I don’t often think about Maxime Verhagen anymore, but it happened this week. The SCP reported that “the majority of Dutch people want the government to focus less on abroad and more on the problems at home.” Lots of media, too NRCtook over the news. And so that speech came back to me in which Maxime Verhagen, then CDA leader, got into the head of the frightened Dutchman. At the time there was an E.coli outbreak in Germany, and the frightened Dutchman said through Verhagen: “Shouldn’t we just get rid of all that foreign stuff completely and wouldn’t it be better to – literally – manage our own affairs? Going abroad only costs money and produces little except problems.”
Even then, in 2011, according to the SCP, the majority of Dutch people thought that the government should focus less on foreign countries. It was the first year that the planning agency had investigated this, based on the following statement: “The Dutch government should focus less on abroad and more on the problems at home.” This allowed respondents to agree, disagree, or neither.
This question, unchanged this year, has two shortcomings. First, she presents the focus on home and abroad as one zero sum game: attention for one thing comes at the expense of another. Now that is true when it comes to money (although you can argue that money for Ukraine is also in Dutch security interests): you can only spend it once. But giving money is only a small part of the Dutch focus on foreign countries. In addition, it has not been proven that domestic problems such as the housing shortage will be solved if money no longer goes to development cooperation or military missions.
Hilariously enough, the SCP itself writes: “Some see solidarity with other countries, such as spending money on tackling climate change or on development cooperation, as a zero-sum game.” Yes, maybe because the question implies that?
The second shortcoming is that the SCP does not explain what ‘focusing on’ means. The Netherlands spends money on, cooperates with, exports to, imports from, has diplomatic relations with, maintains or does not maintain borders with, and submits to rules of ‘abroad’. What exactly the SCP is inquiring about remains unclear. When I say ‘focus on’ and ‘pay attention to’ I think of development cooperation, military missions, EU contributions, and also diplomatic relations. But the report also talks about “international interconnectedness”, and mentions things such as nitrogen regulations, the open economy and the disappearance of borders. It is difficult to see this as a form of ‘focusing abroad’. It is more likely that abroad focuses on us.
There is even more conceptual confusion in the report, for example about the boundaries of ‘self-interest’. The participants were asked to place themselves on a scale between ‘thinking about the national interest’ and ‘taking into account the interests of other countries’. Many opted for a “golden mean” because: “Too much emphasis on self-interest can have negative consequences in the long term.” Ah, so self-interest is not in one’s own interest. Does this perhaps say something about the usefulness of this scale?
In short, the SCP paints a simplistic picture of foreign policy. Maybe to adapt to the respondents? In both 2011 and 2024, the researchers note that participants have little knowledge of foreign policy. In 2011: “Participants do not know exactly what the Netherlands is doing and why, have never thought much about this subject and seem little interested in the background of international developments.” This may explain why the answers have a high ‘eat your cake and have it too‘-content: people do not want the burdens of abroad, but they do want the benefits. The funniest sentence from the 2011 study: “In an ideal situation, an active role abroad is good for both the Netherlands and abroad.” Thank you, panelists.
Yet it is worthwhile to investigate what Dutch people think of foreign policy, according to the SCP in the new report: after all, it influences “the (political) behavior of people and the support for Dutch foreign policy.” And indeed, shifts in public opinion seem worth studying to me. But there is no such shift, which made it crazy that so many media reported it. In 2011, 64 percent of Dutch people wanted the government to focus less on foreign countries, in 2024 that was 63 percent. That unchanged percentage is a miracle when you consider how foreign events have affected us since 2011: the end of the euro crisis, the refugee crisis, the rise of national populism, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine.
If there was any news to be gleaned from the latest SCP research, it is this: no matter what happens in the world, the Dutch continue to think exactly the same, and just as uninformed, about our relationship with foreign countries. In the way that Maxime Verhagen managed to portray so well: is that really necessary, all that foreign stuff?
Floor Rusman ([email protected]) is editor of NRC