The presidency’s half-term report

Date: 03/04/1997

THE Dutch government was dealt a difficult hand when it took over the EU presidency on 1 January.

For the second time in six years, it has found itself in charge of completing the negotiations on a pivotal European Union treaty in the space of six months - albeit in very different circumstances this time around.

As a direct result of the embarrassing set-backs the government suffered during the 1991 Maastricht negotiations, pragmatic caution rather than imaginative initiative has been the hallmark of the Dutch spell at the EU helm so far.

Ironically, the most high-profile event to date was organised not by the Dutch, but by the Italians, as many of the Union's extensive entourage decamped to Rome for several days last week to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the EU's founding treaty.

While no Union presidency is ever totally in charge of events, the Dutch are even less so.

On the centrepiece of their six-month programme, the Intergovernmental Conference, they are effectively hamstrung until after the UK general election on 1 May. Even then, domestic British politics may still weigh heavily on the negotiations.

Equally, they are in the Union's driving seat at a time when the pace of legislative initiatives has slowed almost to a trickle. The first two months of any EU presidency is inevitably slow, but this year has been quieter than most with fewer ministerial and official meetings than usual.

Finally, public attitudes towards the EU in the Netherlands, traditionally one of the Union's main cheerleaders, are proving noticeably more fickle than in the past. Hardly a week goes by without one of the country's leading politicians, Frits Bolkestein, head of the liberal VVD, pouring scorn on the Union in one way or another.

The situation is not helped by the fact that two of his subordinates - Gerrit Zalm and Michiel Patijn - are heavily involved in EU affairs as finance minister and European affairs minister respectively.

So it was no surprise in January when Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van Mierlo explained that his government intended to “adopt a low profile because of the high level of their ambitions”.

He continued: “We are on the brink of taking two major steps forward: enlargement and economic and monetary union. It is a combination of deepening and widening. We are preparing for these two major events and everything should be seen against this background.”

The IGC is the Dutch preoccupation and, so far, it has been fairly astutely handled by the combination of the strong Europhile Van Mierlo and the pragmatic Patijn.

Many major hurdles still remain: how to square contradictory defence and security interests, particularly over the integration of the Western European Union into the EU; how to find a modus vivendi between those inside and those outside the border-free Schengen zone; and how to improve the workings of the EU's institutions - to name but a few.

Many of these, along with the confirmation of the new concept of 'enhanced cooperation', will only fall into place at the very end of the negotiations. But even the cautious Patijn says the Union is now two-thirds of the way down the IGC road.

On a single currency, the Dutch have not really been tested.

“The big debate on monetary union is taking place in newspapers and in speeches. It is not something the Dutch presidency is stimulating,” commented one official.

But there is still work to be done by the Dutch in this area. By Amsterdam, they have to ensure that the legal drafting is completed on four texts central to the future of the euro.

Two of these concern the new exchange rate mechanism, another relates to the stability pact and the fourth will update Union legislation on the euro to ensure it is a genuine currency.

The extent to which the presidency is on target to meet these challenges will become clearer at this weekend's (5 April) informal meeting of EU finance ministers.

But Zalm has already learnt lessons from the early days of the presidency.

With speculation rife over who will be in the first batch of euro members, he fuelled such gossip in early January when he implied that hopeful members such as Spain and Italy had little chance of seeing their wishes fulfilled. These days, his comments are considerably more guarded.

On the external front, the Dutch have, understandably, made preparation for enlargement their main theme and announced their intention to turn the regular political contacts between the Union and the various applicants from a series of monologues into a proper dialogue.

Although the scope for making changes is clearly limited, the Dutch have won some plaudits for ensuring that meetings are better prepared and focus on specific issues, rather than talking in broad policy terms.

Each presidency brings with it the unexpected and the Dutch are no exception. They have been forced to cope with a war of words over Turkey's relations with the Union and have had the task of steering the EU towards a coordinated response to the near civil war in Albania.

Yet, in one way, neither was totally unexpected.

The Union has agonised over its relations with Turkey for years and when Van Mierlo raised the question of how the integration of a large Islamic country into the EU could be handled, he was almost deliberately inviting a debate. But perhaps it went a little further than he expected when a meeting of Christian Democrat leaders suggested early last month the country would never become a member of the Union.

Ruffled Turkish feathers were, however, successfully smoothed by foreign ministers at their informal meeting in Apeldoorn in mid-March as Turkey's right to be considered for EU membership was again recognised.

Albania is a somewhat different case. Although the country's economic collapse had been visible for months, the descent into armed conflict appears to have caught the Union as a whole unawares and its response to date has been little more than a cautious damage limitation exercise.

One of the biggest tests of the Netherlands' handling of EU foreign policy will come later this month with the second Euro-Mediterranean summit in Malta.

The Dutch government has repeatedly declared this to be one of its top priorities, mainly, as Van Mierlo explains, “to prevent any division of roles in the Union between the northern member states edging towards the East and the southern ones wishing to develop links with the South”.

On internal policies, the Dutch took the helm with a reputation for championing liberalisation - so much so that French President Jacques Chirac insisted on wrapping up an EU postal services liberalisation package before Christmas out of fear that the incoming presidency might make it more radical.

Now all eyes are on The Hague to see whether it can push through further liberalisation measures for the gas and railway industries during the next three months.

In core EU policy areas - such as agriculture and fisheries - the main work still lies ahead, with the Dutch facing the task of securing agreement on a farm price package and proposals for a substantial reduction in national fishing fleets.

But none of this has prevented the current presidency from severely upsetting the European Parliament. First, whether by accident or by design, the Dutch government was not represented in the emotional parliamentary debate in February on the mad cow crisis where the European Commission faced the very real threat of censure.

The presidency's absence was taken by MEPs as a snub, which was compounded late last month when it secured unanimous agreement among farm ministers for new beef labelling measures. This effectively cut MEPs out of the legislative process at a time when they thought they would have a greater say over food policy, and a court case now beckons.

Of all the challenges facing the Dutch, there is little doubt that the legacy they most want to bequeath to their Luxembourg successors is a new Treaty of Amsterdam which will remove the stigma of Maastricht and set the Union on a fresh course.

The next three months will reveal whether they can achieve that. As one observer noted in his half-term report: “Generally they have done a good job, but the time is not yet ripe for harvesting.”