The dramatic image said everything. VVD party chairman Joris Voorhoeve tried to shake hands with his party colleague Annex Minister of Defense Wim van Eekelen in a full but quiet plenary meeting room of the Lower House. He had just read an explanation with a lump in the throat in which he announced his immediate resignation. Voorhoeve’s hand was refused. A hurt Wim van Eekelen was not in the mood for a comforting gesture from a party leader who had previously dropped him in rooms.
“The political climate was ripe for retiring ministers,” he wrote twelve years later in his book Tracesin which he looked back on his life. The life that was determined by that one moment. Wim van Eekelen, high on the list of ministers who were best known for their forced retirement, died on Wednesday 25 June at the age of 94. He once dreamed of becoming a doctor in a village who visited his patients on horseback, but it became a study in Utrecht and political sciences at Princeton University in the United States. The diplomat subsequently formed at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague, who made his entrance to the VVD in Dutch politics in 1977 as a member of the VVD, was known as an amiable person; Perhaps too aimable for the hard political company. He did not stay in the Lower House for a long time; Half a year after his appointment, Van Eekelen was already asked to become State Secretary for Defense in the Van Agt-Wiegel cabinet. In the first Lubbers cabinet, he again became State Secretary, this time of European Affairs and then moved in Lubbers’ second cabinet as a minister to the Department of Defense.
Official battle
On that site, Van Eekelen fell victim to “the most absurd political scandal that the Netherlands has known since the Second World War in 1988,” such as the French newspaper Libération At the time. Stumbled on the introduction of a fraud -resistant passport, an operation for which he had been responsible in the previous cabinet as State Secretary for Foreign Affairs. The project failed as a result of the official tribal struggle. He was politically convicted of this with retroactive effect. Again the surprised comment from Libération: “A matter of exaggerated political morality, as it can only come from the light Calvinism of the Dutch parliamentarians.”
When the second Lubbers Cabinet took office in 1986, the brand new opposition leader Wim Kok (PvdA) had called Van Eekelen the Minister of Defense ‘questionable’. In his previous position as State Secretary for Defense, his name came to the fore in two parliamentary surveys in a negative sense. Kok: “This is now the wrong man in the wrong place.”
Van Eekelen in his office. Photo Vincent Mentzel
Emotional
Two years later, another inquiry committee ruled destructively about the problems surrounding the introduction of a new passport. There had been “inadequate policy -making”, a “chaotic implementation” and “insufficient (additional) control from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” Van Eekelen was angry, thought it was a disappointing report with many gaps but knew that fighting no longer had any sense. His own VVD no longer wanted to support him in the Lower House. Then for a Minister of Defense, only the task to “limit the losses”, as he said in his emotional statement in the Lower House. The political fate of “Brekebeen” (dixit: Nieuwsblad van het Noorden) Van Eekelen was determined.
In the hectic days that preceded the decision, VVD leader Voorhoeve van Eekelen indoor roomers had promised to commit himself to an “important ambassador post” if he voluntarily resigned. In 1989 it became the position of Secretary General of the Western European Union, the partnership that was discontinued in 2011 on the defense site of the Member States of the European Union. Van Eekelen went into full speed to give this a greater role in rapidly integrating Europe until then, especially paper -producing and fairly insignificant institute. He had no opportunity passed to bring the WEU to the attention. It did not result in much results. “De Weu: Willems Own Union”, was scamped in The Hague. In the long run he himself considered it a geuzent title.
‘Still confused’
When his period had passed after five years, Van Eekelen was elected in the Senate in 1995 for the VVD; He would stay there until 2003. In the Senate he was able to deal with his favorite subject: the further unification of the European Union. The growing skepticism within his own VVD about the EU was not spent on him. There was only one way: further integration, and further expansion.
Up to a very old age, Van Eekelen, not often accompanied by his wife, could be found at one of those countless discussion meetings about the future of Europe, the future of the transatlantic alliance or the future of the world. He belonged to the regular questioners; His questions were of course preceded by a comprehensive exposé. He was also a much sought -after chairman of these types of meetings that were often held in English in the diplomat city of The Hague. There were always his fixed final words: “Ladies and Gentlemen. We are still confused but on a higher level.”