Next month, government leaders of NATO member states The Hague, and what is striking: a lot of news about the top is about logistics. Blocked roads, police deployment, emergency regulation.
The top must become a knee bend for Donald Trump, so that the United States finally get what he and his predecessors have been demanding for years: higher defense expenditure of European member states. It will probably give interior political tensions in the Netherlands.
But another dilemma is also sleeping. It Washington Convention With which NATO was formed in 1949, one of the principles mentions that Member States protect the principles of democracy, individual freedom and the rule of law. ” It was self -evident for decades. Wás.
Now the US president makes flashy attempts to undo the separation of powers. He squeezes institutions – the congress, media, universities, etc. – that can reside him. In Europe, he unilaterally strengthened the negotiating position of aggressor Vladimir Putin, so that Ukraine, Putin’s victim, and the EU were forced into the defensively.
In other NATO member states, things are not increasing. Turkey threw the main opponent of President Recep Erdogan in jail, and continues a Swedish journalist who came to report. In the Hungary of Viktor Orbán, the separation of powers has long been a dead letter. Slovakia behaves Like a showy Russian slave.
And we know: for the time being Europe is militarily dependent on the US, it can be criticized in NATO ‘Not Done’ each other’s domestic politics, so Trump bumping for the head seems no option. But the question is how long that remains defensible.
Mass support
The demosclerosis also brings different discomfort: the requirement that democracy should be perfect. But people’s representations and governments by definition have the weakness that they can be mistaken, just like their voters.
Consider the mass support for powerful control of benefit fraud prior to the allowance affair. Or the naivety with which the Netherlands Putin closed in 2000 after its election. There are so many examples.
The separation of powers is the classic answer: it was Montesquieu who argued that power without counterpower leads to absolute power. That is why it is a fascinating misunderstanding that American ultra -conservatives recommend the autocracy because democracies would make too many mistakes. As if the abolition of counterpower leads to fewer mistakes.
Something else is that the democratic sense of norm in The Hague also runs backwards. Herman Tjeenk Willink, including former vice president of the Council of State, was seven times informer in the period 1994-2021, and for that as a top official twice secretary of the formation. Nobody knows the dilemmas of the Hague government formation better.
Thus it is interesting that he set up fifteen ‘requirements’ in an unpublished memorandum-one and a half A4 sheet from 1994-updated in 2017-that ‘candidate ministers’ should meet.
I get a few out of it.
Point 1: “Insight into the boundaries of the democratic legal order” – in the rules, in short, between government and citizens, and between citizens themselves. 4: “Knowing when the time of going [voor bewindslieden] has come. ” 5: “The ability to listen Is just as important as the ability to act. ” 13: “Being able […] take the parliamentary debate (more than exchanging views) seriously. ”
Everything in distinctive Tjeenk Willink-PRICISION. And what does it teach us about the Schoof cabinet? Take point 3: In addition to ‘individual responsibility’, nurses must have an eye for their ‘collective responsibility’ as ‘member of the Council of Ministers’. A minister actively participates in that Council of Ministers and accepts the unity of cabinet policy.
A basic rule of The Hague, of which nothing remained in the last three years: Prime Minister Dick Schoof was constantly lost. Examples. He had to tap Deputy Prime Minister Fleur Agema. The same Agema was openly surprised in March, with Deputy Prime Minister Mona Keijzer (Public Housing, BBB), about extended military support to Ukraine, promised by Schoof. Minister Marjolein Faber (asylum and migration, PVV) also publicly dismissed Schoof in March (“I am done with it”) because her asylum laws did not reach the agenda of the Council of Ministers. Et cetera.
Emptiness of cabinet policy.
Conceptual
This loss of formality, traditions and customs opens the door to more oncollegial behavior and enormous. And it illustrates a conceptual mistake by Richard van Zwol, one of the informators and later the formateur of the Cabinet Schoof. He each had fractions write their own section, so that parties in the formation did not have to confront each other and in fact they did not draw any common conclusions.
In this way, the country now has a cabinet with many beginners, without a sound basis, and without shared standards. It creates one Prisoner’s dilemmaespecially in this internationally uncertain period.
On the one hand, politics, which leads its own rules, has become the main problem of the democratic legal order: what can the citizen still count on? At the same time, politics is also the one who seems to be the least of those violations. And only politics can solve this.
In the US, the decades of loss of formality, and the political powerlessness to stop this, produced politicians like Trump, who claim all power. They first question the independence of the judiciary.
It says afterwards everything that Trump about this already in his first term, in 2018, in conflict With the highest judge, chairman John Roberts of the Supreme Court. Trump took off an unwelcome judicial ruling on an asylum seeker as the choice of an “Obama judge”, after which Roberts pointed out that the US has no political but “independent judges”.
Last year, JD Vance, now Vice President, went much further: according to him, any judicial restriction of presidential action is undemocratic. In Polrico he discussed The example in which the Supreme Court determines that the president cannot choose all his own employees. “That is the constitutional crisis, because then the Court says that the president should no longer have control over his own government.”
It is the attitude of politicians who reject every boundary of their power. Politicians who cannot accept the core of democracy: that power is limited by, for example, the Constitution, and that they can always lose power – by opponents, voters or previously set standards.
Trumps resentment policy – extorting institutions and opponents – is a logical consequence of it. Compulsory submission to the ruler. And in the end the ruler claims absolute power: he presents less obedient opponents as danger, as enemies, whose civil rights have to be taken away.
It reminds of Abel Herzberg, the Jewish lawyer and writer who saw in Bergen-Belsen that the deep misery of the camp life brought in human behavior: stealing, fighting and more. But stealing food to satisfy the hunger deserved punishment, Herzberg thought, because the robbery was also hungry. He started a court in the prison camp with a few other lawyers.
Historian Hans Cheap spoke Nice about it in his 4 May lecture from 2022. The sessions even attracted attention from the camp commander, an SS person with whom the memory of the rule of law returned.
So where certain politicians now politicize judges to be able to disqualify them, where Herzberg even saw the value of the law in the inhumanity of the camp: the importance of rules, boundaries, of equal rights.
And what you don’t know: how politics and public opinion would react if resentment policy were to dominate here. For the time being you see relatively few alarmed reactions to the democratic decline in the US, or to the loss of democratic awareness in the heart of your own government.
But people also do not experience a direct threat: there is reasonable prosperity, freedom, often sunshine.
In February 1933. The winter of literature (2021) Van Uwe Wittstock, a beautiful book about German writers in Hitler’s first weeks as a Rijkskanselier, I read that it had been icy cold for a long time when the Nazis came to power on January 30, 1933. Writers responded like other people: heroic, obedient, anxious, reckless.
It didn’t matter much anymore. The regime drove over Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann and everyone else like a steam roller. On March 7, shortly after Hitler strengthened his power in interim elections, the first book burning followed, in Dresden. A high culture was destroyed in five to six weeks.