[European thoughts] Oh dear, the reputation of the Netherlands has become worse!

Last week, the Dutch government collapsed because of disagreements about the Dutch peace mission in the Afghan province Uruzgan. The christian democrats (CDA) want the Dutch troops to stay, the social democrats (PvdA) want them to leave at the end of 2010. Soon a discussion started about the responsibility for the collapse: was it the fault of the christian democrats who wanted to make an inventory of the remaining options to stay in Afghanistan, or was it the fault of the social democrats who wanted to stop without any further discussion?

Foreign policy experts were irritated by the collapse and the discussion that followed. They insist that the Dutch mission in Afghanistan is extremely important and that there is a chance that the four years mission have become useless when no successor is found to replace the Dutch troops. A successor has not been found yet. The experts agreed that the process of decision making will harm the Dutch reputation and that it makes the Dutch a less reliable partner for NATO.

Dutch citizens seem to have turned against the Afghanistan peace mission: many people think that the Netherlands has done enough for peace in Afghanistan. Citizens seem to be more interested in the twenty Dutch soldiers who died during the last four years, than the international importance of the mission. Foreign policy experts implicitly state that these concerns are uninformed and biased.

But the statements of these experts are strange as well. They state that Holland should think about its reputation. But the Netherlands played a larger role in Afghanistan and Iraq than many other countries. The international partners of the Dutch probably do complain that the mission only ends because of party politics, but that does not mean that the Dutch have become fundamentally unreliable. International cooperation between Europe and the US has become more important than ever before. What would be against a little harm to the Dutch reputation? Everybody knows that it will not end the cooperation of the last decades.

So here we see the problem of foreign policy: not only politicians, but also foreign policy experts have problems to explain foreign policies to the citizenry. In this way, peace missions will never receive public support again. Citizens will always prefer that other countries do these missions. Foreign policy experts should try to understand the feelings of the citizenry, in order to convince them of the usefullness of international missions. Experts should never complain about trivial issues such as the Dutch reputation. This indeed sounds as an important issue, but foremost, it illustrates that experts are unable to explain why peace missions are so important.

Chris Aalberts*
Amsterdam, Nederlands 

* Chris Aalberts is docent en onderzoeker politieke communicatie (www.chrisaalberts.nl)