There was an important vote in the Netherlands last Wednesday, April 6.  The Dutch voters were asked: "Are you for or against the Approval Act of the Association Agreement between the European Union and the Ukraine?"  Not everyone voted, of course, but those who did said rather resoundingly - 62 percent in the 'no' column - that they were against the agreement or, more accurately, against the act approving it.

Mark Rutte is the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, and his comment above, today's featured quote, was clearly made before all the details of the vote were known, especially the percentage of the electorate who took part.  That's important because the Dutch government had indicated it would not need to take account of the results of the referendum if less than 30 percent of the voters participated.  In fact, just over 32 percent voted, so that threshold was met.

To begin, portions of the EU's Association Agreement with the EU are already being enforced, albeit provisionally, and have been enforced since November 2014. 

However, for the agreement to have full legal force "all European Union nations must ratify it," and the Dutch may not be inclined to do that, at least not right away.

And, as if all of that were not awkward enough for Prime Minister Rutte, himself a strong supporter of the agreement, the Netherlands currently holds the presidency of the EU.

Your editor once worked for a man who observed, frequently, that the important thing about any meeting was not what actually happened but how it was reported.  Something similar might be said about elections.  The reports on the Dutch referendum we've looked at today express a range of views.  If there is a point of agreement, it is this: Dutch voters were mainly sending a message to Brussels, not Kiev.  That's thread number one.  The second thread was the relevant background.  It is hard to escape the impression that the EU relationship with the Ukraine was almost a tertiary concern.  The first concern was the increasingly pointed debate over the nature of democracy in the European Union.  Right behind that was the ever closer June 23 referendum in the UK.  There the question will be, should the UK stay in, remain, in the EU or leave?  Finally, after that, there was the difficult but in a sense less pressing, question of the EU's relationship with the Ukraine.

We'll come back to all of these topics soon.  Today's goal was simply to take note of the fact of the Dutch vote, the result of which was a series of questions with no particularly good answers.

And also of course to encourage you to....

In the Wake of the Dutch vote is a link to the New York Times article that was the source for today's quote.

The Dutch Referendum is the Wikipedia entry on this development.   We found this a quite useful piece and a good demonstration of the kind of thing that Wikipedia can do but traditional encyclopedias cannot.

The Problem for the Ukraine is a link to a Bloomberg article by Leonid Bershidsky that highlights the significance of Wednesday's vote as it relates to the Ukraine and to attitudes in the Netherlands toward the Ukraine that may have influenced Wednesday's vote.

Note.  There are, of course, numerous articles on this development available on line.  Google "Dutch Referendum," and they will appear at your fingertips.  Some, of course, deal with Brussels' plans for the accession agreement.  Many of the others either explain why the Dutch vote points toward a 'leave' vote in the upcoming UK referendum or is largely irrelevant to that bigger decision.