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

politics and administration
on eu policy go beyond the question of whether the eu is the appropriate
place for the development of policy. A prioritisation committee would
more adequately reflect the complex reality of European co-operation,
with its varieties of policy domains, instrumentation and relations
between the actors. Connecting to citizens begins with the political parties
that are able to make their first ‘gains’ with positions on European issues
that match their profiles. The challenge for these parties is then to be
involved in more than just the traditional debate of ‘more’ or ‘less’ Europe
but also in the formulation of appealing answers to topical questions such
as ‘What kind of Europe do we want?’
Accountability
To date, the Netherlands has always promoted European accountability
mechanisms, and partly as a result, it has devoted little attention to
national accountability mechanisms for European issues at the national
level. As members of the Council of Ministers, government ministers are
part of the European legislature, but the Council is not accountable to other
institutions at the European level. Because the government is accountable
to the Dutch Parliament on European issues, the wrr proposes that the
activities of the parliamentary Prioritisation Committee be linked to a
parliamentary scrutiny reserve. This would mean that the government
would be required to await the outcome of parliamentary debates before
adopting definitive positions in the Brussels decision making process. By
linking the outcomes of the parliamentary debate directly to the Dutch
input in the European decision making process in this way, an ex ante
accountability mechanism would be created. This is all the more important
because the traditional ex post accountability mechanisms are less suited
to amending European legislation once it has been adopted. The strategic
function of the Prime Minister that we mentioned earlier also has great
potential as an accountability mechanism, since it enables Parliament to
call the Prime Minister to account for the strategic input of the Netherlands
at the European level.
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Identification
Initiating processes in which citizens can identify more closely with the eu
is mainly a matter for the longer term and is something that is virtually
impossible for actors from the national political and administrative echelons
to enforce (see also wrr 2007). Whether or not this happens depends
in part on factors such as the role of ‘Europe’ in education, the question of
whether Dutch citizens trust the citizens of other member states (Prast
2007) and the degree to which they benefit from the eu and are actually
aware of it. The contribution of national politicians and administrators lies
primarily in the creation of a fruitful breeding ground for such identifica-