The premier "should have been notified earlier" about the budgetary adjustment from the European Union.
So ran a headline published yesterday in a major European daily, and it wasn't Times of London or the Telegraph. It was the Volkskrant, running an item from the main Dutch wire service, ANP. The prime minister in question was not David Cameron, but Dutch Premier Mark Rutte. The statement that fed the headline came from Eddy van Hijum, a Christian Democrat lawmaker, who wanted to know why Rutte had apparently learned only on Oct. 23 from his finance minister that the Netherlands will be made to dole out an additional €642 million.
In an irritated press statement in the aftermath of David Cameron's flash of indignation over Britain's own €2.1 billion bill, outgoing European Budget Commissioner Jacek Dominik urged against bringing politics into the mix: "It is a process that has never been contested in the past, I strongly warn against politicizing it now."
Dominik gave a detailed breakdown of how the budgetary adjustments are made and characterized UK complaints as an anomaly. For now, he's probably right, though Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem has demanded clearer insight into the numbers before the Netherlands pays. Still, a couple lawmakers from far-wing parties (the ANP article also cited a socialist parliamentarian) or mainstream parties that have struggled (Van Hilum's CDA) matter little on their own, and Rutte himself is the unlikeliest of figures to deliver a Cameron-style jeremiad at the European Council.
But Cameron was just the middleman for an exchange between the cold calculations of European institutions and the political heat of euroskeptics' ascent. Calling on the political elites of member states to not politicize predictable technocratic processes is pointless when the popular perception that those processes are oblique and unpredictable is itself a major political driver. As Germany plays the bad cop and the Italian EU presidency the good cop in dealing with an increasingly aloof United Kingdom, Europe's incoming commissioners must share a sense of discomfort. It probably isn't fair, but as their tenure begins they know that just about anything the EU does sets a stage for domestic political theater - and it won't stop at the English Channel.
