The agitators lobbed the banana-cream projectiles at the official,
Gerrit Zalm, on Jan. 4, 1999, to denounce the newly arrived euro
currency, a tool they warned would lead to the dismantling of the
welfare state and the dominance of bankers.
“I don’t regret it at all,” Jelle Goezinnen, a pie thrower then and currently a refugee counselor in Utrecht, says today. “I still stand behind all those actions.”
Fifteen years and one existential euro crisis later, his pie brigade, known as TAART, has successors questioning what the policy makers of that era wrought for what was once a model euro nation. Now the 16.8 million Dutch are caught in a trap much like the one that has caught their bailed-out neighbors: not enough economic growth, too much debt, and a shortage of policy options fueling doubts about the benefit of union.
For Frits Bolkestein, a former center-right Dutch political leader and member of the European Commission, the lesson is simple. “The monetary union has failed,” says Bolkestein, 80, himself once a target of pie-wielding assailants. “I have considerable difficulty in imagining us continuing like this for very much longer. Let us say 10 years ahead: will we then have the same sort of mess?”
From the start, the Netherlands has been intimately bound up with the euro. One of the six founders of the group that grew into the 28-nation European Union, it hosted the 1991 summit in Maastricht that laid out the roadmap to the currency and sent Wim Duisenberg to Frankfurt as the first president of the European Central Bank. The Dutch made a fetish of the euro’s deficit rules, only to run afoul of them when the crisis struck.
Austerity is no longer the national pastime of a country that pioneered global capitalism and made “going Dutch” a synonym for thrift. Even the purveyors of marijuana who dot the city carved by the canals that made Amsterdam a latter-day tourist destination complain of hard times made harder by government rules.
“Look what I got since we opened at nine this morning -- not even 10 euros,” Mohamed Ouchene, 38, co-owner of the “Blue Lagoon,” says around midday, pointing to his nearly empty cash register and the two customers in the shop. “We wanted to refurbish and upgrade the place but we postponed.”
The Dutch economy is set to be the third-worst performer in the 18-member euro area this year, with growth of 0.2 percent, according to the commission. Ireland, Portugal, Spain, even Greece -- four countries saved from financial ruin partly by Dutch aid, grudgingly granted -- will do better.
“When the party is going on, you don’t want to take away the fun,” says Arnoud Boot, a professor of corporate finance and financial markets at the University of Amsterdam. “As long as house prices were going up, there was no problem. The political process was not good at dealing with these things.”
Note EU-Digest: whatever way you turn it the fact remains that there is a global economic crises going on all over the world - and - if the Netherlands would not have been part of the EU Eurozone the economic crises would have probably hit the country even harder than it did now.
Where there is a major problem is that the Dutch Government is doing an extremely poor job at communicating the benefits of the EU, Eurozone and EURO. As a result opportunist radical populist politicians like Geert Wilders are gaining traction with what in essence is total unfounded nonsense.
Read more: Dutch Confront Euro’s Just Desserts as EU Appetite Ebbs - Businessweek
“I don’t regret it at all,” Jelle Goezinnen, a pie thrower then and currently a refugee counselor in Utrecht, says today. “I still stand behind all those actions.”
Fifteen years and one existential euro crisis later, his pie brigade, known as TAART, has successors questioning what the policy makers of that era wrought for what was once a model euro nation. Now the 16.8 million Dutch are caught in a trap much like the one that has caught their bailed-out neighbors: not enough economic growth, too much debt, and a shortage of policy options fueling doubts about the benefit of union.
For Frits Bolkestein, a former center-right Dutch political leader and member of the European Commission, the lesson is simple. “The monetary union has failed,” says Bolkestein, 80, himself once a target of pie-wielding assailants. “I have considerable difficulty in imagining us continuing like this for very much longer. Let us say 10 years ahead: will we then have the same sort of mess?”
From the start, the Netherlands has been intimately bound up with the euro. One of the six founders of the group that grew into the 28-nation European Union, it hosted the 1991 summit in Maastricht that laid out the roadmap to the currency and sent Wim Duisenberg to Frankfurt as the first president of the European Central Bank. The Dutch made a fetish of the euro’s deficit rules, only to run afoul of them when the crisis struck.
Austerity is no longer the national pastime of a country that pioneered global capitalism and made “going Dutch” a synonym for thrift. Even the purveyors of marijuana who dot the city carved by the canals that made Amsterdam a latter-day tourist destination complain of hard times made harder by government rules.
“Look what I got since we opened at nine this morning -- not even 10 euros,” Mohamed Ouchene, 38, co-owner of the “Blue Lagoon,” says around midday, pointing to his nearly empty cash register and the two customers in the shop. “We wanted to refurbish and upgrade the place but we postponed.”
The Dutch economy is set to be the third-worst performer in the 18-member euro area this year, with growth of 0.2 percent, according to the commission. Ireland, Portugal, Spain, even Greece -- four countries saved from financial ruin partly by Dutch aid, grudgingly granted -- will do better.
“When the party is going on, you don’t want to take away the fun,” says Arnoud Boot, a professor of corporate finance and financial markets at the University of Amsterdam. “As long as house prices were going up, there was no problem. The political process was not good at dealing with these things.”
Note EU-Digest: whatever way you turn it the fact remains that there is a global economic crises going on all over the world - and - if the Netherlands would not have been part of the EU Eurozone the economic crises would have probably hit the country even harder than it did now.
Where there is a major problem is that the Dutch Government is doing an extremely poor job at communicating the benefits of the EU, Eurozone and EURO. As a result opportunist radical populist politicians like Geert Wilders are gaining traction with what in essence is total unfounded nonsense.
Read more: Dutch Confront Euro’s Just Desserts as EU Appetite Ebbs - Businessweek
