From Third World to First: Der Protektionismus Europas

Immer wieder bis in die heutige Zeit - auch als aktueller Kritik an den USA - mahnen hochrangige EU-Politiker und EU-Beamte den Freihandel an und kritisieren - bei anderen Ländern - protektionistische Politik. Dabei ist die EU eines der Regionen, welches schon seit Jahrzehnten mit Einfuhrzöllen und Exportsubventionen diese Politik trotz anderslautender Bekundungen massiv betreibt. Hierbei stellte sogar ein persönlicher Bezug zu Politikern eine Rolle, wie die Produkte aus dem Wahlbezirk des französischen Präsidenten beweisen. Lee Kuan Yew in seinen Memoiren dazu: “I encountered protectionist policies of «Fortress Europe» in the 1970s over our exports. In October 1977, I went to Brussels to see the president of the European Commission, Roy Jenkins... I had written to him earlier that their application to Singapore of GSP rules (the General Scheme of Preferences which gave developing countries limited import duty-free entry) had caused problems for our exports of electronic calculators, umbrellas, projectors, and plywood... Jenkins was sympathetic and promised to look into this, but he could do nothing about the umbrellas. It seemed they were produced in President Giscard d’Estaing’s constituency.” Und weiter schreibt Lee zum Protektionismus der EU: “Any member country with any influence on Brussels, feeling the slightest pain, could appeal to Brussels for protection and would invariably get it. Yet the EEC denied it was the most protectionist of all the trading blocs. I cited the experience of Philips and Siemens, two of the best-known European MNCs; they had found it more difficult to export their Singapore-made electronic products to Europe than to America and Asia.” Und allgemein zur europäischen Industrie bemerkt Lee: “European MNCs were less agile and dynamic than the Americans and Japanese. They were missing the opportunities for global integrated production, manufacturing different components of a product in different countries. That was the situation in the 1980s and it was still largely true in the 1990s.”

Dem für Protektionismus eintretendem französischen Ministerpräsidenten Edouard Balladur erwiderte Lee Kuan Yew: “I disagreed with him and argued that protection of any country’s industry was no longer possible excerpt at great cost. Companies were global in reach, an irreversible result of progress in technology, especially in global communications. Firm sourced material from one country, used labor from another, set up production plants in a third, and marketed their products in a fourth.”

Die schon angesprochene Widersprüchlichkeit zwischen Verlautbarungen und tatsächlicher Politik kommt dann noch einmal bei einem Treffen 1993 mit Jacques Chirac zum Vorschein: “Chirac retorted that France needed to protect its agriculture, but he wanted me to know that he shared my views on free trade. For its own long-term interest, there was no way other than free trade, hence France was the least protectionist.”