International

Around 6.7 million Dutch people watched the Eurovision Song Contest, in stark contrast to the 350.000 viewers attracted by the first televised May Day debate between the leading candidates from each list for the European elections. Actually, this is extremely symbolic: you might not bother with the contest if you don’t like such events or simply don’t want to watch, which is fine. But the European Union is different. You can’t say no to European rules and laws if the majority decides otherwise. Hence the aversion: cooperation is distorted into a movement towards a superstate. Give me the song contest any day. No to this European Union, yes to cooperation to mutual advantage.

There will also certainly be people in the Netherlands who find it an odd show, a festival where a bearded woman wins. Personally I thought it a moving song and I was warmed by the winner’s cry of freedom and peace. The point however is that the Eurovision Song Contest only appears in my living room if I want it to. The event is organised by the European Broadcasting Union, in which all public broadcasters are represented. They work together so that every year we can make the acquaintance of artists from every European country. And if a country doesn’t want to go along with this? No problem, you can simply drop out, as the Netherlands did once when the contest was held on our national day of remembrance for our war dead, 4th May, and it was decided, correctly, that it would not be suitable to hold an event of this kind on such a day.

The European Union works in a different way. Countries don’t cooperate so much as have decisions forced down their throats, decisions which come right into our living rooms whether we like them or not. This is because most laws are adopted by majority vote. In addition, Brussels is so complicated that the ‘insiders’ (a coalition of Eurocrats and major corporations) are in all sorts of ways able to get what they want.

The SP is striving to reach a point where Dutch people in the future will be as likely to watch a programme about European cooperation as they are the Eurovision Song Contest; when they realise that it’s important, because cross-border problems have to be tackled together, to everyone’s advantage; and when, if you say no, as we did to the European Constitution, it really means no; and when the country has the right not to go along with things and to be assured that we remain in charge of our own affairs when it comes to matters such as health care, pensions and education, which we can best regulate amongst ourselves in our own country.

That’s what the European elections are about. Then too you can switch off and stay at home, but you should know that if you do so you’re partly responsible for the headlong rush of the Brussels train: the Eurovision Song Contest is all over in a day; the European Union goes on and on, day after day.