International

I received an e-mail from someone who had needed emergency hospital treatment in Hungary and had been shocked by the unbelievably unhygienic conditions and wanted to know if there was anything I could do about this. This is the kind of dilemma I come across often. Whether it’s the suffering of animals or inadequate social services, such as in this case in health care, people will demand from Brussels that something is at last done. At the same time it’s exactly what we don’t want – more zeal for interference from Brussels when it comes to our own services. The solution for me lies in the word ‘cooperation’. We appear to have forgotten that states can also simply work together without the Brussels bureaucracy having to be brought into play.

The conditions in the Hungarian hospital were indeed appalling. I don’t want to go into details, but in the Netherlands such a hospital would face immediate closure. When you get an email like this, your first reaction is that you’ll do something about it. At the same time you realise that the SP doesn’t want to see Brussels interfering in our hospitals. Brussels follows a neoliberal agenda and that means still more privatisation, and soon. Even if it was really a matter of standards, you’d still have to be extremely apprehensive, because if the Netherlands had to adapt to a European average, we certainly wouldn’t see progress as a result.

Nevertheless, it has to be said that it’s incomprehensible that there are European Union countries in which health care is so far below the mark. Of course we want to do something about that. In all these sorts of considerations I come invariably to the conclusion that the actual problem lies in the European Commission. As soon as you give the EU more powers, the Commission will immediately seek to grab them. Because member states take decisions by qualified majority, national parliaments can be overruled, which the SP won’t stand for.

If however you can work around and outside the Commission, then it seems to me that an agreement between interested member states on the quality of hospitals would be extremely useful. Member states could then attempt to persuade each other of the importance of high standards of, for instance, hygiene. Not diktats from Eurocrats, but constructive discussion. The member states and their parliaments would have the last word, but solid agreements could be drawn up. After that the Commission could check whether these agreements are being respected, but we’d be spared all those authoritarian and for the most part neoliberal legislative proposals that emerge from that body. In this way European cooperation could become useful and popular. It’s a pity that almost all big parties can only think in terms of the transfer of powers and along with that the undermining of national sovereignty. Most Dutch people agree with the SP that as far as health care is concerned we want to maintain control of our own system and not to transfer powers to Brussels, Real cooperation, however, is something most of us are in favour of. So let’s get to work, and in due course hygiene will improve in Hungarian hospitals.