International

In many areas Brussels proceeds from the view that the member states should simply trust each other. This goes for the national bookkeeping of the Eurozone countries, although in the wake of the Greek fraud we are seeing an excess of control from the EU authorities.

You see it also repeatedly in relation to Justice and Home Affairs and immigration and asylum policy. So it’s possible to hand Dutch citizens over to another member state via the European Arrest Warrant, with no thought for their wellbeing, simply because we have to trust each other. The Dutch people who were extradited to Poland taught us that this trust is misplaced. And we must trust each other when it comes to frontier controls, but as things stand the Netherlands has closed the door on accession of Romania and Bulgaria to the Schengen open borders area, simply because the level of corruption in those countries is still not under control and so there’s no reason why we should trust them. That’s why I’m extremely sceptical when anyone starts to go on about the need to trust each other in Europe. Seeing is believing.

It all sounds very much the ideal: Europe as a community of values, within which the member states can trust each other through and through, because they all hold to the same values and respect the same standards. In practice things are a bit more stubborn. This came to the fore around the eurocrisis which was caused first and foremost by casino capitalism, but which was most directly precipitated by the bookkeeping fraud in Greece. Because in 2009 the Greeks turned out to have a great deal more debt than they had admitted to, the banks lost confidence and it became ever more difficult for Greece to come by loans. As a reaction to this, Brussels began to think that they must step up control of the Eurozone national authorities. Although sound control of accounts is necessary, Brussels is going full out for economic government and we are even discussing proposals that would oblige member state governments to send their national budgets to Brussels for approval before the country’s parliament gets to take a look. The SP of course does not find this acceptable. In our view the Dutch national parliament must have the final word on the budget, without Brussels interfering.

In other policy areas the member states do ‘trust’ each other completely. A country like Poland makes intensive use of the European Arrest Warrant, making no distinction between major and minor offences, so that a succession of Dutch citizens is being handed over to the Poles with no thought to the validity or seriousness of the charge. That the rights of suspects in Poland are minimal and that a Dutch speaker won’t even have access to a skilled interpreter evidently forms no obstacle to extradition. After all, we have to trust each other. It’s high time that we ruled in Brussels that arrest warrants should be subject to some test and that conditions can be placed concerning the rights of the extradited suspect. Only then could you know that you are right to trust the other member state.

Lastly, Romania and Bulgaria: in Brussels a witch-hunt against the Netherlands is gradually getting under way, because we are the only member state to continue to resist the removal of border controls between these countries and our own. Yet just this week the Commission came out with a fresh report in which it is clearly stated that corruption and organised crime remain rampant. I rarely find myself in agreement with Gerd Leers, our country’s immigration minister, but in this case he is clearly right: open borders demand sound policing away from the border. And this means that, in the case of Romania and Bulgaria, it’s still too soon.