Is Minister Wopke Hoekstra (Foreign Affairs, CDA) a worthy successor to Chris van der Klaauw (1977-1981), albeit without his inseparable glass of whiskey? The suspicion arose when Hoekstra mocked the kingdom’s government in a parliamentary debate over sanctions against the Kremlin last week. “I really want to study that,” Hoekstra said on the day that Russia’s war against Ukraine had been going on for five weeks. Because it concerns “independent responsibilities that lie with the specific ministers. That’s how we organized it,” said Hoekstra.
That last one is correct. In the Netherlands, responsibilities have been organized for years in such a way that debt sinks to the bottom of the pyramid and no one is responsible at the top. On the 24th of February 2022, the ‘9/11 of Europe’, that has not become less but worse. In a letter, which Hoekstra sent to the House of Representatives on behalf of eight (8) ministers, this ex-partner of McKinsey outlines a whole new Christmas tree: with a new “interdepartmental sanctions working group”, numerous “subgroups”, a “Government-wide steering committee”, a “task group”, the agreement that the Tax and Customs Administration State Secretary will now really “talk” with the [vele] supervisors, and as peak a ‘coordinator’: the experienced former minister Stef Blok.
If this spread led to anything. allah. But no. At the end of last week, just over 1 percent of Russian assets in the Netherlands had been frozen: half a billion (516 million euros) out of the 45 billion that, according to The Financial Times should be flattened.
In a second letter from no fewer than ten (10) other ministers, in which fourteen luxury yachts are reported triumphantly, Hoekstra complains that most other EU countries do not provide figures. this sample whataboutism guess if you are even exposed by Switzerland, a formidable competitor of the Netherlands in terms of money laundering and hiding place, which after four weeks of war had seized 3 percent (6.2 billion out of a total of 213 billion) of the Russian capabilities.
Hoekstra nevertheless sees it differently. The “sanctions have come about in a very short time and are unparalleled in scope and implementation,” he writes.
Very short time? Grotesque. Russia’s war against Ukraine started eight years ago. His ministry could have known since the NATO summit in 2008 that Ukraine has no right to exist in the eyes of the Kremlin, and had to know this from the moment Putin wrote down his annihilation ideology in an essay last summer.
A different conclusion arises. Business and public administration have remained blind all this time. They never wanted sanctions. In 2016, I was at a private dinner party where two chaste Commissioners from Shell and Akzo Nobel complained unconcernedly that they were joining the EU, but that as far as they were concerned the sanctions were being lifted as soon as possible. The government has conformed to this morality. With the exception of a few reforms, she has submitted herself to the principled lack of norms of the Zuidas, where everything is Anglo-Saxon. rule based is and almost nothing principle based†
Hoekstra is also lost in this maze of sneaky tax rulings and professional secrecy. He is to blame for that. As Minister of Finance, he has had the time from 2017 to make a start on the remediation of the Zuidas. All those years he lacked “determined” and “unparalleled commitment”, as he now characterizes his brand new policy.
At McKinsey they know the American quip for this: “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit†
Hubert Smeets is a journalist and historian. He writes a column here every other week.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of April 7, 2022