Free Trade is an opportunity and not a fate to be suffered. Those who close their eyes to it usually disregard human rights, fail to provide for a social balance and cease to be competitive. The least free economies feature the worst abusers of human rights. They misrule their economies without end and destroy social opportunities as a result. Others exclude their citizens from the opportunity to participate out of a desire to cling to power themselves. Not a globally developing market economy, but an absence of market and free trade correlates with a lack of freedom, and is the root cause of the problems of many countries that as a rule are suffering from the after-effects of earlier command economies as well. The standard globalisation scaremongering distracts attention from the real problems in the human rights sphere.

Free trade is one of the most successful means of promoting human and cultural development ever invented by humankind. Genuinely free trade can contribute more to development than can any development policy focusing on the provision of aid. The international and multilateral nature of trade policy since 1945 has made significant contributions to prosperity in Europe and throughout the world. The liberal idea of restraining national arbitrariness in external economic policy through reciprocal treaties based on most-favoured-nation clauses and non-discrimination, which is the essence of multilateral agreements, must be resolutely pursued as a key element of liberal external economic policy.

A mercantilist approach to trade diplomacy, where the opening up of domestic markets is viewed as a concession to partner states, which must be granted in return for improved access to foreign markets, is misguided. It is wrong to portray the liberalisation of domestic markets as a sacrifice and the opening up of foreign markets as a victory. Restricting access to markets only helps the powerful and prevents the emergence of economic growth. Truly open markets with clear competition rules lead to increased trade and economic growth and thus represent the best strategy to achieve economic development.

We Liberals believe that a country has most to gain by opening up its own markets, regardless of the policies pursued by other states. Thus, a forward-looking trade policy must be guided by the principles of the multilateral trade regime, in particular the concepts of non-discrimination and most-favoured-nation treatment mentioned above.

– Between 1948 and 2000, tariffs worldwide fell on average from 40% to 4%, thanks not least to GATT and the WTO. Although some of this effect has been neutralised by non-tariff trade barriers, this remains an impressive achievement. Yet many tariff barriers remain in place today. Often, countries which have liberalised agricultural trade are particularly protectionist when it comes to the textile trade, and vice versa. For this reason, trade liberalisation, as a traditional WTO issue, must remain right at the top of the agenda and must not be supplanted by “new” topics.

– We Liberals regard multilateral arbitration as a sensible mechanism for moving away from a foreign trade policy based on the balance of power to one which is based on a regulatory framework. The increased frequency with which developing countries are making use of this mechanism demonstrates that this multilateral approach is the correct one, as does the condemnation of the USA in the case of the Foreign Sales Corporations (FSC), for example.

– We Liberals call for the continuation and intensification of efforts to bring about further-reaching institutional reforms of the WTO as an organisation and a negotiating forum. These reforms must include increasing efficiency and transparency and improving the involvement of parliaments, by setting up a parliamentary assembly at the WTO for instance.

– Competition policy must be integrated into the WTO regulatory framework. The aim must be to establish competition policy as a new part of the WTO supervisory mechanisms in the medium term and, in the longer term, bring about a framework of common competition rules and a global set of competition rules under the auspices of the WTO.

– The job of drawing up and reaching agreement on social standards should be left to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) alone. All attempts to combine trade policy and social standards under the auspices of the WTO only fuel the mistrust of the developing countries and do nothing to help raise their awareness of this issue. Opening up world markets and taking targeted action to redress unacceptable situations, through, for example, the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) – which uses ILO definitions as a basis for its work – are more effective ways of improving the social situation of people in developing countries than the threat of trade sanctions.

– We Liberals call on the EU and the US to work towards a concrete timetable for the abolition of agricultural export refunds, which have significantly distorted the market, in particular to the detriment of the developing countries. Market regimes which particularly restrict or distort trade with developing countries must be substituted as quickly as possible with measures which do not disrupt international trade.