By Max Smeets

[Thanks to Centraal Plan Bureau]

The previous recession, in 2009, has only just left us. And here we are again.  The Centraal Plan Bureau (CPB) wrote in their latest policy letter Decemberraming 2011: Economische vooruitzichten 2012 that  the Dutch economy will shrink by 0.5% in 2012, while the Dutch government budget deficit will increase to 4.1%.  In addition, with an expected employment loss of 90.000, the unemployment rate is likely to increase to 5.25%.

The substantial increase in unemployment is based on the fact that hoarding is less likely to happen the coming year. In 2009, many Dutch companies still kept their employees due to the tight labour market and their financial capabilities. Currently, although the solvability is still relatively high, the CPB writes that companies have lower profits and the Dutch  labour market has become slacker.

The assumption underlying these predictions is the ‘doormodderscenario’. The CPB assumes that Brussels will do just enough to make sure that an escalation of economic crisis will not happen, but that there won’t be any great solutions provided to solve all the problems on the European table. (Other international aspects discussed in the report relate to the continuing American debt crisis and the stagnation of world trade).

Now, one might wonder, how will these economic predictions be converted into the political arena? Even though some question the accuracy of the CPB predictions, as happens with every forecast, the CPB is nevertheless the principal independent government agency on this issue and the government is undoubtedly going to react in some way to these predictions.

Hence, the issue is not whether the government is going to do something, but rather what they are going to do. In The Hague, the policy of austerity is (again) likely to be favoured over a policy of stimulus. In fact, additional budget cuts would be in line with what is stated in the coalition agreement, and with the policies of the other European countries.

The government is, however, less likely to figure out where to cut spending. More and more politicians claim that their policy area is some kind of holy ground – outside of any future cuts. Still, in the shortlist of austerity candidates for the coming year we can arguably find the home mortgage tax deduction, development aid, and the general pension law (AOW). As the Volkskrant writes, the former is favoured by the opposition, but is seen as holy ground by Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV) and the Liberal Party (VVD). The PVV prefers the second option. The Democrats (D66) would like to a see a gradual increase in the AOW. In the end, regarding this aspect, it seems not much has changed compared to the 2009 recession. Only the Dutch piggy bank is not that full anymore.

[Thanks to AirPowerAustralia]

At the end of November a devastating report entitled the “F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Concurrency Quick Look Review” was issued by the Pentagon. An up-t0-date assessment of the JSF’s current status, it identified 13 issues that required serious attention. The Penatagon being the Pentagon, these were split into three intricate groups:

1) Five involved this: ”major consequence issues have been identified, but root cause, corrective action or fix effectivity are still in development” (i.e. we don’t know what the problem really is);

2) Three involved this: “potentially major consequence discovery is likely pending outcomes of further discovery” (i.e. these small problems could turn out to be big problems);

3) Five involved this: “consequence or cost is moderate, but the number of moderate issues poses a cumulative concurrency risk” (i.e. see 2 above).

The report’s main conclusion was that the practice of ‘concurrency’ – procuring a weapons system before it has actually been developed and tested – has reached excessive proportions. While many Pentagon projects involve this business method, the sheer scale of the JSF – around $385bn for development and production alone, followed by a further $1tr to keep the thing in the air for a decade or two – has required an unusual amount of up-front government investment before the project is even proven to be fly-able. And the longer this goes on, the more the costs rise and the more costly it becomes to cut your losses and run. 

The extent of the Dutch commitment was once again exposed in the aftermath of the report going public, with Ben Knapen stating in parliament on 6 December that the purchase of two test aircraft will still go ahead in 2012-2013 as planned. He nonchalantly added: “It is logical, understandable, and advisable to follow the developments in the US closely, but there is nothing in particular to report.” Knapen defended the fact that the concurrency approach was known from the beginning and was necessary to allow all partners to contribute to the aircraft’s development. The final decision on yes or no for the JSF has, in classic Dutch style, been postponed for the next cabinet to decide. Meanwhile around 1.5bn Euro has already been pumped into the project despite no definitive decision. In January 2011 Hans Hillen announced that the price of each aircraft would be 59.7m Euro, instead of the 47.4m Euro that was pitched only in 2009 – and this is the basic price, with the necessary extras bringing it up to about 100m a piece. 

Naturally, the opposition is steadfastly opposed to this new version of transatlantic ‘burden-sharing’, with Groenlinks leading the leftist pack of PvdA, SP, and D66 in calling for the whole thing to be dropped. The PVV remains, inevitably, the wildcard, having abandoned the oppositional pack just over a year ago. The party went into the June 2010 elections rejecting any JSF test aircraft but abandoned that stance as part of the support agreement for the minority VVD-CDA cabinet. Whether the PVV will stick to this agreement is another matter. For the moment, with no electoral consequences attached to it, they do.

Meanwhile, positive news for the JSF’ers came in from a relatively unexpected quarter – Japan, which announced a week ago that it will probably join this elite club as part of its own defence upgrade. In May the message coming out of Japan was that the Lockheed Martin JSF could be dropped in favour of either the Eurofighter or Boeing’s F/A-18 Super Hornet.  The decision, committing between $6 to $8bn for around 40 aircraft to be delivered by 2016, is clearly a response to stay ahead of China’s ballooning defence budget and the introduction of its own stealth fighter, the Chengdu J-20. Even so, considering the recent misery from the Pentagon about project delays, the decision was something of a surprise.

But the Japanese decision also puts the Dutch position in stark contrast. Japan wants 40 aircraft in a region of the world facing a serious high-tech arms race escalation. The Dutch Ministry of Defence says it wants 85 for……..well, that is the question.

[Thanks to LinkseOnzin]

Robin Doeswijk

Much has been said about the Netherlands becoming an inward-looking country preoccupied with small issues – most remarkably, and painfully, by the ambassadors of various countries in interviews by the NRC  in late October. As if to prove their point, the Dutch collectively spent the month of November debating peculiar national priorities such as raising the speed limit on highways, the dangers of holding two passports and who should be in charge of football club Ajax Amsterdam.

There can be little doubt that the Dutch have become increasingly preoccupied with themselves (navelstaren is what the Dutch themselves call it: staring at your own belly button). It’s not that the Eurocrisis and the future of the EU, the arrival of the first former head of state, Ivory Coast’s Laurent Gbagbo, at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, or major domestic challenges such as the rising costs of healthcare or the sustainability of the pension system are missing any attention, but they are not the issues that arouse real passion. If the formation of the new Belgian government has attracted any interest, it was because of the momumental 541 days needed for the formation – we rarely waste a chance to make fun of our southern neighbours – rather than any genuine curiosity for Belgian politics.

But what about the issues that do interest us, that dominate public debate from the rooms of parliament to the coffee machine (the centre of gravity and chief gathering spot in every Dutch office), are they really small issues? Or should we stop thinking of them as unimportant and acknowledge that something that is on so many people’s minds can, by definition, not be dismissed as small?

Infrastructure minister Melanie Schultz van Haegen recently announced that as of September 2012, the speed limit on large stretches of the Dutch motorway network will be raised to 130 kilometres per hour (from 100 or 120). This was received with horror by environmental and traffic safety advocates, but rarely will a government plan have met with so much enthusiasm from so many people. The outpouring of joy over this decision and the huge media attention it received suggests that raising the speed limit really was the #1 priority for large segments of society. The minister justified her decision as meeting a “social demand” and “connecting better with the road user’s experience”.

Give the people bread, circuses and fast roads!

While car drivers can be forgiven for being passionate about something that affects them every day, the fascination of many Dutch with the (presumed) dangers of dual nationality is harder to explain. In this globalised world, it seems all too natural that many people’s identities are a mix of influences, nationality but one of them. Anet Bleich’s assertion that “everyone possesses multiple identities” (de Volkskrant of 8 October) seems all too obvious, but it is striking how emotional the debate about national identity and second passports becomes time and again, and how persistent the crusade by opponents of dual nationality is.

In recent years, not only Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party (PVV) has placed dual nationality in a bad light. Many other politicians on the right, including from within the governing Liberal Party (VVD), and even on the left (Socialist Party) seem to have succeeded in convincing a considerable part of the electorate that holders of two passports constitute a serious risk to society. Supposed problems include disloyalty, failure to integrate and a lack of national pride. With a sizable portion of Dutch nationals (1.1 million) holding a second passport, one might be tempted to think of this as a serious problem. However, in spite of peculiarities such as the compulsary military service for Dutch citizens who also hold a Turkish passport, the objections to dual nationality seem to have little basis in facts. British historian Neal Ascherson, quoted by Olaf Tempelman in an op-ed in de Volkskrant last month, tellingly said of the relation between (a strong identification with) national identity and facts:

Those who cherish and revive their ‘native’ language usually have ancestors who spoke a different one. Those who claim ‘pure’ lineage, in the genetic sense, are all to some degree mongrels. Even the portrait of a common cultural tradition, as evidence of identity, all too often dissolves away at the first application of rigorous fact. [from Ascherson's book Black Sea]

The verdict: small issue.

Ajax is perhaps the best example of why issues that get lots of attention are not necessarily big issues – even though the ongoing management wars at the club have already made CNN. Yet even a life-long Ajax fan such as the writer of this post has trouble seeing this as a major issue. Bizarre, embarrassing and at times entertaining, yes, but important? Definitely not.

It seems we, the Dutch, are guilty as charged: we spend way too much time and energy on trivial stuff. But change may be on its way, judging from a noteworthy cri de coeur written by the University of Amsterdam researcher Dennis van den Berg (1984) on the web site of the ‘New Leaders’ collective:

“[I worry] About the world. Poverty, starvation, war, financial crisis, economic crisis, climate crisis, biodiversity crisis, ageing populations, government debt, integration. About all of it. I want to do something about it, I just don’t know what. Too complex, too big, and most people don’t seem to care much. To them it’s other things that matter. Dutch society springs to life only when Steve Jobs dies, or when the Dutch Railways introduce ‘bag toilets’ for emergency wees, or when members of parliament tell each other ‘to behave normally for a change’ and call each other ‘the company poodle’.”

He’s right. We need to get our priorities straight.

By Remco Zwetsloot

There is near-universal disagreement on almost all issues facing the European Union right now, but there seems to be a consensus on two points: first, that there is a crisis without precedent going on, and second, that the current system is ill-equipped to deal with this crisis. At the Brussels conference yesterday there was general recognition that ECB, Eurozone, and EU statutes need a fundamental overhaul, but there remain, not surprisingly, profound differences of opinion among member states.

All the leaders involved, however, seem to agree on one thing: there is a need for more cooperation. And there is a historical case that seems particularly reminiscent of Europe’s current situation: the move from a confederate to a federal system that led to the curent United States of America.

The US was for a short time after it declared its independence a confederacy: a loose bond of 13 states that agreed to work together, but which had complete sovereignty and could ignore the laws of the weak national Confederate Congress at will. When troops were needed to sustain the national army and states were called upon to summon state militias, many simply refused. States often competed with each other for economic power, waging tariffs wars with each other, which, as one might imagine, did not exactly forge a culture of unity for the young nation. Indeed, the 1787 Constitutional Convention and preceding meetings intended to discuss an overhaul of the nation’s laws were instead seen by many as a plot for commercial gain (which state was doing the plotting depended on which state you were from, of course).

This may seem weird to us, who live in a time where foreigners see American state governments largely as subsidiaries of the national government, something like an equivalent to Dutch provinces (a view that’s not entirely accurate). At the time of the war for independence and the Constitutional Convention, however, even the US Founding Fathers referred to their states as their countries – i.e., sovereign entities.

But even they believed, or were eventually forced to acknowledge, that the confederacy faced a simple but fundamental choice: the thirteen states would either have to enhance cooperation and surrender some sovereignty to a more powerful national government or continue as wholly independent countries with no formal bonds between them. Both options had their proponents, and the nation divided into two camps: the Federalists, who were in favor of a strong national government, and the anti-Federalists, who saw a strong national government as an infringement of state sovereignty. A fierce rhetorical – and sometimes physical – battle was waged between the two, and one of the central issues was debt: would a new national government guarantee the debt of all states? Some of them had run up substantial budget deficits to finance the independence war. So would Virginians have to pay off the debt of Massachusetts, even if Virginians thought Massachusetts policies were irresponsible?

Replace the US with Europe,Virginia with Germany, and Massachusetts with Italy, and you have roughly the same situation we are in now. Of course, this is a very simple account of the debate in the US at the time, and there are obviously fundamental differences between the two discussions and situations. Firstly, the American states made foreign affairs the sole business of their new national government, and while the Lisbon Treaty has moved the EU in this direction it is still a long way from putting Brussels in charge of European foreign policy. In the late 18th century the young American nation felt threatened by European powers, fuelling a need for unity, whereas external threats are not an issue in Europe’s current integration debates. Secondly, there is no common language in Europe, which makes it harder for EU citizens to communicate and severely lowers potential labor mobility. Thirdly, whereas the American states had largely worked together in the wars of independence and 1812, there is a long history of war between European countries.

However, there are still enough historical similarities, especially in fiscal aspects, to compare the two situations – indeed, some prominent academics and European leaders such as Radoslaw Sikorski  have done so recently. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder went even further: “The current crisis makes it relentlessly clear that we cannot have a common currency zone without a common fiscal, economic and social policy…. From the European Commission, we should make a government which would be supervised by the European Parliament. And that means the United States of Europe.”

The Eurozone is currently a monetary union, but Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy are now uniting around call for a fiscal union. If we consider the choice facing Europe now similar to the choice the US faced roughly 224 years ago, European leaders, as American leaders before them, have clearly chosen the path of more rather than no cooperation – but nobody knows where the road will end.

What we do know, however, is that if you had asked a Virginian in 1760 whether there would ever be such a thing as the United States of America, the answer would have been first a chuckle and then a resounding no – yet that was exactly what came into being just 27 years later. Will the Euro crisis drive Europe in the same direction?

The revelation in a tv documentary on Monday night that Maxime Verhagen wanted to mobilise the AIVD to find out about Geert Wilders’ plans with Fitna has kicked up a major storm in parliament this week. The opposition has been busy peppering the cabinet with demands for an explanation. Yet somehow the words ‘storm’ and ‘teacup’ come to mind. And Wilders himself has remained pretty much out of sight.

On Tuesday the parliament demanded a response from Interior Minister Piet Hein Donner, but he adopted the classic ‘neither confirm nor deny’ approach, and gave the usual rejoinder that all matters discussed by the ministerial council and concerning the AIVD are secret and shall remain so. But any opportunity to undermine the cabinet is worth seizing, so we had the spectacle of Tofik Dibi (Groenlinks), Alex Pechtold (D66), and Jeroen Recourt (PvdA) falling over themselves to table questions and haul Donner back to parliament for further interrogation on Thursday.

Dibi wants the CITVD to investigate, because after all MPS should be allowed to express their views freely and if necessary should receive the protection of the security services to do so. Pechtold thought this was a cheap shot, instead demanding that Donner and Verhagen walk the plank while facing a barrage of criticism from the irate opposition. Recourt protested that this was evidence of an undermining of the democractic system – ‘Nixon-like practices’, for which Nixon (read: Verhagen) had to resign. All three of them then joined forces to submit a list of 11 questions for Donner and Verhagen, including the following: Can you provide an overview of the members of parliament who have been eavesdropped or surveilled by the intelligence services? If not, why not?

What is going on? Firstly this is not only an opportunity for more cabinet-bashing, but more specifically Maxime-bashing, the real entertainment for a large section of the parliament (including a large chunk of his own Christian Democrats). So far Donner has taken the flak, and on Thursday he responded true to form (plenty of outraged indignation etc). Secondly this seems to be yet another chance for taking the AIVD down a peg or two, it being a popular target for those afraid that the ‘secret state’ is forever undermining the democratic system. Others disagree – aivdwatch has pointed out that we need the AIVD to watch out for serious breaches of democratic protocol, as the case of Wilders’ PVV colleague Gidi Markuszower illustrated not so long ago. And Roelof Bouwman has reminded us that not so long ago members of the Communist party, the Pacifist Socialists, even the Farmers party were regular targets for security service surveillance as ‘threats to the state’.   

Wilders, of course, has been here before – back in 2007 the Telegraaf printed a story, leaked from the AIVD, about Wilders’ visits to the Israeli Embassy which triggered a list of questions from GW  himself for the then Interior Minister Guusje Ter Horst. The Minister denied the allegations but refused to go any further than that. Vrij Nederland (among others) jumped in to question the right of the AIVD to leak judgements on a politician’s loyalty to the press.

So four years ago the Left backed Wilders against the security service, saying he should be allowed to visit the Israelis any time he wants. In 2011 the Left again backs Wilders on suggestions of surveillance of his Fitna project, even though the security service clearly rejected this task. GW as an unjust target of state power? Do Dibi, Pechtold and Recourt really know what they are doing?

Personnel                    57%

Activities                    31%

Infrastructure              12%

AIVD Expenditure 2010: Annual Report

On 29 May 2002 the Algemene Inlichtingen en Veiligheidsdienst and the Militaire Inlichtingen en Veiligheidsdienst were both created out of their Cold War forerunners, the BVD and the MID. The AIVD’s task was expanded with the removal of the division between foreign intelligence and dometic security – from then on it would be doing both. The time was right for expansion. Al Qaeda were meant to be everywhere and Pim Fortuyn had been gunned down only 23 days before by someone from the Green radical underground.

From 2002 to 2005 the AIVD grew from around 850 to 1100 employees and its budget mushroomed from 68m to 112m Euro. By 2010 it had expanded further to a staff of around 1400 full time equivalent and a budget of 191m Euro. The early 2010 talk of cutting every government department by 20% obviously led the AIVD to remind everyone that cutting back on national security was a risky business. The Ministry of Defence can lose its tanks, but the Ministry of Home Affairs can’t lose its surveillance and listening gear. The activities of foreign intelligence – particularly for economic espionage – were increasingly a threat. The political capital to be gained from cutting the AIVD’s budget - outside of the consistent criticisms of AIVD phone tapping and dodgy relations with journalists from parliament’s leftist ranks – remained pretty much at nil. And the AIVD instead showed in its annual report for 2009 an ambition to introduce ‘forward defence’ – a greater presence in trouble spots around the world.  With few threats at home, they had to go out and look for them elsewhere.    

This could now be changing. There were rumblings within the CDA’s 2010 election manifesto to merge the AIVD and MIVD, although no reason was given other than the need to ‘harmonise’ the security apparatus. In the CITVD’s report on the February Sirte mission released on 1 November, the principal accusation was that the AIVD and MIVD failed to work together in any coherent way and that if the mission told anything is was that better coordination was needed. The need for better coordination has been a repetitive complaint for several years. Last week a new chief of the AIVD was appointed, and to everyone’s surprise it was a military man: Lieutenant-General Robert Bertholee, the former commandant of the army and someone with no particular experience in the world of intelligence. As former MIVD boss Pieter Cobelens stated to the NRC yesterday, Bertholee had even opposed making intelligence a separate professional unit within the army.

With incredulity from his military colleagues marking his appointment, it could be that Bertholee’s arrival is no more than a move to ensure smoother relations between the two services. But with extra government cuts of around 5bn Euro looming, it could genuinely be a move to keep options open on the AIVD-MIVD front after a decade of intelligence-and-security growth. And both Defence and Internal Affairs are in the hands of CDA ministers. 

How would the PVV react to any such move? Tomorrow night part two of the documentary series on ‘The Wilders Process’, tracking the story of how Wilders ended up in court, will make the claim that in 2007 Maxime Verhagen (then Minister of Foreign Affairs) wanted the AIVD to find out more about the content and release date of the film Fitna. Both his ministerial colleague Guusje ter Horst (Internal Affairs) and the National Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism chief Tjibbe Joustra confirm that they rejected this move. Wilders has so far not responded. One wonders if it will have any impact on his opposition to further spending cuts.

Mark Rutte had his first encounter with Barack Obama at the White House today, and economics was top of the agenda – specifically, Rutte and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs played along with Obama’s current No. 1 concern and emphasised the number of jobs Dutch business concerns provide in the United States. 625,000, to be precise, according to a report assembled by the Dutch Embassy in Washington DC, a total which combines jobs linked to US exports to the Netherlands and jobs secured through Dutch investments in the US.

The packaging of the Rutte visit in this economic context is of course choosing a topic that will get the President’s ear, but it is also a smart move to focus on the economics of the Dutch-US relationship. While the importance of the Netherlands has declined in American eyes, the stats on trade and investment remain remarkable.

The Netherlands still holds on to the No. 3 position in terms of foreign direct investment in the US with $217bn. Beyond this is the fact that the US invests more in the Netherlands than any other state – $521bn. As the Dutch Ambassador Renee Jones-Bos puts it, “It is the result of our shared entrepreneurial spirit,” which is nice, but kind of glosses over the impact that extremely favourable Dutch tax and company registration policies have in making the Netherlands such an attractive destination for US funds. Most of the 1500+ US companies registered in the Netherlands are after all holding companies – shells profiting from a foothold in the Single Market. I also like the way the Netherlands is promoted as “a reliable trade and investment partner to the U.S,” a semi-swipe at those other nations that are perhaps not so trustworthy with their holdings of billions of US government bonds…..

But ok, the figures to an extent certainly speak for themselves. Its also fun to see a country exploiting the fact that it runs a major trade deficit with the US as an item of pride, not concern – ‘Hey, we buy loads of your stuff, we’re on your side!’ Rutte has rammed this pitch home by floating the idea of a US-EU free trade zone to further boost jobs, trade, investment – and who better to do this than the Dutch, pushing the merits of free trade from within the centre of the European integration process since day one (unlike the Brits, who may talk free trade but don’t walk the EU). “Dutch business leaders look forward to an intensive dialogue with American authorities” on this issue, according to Rutte in a ‘leaked’ press release. And why not? The transatlantic economy may be fading slightly in terms of trade (the US now trades more with Asia as a whole), but in terms of investment it is way ahead of anything crossing the Pacific. As the American Chamber of Commerce in Rotterdam put it, “mutual investment in the North Atlantic space is very large, dwarfs trade, and has become essential to U.S. and European jobs and prosperity.” And the Dutch are pretty well integrated into American socio-economic life, down to the Little Amsterdam Coffeeshop in Saratoga, California, that sells a good ……. pea soup.

But perhaps the nicest part of the whole (brief) Rutte-Obama show is the Dutch Embassy’s report on the US-Dutch economic relationship. Having had a dig in the last post below at the downward direction of the Dutch brand, the interactive maps of the Economic Ties report are great. Just shows, even economic chauvinism can sometimes look really good.

 [Thanks to Healthview for image]

There is a growing academic research and consultancy industry on the issue of nation-branding, specifically: how a nation-state can improve its impact in the world by building a credible, recognisable brand-name for itself. Classic examples are Spain leaving Franco behind and re-creating itself as an idyllic, culturally-rich Mediterranean hotspot, and Norway earning a reputation as a quiet but effective behind-the-scenes conflict-resolver (otherwise known as ‘niche diplomacy’). But brands, as with anything in the marketplace, are not permanent and need to be constantly nurtured, otherwise the credibility soon dissolves. Spain has run into trouble as its hotspot image hits the financial buffers, but Barcelona remains ultra-cool. Norway has entered a period of major soul-searching now that Anton Breivik has shattered the domestic peace, but it remains an effective diplomatic force.

While there are plenty of recorded success stories, it is more interesting to watch the complete fragmentation of a national brand up close, in real time. Welcome to the Netherlands in late 2011.

When Uri Rosenthal became Foreign Minister just over a year ago, there was a sense that his reputation as a heavy-weight domestic political fixer and trusted advisor to Mark Rutte would carry some momentum into foreign affairs. Together with State Secretary Ben Knapen (‘The Nonconformist’), it was a noticeable change of tack for the Ministry. But the writing was already on the wall in the Governing Agreement between VVD and CDA that identified Israel as the only land that the Dutch minority government would strengthen relations with.

Overall, the Agreement declared that the Netherlands would “pursue international stability and security, the supply of energy and raw materials, the promotion of international law, and the trade and economic interests of the Netherlands and Dutch companies.” One year down the line and it is clear that Israel and economic interests – very narrowly defined – dominate everything coming out of The Hague. The long tradition of the Netherlands being on the side of a just, balanced international system, with development aid and peace-keeping as central parts of this, is being left behind for a petty nationalism lacking any vision except for immediate selfish gain. The Dutch brand is in free-fall.

Rosenthal has been repeatedly criticised for his ham-fisted determination to push national interests abroad. A discreet survey by the NRC, published yesterday, of Dutch diplomats and civil servants has produced a highly negative insight into the diplomatic apparatus. The pro-Israeli standpoint had led to the isolation of the Netherlands in the EU and the loss of one of the central planks of the Dutch brand, the support of human rights. The minimal Dutch contribution to NATO’s Operation Unified Protector – compared even to Denmark, or Belgium, which still doesn’t even have a government – and the hardly-worth-bothering-about ‘police training mission’ in the northern Afghan province of Kunduz has reduced The Hague from a worthwhile trustworthy ally of Washington to a small insignificant inward-looking country that the Americans don’t care about any more. G20 participation is long, long gone. The blinkered focus on economic interests has reduced the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to little more than an appendage to the Ministry of Economic Affairs under Maxime Verhagen.

In short, the current leadership of foreign policy is dismantling the Dutch brand, piece by piece, norm by norm, value by value. This is not totally down to Geert Wilders either – Rosenthal has long been an Israel supporter and does not need heat from the PVV to follow that line. This is simply his style. Typical is his reaction to the NRC‘s expose on Binnenhof today, disliking the fact that civil servants had spoken to the paper anonymously and dismissing them as the no-hopers most afraid of their jobs with the coming 75m Euro cuts at the Ministry. Not a response that suggests much self-reflection, or a willingness to accept criticism. He reacted equally negatively at the end of October after interviews with various ambassadors in the NRC sketched the Netherlands as an increasingly provincial land where small issues dominate the political scene.

As Juurd Eijsvoogel reminded everyone a week ago, the Dutch ‘Alleingang’ is a costly business. The promotion of economic interests relies on maintaining positive relations with your partners. Demanding results for oneself while ignoring the standpoints of others is a rapid way to de-friend yourself. As the Belgian ambassador put it – the Dutch could start by listening to others more (listening is not a Dutch strong point). Having spent the past decade nurturing a brand of international repute, the Dutch Foreign Ministry is now reducing everything to simplistic chauvinism.

Last Sunday and Monday Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal visited Tripoli, making some positive noises about releasing $2bn of frozen Libyan funds (earlier declarations of releasing $3.5bn have so far produced nothing). Dutch involvement in Operation Unified Protector was limited to enforcing the no-fly zone, leaving the serious stuff to others. But last week the most intriguing event in the whole Libyan escapade – the failed Sirte evacuation mission of Sunday 27 February – once more saw the light of day.

A short recap. A representative (who we know as ‘NN’) of infrastructure/engineering giant Royal Haskoning needed to be evacuated. The frigate Hr.Ms.Tromp, stationed just off the coast, sent a helicopter to rescue him. The location chosen was, remarkably, Sirte - home town of Gaddafi himself. The helicopter, which entered Libyan airspace without authorisation, and its three crew were held by pro-Gaddafi forces soon after landing. After plenty of behind-the-scenes negotiations, the crew were released after a week and a half.

On 1 November the Advisory Committee for the Intelligence and Security Services (CTIVD) made public its report on the role of the MIVD and AIVD in the evacuation mission. The results were not very startling. Coordination between the two intelligence services was lacking. The MIVD only informed the AIVD of the situation on 3 March. The AIVD then approached foreign intelligence services without informing the Foreign Ministry. Back in March the big joke had been that Military Intelligence didn’t work on Sunday and so failed to respond to the Tromp’s request for information that afternoon – an accusation that drew a furious response from the MIVD’s supporters. The CTIVD now largely exonerates the MIVD from any failure to respond.

But the CTIVD’s mandate for this report was very narrow – only look at the intelligence services. The decision to go ahead with the mission came from the very top - the Ministerial Core Group for Special Operations (MKSO), consisting of the Minister-President (Mark Rutte), Vice Minister-President (Maxime Verhagen), Minister of Defence (Hans Hillen), and Minister of Foreign Affairs (Uri Rosenthal). Under the MKSO’s responsibility lay “the evacuation of citizens from life-threatening situations.” As former MIVD boss Joop van Reijn said, the service had been unable to respond properly at the time because it had been deliberately excluded from the planning of the operation.

For the whole month of March both media and opposition MPs went after Defence Minister Hans Hillen and the MIVD. 124 parliamentary questions were tabled. Hillen survived, but many remained unconvinced.

Inevitably, the more interesting rumours circulated for a while in the outer reaches of the Dutch blogcloud. The origin seems to have been Klokkenluider.nl, who posted a remarkable alternate version of events already on 5 March. Other sites picked it up, but the mainstream media, as far as I am aware, never went near it apart from one or two passing references. Which is a pity – and in itself also says a lot.

It goes something like this. The official story is that the helicopter was sent to pick up a Dutch engineer and a woman with a Swedish passport who had somehow heard about the evacuation. Even though this ’Swedish woman’ was actually interviewed by the Dutch media in late March, this was a put-up job. The woman in Libya was in fact Princess Mabel of Oranje Nassau, Mabel Wisse Smit, wife of Prince Friso, who was in Libya to arrange a mutually acceptable solution for Gaddafi’s economic interests in the Netherlands. Gaddafi held a substantial stake in Fortis-ABN and this needed to be taken care of. The helicopter was not on a rescue mission but a hostage mission – the crew were to remain in Libya until the transaction was secure and Wisse Smit was out of the country – official reports state that the two ‘evacuees’ left the country on 2 March. Why Wisse Smit? A long-time executive in George Soros’s Open Society Institute and closely involved in Balkans affairs, she knew prominent son Saif Gaddafi through the World Economic Forum’s Global Young Leaders network, and was well-connected with both financial and governmental leaders on both sides. The Gaddafi assets were apparently transferred to Ageas, a successor enterprise to Fortis. Gaddafi’s economic interests in the Netherlands went far beyond the $3.5bn of frozen financial assets. There was plenty of private equity interest in the substantial funds available from the Libyan Sovereign Wealth Fund. Tamoil, the Libyan national oil company, has a base in Riddekerk from where it runs around 160 filling stations in the Netherlands. Verenex Energy, the Libyan oil and gas prospector, is based in the same location. From GeenNieuws came the nice extra detail: Wisse Smit’s Twitter timeline stopped on 24 February and restarted on 2 March, when she claimed to be in Ethiopia.

Elite / Conspiracy nonsense? Or simply a cover-up for a business transaction that almost cost the Defence Minister his job? Nothing more has come out on this that I know of. But the bottom line is that its just about believable. And its a great story.

[Thanks to HongarijeVandaag]

The Nabucco gas pipeline: a vital future supplier of energy resources for Europe. And, along with the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline, one of the central planks for a diversified energy policy outside of Russian control. Or so those concerned about Gazprom would like. But competition to supply oil and gas to the major European market has produced other options – the Russian-German-Dutch Nordstream [as described by Max Smeets in the previous post], SouthStream, Gazprom’s direct competitor to Nabucco, and BlueStream, Moscow’s attempt to ease Turkey away from its key role in non-Russian pipeline projects. In these circumstances, one might expect Nabucco to be promoted with some real sense of mission.

Instead the Nabucco plan has gone very quiet. And this is all the more interesting considering – as with Nordstream – the Dutch involvement in the project. The story began in 2002 with an initial cooperation agreement between Austrian energy concern OMV and Turkish BOTAS. The joint venture between Austrian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Turkish firms was agreed in 2005, and the German RWE became a shareholder in 2008. The five-nation intergovernmental agreement followed in 2009. By March 2010 all five had officially ratified it. The plan was to begin construction in 2013 and have it operational by 2017.

The Dutch stake came in the form of former Foreign Minister (1998-2002) and, since March 2008, Mayor of The Hague Jozias van Aartsen (in itself a position of international significance, as The Hague Agenda on City Diplomacy from 2008 demonstrates). Van Aartsen was named as coordinator of the project by the European Commission in 2007, the idea being to have an experienced diplomat to monitor a project ’facing technical, political, or financial difficulties.’ Van Aartsen’s official title was the NG3 Coordinator, referring to the Natural Gas 3 routes from the Caspian and Middle East (the Southern Corridor) that the EU wants to develop through a variety of channels: Whitestream, TAP, ITGI, and  Nabucco. This is all part of the EU’s TEN-E (Trans-European Networks) plan to get European energy supply sorted by 2020. Nabucco alone is expected to deliver only around 5% of the EU’s total natural gas consumption by that date (but will of course provide proportionally more for the EU nations directly involved).

Van Aartsen’s first report in 2009  gave a down-to-earth view on the problems faced. There could be up to nine supplier countries serving up to ten EU consumer countries. Several transit countries are needed to make the plan work, including Syria and Georgia. As usual, EU member states have been working against each other and playing one pipeline against another to leverage extra advantages, which ultimately only serves to cause mistrust among potential suppliers who are looking for a fixed long-term strategy for the European market as a whole.

Van Aartsen’s appointment, for four years, expired in 2011 and has not been renewed. As he himself admitted earlier this year, the task of pulling all the diverse and conflicting parts together was beyond the capabilities of someone like himself with a full-time portfolio in The Hague. He had been chosen exactly because his links with Central and Eastern Europe are good – as Minister of Foreign Affairs he promoted the expansion of the EU in that direction, and supported Dutch peace-keeping missions in Bosnia and Kosovo. But van Aartsen is a full believer in the free market, and is not someone to cramp a possible deal with political complications. It was interesting in this respect that earlier this year he was appointed chair of the Netherlands-Russia 2013 advisory committee. This celebration of bilateral contacts, on invitation from Moscow, will be a high-profile diplomatic-cultural event. Significantly, van Aartsen seems to have taken up the 2013 project just as he left the NG3 Coordinator position.

Considering this pragmatic international posture – and the return of Shell to Russia’s energy scene this year – it is unlikely that van Aartsen would look to Nabucco as a means to shut out the Russians from the European gas market. What is more, Nabucco serves no purpose for the intended role of the Netherlands as a ‘gas hub’ for North-West Europe. Remarkably, given van Aartsen’s role, a Dutch energy advisor told the US Embassy back in January 2008 that “there was “no role” or economic interest for the Netherlands in the Nabucco project.”

Nabucco is looking increasingly shaky. Currently it is not expected to be operational before 2018. It will probably be later than this simply because the financing is yet to be set, and that won’t be set before it is clear who exactly is going to supply the gas.

Van Aartsen looked to Azerbaijan as a major supplier but had to admit in his report that future Azeri production remains uncertain and uncommitted (Shah Deniz Phase II). RWE has a major stake in Egyptian production, and Turmenistan, initially a possible partner, has been under subtle pressure over the past two years to switch its interests eastwards with a Caspian-China pipeline potentially undercutting the EU. All along the elephant in the room has been Iran, fast becoming a welcome energy supplier to South Asia and beyond. The US decision to back Nabucco as a way to reduce a structural European dependence on Russia has instead allowed Iran to move in as a significant regional energy operator. Van Aartsen didn’t refer once to Iran, the holder of the second-largest gas reserves, in his 2009 report. Yet Austrian OMV has long been in favour of Iranian participation, and told the Americans so in 2008, as a way to prevent Russia benefitting from deals with Iran while the West persists with its economic embargo.

What does this add up to? Firstly, that EU energy policy is about as uncoordinated and haphazard as its attempts to save the Euro. Secondly, that there are absolutely no certainties on the future energy matrix for Europe. And thirdly, that Dutch energy interests and the aim to be a ‘gas hub’ are evidently reliant on a solid relationship with Russia. During 2008-2009 then Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen and Minister for Economic Affairs Maria van der Hoeven embarked on a series of tours to drum up the Dutch hub idea in Algeria, Angola, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Yet Russia remains central. As the US Embassy reported in 2008, the Dutch view was that ”Russia had proven to be a reliable supplier in the past.”