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

ediscovering europe in the netherlands
ambiguous; it is becoming ever clearer that these can no longer be so
sharply distinguished from safeguards in other areas, such as social protection
(where the member states have primacy). This has given rise to debate
in recent years on vertical safeguards, which are intended to offer guarantees
in the relationship between the eu and the member states. The European
Council responded with the Laeken Declaration (2001), which established
that the European Convention necessarily had to include proposals
for making the division of powers between the eu and the member states
more explicit. The ‘competence catalogue’ and the proposal to give national
parliaments a role in testing the subsidiarity principle can be regarded as
the tangible outcomes of this discussion. Notwithstanding the rejection
of the Constitutional Treaty, the debate on the subsidiarity principle was
picked up by the Dutch States-General, and this led to the establishment
of the parliamentary Temporary Committee on Subsidiarity Testing. This
was accompanied by more attention being paid to substantive vertical
safeguards. Several political parties and politicians 1 after a ruling by the
European Court of Justice, 2 announced that they were in favour of protecting
the national criminal justice system from eu influence.
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Since then, national horizontal safeguards have also emerged, albeit to a
somewhat limited extent. Since the ratification of the Treaty of Maastricht,
the two Houses of the Dutch Parliament (the States-General) have negotiated
a right of assent in Justice and Home Affairs (jha) matters, which
left the European Parliament uninvolved as a co-legislator. The Dutch
Constitution is also important in this regard; at present, the Constitution
contains no reference whatsoever to Dutch membership in the eu, but
there are those who are urging a change in this situation (see, e.g., National
Convention 2006). These voices are not just concerned with establishing
eu membership and thus making the Dutch Constitution reflect the existing
constitutional reality, but also with providing appropriate safeguards
as a response to that reality. Horizontal safeguards are also sought outside
the context of the Constitution; the National Convention has, for example,
called for the introduction of a ‘scrutiny reserve’ along the lines of the
British model, which would forbid a Dutch minister from collaborating in
Council of Ministers decisions before the Dutch Parliament has had an
opportunity to scrutinise the proposal in question.
Such safeguards are to date, however, virtually non-existent in the Netherlands
and receive less attention than the first two types. In some member
states, the situation is quite different; countries with a more critical attitude
towards European integration (such as Denmark and the United
Kingdom), countries with a federal structure (such as Belgium, Germany,
Austria and, to a certain extent, Spain) or countries which acceded to the