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

politics and administration
of elections to express their European political preferences and to hold
politicians and parties accountable for the eu policies they pursue.
In the short term, the possibilities for strengthening the contribution of
political parties with regard to the legitimisation of eu policy in the
Netherlands are to be found among those European policy issues that
easily fit into a specific party’s political profile and ideology. In this
context, Kiiver (2007) calls for selective or targeted politicisation. Current
developments on European policy already offer opportunities in this
respect. The traditional left-right opposition, for example, appears to be
becoming more relevant. Political choices on the structuring of the internal
market are also becoming increasingly important, especially in light of
ongoing co-operation in the area of the free movement of services and
persons. The Services Directive is a good example (Pelkmans and Van
Kessel 2007). Immigration is currently so high on the political agenda that
the majority of parties included passages on this issue in their party manifestos.
Security is another example of an issue with an increasingly international
dimension, which guarantees a diversity of standpoints among the
different political parties.
The second option for strengthening the role of political parties is encapsulated
in the opposition between ‘more’ and ‘less’ Europe, which continues
to acquire increased importance in Dutch politics in the wake of the ebbing
away of the unquestioning ‘permissive consensus’ of Dutch citizens with
regard to European integration (see chapter 2). The critical standpoints of
the various political parties on (specific components of) European co-operation
have been put forward more clearly since their successful performance
in the referendum campaign (Crum 2007b). The parties that have
taken a more positive view of European co-operation appear to have little
awareness of this change, or at least do not seem to know how to deal with
it, whereas politicisation places higher demands, especially on the ‘automatically’
pro-European parties who have no desire to lose the battle for
electoral support before it has even started. Their traditional approach, that
European interests are automatically equated with Dutch interests, is just
as one-sided as the approach of those parties more critical of Europe, which
regard Dutch interests as being diametrically opposed to European interests.
Now that European co-operation has proven to be a politically
charged subject in some respects, the ‘burden of proof’ has increased for
the proponents of further European integration.
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Both the preferences and expectations of Dutch citizens and the actual
challenges facing Europe imply that the political discourse cannot remain
permanently limited in scope, however (see section 2.4.2). Therefore, the