Brief addition – Sunday’s opinion poll on support for Dutch parties, from Maurice de Hond’s survey bureau. An increase for Labour – will the Uruzgan decision pay off?

Since the rump Christian Democrat / Christian Union government can no longer introduce policies before the next election, the withdrawal of Dutch troops from Afghanistan will now begin in August and be completed in December. This force of 1800 has lost 21 personnel during the 4-year mission.

Responses have been somber in some quarters. Edwin Bakker, a senior research fellow at the Clingendael Institute in The Hague told Reuters that ‘A withdrawal will damage the reputation of the Dutch as a reliable partner that is willing and able to contribute to important military missions.’

Yet being willing and able is only part of the story. In its decision to quit the cabinet over this issue, the Labour party has opened up a much wider debate over the direction of the Netherlands. Over the past decade Labour has opposed the war in Iraq, has consistently questioned the purchase of the over-budget and over-deadline Joint Strike Fighter, and now finally has ended the Dutch contribution to the NATO mission in Afghanistan. There is a trend here that looks more than temporary.

The left has long had a somewhat problematic relation with NATO, but not to the extent of going against its central mission – security for the North Atlantic area. It looks as if the decision to end Uruzgan also comes down to a lack of being convinced that it was part of NATO’s central purpose. Labour agreed reluctantly to the mission in 2006 and 2008 when it was emphasised that it would be a development mission supported by the military, but it soon became clear that it was the other way around.

The shenanigans surrounding the Iraq war, as brought to light officially in the Davids report, have also had an effect on Labour’s attitudes. The letter from NATO Secretary General Rasmussen looked once again like an attempt by elements in the Dutch government to force an issue in a certain direction by means of manipulation. So this time there was a determination to say ‘not again’. 

One wonders what kind of fall-out the corruption surrounding Karzai’s re-election last year actually had on Labour attitudes – and on the attitudes of most of the Dutch parliamentary opposition, considering the motion already last October about ending the mission.

What will happen from now on is going to be a running contest between the pro-Atlantic factions in the ministries and the national-populist factions in politics, gathered on both the right (Wilders) and the left (Socialists). Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen’s platform for promoting human rights around the globe – closely tied as it is to Washington’s own value-system – has been dealt a blow with this decision. As former Foreign Minsiter Joris Voorhoeve stated on Saturday, the Netherlands has created a special position for itself within transatlantic relations precisely because over the years it has taken on more of a relative burden than other allies, and Uruzgan is a fine example of this. This approach is rewarded, but it also means that should the burden no longer be carried, it is not appreciated, or understood. But a change of course can also indicate a nation unwilling to treat everything as taken for granted, and that does not have to be negative. 

The Dutch have been far more willing and able than others to play a role. The sense now is that its been enough, and others should take over. A role somewhere else in Afghanistan is still possible, but that will have to wait until the results of the elections and the next cabinet.

The Dutch Parliament [Photo from derdekamer.nl]

In this first reflection, lets start by considering some of the domestic political dimensions.

The cabinet Balkenende IV failed by two days to hang around until its third birthday, and for the fourth time in a row a cabinet led by Balkenende suffers a premature end. His (lack of) leadership has been criticised consistently throughout those governments, but Dutch politics has become far more restless over the past eight years, and he cannot be solely held to blame.

Balkenende I (2002) went down after only 86 days due to the ministers from Pim Fortuyn’s party (effectively leaderless following his assassination before the election) proving unable to maintain any unity. Balkenende II (2003-2006) collapsed when D 66 decided it could no longer work together with the right-wing national-populism of Minister for Immigration Rita Verdonk. After D 66 withdrew, Balkenende III held the country together from July 2006 till February 2007, when the results of the November elections finally brough Balkenende IV into existence. Three years later it has now gone down. 

But Balkenende IV, with its awkward alliance between Christian Democrats and Labour, was always a shaky political construction waiting for one or other policy earthquake. Journalist Marc Chavannes describes it as “one of the strangest post-war cabinets” – due to incessant compromises it never got going, so its difficult to say that its now actually gone. For a while in 2008-2009 it looked like Labour would come out of it well, thanks to Minister of Finance Bos looking like he could manage the pitfalls of the financial crisis. But the rescue of ABN AMRO by the Dutch state has cost billions, leaving a large hole in the public purse and pushing the Netherlands beyond the agreed-on limits to public debt for the Euro-zone (but this is hardly unusual at the moment). And Labour has had to twist its programme – most notably on raising the pension age from 65 to 67 and on bank bonuses - in order to keep in line with the cabinet, in doing so alienating its members and distancing potential supporters. From this perspective, it is no surprise that it is Bos and Labour who have ended this Grand Coalition experiment.

 It leaves an uncertain time ahead. Labour will depart from its ministerial positions tomorrow, leaving the Christian Democrats and Christian Union to hold the government together before elections produce a new formation. But what will that mean in practice?

The first outburst will be the local elections on 3 March, where it is widely expected that there will be a large turn to the opposition parties. The most significant point here is the Wilders chose last year only to put candidates forward in two cities, Almere and The Hague. Speculation abounded but most likely reason is that Wilders, determined to maintain control, did not want to lose it should his party win hundreds of seats across the country. As it turns out, it looks like a master stroke. With the vast majority of voters not having Wilders’ PVV as an option on 3 March, it is highly likely that many of them will therefore do so at the next opportunity – national elections, probably on or around 12 May. In other words, the local elections will not function as a safety valve, but as a bottleneck.

If current trends continue, the May elections are going to produce one of the most significant test cases for the future of Dutch politics. The battle is to be the largest party, as the leader of that party will then have the first opportunity to form a cabinet. 76 seats out of the 150 in parliament are needed to back up a stable cabinet.

Scenario I – Christian Democrats are the largest, but this may be no more than 30 seats. Logical partners are the Liberals (VVD), Christian Union, maybe D 66. If together they could get  above 76, they  might be able to form a four-party cabinet.

But this is probably wishful thinking. And considering I am a typical voter of the centre-left, it gives some idea of how desperate the current situation is that I actually see this as potentially the best outcome.

Scenario II – The Christian Democrats become the largest and are prepared to work with Wilders’ PVV, plus perhaps the Liberals. This would be the most right-wing government the Netherlands has had. The positive spin on this – and that would be more spin than one of Shane Warne’s leg-breaks, out of the rough - is that, just like Balkenende I, the authoritarian Wilders and the inexperienced PVV would cause the cabinet to self-destruct fairly soon, bringing new elections and a more sober outcome. That is what happened in 2002-2003. But Wilders is not the same as a rudderless Pim Fortuyn party without Pim Fortuyn. And the bottom line here is that the CDA would be taking this on in order to stay in power – for the good of the country, of course. It would be a high-risk strategy, and it would take the Netherlands in a whole new direction. 

Scenario III – Labour or the Socialists are the largest party, and set out to form a left-of-centre cabinet together with GreenLeft and probably D 66. This won’t happen. Labour are facing their worst results for a long time, and it is highly unlikely that the Socialists will come out on top of everyone else. With their previous leader Jan Marijnissen? Maybe. Under Agnes Kant? No.

Scenario IV – Wilders’ PVV becomes the largest party with somewhere around 30 seats. Wilders sets out to form a cabinet. Then it becomes very, very interesting indeed. Who would be prepared to work with him? Who would be prepared to accept Wilders as Minister-President? The Christian Democrats might work with Wilders if they are top dog, but being second best? And the Liberals?

Two points here, both of which have direct reference to Belgian politics:

1) It is widely considered that the cordon sanitaire run by the centrist parties against the Vlaams Bloc (now Vlaams Belang), particularly in Antwerp, successfully excluded the Flemish nationalists from power and partly led to their decline. Are we entering a similar phase in Dutch politics? Somehow I doubt it. Wilders is not Filip Dewinter, and the PVV is a different kind of political animal. A lot will depend on how Wilders presents himself from now on, and how willing he is to start bending his message for possible deals later.

1) It is almost certainly going to take a long, long time to sort it all out. The Dutch average is three months between elections and having the new cabinet sworn in. This time it is going to take longer. In 2007 the Belgians took 196 days to form a government, which then proved to be hopelessly fragile. This was the second longest post-election government formation in Europe’s democratic history……beaten only by the Dutch, with 208 days, in 1977.

Conclusions:

Worst of all worst case scenarios – PVV-CDA-VVD 

Second worst of worst case scenarios – CDA-PVV-VVD

Relative sanity – CDA-D66-VVD

Muddling through – CDA-VVD-D66-CU

Leftist dreamland – PvdA-D66-SP-GroenLinks

May the betting begin.

10.40 pm:

We still have a government, for the moment. Opinion polls taken today indicate 45% in favour of Uruzgan being worth a crisis, 35% against. Supporters of Wilders’ PVV and the Socialists are above 60% in their hope that the cabinet falls, as are – significantly – 55% of Labour. Yet overall 54% still come out hopeing the cabinet stays together, economic concerns being the main reason. Its rare that a foreign policy issue can be so divisive, and potentially so decisive.

Wilders backs ending the Uruzgan mission but supports the war against the Taliban in general. For him, the Dutch have done enough and its time for others to take over the heavy lifting in the south of Afghanistan. But there is also a whiff of opinion-poll-driven opportunism about this that will deliver results when the elections come.

No-one has conducted an opinion poll at NATO HQ in Brussels, but maybe someone should. Apparently there has been a proposal that Rasmussen withdraw his letter to the Dutch government requesting an extension of the Afghan mission, to avoid the impression of outside pressure. So, take away the request to hopefully deliver the same result that the letter was asking for? For some this makes no sense. But then they don’t appreciate how Rasmussen’s letter represented the large drop that made the Labour party’s bucket overflow this last week.

If the cabinet does go and the Uruzgan mission ends this year, it will have major implications for both domestic and international politics here. The Dutch Foreign Ministry is geared to having a place at the top table in all the fora that matter, and this will not only close them out of the NATO in-crowd, but could also have repercussions in other areas, such as with those sought-after invitations to the G20.

Maybe the Belgians were right all along. Europe is the only answer, love it or hate it.

I am now quitting for a weekend in Amsterdam and will be back to survey any carnage on Sunday.

1.30 pm:

We seem to be in the midst of an imminent cabinet collapse in The Hague. Minister of Finance and Vice-premier Wouter Bos has insisted again on Wednesday that there is no room for manoeuver on the Labour party’s determination to end the Dutch military role in Afghanistan. His cabinet partners from the Christian Democrats and Christian Union appear surprised that no further discussion is possible. The debate in parliament yesterday did not bring any further revelations. Maybe we have no government by 5pm today.

The cabinet had planned to make an announcement before 1 March, but Bos has clearly decided to push the issue before parliamentary recess next week, and with local elections looming on 3 March. Uruzgan has become the High Noon between Labour and the Christian Democrats, neither wanting to show any sign of weakness in their position. It could have been something else – the still to be defined fiscal cut-backs, for instance – but it is remarkable how in 2010 the two issues that have quickly forced the cabinet to the edge are both in foreign policy – Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither are vote-winning issues – instead, they are definitely vote losers, whichever way you look at it. So Bos and Labour are calculating that if they go down at the polls, they will at least go down with integrity intact.

Meanwhile, a linkage between terrorism and Dutch policy surfaced yesterday, but from an unexpected angle. The Italian AdnKronos news agency published a message from the Yemen-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) terror cell which had been posted in its online magazine ‘al-Malamih’. The message, commenting on the attempted airliner bomb attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on 25 December, went on: “The reason we chose a flight that left from Amsterdam, is that the Netherlands is a country that has offended the Koran and Islam.” The Kronos report speculated that this was probably linked to the film ‘Submission’ by Theo van Gogh, subsequently assassinated by extremist Mohammed Bouyeri on 2 November 2004, and to Ayaan Hirsi Ali who wrote the film’s screenplay.

Late last year there were messages purported to be from Bin Laden stating that those nations involved in the NATO mission in Afghanistan were legitimate targets for terrorist attack.  The intention was clear – use fear and terror to split the alliance and make nations drop out. The Madrid train attacks of 11 March 2004, which seem to have influenced the Spanish general election results shortly afterwards, are significant in this respect. [See 'Was there a Dutch angle with Abdulmutallab?'  The Holland Bureau, 12 January 2010]

But the AQAP message is directed at Dutch domestic policy and society, not its foreign policy. There is apparently no mention of Afghanistan, therefore no apparent attempt to influence the current political deadlock on Uruzgan or the coming local election results. This is striking, and unexpected.

What AdnKronos does not mention is whether this AQAP message is directed in any way at Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom. Wilders is after all currently facing a court case to do with his alleged discrimination against Islam, and his film ‘Fitna’ was arguably as inflammatory as ’Submission’. The AIVD and the National Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism in the Netherlands have long been aware that Wilders could prove to be a magnet for generating violence amonst extreme Islamic elements. Yet the response to Fitna in the Netherlands was muted, and recent reports have indicated that radicalisation in the Netherlands itself has been on the wane. In contrast, the AQAB message seems to want to stir things up from outside. But the focus of the message – domestic not foreign - remains curious.

More political ruptures around the should-I-stay-or-should-I-go issue of Uruzgan. NATO Secretary General Rasmussen sent a letter on 10 February formally asking the Netherlands to keep its forces in Afghanistan for another year following the current August 2010 deadline. The request seems reasonable, considering the wide response amongst the 43 nations militarily active in that country, both NATO and non-NATO, to increase their support for the war since President Obama presented the US strategy late last year.

The problems started when it became clear that there was no unanimous response from the Dutch cabinet to Rasmussen’s letter. Worse still, it turned out that such a letter from the NATO Secretary General should only be sent if a clear signal has already been given from the given government that it is going to accept the request. This way it can be avoided that NATO gets directly involved in domestic political battles – never a good idea. And while there has been plenty speculated in recent weeks about a possible classic Dutch compromise to satisfy the pro-Uruzgan faction in the Christian Democrats and the anti-Uruzgan faction in the Labour party, the deadline for the announement of the government position is not until 1 March. 

So Rasmussen’s letter, sent with the best intentions, did enter a politically divided Dutch cabinet, and as a result it immediately raised questions from Labour about who had given Brussels the signal that it could be sent. Inevitably, all eyes rested on Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen, the principal supporter for extending the Dutch mission. Verhagen had to attend the recent Afghanistan conference in London empty-handed while many other nations pledged allegiance to the US-led military surge, not a situation that would have made him feel very comfortable.

Did the arrival of the NATO letter indicate that he was trying to force the issue in The Hague? Not so, answered Verhagen – anything I do or say on this issue is disussed with cabinet leaders beforehand. Dutch policy towards Afghanistan is not a ‘one-person activity’. Once again, as with the Davids report on Iraq, the Christian Democrats and the Labour party rushed to accuse each other and then, after several hours (if not days) behind closed doors, declared that the crisis is over. Until the next misunderstanding.      

Conclusions from this episode?

Firstly, that the Dutch image as ‘loyal ally’ in NATO is again being damaged by political in-fighting and indecision. But we’ve been through this one with the Atlantic reflex and Iraq – if loyalty means collectively nodding and saying ‘yes boss’, the results don’t necessarily lead in the right direction. Better if the Netherlands accepts that the days of such clarity (if they ever existed) are over, and a rapidly changing world requires other responses.

Secondly, its worth picking up on what journalist Marc Chavannes said last weekend. Chavannes pointed out that the way the Davids report has been treated up to now has totally avoided the big issues such as ‘the role of the Netherlands in the world’ and ‘the continuing value of an exceptional Atlanticism as opposed to a more European-orientated politics.’

I couldn’t agree more. Chavannes goes on to say that the Lisbon treaty has introduced a new phase in the EU’s development where national affairs will to a greater degree be decided at the European level. Yet the Netherlands is absent in this process, not only due to a lack of any senior EU functionary, but also due to a lack of any meaningful political debate on the continuing processes of integration. To an extent, the ‘no’ in the referendum on the EU constitution has killed off both.

And then there is the new report by the Dutch Advisory Committee on International Issues (to be released in English as well), led by former Defence Minister Joris Voorhoeve. The report, which covers the new strategic concept being prepared for NATO, expresses concern that Afghanistan has come to dominate all debate about the Organisation – indeed that it has come to represent either its future or its failure, at the expense of many other threats. Voorhoeve pleads for closer attention to the security needs of the Atlantic area – the foundation of NATO’s existence. While Afghanistan does represent a threat to NATO ountries, so in similar or different ways do other countries, and they are currenty not on NATO’s agenda. And the need to shift attention towards issues such as energy security and cyberwarfare is growing.

Both Chavannes and Voorhoeve provide valuable interventions to broaden out the debate on Dutch foreign policy, which politically is currently stuck in short-term electoral considerations. Both point towards a situation where multiple factors should decide foreign policy direction, potentially with a changing array of allies. In this sense Uruzgan is not the make-or-break issue that it is made out tobe, it is no more than the closing of a particular episode, be it in August 2010 or August 2011. It is what will happen beyond Uruzgan that is of much bigger significance.