Constitutionalising Europe

Constitutionalising Europe. Dutch Reactions to an Incoming Tide (1948-2005) aims to solve the riddle of how the relation between the Netherlands and Europe got under pressure. Widely renowned as one of the Founding Fathers of the European Coal and Steel Community and as one of the most loyal partici [...]
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Constitutionalising Europe. Dutch Reactions to an Incoming Tide (1948-2005) aims to solve the riddle of how the relation between the Netherlands and Europe got under pressure. Widely renowned as one of the Founding Fathers of the European Coal and Steel Community and as one of the most loyal participants of European integration in general, the Netherlands surprised friend and foe when on 1 June 2005, its people rejected the European Constitution with a majority of 61,1%. Until now only little satisfying, short-term explanations have been given for this occurrence. This book offers a new, long term perspective. Based on a wealth of new primary sources - i.e. parliamentary accounts, Council of State advices and interviews with key-figures in the process - this book shows that the origin of the gap between Dutch political elite and society at large, as it became manifest on 1 June 2005, was already latently present within the identity of the Dutch polity for a long time. It is shown that the more the Netherlands stressed its identity as an open nation, the more it got estranged from its own political and constitutional identity. The very zeal to constitutionalise Europe blinded the Dutch political elite for the downsides of this process for national democratic relations. About the author After receiving an MA in political history, Jieskje Hollander (1983) started a PhD track at the European Law department of Groningen University, as a team member within the Contested Constitutions research group, funded by NWO. Constitutionalising Europe. Dutch Reactions to an Incoming Tide is the PhD Thesis that resulted from it. Intrigued by the peculiarities of national democracy, in February 2012 Hollander decided to move from the academic to the political domain. She now works for the Hans van Mierlo Foundation in The Hague, the independent think tank that aims to deepen and feed the social-liberal ideas of the political party D66.