Series IV

The Dissociated Union

Nine papers on dissociation at the supranational scale

The pattern is no Dutch exception. It is the local instance of something larger.

Series III diagnosed the dissociated organisation within the Dutch public sector. The question that follows is whether the pattern is Dutch. The answer this series works out: at the supranational scale it is better documented than in its Dutch instance, and the scale at which it operates in Brussels explains why the Dutch executing state increasingly carries out policy whose production side it does not know.

Two mechanisms carry the series: network corruption in Willeke Slingerland's sense, the aggregation of legally correct acts into an outcome that is corrupted in the public-interest sense, and proxy-substitution, whereby a measurable variable displaces the unmeasured chain it comes from. The network supplies the proxy; the proxy renders the network invisible.

The series appears in phases. The Dutch edition is the source and carries the full nine-part architecture; English versions appear for selected papers. The first written paper is Nº 06, The Ungauged Chain.

§ 04Series IV

The Dissociated Union

One methodological opener, one meta-paper introducing the two mechanisms, six case papers across the regulatory axis (EMA, EFSA, ECHA), the spending axis (EU funds), the industrial-strategic axis (raw materials) and the control axis (audit cascade), and a closing synthesis. The papers available in English are listed below; the complete series is published in Dutch at /reeks-iv/.

06 / Case Industrial-strategic axis

The Ungauged Chain

Raw Materials, the CO2 Proxy and the Absence of Industrial Policy

Series IV Nº 06. Europe's climate architecture reckons in CO2 as its only workable unit of measure; the material chain from which every avoided tonne arises, lithium, cobalt, rare earths, magnets, falls outside the administrative discourse. Two dissociations work together, one instrumental and one intrinsic. The Critical Raw Materials Act codifies the dependency rather than breaking it, defence doubles the claim on the same chain, and the Netherlands spreads the file across six ministries without ownership.

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2 June 2026 NL EN