Reassessment of foreign policy 2022 – De Groene Amsterdammer
What does the Netherlands actually want to achieve in the world? The last time a minister explicitly mentioned that question, to the House of Representatives and to the country as a whole, was almost thirty years ago. Hans van Mierlo called for a national debate. It was a time when Berlin was still being built together and China had officially asked the Netherlands for more development aid. This resulted in a ‘Re-evaluation of Foreign Countries’ – the last one ever made by the Netherlands.
The reason for all this was money. Four hundred million euros to be precise, which was open under the heading ‘policy intensification’ in the budget of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. the vvd wanted to spend that on defence, the PvdA on development aid. Van Mierlo has to make a decision beyond a thorough conversation, in which all kinds of people in diplomacy and civil society were developed to shine their light on the changed world, and how the Netherlands should be adapted. And that conversation also started; The Green Amsterdammer wrote about ‘the recalibration circus that is currently in full swing’.
Entirely in the style of the times and the Purple government, Van Mierlo immediately depoliticized that debate. In the future reassessment, many generalities were introduced by the announcement that ‘since taking office, this Cabinet has already put a bit of recalibration into practice’. Clear positions were buried under woolly language, and De Heering resulted in a reorganization of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and tug-of-war between ministers about who was allowed to say something about ‘facets that radiate foreign policy’.
‘If you see how the dividing lines in the Netherlands are now, and how foreign themes threaten to strengthen those dividing lines, then a social debate is necessary.’
That Van Mierlo himself started the debate that he had started to a saltless conclusion at the time, is not really a useless conversation. The Rutte-IV coalition agreement illustrates this. Although the foreign section is clear, it opens up to the world with changing balance of power and instability around Europe’, and then gives no vision of the Netherlands should oppose it – whether the Netherlands is actively opposing Russian and Chinese influence, for example, or how active the Netherlands should be. concerned with stability in North Africa and the Middle East.
But above all, the Coalition Agreement avoids touching the political division among the Dutch about what kind of country the Netherlands should be. ‘I especially miss the citizen’, says Monika Sie in this week’s Foreign Affairs podcast. Sie is director of the Clingendael Institute for International Relations, the most important Dutch think tank in this field. She points out a division in the Netherlands between what they consider to be citizens who want the Netherlands to remain primarily open and collaborative in the world, including more opportunities for legal migration, mobility and policy, and Dutch people who want a more closed, less active and want less cooperation and openness oriented foreign policy. The Coalition Agreement does not recognize this separation, does not take a position on it, and initiates a conversation.
That has to change, says Sie. ‘If you see how the dividing lines in the Netherlands are now, and how foreign themes threaten to strengthen those dividing lines, then a social debate is necessary. Even more than back then’, says Sie. Because the Netherlands cannot move forward on a compass that was set in 1994. And the Netherlands would also not do well to leave political differences of opinion among citizens about foreign countries untouched, or to ignore them, or to ignore them in our foreign policy. If in 1994 it was necessary to ‘look at ourselves internationally’ – before the slump in the gravity of climate change, before global inequality started to grow and gradual freedoms started to decline, before the 2001 attacks, the crisis, the corona pandemic, the deteriorated relationship with Russia, the stormy rise of China, the migration crises at Europe’s external borders, the consequences of economic globalization obvious, the tensions in the European Union, and so on – almost thirty times more than that now. Lake.