The discussions made several important things clear. First of all, the real aim of the initiators was not to torpedo the EU Association Agreement with Ukraine, but to weaken the EU “by using all possibilities to complicate the relations between the Netherlands and the EU”. They said to have nothing against the promotion of mutual trade between the EU and Ukraine and nothing against supporting the fight against corruption and anti-democratic structures. In their view, however, an Association Agreement is not required for this.
Secondly, during the campaign the initiators continuously stressed that fundamental democratic values lie at the basis of their actions. Thus, the European Union “must be democratically organised from the bottom up” and there is “too much power for multinationals and too little for the average citizen.” For the Netherlands they see the need for a “democratic revolution” that should train a new generation of leaders to replace the current irresponsible elite …..”
In the third place the many interviews with and presentations by young Ukrainian civil-society activists and corruption-fighters during the past few weeks made clear that the Ukrainian people want nothing more than to live in the type of a society Western Europeans already enjoy for such a long time: a democratic rule-of-law system with a market economy and adequate protection for the socially weak, where the law prevails and not the right of the most corrupted. It became clear as well that Ukrainians desperately need international help to break the power of the old guard that is blocking further reforms (oligarchs, corrupt members of parliament, the utterly corrupt 18,000 public prosecutors and 8,000 judges and the old generation of civil servants.
There are many valid arguments as to why the Association Agreement between the EU and Ukraine provides essential support to the Ukrainian people in their struggle for a democratic society. Regrettably the initiators of the referendum and their followers do not want, or cannot, recognize this.
500 million citizens in the other 27 EU member states of the European Union apparently do see the importance of the Association Agreement, not only for Ukraine, but also for their own countries. Their governments and parliaments have ratified the agreement. The Dutch “no”-voters, who account for a mere 0,5 percent of the total EU population, want to withhold this effective European support from Ukrainian citizens aching for democracy and the rule of law.
The instigators of the referendum therefore have the moral obligation to make clear concretely how the Netherlands will help them in the absence of an Association Agreement. All the more so since in their logic the ambitions of the Ukrainian democrats largely coincide with their own: the strengthening of democracy, empowering citizens, breaking down the “big, undemocratic top-down structures” and, one could add, “breaking the power of big capital”. In view of the dramatic situation in which average Ukrainians find themselves, help should be forthcoming urgently. For activists in societies like the Netherlands, with their comfortable standards of living and well-functioning legal systems, talk comes easy. Ukrainian citizens, however, do not have that luxury. They are fighting for economic and political survival.”
Willem Aldershoff is a Brussels-based analyst of international affairs.
