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

diagnosis
long-term federal goals. In the wake of this debacle, the majority of Dutch
politicians and administrators have largely tried to ignore or belittle the
significance and consequences of the European constitutional discussions
in recent years, so that their input has often been late and reactive. This
stands in stark contrast to the abundant energy that successive governments
have invested since 1994 in improving the position of the Netherlands
as a net contributor to the eu in compliance with the Stability Pact.
As Luuk van Middelaar, former advisor to eu Commissioner Frits
Bolkestein, bemoaned:
… in many other aspects of political life on which Europe now impinges – the environment,
health care, criminal justice, foreign policy, immigration, etc. – the Dutch government
in The Hague has no idea precisely what we wish to achieve (nor how). … The
Netherlands has changed from a versatile pays fondateur into a one-issue country. …
Financial criteria do not however provide a solid basis for negotiation on constitutional
affairs and sometimes lead to strange effects. Anyone who, in the absence of a clear
destination, allows themselves to be led by the price of the ticket, will not get very far.
(Van Middelaar 2004).
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Moreover, this trepidation on the part of the Dutch government with
regard to constitutional discussions, and its one-sided focus on finances,
meant that insufficient attention was devoted to the need to provide the
politicising Union with sources of legitimacy other than just results. The
fact that the constitutional debates were also undoubtedly concerned with
the question of how the legitimacy of Europe could be increased among
Europe’s citizens through new means of representation and accountability,
appears to have been fully appreciated by the Dutch government only at a
fairly late stage. In 2002, the government was still afraid that the involvement
of national parliaments in the subsidiarity test would slow down
European decision making and ‘threaten to confuse national and European
democracy’ (Van Middelaar 2004). There was thus a failure to realise that
in reality the national and European democracies had already been inextricably
linked for decades thanks to the lines of representation referred to
earlier that move from citizen to Parliament to line ministers in the Council,
and from citizen to Parliament to the Prime Minister in the European
Council. Partly thanks to the shock of the ‘No’ vote in the referendum,
however, the government has finally become an enthusiastic proponent of
this subsidiarity test. Furthermore, it supports other democratic innovations
from the Constitutional Treaty such as the civil initiative, increasing
the role of national parliaments and greater transparency (Ministry of
Foreign Affairs 2007). 2