European Election Program, 9th European Parliament 2019, Foreign Trade Policy

European Election Program

Program of the Alternative für Deutschland for Election

     of the 9th European Parliament 2019

3.4 Foreign Trade Policy

3.4 Foreign Trade Policy

The EU should manage a foreign economic policy that is aligned with the interests of the member states. To that before all pertains that the EU commits itself in the future to free trade and open markets. Protectionist efforts are to be repelled. The EU’s import restrictions, particularly in the non-tariff field, are to be dismantled. Export subventions are to be progressively eliminated so as to avoid distortions of competition. Since not all branches uniformly profit from free trade and globalization, European or national equalization measures should, if necessary, be taken up.  

Trade agreements are preferably to be concluded within the framework of the World Trade Organization (WTO), since they then provide the greatest advantages to all participants. Our standards for consumer and environmental protection and in the social area are thereby maintained. All agreements must be negotiated in transparent proceedings with the inclusion of business representatives and be ratified by the national parliaments. Investment agreements which protect the rights of European firms should be managed by the EU. The AfD thereby rejects the transfer of national sovereignty to private courts of arbitration. In so far as EU sanctions against third parties [Drittstaaten] have been undertaken, the sanctions are to be regularly tested for practicality and effectiveness. Conversely, the EU should take proportionate counter-measures against the unjustified trade limitations of third parties and secure the protection of intellectual property and the equal treatment of businesses.

The selling-off of technology firms to third parties is to be prevented by appropriate trade policy and other measures. Value-added chains and their technological know-how must be maintained. Foreign trade, security and development policy must be mutually adjusted. In cooperation with member states and international partners, the EU must guarantee the freedom of maritime and trade routes and thereby secure access to raw material, energy and sales markets.



[Translated by Todd Martin]

European Election Program, 9th European Parliament 2019, Development Policy

European Election Program

Program of the Alternative für Deutschland for Election

     of the 9th European Parliament 2019

3.3 Development Policy

3.3 Development Policy

The AfD’s goal is to return EU development policy again to the national level of the member states, with a coordinating role for the EU so as to avoid redundancy. The donation of development assistance concerns the principle of subsidiarity and the maintenance of the donor countries’ self-interest.

Development policy must be help for self-help. A sustained effort against poverty must be the result of steady economic development and the construction of educational systems and functioning state institutions. Private business initiative, a competitive work place and maintenance security are to be required. The recipient countries should be in a position to promote under their own power the formation of their economy and society.

Furthermore, arms exports to crisis regions, especially to despotic regimes, are to be immediately ended.

States in which corruption, nepotism and mismanagement predominate are to be excluded from development assistance. Budgetary assistance promotes waste of resources and is to be stopped. Nuclear powers such as China, India and Pakistan which are however also states which guarantee development assistance should not receive, as it always turns out, development assistance.

Free trade is the most practical and un-bureaucratic form of development assistance. The EU must therefore open its market to the goods and services of developing countries and end the export of subsidized products to developing countries. EU evaluation and donation procedures as well as standards and norms should not become trade secrets.

Development assistance must submit to a strict usage control and to a regular, independent evaluation of results. Humanitarian aid generally has no long-term development effect and is thus is not in the strict sense development assistance. Humanitarian aid should be the mission of the churches and welfare organizations. Financial aid to organizations which commit, support or favor terrorist action is to be immediately stopped.

[Translated by Todd Martin]

Alexander Gauland, April 12, 2019, Europe

Alexander Gauland

Europe

German Bundestag, April 12, 2019, Plenarprotokoll 19/96, pp. 11552-11553

[Alexander Gauland is a national chairman of the Alternative für Deutschland as well as a chairman of the AfD delegation in the German Bundestag.]

Herr President. Ladies and gentlemen.

The aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila has written that the idea of the free individual was a Christian impression upon a classical clay. I wish today to call to mind that this is a European idea. When we speak of the right to a free, self-determined life, then we all know that such a right in large parts of the world does not exist and has not existed during most of human history. A free, self-determined life, that is the expression of individuality. This idea was born in ancient Greece. It is bound up in the Christian proclamation. The idea of the free individual bloomed in the Italian Renaissance and the Enlightenment’s thinkers procured for themselves that spiritual groundwork. The individualization of man, his liberation to a self-determined life, was an all-European project, and was from the 18^th Century a leading European export.

Europe, ladies and gentlemen, ever since has meant variety. What this continent has to offer in cultural, linguistic, spiritual, technological and customary [lebensartlicher] variety is unique in the world. Precisely because Europe was a continent of variety and competition, the European spirit bloomed. Precisely because no central power oppressed it under its crippling command, Europe brought forth the coin of these ideas. Whenever, ladies and gentlemen, a hegemon sought to centralize Europe, powers of resistance were developed. The history of Europe is one of reciprocal action between hegemony and balance. Charles V had to learn that, Louis XIV and Napoleon had to learn, and Germany had to learn that in the 20^th Century. And the Eurocrats will have to learn that when Brexit marks not the beginning but the end of a fatal development.

A pledge of variety is also part of the Eurocrats’ rhetoric. Yet they do not actually want variety but homogeneity, they want unification and egalitarianism. From Lake Balaton to the Canaries, the people will heed the same rules. Our Eurocrats seek a visionary future for Europe. Gradually, one foresees how it is to appear. The United States of Europe as a de-industrialized, windmill-surfeited, resettlement area in which the national identities have been done away with, open to migrants from all the world, for whom European values are all the same –

            Ulli Nissen (SPD): Now here it goes again.

- and who need not integrate themselves into the European societies because they are to be integrated into and raised by the respective parallel society, a corner of the Earth, ladies and gentlemen, where only electric cars run, where cash is forbidden, where the eating of meat is restricted, and where the correct social behavior will, by various ways, be supervised.

            Ulli Nissen (SPD): You may be speaking out of order.

The freedom of the individual and the right to a self-determined life are under threat. Technocrats take power of control over our thoughts and feelings. They want to direct people as disconnected, pleasingly displaceable figures on the global chessboard.

            Gustav Herzog (SPD): You’re talking nonsense!

            Johannes Fechner (SPD): That is rubbish.

They assert that is passé and unmodern to hold onto one’s customs, traditions and practices –

            Christian Dürr (FDP): That can each freely decide.

- at least so far as one is a white European.

            Christian Dürr (FDP): That is the AfD’s manners police!

In common they sing their pious songs of sharing and diversity. The state wants to relieve its subjects of the care of thoughts and the trouble of decisions.

            Christian Dürr (FDP): You want to dictate how other people shall think!

Today’s greatest sacrilege is committed by those who demand the referendum. The goings-on with Brexit each day teaches us something new of that, Frau Barley. The answer of today’s EU to the urgent questions is always the same: unification, homogenization, normalization. In the beginning, the EU normalized the curve of cucumbers. In the end, it normalizes thought.

The most conspicuous attack upon European variety is the centralism of the EU. I will cite here as pars pro toto the writer Robert Menasse – I cite with the permission of the president –

…First of all for once, to forget democracy, to do away with its institutions, so far as they are national institutions, and this model of a democracy that appears so holy and valuable to us because we have trusted in it, to mourn its downfall. We must push what in any case will fall when the European project succeeds. We must break this last taboo of enlightened societies, that our democracy is a holy good.

            Ralph Brinkhaus (CDU/CSU): Who said that?

A citation, ladies and gentlemen, of a writer.

            Jans Zimmermann (SPD): It’s good you said so!

Should I have uttered that, and not in fact as a citation, you would call for the constitution defense.

            Christian Dürr (FDP): Because we entrust it to them, Herr Gauland! That’s why!

What Menasse brought forward here was a call for a United States of Europe.

Britta Haßelmann (Bündnis90/Grünen): First of all for once put in order your donor swamp!

Many members of the political class, the economic elite, and even the intellectuals of the left, dream this dream. Menasse plainly had formulated the consequence of the thing: Who wants the United States of Europe must do away with the national states and the national parliaments. Who wants the United States of Europe must disempower the European sovereigns.

            Christian Dürr (FDP): Nonsense!

Menasse had betrayed a secret for which most people are not yet ready, wherefore this process gradually and knowingly proceeds behind their backs, until one day one stands before the accomplished facts.

Ladies and gentlemen, in his speech in Warsaw in July 2017– become quite famous – Donald Trump had said concerning the unique Western tradition of individuality, freedom and law: What we possess, what we have inherited from our forefathers, has never existed on this scale anywhere else. And should we fail to preserve it, it will never again exist.

None can claim that he does not know what is at stake. And your politics unfortunately leads exactly there.

            Michael Brand (CDU/CSU – Fulda): Your choice of citation is also revealing!

I am grateful.

[Translated by Todd Martin]