CONSERVATIVE

A New European Referendum
Tom Zwitser
On the 1st of June 2005, the Dutch people were
asked in a referendum about their opinion on the new
Constitution of the European Union. The Dutch
voted against this Constitution. But within two years,
their will was ignored and the text was simply passed as
the ‘Treaty of Lisbon’. The public was never consulted
again and, since then, the process of European
integration has continued inexorably, encouraged by
financial crises and other ‘threats’.
Exactly ten years after the Dutch referendum,
in June of this year, the Civil EU Committee in the
Netherlands presented a Manifesto to the People of the
Netherlands at a conference held in the press room
of The Hague’s parliament. Despite invitations to
attend the launch, not a single member of parliament
attended. (They did, however, receive a copy of the
Manifesto in their mailboxes.) This was neglect on their
part as public officials.
The EU has continued to reduce the Netherlands
to merely a province of a new supranational state—
one in which we have less sovereignty and a rapidly
diminishing grip on power. Ten years after the 2005
referendum, the Netherlands as a sovereign state has
almost vanished. Although the country may seem
to exist, its power has shifted from The Hague to
Brussels, away from ordinary people. In ten short
years, the Netherlands has became a country that
has abolished its right to self-determination—one in
which its own citizens cannot rule themselves. In fact,
the Netherlands isn’t even a democracy anymore.
The Manifesto to the People of the Netherlands
analyses in detail what has happened, and uncovers all
the hidden mechanisms through which authority and
sovereignty are undermined. It blames the weakening
of Dutch democracy squarely on the European Union
and calls for a Constitutional restoration.
But the Manifesto doesn’t just analyse the ongoing
delegation of authority to Brussels; it also refutes the
main arguments used by the ‘Europhiles’ to defend
the EU—such as the ‘inevitability’ of history, and
the claim that the EU has brought peace, wealth,
and stability to all of its member states. By reviewing
Dutch government documents, and other institutional
and legal texts, the authors—Arjan van Dixhoorn of
Utrecht University and Pepijn van Houwelingen of
the Netherlands Institute for Social Research—reveal
that the only justification offered for the shift in power
from the Netherlands to the EU is the claim that it
improves the so-called manageability of the EU.
And so, in short, crisis after crisis has been
used to increase the power of the EU’s institutions
in Brussels, as well as that of the European Central
Bank, while at the same time diminishing the power of
national level institutions in each member state.
The argument of ‘manageability’ seems to merely
Manifest
aan het volk van Nederlands
Arjan van Dixhoorn &
Pepijn van Houwelingen
Groningen: Uitgeverij De Blauwe Tijger, 2015
be the ‘garment’ of the new European ‘emperor’—
one for whom (the bureaucrats argue) it is worth
sacrificing democratic institutions, the last traces of
sovereignty, and any remaining possibility of national
self-determination. The Manifesto to the People of the
Netherlands demonstrates how absurd this argument
really is.
Last year, the Civil EU Committee gathered
65,000 signatures in the Netherlands in a petititon
submitted to the Dutch parliament calling for a new
referendum. As a result, members of the Committee
were given the right to present their arguments formally
to members of parliament. The parliament then had
a debate about the EU and discussed the possibility
of holding another referendum—though in the end it
voted against it.
This hasn’t stopped the organizers of the Civil
EU Committee. The publication of the Manifesto
is only the first in a series of events that have taken
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