Between conflict and consensus: The Dutch depoliticized paradigm shift of the 1980s
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Between conflict and consensus: The Dutch depoliticized paradigm shift of the 1980s Merijn Oudenampsen1
© Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract How do deep economic crises reshuffle dominant policy frameworks? Institutionalist scholars such as Peter Hall, Mark Blyth, Vivien Schmidt and Colin Hay have focused particularly on the 1980s. The polarizing ascension of Thatcher and Reagan, characterized by a public battle of ideas, has become the prime example of a broader neoliberal turn. Based on this experience, it is common to assume that a shift in policy paradigm involves a politicized contest over ideas. The Dutch market-oriented reforms of the 1980s have long been described as a counterexample, representing an alternative, consensual trajectory of institutional change. As critics have pointed out, the problem with this account is that there is little evidence for an economic policy consensus in the 1980s. Based on the Dutch case, this paper proposes a third, depoliticized model of institutional change, where policy makers instigate a battle of ideas within the institutions, while politicians depoliticize the reforms in public debate. Keywords Discursive institutionalism · Neoliberalism · The Netherlands · Depoliticization · Discourse
Introduction In January 1984, the Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers visited Washington to discuss economic policy and nuclear missile deployment with Ronald Reagan and his staff. Lubbers was warmly received. Time Magazine (1984, p. 29) portrayed him glowingly as Ruud ‘Shock’, supposedly tougher than the Iron Lady. The weekly stated that Lubbers had ‘transformed the Netherlands from one of Western Europe’s freest-spending welfare states into its leading belt tightener’. The article featured a reverential quip by Margaret Thatcher on an earlier state visit to the Netherlands: * Merijn Oudenampsen [email protected] 1
Faculty of social sciences, University of Amsterdam, Room B4.16, Postbus 15629, 1001 NC Amsterdam, The Netherlands Vol.:(0123456789)
M. Oudenampsen
‘Mr. Lubbers, are you really intending to cut the salaries of your public employees by more than 3%? That’s a disaster. I am supposed to be the toughest in Europe. You are going to ruin my reputation as the Iron Lady’. In reality, Lubbers never attained that though image in the Netherlands. In fact, it would have been more appropriate for Time Magazine to call him Ruud ‘Smog’, due to his reputation for opaque language. Dutch journalists have coined a special word for it: to speak in a ‘Lubberian’ manner is to use ‘woolly, obscure and even deceiving’ language (Blokker 1991). Among many others, future right-wing populist firebrand Pim Fortuyn (1992, p. 111) pointed to Lubbers’ ‘sphinx-like character’ and remarked on his consensual ‘magic formulas’, so ‘Jesuitically unclear’ that ‘all participants left with the impression that they had been proven right’. All in all, Lubbers lacked the ideological drive of Reagan and Thatcher (Oudenampsen 2018). There was no Dutch equivalent to Reagan’s ‘morning in America’ (Blumenthal
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