Statecraft in the Interregnum — Statecraft

Position Paper · Jacob Huibers · House of Viridian | Statecraft · April 2026

A note for non-Dutch readers

This paper diagnoses a structural condition in Dutch public administration, but the underlying argument applies across mature consensual democracies — Germany, Austria, the Nordics, Belgium, parts of the Anglosphere. Where Dutch terms are retained, they carry meaning that no English equivalent captures fully:

Polder governance (polderbestuur, poldermodel) — the consensus-seeking, multi-stakeholder deliberative idiom that has been the dominant Dutch administrative style since the late twentieth century. Comparable in spirit to German Konsensdemokratie or Nordic tripartite bargaining, but more diffuse and less formally institutionalised.
Wethouder — an elected member of a municipal executive board, holding a portfolio (e.g. social affairs, spatial planning, finance). The closest Anglosphere equivalents are alderman (Belgium, parts of the US) or cabinet member (UK local government). Not a mayor.
Gemeentesecretaris — the chief civil servant of a municipality, head of the bureaucracy. Closest equivalent is city manager (US) or chief executive (UK local authorities).
Jan Salie — a nineteenth-century literary archetype of post-prosperity complacency, coined by E.J. Potgieter in the literary journal De Gids in 1841 to indict a Dutch elite that had stopped building and started living off accumulated rent. The figure has become shorthand in Dutch cultural commentary for the affliction of successful societies that outlive their dynamism.
Box 3 — a category in the Dutch personal income tax code covering wealth, which has been the subject of long-running constitutional and political dispute and stands here as one example among several of policy files that remain unresolved despite broad acknowledgement of urgency.
Anchoring (borging) — a term of art in the author’s prior work, denoting the practice of ensuring an intervention persists after the change-agent has departed. Translates roughly as institutional embedding or durable handover, but carries a sharper accent on the responsibility of the practitioner for what remains rather than what was achieved on the day of departure.

The crises briefly named — nitrogen policy, housing, youth care, immigration services, the tax authority — are concrete Dutch policy files, but each maps onto a recognisable structural-failure pattern that practitioners in comparable jurisdictions will identify in their own contexts.

Abstract

Dutch public administration operates in an interregnum. The post-war narrative of institutional optimism has exhausted itself; a replacement grand narrative is absent; and the attempts to fill that vacancy with technological nationalism work on a register against which the polder bureaucracy is largely defenceless.

This position paper diagnoses the pattern as a three-layered erosion. The physiological layer of the individual citizen has been colonised by an attention economy that operates beneath cognition. The social layer of belonging and community has fragmented. The institutional layer exhibits the symptoms that E.J. Potgieter named in 1841 as the Jan Salie mentality. The three layers reinforce one another, and interventions on a single layer systematically underperform as long as the other two remain unprotected.

The paper then asks the practical question of what statecraft can mean under these conditions. The answer is not a replacement narrative, but a craft: personal limbic literacy as professional competence, the design of rhythms and spaces that allow the nervous system to land, and a heavier conception of anchoring as the protection of the substrates from which collective capacity may eventually return. This is preserving work, not narrative work. It is precisely what the Dutch administrative tradition is best equipped to carry.

§ 01 — The premise

For some years now, Dutch public administration has carried an underground imbalance for which the inherited vocabulary of public administration scholarship has no word. Policy interventions that are coherent on paper fail at the implementation stage. Communications campaigns that are properly grounded in evidence either fail to reach their intended audience or reach a different audience than intended. Coalition formation takes longer, produces thinner support, and falls apart sooner.

The average tenure of public office-holders is contracting, with 225 wethouders leaving office in 2024 as a marker.¹ Citizens who have no formal reason for distrust nonetheless report a diffuse unease that no single policy file fully explains. The standard explanations — complexity, polarisation, social media, populism — each capture a fragment, but together they do not produce a pattern.

A practitioner who works successive interim assignments across the social domain, the spatial-physical domain, and regional cooperation arrangements observes the same phenomenon recurring in entirely different organisational contexts. That recurrence suggests a shared substrate.

This paper names that substrate. The thesis is that three load-bearing infrastructures of public administration are eroding simultaneously, and that most reform proposals underperform because they intervene on one layer while the other two remain undefended. The first is physiological: the nervous system of the individual citizen, structurally compromised by what David Courtwright has called limbic capitalism.² The second is social: the web of belonging, identity and community that makes biographical continuity possible. The third is institutional: the administrative architecture that carries collective capacity across electoral cycles.

The relevance of this diagnosis is practical, not academic. A gemeentesecretaris, a wethouder, a programme manager or a senior policy adviser operates in a field whose foundational assumptions no longer hold. The work demands a different register than the post-war public-administration idiom can supply. This paper formulates that register as statecraft in the interregnum.

§ 02 — The three-layered diagnosis

The physiological layer

The average Dutch adult spends roughly three hours and ten minutes per day on a smartphone, of which approximately two and a half hours on applications calibrated for variable-ratio dopamine response.³ That is no longer leisure time in the older sense. It is structured attention within an environment engineered to operate on the limbic system beneath cognition.

The neurological mechanism is well-documented. Wolfram Schultz demonstrated that dopamine is released not primarily at the moment of reward, but at the uncertainty preceding it. Kent Berridge distinguished wanting from liking: the desire is fed while the satisfaction is withheld.⁴ Social media feeds are the most commercially successful application of these findings to date. The difference between a slot machine and a social feed is not mechanical. It is cosmetic.

The citizen’s nervous system, before the public conversation begins, has already been triggered dozens of times, primed for alarm and reward, diminished in its capacity for deliberation.

The consequence for public administration is that the citizen with whom an alderman or a permitting officer sits down to negotiate enters that conversation from a physiological state that is not neutral. The prefrontal cortex required to follow a complex policy argument is energetically depleted before the argument is made. This is not a rhetorical problem. It is a physiological one.

The second layer is the erosion of Geborgenheit — belonging in the anthropological sense: the assurance of being-at-home somewhere, of one’s biography being embedded in a community that endures. Zygmunt Bauman characterised modernity as liquid: everything that once seemed solid — occupation, place of residence, religion, class, family form — has been set in motion.⁵ For those who can master the motion, this opens space. For those who undergo it, it produces uprootedness.

The Netherlands combines two tendencies in this respect. On one side, a high degree of mobility, urbanisation, separation of home and work, secularisation, individualisation. On the other, a nostalgic public imagination that still references the village community, the pillarised society and the nuclear family as default points of reference. The tension between lived experience and imagined frame is itself a source of unease. Citizens experience uprootedness without the public language giving them vocabulary for it.

The administrative consequence: the constituency on which decisions can land becomes not only narrower as polarisation grows, but also shallower because the shared ground that carries decisions has fragmented at the individual level. A wethouder explaining an unpopular decision once spoke to a community with shared frames of reference. She now speaks to a collection of individuals whose substrates are each a different composite.⁶

The institutional layer

The third layer concerns the administrative architecture itself. In Decline and Revival, I have developed this as the contemporary manifestation of what E.J. Potgieter, writing in 1841, named the Jan Salie mentality: a prosperous society that gradually shifts from value-creation to value-preservation, from risk-bearing to risk-aversion, from institutional innovation to institutional ossification.⁷

The symptoms are recognisable to anyone operating inside Dutch public administration. Policy files left dormant for years despite broad acknowledgement of urgency — nitrogen, Box 3, housing, youth care. Implementing agencies unable to perform their basic statutory tasks — the tax authority, the employee-insurance agency, the immigration service. Departmental fragmentation that produces structural outcomes no department willed. A carousel of interim managers, senior civil-service appointees and consultants who collectively erode institutional knowledge faster than they preserve it.

Mancur Olson predicted this pattern as the logical consequence of prolonged stability without external shock: vested interests accumulate, reform coalitions fragment, the system reproduces its own paralysis.⁸ The Netherlands is in this phase.

The interaction

The three layers reinforce one another. A citizen whose nervous system is limbically encumbered lacks the physiological calm required to maintain the community ties that produce Geborgenheit. The loss of those ties amplifies receptivity to digital surrogates, which raises limbic load further. Both together undermine the constituency on which institutions depend, which erodes institutional trust, which strengthens the demand for strong leaders, who in turn deploy limbic mobilisation as their governing instrument.

This is not a linear process. It is a feedback architecture. To intervene on one layer alone — media literacy for the citizen, civic-society subsidies for the social middle, structural reform for the state — is to row against the current of the other two. It explains the experience of administrators and programme managers that solutions which are elegant in isolation tend to come apart in practice.

§ 03 — Why rational policy interventions systematically underperform

Mark Moore formulated the strategic triangle as the analytical compass for public-value creation: public value, operational capacity, political legitimacy.⁹ The three corners must be addressed in coherence. Failure occurs when one corner is maximised at the expense of the other two. The model is widely known in Dutch public-administration scholarship and functions as a compass — provided an unspoken precondition is met: that the three corners can in fact be addressed at all.

Under conditions of three-layered erosion, that precondition no longer holds. Operational capacity presupposes implementers with sufficient cognitive headroom to execute complex tasks. In organisations whose own staff operate under permanent reachability and policy uncertainty, that headroom is constrained. Political legitimacy presupposes a citizen who receives argument and explanation at the rational register. In a limbically loaded citizen, argument lands as noise. Public value presupposes a shared conception of the public. Under advanced uprootedness, that conception is absent.

This explains a pattern that recurs in evaluations of public programmes. The programme was substantively sound. The implementation was professionally executed. The communications were carefully designed. And yet it did not land, or it landed wrong, or it turned against its own intent. The conventional conclusion is that communications could have been better. The more precise conclusion is that the communications were substantively irrelevant, because the problem was not at the level of substance.

A second face of the same pattern: actors who do engage the physiological and social layers achieve impact in ways formal institutions cannot reproduce. Attention entrepreneurs, populist movements, the ideological entrepreneurs visible in recent American manifestos on technological nationalism, conduct the political conversation on the limbic register that the public nervous system is best primed to receive.¹⁰ The result is a political discourse that formally underperforms by traditional standards but factually dominates, simply because it operates on the right physiological wavelength.

Dutch polder governance is optimised for the inverse situation. Its assumptions are shared frames of reference, reasonableness, deliberation, technocratic precision. Excellent on paper. In practice defenceless against actors who play the layers beneath deliberation.

Statecraft in the interregnum begins with the acknowledgement of this asymmetry.

§ 04 — Statecraft as craft in the interregnum

The temptation is obvious: to demand a replacement grand narrative, a contemporary Roosevelt or Monnet who closes the interregnum. The temptation is understandable but unproductive. The conditions that made the post-war narrative possible — concentrated shock, identifiable adversary, Fordist productivity flywheel — are not present.¹¹ A narrative that attempts to land without those conditions takes on the quality of rhetoric, and rhetoric on the limbic playing field is the weakest player.

The productive register is different. Not to offer a narrative, but to practice the craft that protects the conditions from which a narrative may eventually return. This is not small work. It is preserving work, and preserving work in an age of acceleration is rarely recognised for the value it carries. But it is the work that fits.

Three operational movements together constitute the craft.

First movement — personal limbic literacy as professional competence

An interim manager, an alderman, a city manager who herself reacts limbically under political pressure reinforces the very system she is trying to mediate. Limbic literacy — the capacity to perceive one’s own physiological reaction and not reflexively translate it into judgement or action — is in this light not a wellness theme. It is professional competence.¹²

The Aiki method as developed in De Richting van de Beweging is the operational expression of this discipline: yielding rather than forcing, redirecting energy, centring when tension rises. Aiki only works when the intent serves the collective interest. Otherwise it becomes manipulation. But when ethically anchored, it provides the discipline to remain steady under conditions in which the field itself is limbically loaded.

Second movement — the design of rhythms and spaces

At the organisational level, statecraft means protecting physical and temporal infrastructures in which a different nervous-system rhythm becomes possible than that of the feed. Council chambers, neighbourhood meetings, longer decision cycles, physical presence on cases, the deliberate choice not to digitise or accelerate everything. This sounds nostalgic. It is functional.

A leader who consciously designs for longer attention spans, slowness where it is possible, physical presence where feasible, is building the operational capacity that the strategic triangle requires and that the physiological layer continuously erodes. In an interim assignment in the social domain at a regional centre municipality, I observed that the reintroduction of weekly in-person team meetings — after three years of fully digital working — more than doubled decision-making speed on complex casework within eight weeks. Not through better technology. Through a better-regulated nervous system.

Third movement — anchoring as protection of substrates

In De Richting van de Beweging, anchoring (borging) is defined as the primary KPI of interim work: success is not measured on the day of departure, but by what still stands when no one any longer thinks about the intervention.¹³ In the interregnum, the content of anchoring shifts. It is no longer only about the continuation of what has been built. It becomes about the protection of the conditions under which collective capacity may return when external conditions allow it again.

Preserving institutional knowledge. Maintaining the ties between people. Sustaining rhythms and rituals that have no immediately measurable yield but that will later make the difference. This is anchoring in a heavier register: not only the handover within an organisation, but the protection of a substrate larger than any single organisation.

Taken together, these three movements form a coherent craft. Not glamorous, not viral, not narratively compelling. But preserving, navigating, patient. This is what statecraft in the interregnum looks like in practice.

§ 05 — Operational implications, by role

For the gemeentesecretaris

The work is primarily the protection of the institutional substrate. Not joining every reform fashion. Performing the quiet maintenance tasks that carry the organisation between successive coalitions: preserving file knowledge, guarding legal rigour, keeping space for internal dissent inside the bureaucracy, weighing senior-civil-service rotations on their actual effect on continuity. The work is largely invisible. The measure is what still functions in fifteen years.

For the interim manager

The four models of the practice deployed in this register. The strategic triangle becomes the diagnostic compass: which corner is under tension, and which layer — physiological, social, institutional — is undermining that corner. The interim cycle (preparation, entry, execution, handover, reflection) structures time, with explicit attention to anchoring as protection of a substrate that exceeds the engagement itself. The change colours (de Caluwé and Vermaak’s typology of intervention modes — power, rational, motivational, learning, emergent) describe the intervention mix: monochrome blue planning does not work, layered colour does.¹⁴ Aiki disciplines the personal mastery under pressure.

For the wethouder and informed councillors

Limbic regulation as a competence of office. Not as self-care but as professional requirement. An office-holder who does not know how her own nervous system responds to political pressure falls predictably into the patterns the political game imposes on her. An office-holder who does know can choose when to move, when to hold, when to retreat in order to act effectively later. This is not psychology. It is professionalism.

For the senior policy adviser

Writing in a register that does not exploit limbic load but settles it. That is craft, and it is rare. It demands a certain pace, concreteness and trust in the reader’s intelligence. The exact opposite of the alarm-plus-identity-plus-enemy package that dominates the attention market. To cultivate this register is to accept that it lands more slowly and travels less virally. But it is what builds durable legitimacy.

For commissioners of interim work and executive search

Select for the capacity to operate in this register, not only for management skill in the older sense. The question to a candidate is not only what she has delivered, but what is still standing after her departure, and which conditions for collective capacity she protected or built. That is a different selection question. It calls for different references, different cases, different indicators.

§ 06 — Conclusion

Statecraft in this sense is not a novelty. It is an old practice in a new condition. It is what statesmen, civil servants and craftspeople have always done in periods when the grand narrative was absent: practising the discipline, protecting what is transmissible, maintaining the conditions from which something new may eventually emerge.

Antonio Gramsci formulated the disposition that fits: pessimismo dell’intelligenza, ottimismo della volontà.¹⁵ Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. The intellect acknowledges the seriousness of what has eroded. The will refuses to accept this as the final station and continues to do the work that needs doing.

The Netherlands of Potgieter recovered, not because a saviour arrived with a replacement narrative, but because enough people in enough positions kept practising the craft until external conditions allowed them to build again. The canals are still beautiful. The question is what happens around them.

That depends on people who, in this time, perform this kind of work. It is larger than any individual programme. It is smaller than any ideological movement. It is precisely tailored: the craft of public administration, practised in full consciousness of what it is and of what it is not.

This position paper is the synthesising layer beneath a wider corpus. The diagnostic work is developed at the physiological layer in Limbic Literacy*, at the social layer in* Allemaal Ontheemd (All Uprooted), and at the institutional layer in Verval en Herstel (Decline and Revival). The practical translation for public professionals is De Richting van de Beweging: Interim-Management in de Publieke Sector (The Direction of the Movement: Interim Management in the Public Sector).

Monitor Wethouders, Dutch Association for Councillors and Aldermen Association, annual reports 2023 and 2024. For the average tenure of directors-general and city managers, see ABD publications and the ministry of the Interior’s Staat van het Bestuur (State of Public Administration), 2024. ↩
D.T. Courtwright, The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business, Harvard University Press, 2019. Courtwright introduces limbic capitalism as an analytical category for economic sectors that structurally engage the brain’s reward systems. ↩
We Are Social and Hootsuite, Digital 2025 Netherlands Country Report; cross-checked with the Newcom Social Media Survey 2025 and NOM Mediastandaard. Figures refer to active screen time on smartphones for adults 18+, measured via panel data. ↩
W. Schultz, P. Dayan and P.R. Montague, “A neural substrate of prediction and reward,” Science 275 (1997), pp. 1593–1599; K.C. Berridge and T.E. Robinson, “What is the role of dopamine in reward,” Brain Research Reviews 28 (1998), pp. 309–369. For the operational translation into product design, see N. Eyal, Hooked, 2014, and the critique developed by T. Harris at the Center for Humane Technology. ↩
Z. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Polity Press, 2000. Complementary work treating acceleration as an autonomous sociological category: H. Rosa, Beschleunigung, Suhrkamp, 2005; B.-C. Han, Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (The Burnout Society), Matthes & Seitz, 2010. ↩
For the Dutch phenomenology of this fragmentation, see J. Huibers, Allemaal Ontheemd: Een verkenning van identiteit, gemeenschap en geborgenheid in een veranderende wereld (All Uprooted: An Exploration of Identity, Community and Belonging in a Changing World), House of Viridian, 2026, in particular chapters 1, 3 and 5. For empirical underpinning at the cohesion level, see SCP, De sociale staat van Nederland (The Social State of the Netherlands), and Statistics Netherlands data on social contact and trust. ↩
E.J. Potgieter, “Jan, Jannetje en hun jongste kind” (Jan, Jannetje and their Youngest Child), De Gids, 1841. For the contemporary reworking and the Belgian comparison, see J. Huibers, Verval en Herstel: Is Nederland de geschiedenis aan het herhalen? (Decline and Revival: Is the Netherlands Repeating History?), House of Viridian, 2026, in particular chapters 2 and 6. ↩
M. Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, Yale University Press, 1982. The thesis that prolonged stability without external shock leads to institutional sclerosis has been empirically updated by, among others, D. Acemoglu and J. Robinson, Why Nations Fail, 2012. ↩
M.H. Moore, Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government, Harvard University Press, 1995. For Dutch application see the publications of the Netherlands School of Public Administration (NSOB) on public value, in particular the workbooks from 2014 onward. ↩
A.C. Karp and N.W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, Crown, 2025. The manifesto is referenced here not as the subject but as an example of a broader type of policy discourse that operates on the limbic register. A developed critique will appear in a separate Statecraft paper. ↩
For the structural analysis of what made a productive post-war narrative possible, see C. Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, Edward Elgar, 2002, and T. Judt, Postwar, Penguin, 2005. For the contemporary interregnum as analytical category, A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks), remains the starting point. ↩
J. Huibers, Limbic Literacy: Zelfverdediging tegen de aandachtseconomie (Limbic Literacy: Self-Defence Against the Attention Economy), House of Viridian, 2026, in particular chapter 14 on the three operational layers — recognition, comprehension, structure. ↩
J. Huibers, De Richting van de Beweging: Interim-Management in de Publieke Sector (The Direction of the Movement: Interim Management in the Public Sector), chapter 9 on transfer value and anchoring as primary KPI. For the connection with the strategic triangle see chapter 3, for the Aiki method chapter 11. Forthcoming, autumn 2026. ↩
L. de Caluwé and H. Vermaak, Leren Veranderen (Learning to Change), Kluwer, third edition 2019. This widely used Dutch framework typologises change interventions into five colours: yellow (power and politics), blue (rational and planned), red (motivation and people), green (learning), white (self-organisation and emergence). The English-language equivalent is published as Learning to Change: A Guide for Organization Change Agents, Sage, 2003. For application to public-sector transformations, see the workbooks of NSOB and the A+O Fund for Municipalities. ↩
A. Gramsci, letter to his brother Carlo, 19 December 1929, collected in the Lettere dal carcere (Prison Letters). The phrase has been variously attributed to Romain Rolland; Gramsci himself cited it as already in circulation but rendered it canonical for those performing political work under unfavourable conditions. ↩