Reliable information from and about China: That is our claim and, at the same time, our promise to you. Starting on Monday, our editorial team at China.Table will inform you every weekday morning about current trends, classify political developments and analyze economic and social backgrounds. We also scan the headlines of the most important German and English publications daily, inform you about dates and introduce you to experts you should know about.
More than 1000 China connoisseurs and people interested in China have already registered in the last few days. Welcome! We not only value your expertise but also want to create a platform for the exchange of opinions, which is why I would like to invite you to discuss your positions and experiences in the section of our China.Table with the same name. Feel free to write to me and let us enter into a broad dialogue – at our Table.
The time has come: On Feb. 1, China will enter the long-planned and repeatedly postponed emissions trading. It is true that trading certificates on the Shanghai Environment and Energy Exchange will only start this summer. But the legal framework for the system is now coming into force. The reporting authority for participating companies in Wuhan is already up and running, and China’s Ministry for the Environment has issued its first emissions quotas, according to its own information. This is the first time in China that responsibility for reducing greenhouse gas emissions has been transferred to companies by order at the national level, said Li Gao, Director of the climate change department at the Ministry for the Environment. So far, emissions trading only had a few local pilot programs.
For now, the system only covers the energy sector – more precisely, 2,225 operators of coal and gas-fired power plants. These companies have annual emissions of more than 26,000 megatonnes of carbon dioxide (carbon) equivalent or energy consumption per year of 10,000 megatonnes or more of standard coal equivalent. Participation is mandatory for them. These power plants produce around a third of China’s carbon emissions, says Nis Gruenberg, an expert on China’s sustainable development at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (Merics) in Berlin.
Emissions trading is to become an important component of China’s climate policy. China is currently the world’s largest carbon emitter at 11.5 billion tonnes per year. But President Xi Jinping announced in September that his country would operate in a carbon-neutral manner starting in 2060. China wants to reach “peak carbon”, i.e., the historical maximum of absolute annual emissions by 2030 at the latest. The economy’s carbon intensity, or emissions relative to economic output, is already falling. According to official data, the decline was 48.1 percent between 2005 and 2019.
China’s emissions trading model is also based on carbon intensity. The allocation of quotas is calculated according to carbon emissions per unit of produced energy of each company. The Chinese model thus allows for energy demand to continue to rise for the time being. In contrast, Europe applies a cap-and-trade model that sets an absolute emissions ceiling that gets lower and lower.
In the draft rule, the Environment Ministry initially set 0.877 megatonnes of carbon per generated megawatt hour as the benchmark for the allocation of quotas for normal coal-fired power plants with a capacity of 300 MW or more. According to Gruenberg, this is roughly equivalent to the average efficiency of Chinese power plants. Only the oldest, most inefficient coal-fired power plants would currently have to buy additional certificates. According to a study by the International Energy Agency (IEA), this would give companies an incentive to transfer larger shares of their electricity generation to the most efficient power plants – and to invest only in their most modern power plants. Small, dirty power plants, on the other hand, would gradually be forced out of the market – which is politically desirable anyway.
As with many reform projects, China initially gained experience through emissions trading in local pilot projects. Since 2013, local platforms for emissions trading have been established in eight cities and provinces: in the largest cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, and also in the booming province of Guangdong or the somewhat less developed central Chinese province of Hubei. “The pilots tried to cover differently structured energy systems,” Gruenberg says. As a result, the rules were different everywhere. “In Guangdong, for example, companies first had to buy 10 percent of the carbon credits. The remaining 90 percent was then given away for free,” Gruenberg says. “And individual projects had relative autonomy to decide how to award prices.” Prices were low and varied widely, between €2 and €15 per megaton of carbon. By comparison, the price in the EU was around €35 at the beginning of January.
The on-site experience should now help to fill the regulatory framework with details. At the moment, many things are still unclear. “As far as the fine print is concerned, a lot will happen in the coming months,” says Gruenberg. “It’s about compliance, for example, and whether emissions allowances will be traded in Shanghai via auctions or also in bilateral trading.”
In any case, Nis Gruenberg expects that rules and standards, initially kept quite loose, will gradually become stricter. “My prediction is that emissions trading will initially be established as an integral part of the energy system in the new five-year plan from 2021 to 2025.” The details of that plan will be unveiled at the National People’s Congress in March. The thumbscrews could then be tightened in the following plan (2026-2030) at the latest. “By then, the government will know what needs to be done concretely to achieve the peak carbon target for 2030,” Gruenberg said.
Lai Xiaoming, Head of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, where the Emissions Trading System will dock, expects that the industry will soon have to join in – eight energy-intensive sectors such as cement, steel, metallurgy and petrochemicals. This will increase the system to around 10,000 firms with emission quotas above five billion tonnes of carbon equivalent throughout the 2021-2025 five-year plan, Lai told the local financial newspaper Securities News. Emissions trading could then cover 70-80 percent of China’s carbon emissions, carbon analyst Yan Qin of financial data provider Refinitiv estimated in a post on Twitter. Emissions trading in Europe, with around 11,000 companies, covers about 40 percent of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions.
In the medium term, the two will thus be similar in scope. However, the price development will also be decisive in the future. China’s price for carbon emissions will have to rise significantly to redirect investments from climate-damaging to emission-reducing sectors.
Just a year ago, many Lucerne residents turned up their noses at the number of tourists. In a survey by the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, almost 80 percent of the more than 1,500 residents questioned said there were too many visitors in the streets of the city on Lake Lucerne. There was talk of “overtourism”. Tourists from Asia were the least popular. For 47 percent of those surveyed, acceptance of these guests was low to very low. Many still remember the XXL travel group from May 2019: A Chinese cosmetics company had invaded Lucerne with 12,000 employees for a joint trip.
That was before Covid. Now the alleys are empty. And with so many watch shops, souvenir shops and hotels closed, the tourists from the Far East are suddenly sorely missed. This weekend, the holidays begin in China. But in the 2021 season, Chinese tourists will be completely absent in Europe.
Like the city of Lucerne and Switzerland, many European tourist destinations are currently sharing the same fate. Depending on the calculation method, more than five million Chinese tourists visited a European country in 2019, and around three million came to Germany. Switzerland, as well as cities like Paris, Milan and Berlin, are particularly popular for travelers from China in January and February. They use the holidays around Chinese New Year for an extensive city holiday in Europe – or they go skiing here. However, with the outbreak of the Covid pandemic last February, business completely collapsed.
Visitors from China have spent a particularly large amount of money on their trips – so it is no wonder that business people and hotels are now missing them. Tourists from the People’s Republic spent around €360 in 2019 per person on average – every day. By comparison, German tourists spend an average of just under €100 per holiday day in Europe.
Although the Chinese government has been counting relatively few new infections in the country of origin of the Covid-19 pandemic for months and domestic air travel has mainly been normal, it has allowed its citizens virtually no private foreign travel for a year. Most international flights have been canceled. Quarantine rules on returning from risk areas abroad are very strict. For much of the isolation period, travelers returning are not allowed to go home but must stay in specially assigned hotels first.
The losses for the European tourism industry have been immense over the past twelve months. The number of overnight stays in hotels by Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwan tourists was just 167,000 in Switzerland between January and November 2020. The year before, it was over 1.8 million overnight stays. “That is impressively over 90 percent less than the previous year,” says André Aschwanden of Switzerland Tourism, the tourism marketing organization of the Swiss Confederation.
Berlin is also experiencing an equally bad slump. In 2019, there had still been 330,000 overnight stays by Chinese guests, says Christian Taenzler of VisitBerlin, the Berlin tourism and convention company. The numbers had more than tripled in the previous ten years. The decline between January and November 2020 amounted to 98 percent compared to the same period last year.
Amsterdam’s international airport, Schiphol, also reported an immense slump. Air traffic to and from China plummeted by 88 percent. The airport wanted to position itself as the “China hub of Europe”. The duty-free shops are advertised specifically for travelers from the Far East, especially around the Chinese New Year holidays. Last year, the Chinese celebrated the Year of the Pig, and all the advertising boards were decorated with pigs. In 2021, it is the buffalo’s turn – but this time, the corresponding advertising campaigns are canceled. China’s largest airline, China Southern, still flies irregularly to the largest airport in the Netherlands. But the few Chinese passengers have other worries. Pictures in Chinese media show them waiting at the boarding gate in white full-body protective suits.
No one dares to put a precise figure on the losses. The industry is practically idle. “At the moment, we assume that we will not reach about 80 percent of the usual hotel overnight stays again until 2023,” says Aschwanden from Switzerland Tourism. Taenzler from VisitBerlin doesn’t give a forecast at all – that would be “unserious,” he says. But what his organization has already noticed in recent months: Interest in Berlin in China has increased significantly again in recent weeks on digital channels, he says. Travel websites about Berlin are being accessed more frequently. For him, this is a sign: “Chinese tourism is in the starting blocks.”
When elephants fight, the grass suffers, says an African proverb. For some years now, observers have seen a new Cold War brewing between China and the USA, a systemic conflict, and we in Europe have to fear being trampled as grass by two fighting elephants. For years, American magazines and books have been full of articles and contributions about the “coming war with China,” while Chinese thinkers have been prophesying the demise of the US and, at the same time, calling on Europeans to pursue an “independent” foreign policy.
However, such advice is not neutral but interest-driven. China is a dictatorship in which human rights violations are the order of the day. The conflict between the US and China is also a systemic conflict about how we want to live, a conflict between freedom and lack of freedom. The images from Hong Kong and Xinjiang alone speak volumes. But Chinese attempts at censorship at SWR and the demand for obsequious gestures of humility from top German managers show that the People’s Republic is already closer to us than many believe.
China has been working for years to detach the European Union externally from the US and to divide it internally. The Soviet Union has always tried to do the same, so the analogy with the Cold War of the 20th century is obvious. One error in thinking should be avoided at all costs: Just because the West won the first Cold War does not mean we will automatically win further Cold Wars. On the contrary, the Chinese leadership has developed its country into an economically strong and efficient power, while American democracy has recently been consumed by ideological trench warfare. In this perspective, the deselection of Donald Trump appears to be a glimmer of hope but by no means a guarantee that the leading power of the West has completely found itself again.
But Germany’s hope seems to rest once again on the fact that the US will sort things out. Expectations of Biden are high, but few bother to turn the question around: What should a Biden administration actually expect from us? During his time as EU Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker demanded Europe “to become capable of global politics,” while Ursula von der Leyen intends to lead a “geopolitical” Commission. Both are right, and yet Europe is a long way from these goals, Germany even miles. We live in freedom, with democracy, the rule of law and a market economy, but as Europeans, we also attach great importance to social balance and environmental and climate protection. That is our European way of life. Germany is politically anchored in the EU, militarily secured in NATO and our products have access to the world’s markets. We take this system for granted, and as Germany alone we would never be in a position to establish or defend it. Everything we hold dear depends on the preservation of the liberal world order, but we prefer to be concerned with ourselves, especially in political Berlin – that has to change.
This change is also needed because another Cold War is taking place in our capital as hackers continue to attack the Bundestag and federal ministries, most of them coming from Russia. Disinformation and cyber operations are elements of the Cold War being waged by Moscow against our liberal democracy and the cohesion of the EU. This Cold War against democracy is also being waged by Putin’s helpers inside the European Union, whether their names are Trump or Salvini, Gauland or Le Pen. So we have a triple challenge and must say what we want to do to preserve the European way of life for future generations. What contribution do we need to make to preserve freedom and prosperity in the 21st century?
In a conflict between freedom and unfreedom, a values-driven foreign policy must always choose freedom. The election of Joe Biden is an opportunity we will miss if we do not revitalize the transatlantic relationship. But more than that, if the dominant conflict of the 21st century is in the Pacific, we need to look much more closely at our partners there than we have in the past. Deeper cooperation with Japan, Australia and South Korea must lead to the creation of a global West as a peaceful and free counterweight to China. This would not have to hide economically either because the EU, the US and other Western countries account for more than half of the world’s economic output.
The question of Germany’s role brings a country into focus that knows it is too small to change the world: Norway. Progressive in a Scandinavian way, not neutral, but an active NATO member, our neighbor to the north is, above all, highly engaged diplomatically. Anyone who walks through the corridors of the UN in New York is amazed at how many Norwegians are shaping world policy. After 70 years of education in pacifism, we Germans are not prepared to emulate France or even the USA militarily. On the other hand, support for civil crisis prevention and active diplomacy is consistently high – but these are just as underfunded as the Bundeswehr. We must fulfill our military obligations in NATO because even the democrats in the USA no longer accept that we only consume security but do not produce it. Above all, however, Germany must have a strong financial, conceptual and personnel presence in the United Nations, regardless of whether the issue is health, climate, food, development, migration or the great diplomacy of peacekeeping. If we want to contribute to preserving the order on which we depend, then Germany should become a kind of “Super-Norway”, a civilian power with courage.
Alexander Graf Lambsdorff is a member of the Bundestag and Deputy Parliamentary Group Leader of the FDP. On Feb.1, his book “Wenn Elefanten kämpfen” (When elephants fight) will be published by Propyläen Verlag, in which he locates Germany in a pincer grip between China and the USA.
Zoologist Peter Daszak, President of the EcoHealth Alliance and a member of the WHO mission to investigate the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, shows his hotel room on Twitter. In another tweet, he writes it was “surprisingly easy” to spend 14 days in quarantine. A lot of work and a nice hotel made sure that the “time flew by”.
Reliable information from and about China: That is our claim and, at the same time, our promise to you. Starting on Monday, our editorial team at China.Table will inform you every weekday morning about current trends, classify political developments and analyze economic and social backgrounds. We also scan the headlines of the most important German and English publications daily, inform you about dates and introduce you to experts you should know about.
More than 1000 China connoisseurs and people interested in China have already registered in the last few days. Welcome! We not only value your expertise but also want to create a platform for the exchange of opinions, which is why I would like to invite you to discuss your positions and experiences in the section of our China.Table with the same name. Feel free to write to me and let us enter into a broad dialogue – at our Table.
The time has come: On Feb. 1, China will enter the long-planned and repeatedly postponed emissions trading. It is true that trading certificates on the Shanghai Environment and Energy Exchange will only start this summer. But the legal framework for the system is now coming into force. The reporting authority for participating companies in Wuhan is already up and running, and China’s Ministry for the Environment has issued its first emissions quotas, according to its own information. This is the first time in China that responsibility for reducing greenhouse gas emissions has been transferred to companies by order at the national level, said Li Gao, Director of the climate change department at the Ministry for the Environment. So far, emissions trading only had a few local pilot programs.
For now, the system only covers the energy sector – more precisely, 2,225 operators of coal and gas-fired power plants. These companies have annual emissions of more than 26,000 megatonnes of carbon dioxide (carbon) equivalent or energy consumption per year of 10,000 megatonnes or more of standard coal equivalent. Participation is mandatory for them. These power plants produce around a third of China’s carbon emissions, says Nis Gruenberg, an expert on China’s sustainable development at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (Merics) in Berlin.
Emissions trading is to become an important component of China’s climate policy. China is currently the world’s largest carbon emitter at 11.5 billion tonnes per year. But President Xi Jinping announced in September that his country would operate in a carbon-neutral manner starting in 2060. China wants to reach “peak carbon”, i.e., the historical maximum of absolute annual emissions by 2030 at the latest. The economy’s carbon intensity, or emissions relative to economic output, is already falling. According to official data, the decline was 48.1 percent between 2005 and 2019.
China’s emissions trading model is also based on carbon intensity. The allocation of quotas is calculated according to carbon emissions per unit of produced energy of each company. The Chinese model thus allows for energy demand to continue to rise for the time being. In contrast, Europe applies a cap-and-trade model that sets an absolute emissions ceiling that gets lower and lower.
In the draft rule, the Environment Ministry initially set 0.877 megatonnes of carbon per generated megawatt hour as the benchmark for the allocation of quotas for normal coal-fired power plants with a capacity of 300 MW or more. According to Gruenberg, this is roughly equivalent to the average efficiency of Chinese power plants. Only the oldest, most inefficient coal-fired power plants would currently have to buy additional certificates. According to a study by the International Energy Agency (IEA), this would give companies an incentive to transfer larger shares of their electricity generation to the most efficient power plants – and to invest only in their most modern power plants. Small, dirty power plants, on the other hand, would gradually be forced out of the market – which is politically desirable anyway.
As with many reform projects, China initially gained experience through emissions trading in local pilot projects. Since 2013, local platforms for emissions trading have been established in eight cities and provinces: in the largest cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, and also in the booming province of Guangdong or the somewhat less developed central Chinese province of Hubei. “The pilots tried to cover differently structured energy systems,” Gruenberg says. As a result, the rules were different everywhere. “In Guangdong, for example, companies first had to buy 10 percent of the carbon credits. The remaining 90 percent was then given away for free,” Gruenberg says. “And individual projects had relative autonomy to decide how to award prices.” Prices were low and varied widely, between €2 and €15 per megaton of carbon. By comparison, the price in the EU was around €35 at the beginning of January.
The on-site experience should now help to fill the regulatory framework with details. At the moment, many things are still unclear. “As far as the fine print is concerned, a lot will happen in the coming months,” says Gruenberg. “It’s about compliance, for example, and whether emissions allowances will be traded in Shanghai via auctions or also in bilateral trading.”
In any case, Nis Gruenberg expects that rules and standards, initially kept quite loose, will gradually become stricter. “My prediction is that emissions trading will initially be established as an integral part of the energy system in the new five-year plan from 2021 to 2025.” The details of that plan will be unveiled at the National People’s Congress in March. The thumbscrews could then be tightened in the following plan (2026-2030) at the latest. “By then, the government will know what needs to be done concretely to achieve the peak carbon target for 2030,” Gruenberg said.
Lai Xiaoming, Head of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, where the Emissions Trading System will dock, expects that the industry will soon have to join in – eight energy-intensive sectors such as cement, steel, metallurgy and petrochemicals. This will increase the system to around 10,000 firms with emission quotas above five billion tonnes of carbon equivalent throughout the 2021-2025 five-year plan, Lai told the local financial newspaper Securities News. Emissions trading could then cover 70-80 percent of China’s carbon emissions, carbon analyst Yan Qin of financial data provider Refinitiv estimated in a post on Twitter. Emissions trading in Europe, with around 11,000 companies, covers about 40 percent of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions.
In the medium term, the two will thus be similar in scope. However, the price development will also be decisive in the future. China’s price for carbon emissions will have to rise significantly to redirect investments from climate-damaging to emission-reducing sectors.
Just a year ago, many Lucerne residents turned up their noses at the number of tourists. In a survey by the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, almost 80 percent of the more than 1,500 residents questioned said there were too many visitors in the streets of the city on Lake Lucerne. There was talk of “overtourism”. Tourists from Asia were the least popular. For 47 percent of those surveyed, acceptance of these guests was low to very low. Many still remember the XXL travel group from May 2019: A Chinese cosmetics company had invaded Lucerne with 12,000 employees for a joint trip.
That was before Covid. Now the alleys are empty. And with so many watch shops, souvenir shops and hotels closed, the tourists from the Far East are suddenly sorely missed. This weekend, the holidays begin in China. But in the 2021 season, Chinese tourists will be completely absent in Europe.
Like the city of Lucerne and Switzerland, many European tourist destinations are currently sharing the same fate. Depending on the calculation method, more than five million Chinese tourists visited a European country in 2019, and around three million came to Germany. Switzerland, as well as cities like Paris, Milan and Berlin, are particularly popular for travelers from China in January and February. They use the holidays around Chinese New Year for an extensive city holiday in Europe – or they go skiing here. However, with the outbreak of the Covid pandemic last February, business completely collapsed.
Visitors from China have spent a particularly large amount of money on their trips – so it is no wonder that business people and hotels are now missing them. Tourists from the People’s Republic spent around €360 in 2019 per person on average – every day. By comparison, German tourists spend an average of just under €100 per holiday day in Europe.
Although the Chinese government has been counting relatively few new infections in the country of origin of the Covid-19 pandemic for months and domestic air travel has mainly been normal, it has allowed its citizens virtually no private foreign travel for a year. Most international flights have been canceled. Quarantine rules on returning from risk areas abroad are very strict. For much of the isolation period, travelers returning are not allowed to go home but must stay in specially assigned hotels first.
The losses for the European tourism industry have been immense over the past twelve months. The number of overnight stays in hotels by Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwan tourists was just 167,000 in Switzerland between January and November 2020. The year before, it was over 1.8 million overnight stays. “That is impressively over 90 percent less than the previous year,” says André Aschwanden of Switzerland Tourism, the tourism marketing organization of the Swiss Confederation.
Berlin is also experiencing an equally bad slump. In 2019, there had still been 330,000 overnight stays by Chinese guests, says Christian Taenzler of VisitBerlin, the Berlin tourism and convention company. The numbers had more than tripled in the previous ten years. The decline between January and November 2020 amounted to 98 percent compared to the same period last year.
Amsterdam’s international airport, Schiphol, also reported an immense slump. Air traffic to and from China plummeted by 88 percent. The airport wanted to position itself as the “China hub of Europe”. The duty-free shops are advertised specifically for travelers from the Far East, especially around the Chinese New Year holidays. Last year, the Chinese celebrated the Year of the Pig, and all the advertising boards were decorated with pigs. In 2021, it is the buffalo’s turn – but this time, the corresponding advertising campaigns are canceled. China’s largest airline, China Southern, still flies irregularly to the largest airport in the Netherlands. But the few Chinese passengers have other worries. Pictures in Chinese media show them waiting at the boarding gate in white full-body protective suits.
No one dares to put a precise figure on the losses. The industry is practically idle. “At the moment, we assume that we will not reach about 80 percent of the usual hotel overnight stays again until 2023,” says Aschwanden from Switzerland Tourism. Taenzler from VisitBerlin doesn’t give a forecast at all – that would be “unserious,” he says. But what his organization has already noticed in recent months: Interest in Berlin in China has increased significantly again in recent weeks on digital channels, he says. Travel websites about Berlin are being accessed more frequently. For him, this is a sign: “Chinese tourism is in the starting blocks.”
When elephants fight, the grass suffers, says an African proverb. For some years now, observers have seen a new Cold War brewing between China and the USA, a systemic conflict, and we in Europe have to fear being trampled as grass by two fighting elephants. For years, American magazines and books have been full of articles and contributions about the “coming war with China,” while Chinese thinkers have been prophesying the demise of the US and, at the same time, calling on Europeans to pursue an “independent” foreign policy.
However, such advice is not neutral but interest-driven. China is a dictatorship in which human rights violations are the order of the day. The conflict between the US and China is also a systemic conflict about how we want to live, a conflict between freedom and lack of freedom. The images from Hong Kong and Xinjiang alone speak volumes. But Chinese attempts at censorship at SWR and the demand for obsequious gestures of humility from top German managers show that the People’s Republic is already closer to us than many believe.
China has been working for years to detach the European Union externally from the US and to divide it internally. The Soviet Union has always tried to do the same, so the analogy with the Cold War of the 20th century is obvious. One error in thinking should be avoided at all costs: Just because the West won the first Cold War does not mean we will automatically win further Cold Wars. On the contrary, the Chinese leadership has developed its country into an economically strong and efficient power, while American democracy has recently been consumed by ideological trench warfare. In this perspective, the deselection of Donald Trump appears to be a glimmer of hope but by no means a guarantee that the leading power of the West has completely found itself again.
But Germany’s hope seems to rest once again on the fact that the US will sort things out. Expectations of Biden are high, but few bother to turn the question around: What should a Biden administration actually expect from us? During his time as EU Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker demanded Europe “to become capable of global politics,” while Ursula von der Leyen intends to lead a “geopolitical” Commission. Both are right, and yet Europe is a long way from these goals, Germany even miles. We live in freedom, with democracy, the rule of law and a market economy, but as Europeans, we also attach great importance to social balance and environmental and climate protection. That is our European way of life. Germany is politically anchored in the EU, militarily secured in NATO and our products have access to the world’s markets. We take this system for granted, and as Germany alone we would never be in a position to establish or defend it. Everything we hold dear depends on the preservation of the liberal world order, but we prefer to be concerned with ourselves, especially in political Berlin – that has to change.
This change is also needed because another Cold War is taking place in our capital as hackers continue to attack the Bundestag and federal ministries, most of them coming from Russia. Disinformation and cyber operations are elements of the Cold War being waged by Moscow against our liberal democracy and the cohesion of the EU. This Cold War against democracy is also being waged by Putin’s helpers inside the European Union, whether their names are Trump or Salvini, Gauland or Le Pen. So we have a triple challenge and must say what we want to do to preserve the European way of life for future generations. What contribution do we need to make to preserve freedom and prosperity in the 21st century?
In a conflict between freedom and unfreedom, a values-driven foreign policy must always choose freedom. The election of Joe Biden is an opportunity we will miss if we do not revitalize the transatlantic relationship. But more than that, if the dominant conflict of the 21st century is in the Pacific, we need to look much more closely at our partners there than we have in the past. Deeper cooperation with Japan, Australia and South Korea must lead to the creation of a global West as a peaceful and free counterweight to China. This would not have to hide economically either because the EU, the US and other Western countries account for more than half of the world’s economic output.
The question of Germany’s role brings a country into focus that knows it is too small to change the world: Norway. Progressive in a Scandinavian way, not neutral, but an active NATO member, our neighbor to the north is, above all, highly engaged diplomatically. Anyone who walks through the corridors of the UN in New York is amazed at how many Norwegians are shaping world policy. After 70 years of education in pacifism, we Germans are not prepared to emulate France or even the USA militarily. On the other hand, support for civil crisis prevention and active diplomacy is consistently high – but these are just as underfunded as the Bundeswehr. We must fulfill our military obligations in NATO because even the democrats in the USA no longer accept that we only consume security but do not produce it. Above all, however, Germany must have a strong financial, conceptual and personnel presence in the United Nations, regardless of whether the issue is health, climate, food, development, migration or the great diplomacy of peacekeeping. If we want to contribute to preserving the order on which we depend, then Germany should become a kind of “Super-Norway”, a civilian power with courage.
Alexander Graf Lambsdorff is a member of the Bundestag and Deputy Parliamentary Group Leader of the FDP. On Feb.1, his book “Wenn Elefanten kämpfen” (When elephants fight) will be published by Propyläen Verlag, in which he locates Germany in a pincer grip between China and the USA.
Zoologist Peter Daszak, President of the EcoHealth Alliance and a member of the WHO mission to investigate the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, shows his hotel room on Twitter. In another tweet, he writes it was “surprisingly easy” to spend 14 days in quarantine. A lot of work and a nice hotel made sure that the “time flew by”.
