Abstract
Germany and the Netherlands have traditionally been supportive of European integration. As original signatories to the Treaty of Rome, both countries claim to have always been a strong pillar of the European project. In the relance européenne of the mid-1980s both countries did not shy away from proposing supranational solutions to the main challenge that was perceived at the time: fear of losing economic competition to the US and the emerging economies in Asia. Indeed, in September 1991 the Netherlands, holding the rotating chair, famously proposed a treaty revision that was considered far too supranational—by France in particular—and then succeeded in securing a lighter version, the Treaty of Maastricht in December of that year. The realization of the single market and the establishment of the Eurozone proved vital in protecting the European Union (EU) from the effects of globalization, but these successes at the same time promoted the conditions for anti-European sentiments among various segments of the population, paving the ways for populist parties from the right as well as from the left.
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Notes
- 1.
The AfD was given this label due to the large number of professors within the party.
- 2.
All translations by the authors.
- 3.
The AfD does make a partial ‘exception’ for developing countries (AfD, 2018: 134), but this concession is less motivated by concerns for economic development and economic justice but by the desire to “reduce incentives for migration to Europe and Germany in particular” (AfD, 2017: 21) by addressing “the economic causes for migration” (AfD, 2018: 121).
- 4.
The leader of Der Flügel, Björn Höcke, for example, claimed NATO does not serve German interests but US interests: “Our once respected army has degenerated from an instrument of national defence to a completely gendered multiculturalized intervention force in the service of the United States” (Höcke, 2017b).
- 5.
The AfD’s apparent sympathy towards Russia has also been visible during the Russian-Ukrainian war. Though the AfD officially condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 as a severe breach of international law (AfD, 2022), leading AfD politicians such as Tino Chrupalla and Björn Höcke have relativized the Russian attack and blamed not only the US and NATO for the Russian-Ukrainian war, but also spread Russian propaganda such as the claim that there are secret US bioweapon laboratories in Ukraine (Chrupalla, 2022; Höcke, 2022).
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Verbeek, B., Wojczewski, T. (2023). Digging New Western European Trenches: Populism and the Foreign Policies of Germany and the Netherlands. In: Giurlando, P., Wajner, D.F. (eds) Populist Foreign Policy. Global Foreign Policy Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22773-8_2
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