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.]
[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 18th 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 20th
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]
