflected in a distrust of ideological and constitutional debates which regard differences of opinion on the substance of policy as the key issue. Dutch policymakers prefer to tackle political issues as if they were technical and apolitical, and to deal with them in closed networks of elites and experts, especially when dealing with eu affairs. Those civil society organisations that are indeed consulted are moreover often absorbed into the inner cocoon of eu policy themselves. Their involvement in decision making is therefore typically supportive and solution-oriented and often contributes little to the generation of new perspectives or different positions with regard to the legitimisation of eu policy. Civil society actors and the news media which do not have access to these networks generally have little to contribute and little influence, either on the process of setting policy (input) or on its implementation (output). 153 Against this background, one can understand how Dutch politicians have had some difficulty with the growing politicisation of the enlarged eu. eu policy in the Netherlands continues to lack overall direction, control and robustness. Calls for improved eu policy legitimisation in the Netherlands have accordingly gotten through to the Dutch political elites relatively late in the day. The occasional attempt to create a more lively political debate on Europe in the recent past have always bog down, the traditional approach based on a diplomatic union of ‘the European interest is the
ediscovering europe in the netherlands Dutch interest’ coming to loggerheads, with an approach which is at least as unsubtle along the lines of ‘more Europe means less Netherlands’. Dutch citizens have thus been unjustly confronted time and again with an all too limited ‘all or nothing’ range of options. Furthermore, the legitimising political channels have been notable for their absence and there have been virtually no serious attempts at information, let alone communication. It was only after the ‘No’ vote on the Constitutional Treaty that it seems to have dawned on the involved that, although the Netherlands still broadly supports European integration, a future-proof eu policy can no longer be based on a virtually exclusive focus on output legitimacy. More is needed. The central message of this report is that a future-proof and legitimate eu policy in the Netherlands urgently requires supplementary mechanisms of input, accountability and identification along with the already existing tradition of legitimising through output. Moreover, this policy demands the setting of clear substantive priorities and goals. This is explored in more detail in the following sections. 154 7.2 opting for vital policy The existing method of legitimisation via policy results continues to be of crucial importance. Will the eu still be able to generate relevant policy results in the future? What type of results will these be? And what will this require of Dutch politicians and the Dutch administration? Different answers will be needed to these questions in the future (see section 7.3). This also places legitimisation via policy achievements in a different context and demands new incentives in order to achieve a vital policy output. In a recent letter to the Dutch House of Representatives on the current Treaty reform process, the Dutch government cites a number of issues on which it believes that more European co-operation will be needed. 1 These include energy policy, cross-border environmental problems, climate change, asylum and immigration policy, the competitiveness of European economies, combating terrorism and cross-border crime, and foreign policy; these are all current and urgent issues where a ‘subsidiarity test’ quickly points in the direction of a more active eu because of the inescapable need for a common response to deal with these issues. It is, however, not immediately clear from the letter which objectives the government wishes to pursue in these areas, which choices it has made and which concessions it is willing to make. To cite a few examples: combating
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