Rudy B. Andeweg

Socio-Economic Policy

On Tuesday, 18 September 1991, Queen Beatrix began her reading of the government’s annual budget message on a sombre note: n1992 will not be an easy year, either internationally or nationally. Our economy will receive a backlash similar to that which has taken place in other countries. After a number of good years, the threat of increased unemployment is hereby faced. n nTherefore, retention and growth of employment must be given first priority. This is in order to absorb the backlash now and to profit maximally from international economic recovery thereafter. nOutside the Parliament buildings and around the country, large groups had gathered. They were already well aware of the stern measures that the Queen would soon announce, and were ready to begin their protest. Work was stopped in the Rotterdam harbour; buses and trams stopped running; teachers and professors stopped their classes to watch the televised address and discuss the problems with their students.

Political Parties and the Party System

The growth of political parties was integrally tied to the development of the pillars. For the Protestants, organisation was due in no small part to the efforts of the nineteenth-century leader, Abraham Kuyper. Kuyper was a master organiser and founded (or helped to found) many of the most important institutions within the pillar. He was in fact responsible for the organisation of those orthodox groups that had broken away, in part with his help, from the Dutch Reformed Church into the Gereformeerde Churches. He was responsible for setting up a newspaper to be the mouthpiece of the movement, and a university — the Free University of Amsterdam — to train an intellectual elite. In 1879 he founded the first mass political party of the Netherlands: the ARP.

A Country of Minorities

The Netherlands is a country of minorities. This is without doubt the single most important characteristic of Dutch politics. From the introduction of universal suffrage to the present, no political party has ever succeeded in winning an electoral (or even a parliamentary) majority, and it is unlikely that we shall witness such a majority in the near future. In the 1989 Parliamentary elections the biggest party obtained only 35.3 per cent of the vote (a record nevertheless), and was still 22 (out of 150) seats short of an overall majority in the Second Chamber of Parliament.

The Country and the People

The Netherlands comprises an area of land with a surface area of some 42 000 square kilometres located on the North Sea around the Rhine/Meuse estuary. By some standards this area is not particularly large, and the Netherlands is often referred to, even by the self-deprecating Dutch, as a ‘small’ country. Granted, the area is about twice the size of Wales or half of Scotland, and also equal to the size of the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. Yet a definition of size that relies only upon land mass is far too limited. Even though just over 4000 square kilometres of this area is uninhabitable, as it is covered by the water of rivers, canals, and lakes, the remaining space is utilised with great efficiency to provide homes for 15 million people. With an average of more than 400 people per square kilometre, it is one of the most densely populated countries of the world. In terms of inhabitants it has 1.5 times the population of Belgium or Sweden, twice that of Austria or Switzerland, and more than Norway, Denmark, and Finland combined.

The Policy-Making Process: Territorial Centralisation and Functional Decentralisation

The Dutch state was once known as the Republic of the Seven United Provinces. Today, it has occasionally jokingly been referred to as ‘the Republic of the Thirteen Disunited Departments’. This chapter discusses the degree of (de)centralisation of the policy-making process, geographically as well as functionally. First, we review the role of provincial and municipal governments to see whether the Dutch political system is indeed at least as centralised as France, as it is often claimed to be. We then turn to functional decentralisation, and to the main factors that are supposed to contribute to the ‘sectorisation’ that characterises Dutch policy-making: neo-corporatist arrangements and the absence of a unified civil service. An evaluation of the (im)balance of decentralisation and coordination of governmental policy concludes this chapter.

The Capability of a Fragmented System

Only in the Dutch language itself is the country known by the singular label Nederland: elsewhere it is the plural Netherlands, Pays Bas, or Niederlande. Despite Napoleon’s successful territorial centralisation, the overwhelming first impression foreign students of the Dutch political system are bound to develop is still one of remarkable fragmentation. Indeed, this book has no doubt contributed to that impression.