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

ediscovering europe in the netherlands
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The ‘Constitution’: a bridge too far?
A fourth development, which marks a reaction against this transition
within the eu, is the emergence of a constitutional discourse on Europe.
The ‘constructive ambiguity’ from which the European process has benefited
since its foundation and which has traditionally justified a processbased
approach, was buried once and for all with the referenda on emu,
the debates on the democratic deficit, the Convention and the Constitutional
Treaty. This change of discourse has not gone unnoticed by the
public. European citizens no longer unquestioningly allow themselves
to be convinced by their elites about the benefits and necessity of ‘Europe’
and new European projects. The introduction of European citizenship has
done little to change this. The period 1992-1993 brought the first major
protests against the Treaty of Maastricht, in the form of negative referendum
results in France, Ireland and Denmark and a negative vote in the
British House of Commons. Euro-sceptic voices were subsequently
also heard with the emergence of various anti-European parties during
the European elections in 1994; in referenda concerning eu accession
in Austria, Sweden, Finland and Norway; in the opinion polls preceding
the introduction of the euro in 1999; during the European elections in
2004; and of course in the French and Dutch referenda on the Constitutional
Treaty in 2005. The anti-European genie, it seems, has certainly
escaped on numerous occasions from its bottle since the 1990s (Hix
2005: 151).
Politicisation and questions of identity
Research has shown that the politicisation of the eu has also gradually
transformed the behaviour and attitudes of the public towards European
integration. Not only does public opinion now reflect more clearly structured
opinions, but those opinions also more frequently influence the
national voting behaviour and are linked into basic political conflicts
within national democracies. The consequence is that national governments,
political leaders and their political parties, especially in countries
where referenda have been held on European issues, have become more
responsive to public preferences. The emu referenda in the early 1990s
marked a turning point in this regard, in that they confiscated the political
initiative from the representatives of the major government parties and
placed it directly in the hands of the national electorate (Hooghe and Marks
2005a). This enabled smaller, Euro-sceptic parties on the more extreme left
and right of the political spectrum, with their anti-capitalist critique of the
internal market and emu on the one hand and a populist defence of the
national state against further integration on the other, to tap into latent
public discontent more effectively than the larger political parties occupying
the political middle ground. These latter parties have in turn become