The Hague

The Hague, Den Haag in Dutch, is the seat of the Dutch government, Parliament and royal court, in the province of South Holland on the North Sea coast, and the third-largest city in the Netherlands at roughly 550,000 people. Although Amsterdam is the constitutional capital, The Hague has been the effective seat of executive and legislative power since the Dutch Golden Age, housing the Binnenhof parliamentary complex, the Ministry of General Affairs and the ministries that shape Dutch domestic and Foreign Policy. It is also home to a cluster of international institutions, including the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and Europol.

Because the Ministry of Economic Affairs sits in The Hague, the city has become a locus of Dutch economic-security decisions taken independently of Brussels. On 26 May 2026, minister Willemijn Aerdts blocked Kyndryl's 100 million euro acquisition of cloud provider Solvinity, the first time the Netherlands had stopped a US deal under its investment-screening law, citing US CLOUD Act exposure for the DigiD digital-identity infrastructure Solvinity runs. The same ministry's earlier intervention in the Nexperia chipmaker dispute, and the Dutch cabinet's separate friction with Washington over ASML's China sales, both trace to decisions made by ministries headquartered in the city.

The Hague's significance in the European tech-sovereignty debate is structural: national capitals, acting through ministries based there, have operationalised cloud and chip-sovereignty tools ahead of the EU's own legislative timetable.