An Austere Nation? Dutch Public Choice Theory and European Monetary Union

When considering the ideas behind economic and monetary union, most of the scholarly attention has focused on Germany and its ordoliberal tradition. The role of smaller countries such as the Netherlands, however, has yet to be considered. The Netherlands has long been one of Europe's staunchest fiscal hawks. To explain Dutch hawkishness, the international business press has reverted to the cultural trope of Calvinism. In contrast, this article traces this hawkish stance to the Dutch neoliberal turn of the 1980s, in particular the rise of public choice theory. In early 2012, during a meeting in Brussels, the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte described the need for fiscal discipline as ‘the lesson of the 1980s’. Building on institutional analysis and intellectual history, this article shows how Dutch policymaking elites conceived of EMU as a response to that lesson.