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

ediscovering europe in the netherlands
problems for the European debates in member states because they often
occur too late. Moreover, this situation prompts national politicians, on
the one hand, to claim the benefits of European co-operation as their own
achievements and, on the other hand, to blame ‘Brussels’ for any disadvantages
or problems, or simply fail to account for them. This frequently leads
to negative attention paid to eu policy in the media, which in turn has an
impact on the citizens and on public opinion.
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Legitimisation via representation and accountability
As a result, traditional eu policy is designed within the ‘steel triangle’ of
elites comprised of national and European politicians and officials, who
are, at best, watched by small elite groups of special interest organisation
representatives (Hooghe and Marks 2005a). Within this closed system, the
decision making follows the more or less fixed procedures of the ‘community
method’ or ‘intergovernmental method’. This first administrative
mode assigns a relatively large role to the European Commission as the
drafter of policy, to the European Parliament as the watchdog over the
Commission, to the European Court of Justice as the arbiter and supervisory
mechanism of national enforcement of common regulations, and to
specific interest groups (wrr 2003: 36-7). The second administrative mode
is characterised by the active involvement of the European Council of
government leaders who establish the course of policy, assigning a major
role to the Council of Ministers and a limited circle of national policymakers
who hammer out the details of that course. Meanwhile, there is only
minimal involvement by the European Commission and a consultative
rather than a full role for the European Parliament and the European Court
of Justice (Wallace 2006: 79-87).
The political mechanisms for representation and accountability from and
to citizens thus operate along three formal lines (Van Middelaar 2004):
1. From citizen to Parliament to line minister in the Council of Ministers;
2. From citizen to Parliament to Prime Minister in the European Council;
and
3. From citizen to Parliament to Commission.
In the first line, the political legitimacy of the Council of Ministers is guaranteed
via national general elections, which send government ministers to
the Council of Ministers with a national agenda and which also holds them
accountable afterwards. However, this is not a purely national mechanism,
as is often erroneously thought. After all, although the minister is sent to
the European Council with a national mandate, that same minister has to
defend decisions taken in the Council before his or her own parliament as
if he or she were a representative of the eu in the Netherlands. As Van