Koos van Houdt

Between 2002 and 2004, Aart Jan de Geus and Mark Rutte were ministers and state secretaries at the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment. De Geus has been chairman of the board of the Bertelsmann Stiftung in Berlin since 2012. Last Friday we saw the ‘old boys network’ in action.

Is there a reading guide to Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s speech in Berlin last Friday? Yes, there is. But it wasn’t just delivered on Friday. On 1 November 2016, Mark Rutte discussed his views on the European Union with the members of the Senate. Speak in the Senate and it remains secret. Although anyone can find them.

More than sixteen months ago, Mark Rutte said, among other things, this: “Because the Commission is not a government! Fortunately, the Commission is not a government, because that is the last thing you want. The European Parliament is not a parliament, but it is something quite different. We call it a parliament, but of course it is not a parliament like the one we sit here. That’s just the way it is. You may not like that, because you have a completely different idea about making Europe more federal.
In the Europe that I envisage and that this government is working on, we want to keep the institutions clean and the Commission is not a government. The European Parliament is not a parliament like a national parliament, but a completely different body with very specific powers. If you were to make the Commission political, where it is actually a supervisory body, the head of an administration, you could, so to speak, give our secretaries-general meeting a political chairman.”
When Mark Rutte talks about the European Union, he is therefore talking about a very different Union from the one we know in daily practice. Rutte feels comfortable among his colleagues in the European Council. But for the rest, he feels very uncomfortable when it comes to the day-to-day functioning of the European Union. That’s possible, that’s allowed.
But if you are on the Board of Directors, because that is what you can compare the European Council with, then you have the opportunity to translate your dissatisfaction into proposals to amend the European Treaty. The dangerous thing about Rutte’s argument is that we all think it’s fine. Even though Rutte does not propose to change the Treaty. Nevertheless, he tries to cycle through and around it in every possible way.
Fortunately, nowadays we are talking more about the content of European policy than about the institutions and their democratic content. It requires a long argument to make it clear that these institutional relationships, partly due to great pressure from the Dutch electorate in the 1950s, are the way they are.
If there is more and more substantive policy on the European stage, then it is also a good thing that there is democratically legitimised control, for example through the direct elections to the European Parliament that have been implemented since 1979. This has been confirmed six times since the Treaty of Rome in 1957 by large majorities in all national parliaments. The fact that Rutte can use his distorted vision of the European institutions as a manual in the Dutch debate says a lot about the expertise of the current generation of Dutch politicians about the European Union. Adders are venomous and dangerous. They are almost visibly under the grass with Rutte.