Crisis management as anti-politics in the Netherlands
How the Dutch gov't uses emergencies--epidemic, climate change, war--to create a new people
The Covid epidemic in Europe has been treated mostly as a problem for administration to solve in increasingly despotic ways. I have written three previous reports on how the Dutch gov’t under Prime Minister Mark Rutte is attempting to overcome political dissent & get rid of political opposition altogether (here, here, & here). The distinction between state & society, crucial to modern politics, is quickly unraveling in a grasp for tyranny.
The various crackdowns have ranged from police violence to restriction of public discourse, always under the excuse of emergency, as a matter of public health. Covid has been moving towards endemic status for a while, however, which undermines the claim that emergency powers are necessary, helpful, or even tolerable. Here in the Netherlands, the change in rhetoric has been remarkable: One week, “cases” are off the charts & anyone shy about affirming all the supporting data graphs & proposed policies has betrayed his grandmother & his country—the next week, there’s no mask to be seen outside or in. Are we waking up from a bad dream? The seamless shift in public discourse this winter & spring from hysterical cowardice to reckless warmongering occasioned by the newly minted “current thing,” Ukraine suggests the contrary: The dreamscape of public affairs is getting more feverish than it was back when many of us were wallowing at home with a temperature.
Indeed, the rhetoric of emergency & safety used to harass dissenters through the courts, through new laws on banning legal persons makes more dramatic sense when we’re facing the threat of war with a nuclear superpower than it ever did for Covid. Hysteria about Russia, though it eventually watered down to the status of talking point, was more intense than the hysteria about disease. But so far, gov’t attacks on freedom have been limited to some shady arrests of activists & grotesque motions raised in Parliament to exclude from debate Forum for Democracy, a right-wing party, as “Kremlin-backed.” Flirting with accusations of treason, after all, might just be part of partisanship in a democratic society (if the American Russiagate debacle is anything to go by). The dangers I anticipated in my last report lie elsewhere: The NCTV (Dutch national coordinator of terrorism & safety) has been coordinating surveillance & troll attacks against dissident activists & even representatives in Parliament. Despotism is advancing through the courts of law, in the first place, against the representative legislature, but also, in the second place, through the internet, attacking not only elected representatives, but even the very people & opinions they are there to represent. Who on either side of the fence can still be heard claiming that digital technology, in its capacity as forum for public discourse, is an unmitigated blessing unto democratic politics? In the third place, despotism is advancing through the introduction of new emergency legislation that renders the gov’t capable of mandating harsh policy on the municipal level. I have previously recommended that the Dutch endeavor to regain local agency, & a commonsensical understanding of politics. Seeing Dutch Prime Minister Rutte attack this most basic level of freedom makes me think he’s the only man reading my reports. Indeed, an attack on local self-gov’t is the closest he has come to showing that he takes public opinion into consideration, the better to stifle it.
The state emergency law
On Wednesday, March 29, Dutch State Secretary of Asylum Eric van der Burg announced that the State Emergency Law, an umbrella term comprising all areas of policy that bear on “emergency situations,” would be activated, out of concern about Ukrainian refugees. The Dutch gov’t was preparing to accommodate around 150,000 refugees; there were not then 50,000 beds available for them. Hence the use of emergency powers, specifically the “Law on Relocating Population,” of which Articles 2c & 4 were activated as of March 31, 2022. This law can be used to compel any mayor in the country to claim property from Dutch citizens, even to evict/relocate them, in order to accommodate the number of refugees the state deems necessary in any given municipality. A formidable step up from national house arrest during the epidemic, to be sure, increasing the powers & discretion of state administration against ordinary citizens.
Was there no such emergency when Covid-19 was declared an A-status disease? Is the administration claiming retrospectively that no emergency situation of this kind was necessary for them to mandate the 2021 curfews, among other extraordinary “measures of containment?” Indeed, the emergencies lengthen until they become habits & therefore “normal;” worse, they are becoming “normative,” too: The temporary “emergency law” (spoedwet in Dutch) used to enable the gov’t to take the ensemble of measures to contain Covid will be extended for the seventh time in September 2022 &, before the end of the year, the spoedwet is to become permanently integrated into public health law. The changes in pandemic law, wrote Public Health minister Ernst Kuipers in his letter to Parliament on May 4, 2022, are to be submitted to Parliament in the second half of August. If the legislature is in any sense the representative of the people, it is only there to ratify what the gov’t is doing anyway. The state runs the society, the society acknowledges obediently. Emergencies call into being more gov’t & the gov’t in turn creates more emergencies…
As with ICU beds during the pandemic, there have been regular shortages of asylum beds in the Netherlands for years. In the April 21 Parliamentary debate on asylum for Ukrainian refugees, where the State Emergency Law was discussed, it was often remarked that there are still many refugees coming from places like Syria & Yemen. Those are fond, quaint, old emergencies of the previous decade, when the Middle East was of interest & the “Global War on Terror” was shuffling millions of people around, including by Europeanizing them... Ms. Kröger of the Green Party was quick to suggest during the debate that perhaps the State Emergency Law should be made to apply to the existing influx of refugees as well. Considering the current state of Dutch jurisprudence, is it a stretch to expect a suggestion like that to be taken seriously, perhaps even as a revision to the existing legislation on asylum seekers? Will the current crisis, too, be integrated into our “new normal?” One of the ministers answering questions in the April 21 debates was Minister of Housing Hugo de Jonge. He had previously overseen the implementation & multiple extensions of the emergency law as Minister of Public Health in the demissionary Rutte III cabinet.1 Now, it’s the Rutte IV cabinet, with newer emergencies & new portfolios, but it’s the same play, with the same actors...2
New state powers to relocate citizens
The Law on Relocating Population, dating from July 10, 1952, which has never been invoked, justifies state action: “[As] we have considered that it is desirable in case of war, threat of war, or related extraordinary circumstances, to determine measures concerning the relocation of the population in the interests of safety, the support of societal life, or the exercise of the army’s function…” Well, what is our extraordinary circumstance? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a conflict between two foreign nations which, apparently, invites the Rutte go'v’t’s extraordinary liberality. The 1952 law clearly pertains to evacuation during national emergencies, but according to the Utopian reasoning in the extraordinary new interpretation, the interest of Dutch national safety includes gov’t compulsion of Dutch mayors to evict Dutchmen on behalf of Ukrainians. Patriotism & property rights are both jeopardized in principle, or jettisoned, & it’s now only a matter of how far the state will go in practice.3 The gov’t statement elucidating the decision emphasizes that the law gives mayors a legal task which does not yet involve the capacity to exercise emergency authority that might contradict constitutional rights; the Rutte gov’t does not consider such authority proportional at this time. Mayors are to execute asylum policies according to their own local circumstances & possibilities, while keeping in mind Article 4, Clause 2. The statement continues: Should circumstances require it, limits on the exercise of authority could be reconsidered, making it possible for mayors to compel citizens to move out of their homes (Articles 2a & 2b) or use any property they may own to shelter refugees (Article 7, Clause 1).4
Crisis management & democratic politics
Moreover, gov’t is proposing to turn politics into crisis management as an excuse to get rid of democracy. The Center For Scientific Research & Documentation, in December 2021, issued a report for the gov’t which was accepted as a justification for the measures now enacted or contemplated (in order to activate powers on the part of the mayors, the government must first submit a legal proposal that needs the consent of Parliament and the Council of State, whose report on April 13th 2022 concluded that the government should reformulate the proposal; three more roundtable discussions are scheduled in Parliament on June 29th). The report states that Dutch State Emergency Law is outmoded, because it is too complex & incapable of dealing with current & future crises, which are no longer limited to national boundaries & which, rather than emerging suddenly, demanding gov’t action, develop gradually, thereby requiring “flexibility” & ever more precise measures taken by administrative experts. The suggestion seems to be that State Emergency Law needs to be changed because of climate change, among other current or possible material conditions. Another revelation from the official statement is that Minister of Justice & Safety Ferd Grapperhaus had already pushed for changes in State Emergency Law back in 2018. In 2020, a motion by Christian Democrat Chris van Dam was passed in parliament that resulted in a report being requested from a commission under Global Affairs professor Edwin Muller, an analysis of Safety Risk laws, which date from 2010 & pertain to measures for resolving crisis situations. In his formal advice to gov’t, Prof. Muller proposed that the definition of "crisis” be expanded to include "looming crises”, on account of their “increasing complexity, limitlessness, & unfathomability.” Thus, changing definitions helps increase the gov’t’s capacity to act on matters of its concern. In 2020-2021, it was Covid & curfews. Activists against curfews won their case in court; the state reacted by overruling the decision in order to get the policy through; the lesson learned was that systemic changes are required for things to run smoothly in future. In 2022, some definitions were fudged & now Ukrainian refugees constitute a national emergency that justifies the activation of the State Emergency Law.
The EU future
This emergency, however, is not simply a result of Russia's invasion, but of the EU March 3, 2022 decision to accommodate Ukrainian refugees, which the Netherlands are merely obeying. The costs involved are not negligible, either, even beyond the bed shortages, especially after the economic & social wreckage of Covid lockdowns & mandates; especially after the sanctions on Russia have backfired to make inflation even worse. This spring, the EU & NATO have engaged Russia in attrition warfare by supplying arms to the Ukraine; on June 23-4, the European Council decided to take the war a great step forward by making the Ukraine a candidate for EU membership (along with Moldova), which means taking on a warzone & looking for much greater enmity with Russia over a new border, even as the Russian army is moving this prospective border West while slaughtering Ukrainian troops & leveling cities. “That war out there,” as our PM Mark Rutte would put it during his press conference on June 18th, “is our war.”
This is life in Europe now. Increasingly, life-altering decisions are made in Brussels by the EU, isolated from democracy, relying instead on its NGOs & think tanks. The “opposition” parties grumble about it at home, while the gov’t considers how best to ignore them & stifle debate. So there is no limit to what this administration is willing to pile up: Two years of lockdowns, 25 billion Euros for reducing nitrogen in agriculture by 30%, which is immiserating farmers who are now protesting, getting out of fossil fuels, which hurts the poor worst in higher energy prices, increasing the tax on meat, attempting to foist vegetarianism on people who would never choose it, an economic conflict with Russia, & now, refugee humanitarianism at the expense of ordinary people. The attempt to transform Dutchmen into something their elites can tolerate is ongoing, in spite of all the political & economic troubles. It’s fitting to end this report with videos of the most recent protests:
On January 15, 2021, the entire Rutte III cabinet officially became ‘demissionary,’ a legal status signifying the formal resignation of an Executive member of gov’t once the majority of the Judiciary has deemed it untrustworthy. Once demissionary, such a gov’t is relegated to seeing through ongoing affairs & is not supposed to decide on any controversial matters. The reason for the resignation of the cabinet was the so-called “subsidy affair,” referring to the extreme prejudice with which the Dutch tax agency had been systematically accusing parents of committing fraud with their childcare subsidies. These wrongly accused people were also prosecuted severely: Some 26,000 parents were affected (70,000 children, according to official estimates). Many families got into financial trouble, but the worst of it was that 1,675 children (the first official estimate was 1,115!) were kidnapped from their parents by the Child agencies as a result, with most of them still waiting to be reunited. While there was some upheaval in Parliament over this horrific scandal, as well as the government’s failure to compensate its victims or even acknowledge the injustice, the Cabinet remained intact through the elections two months later, emerging with an even greater majority of seats than the 2017 election that led to its formation, thanks to the continued support of the Christian Democrats, the Greens, & the centrist-Progressive D66. It beggars belief, but there is no more getting around the fact that something like this can happen in the Netherlands without any consequence. PM Rutte oversaw the injustice in full knowledge & has ostensibly been rewarded by the electorate with another term…
The play has been going on behind the scenes for a long time. Freedom of Information requests have revealed internal gov’t emails confirming that the 2020 emergency law (spoedwet) had been unanimously agreed-upon by the coalition parties before the respective debate had even taken place.
Article 2c of The Law on Relocating Population states that the law applies to large-scale relocations that are not the consequence of an order to relocate (defined as an agreement between two parties where the party that gives the order takes on financial responsibility for the legal actions taken by the party executing the order either by receiving the bill directly or by compensating the latter party). Article 4 states that 1. it is the mayor who is charged with any order that accords with the preceding articles of the law to relocate part of his municipality’s population; 2. Concerning the clearing out of goods & transportation, respective Ministries can give direct instructions to the mayor; the Minister of Internal Affairs may do so concerning shelter & healthcare.
Article 7 states that, in the interests of persons who have been relocated or are to be relocated, the mayor may compel others to make available residences, buildings, & other shelter, with inventory if necessary, & thus with or without furniture. According to Article 8 (likewise explicitly kept on standby), the Minister of Internal Affairs or an authority appointed by him may, in the interest of Public Health, be it with regard to the health, age, or behavior of the person who has been moved, as well as those residing with him, refer the person who has been moved to a special shelter & keep him there in accord with the respective regulations. So the gov’t holds in reserve the power to detain people who have been accused of no crime, all in the name of, once again, Public Health!
Crisis management as anti-politics in the Netherlands
Amazing piece and videos!
Since this is a very serious, well-researched piece that might cause depression in some of our readers, I will highlight an odd fact I noticed tonight while composing my Millennial bands piece that might give heart. Three years ago, The Sure Fire Ensemble, a solid funk-instro band hailing from my old-home-town of San Diego, recorded a (tasty) version of "Impeach the President," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwQZWjZaSKw&ab_channel=ColemineRecords, but they just released this (wordless) video for a new instro "Step Down," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPp4Jqffvx0&ab_channel=ColemineRecords which seems to have a message at least ready to dialogue with and perhaps temporarily ally with populist-conservative opponents of lockdown-style governance.