European nations are making a mistake courting China, says John Lee. To maintain relevance they need to align with the US.
At the height of the George W. Bush presidency, in 2004, Chinese state-owned media enthusiastically pushed the prospect of China and states within the European Union such as France working together in strategic unison to promote a more peaceful and stable multi-polar world.
Yet fast forward six years, and it’s clear the visit by French President Nicolas Sarkozy (and EU President Jose Manuel Barroso) to China late last month was only the latest attempt to revive Europe’s relevance as a major centre of power alongside Beijing and Washington. Indeed, counter-intuitive as it seems, seeking a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’ with Beijing is only playing to Chinese strengths and European weaknesses—accelerating the European Union’s strategic irrelevance. Instead, working with Washington to help manage China’s rise ought to be the EU’s strategic endgame.
The French-Sino relationship is an important one for the EU given that Paris will assume the presidency of the G8 and G20 from this November. In contrast to recent periods of tension with Beijing over issues such as Chinese policies in Tibet and Africa, Sarkozy was received warmly by Chinese President Hu Jintao. But despite talk about a much closer and more comprehensive economic and security partnership, Beijing will hold back on any genuine strategic partnership with Paris or Brussels. As debates within Chinese strategic elites and officials since the turn of the century indicate, it all comes down to how China views the future grand strategic chessboard.
Even as China remains obsessed about how best to deal with a much more powerful United States, its strategists see no room for European powers at the highest echelons of great powers in the future. In particular, despite public declarations about a preference for a multi-polar world, Beijing ultimately seeks a bi-polar future: with itself and the United States at the top, looking over ‘declining powers’ such as France, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and Russia.
Despite the enormous size of the collective EU economy, Chinese thinkers frequently use a dismissive phrase to characterize its default strategy for managing Europe: let the barbarians divide and rule the barbarians. China sees Europe as an increasingly irrelevant strategic actor where the sum of the whole is less than the sum of its parts—with the additional problem that no individual European state is powerful enough to exercise any leverage over China. Therefore, European hopes that a future G2 (the US and China) can still be transformed into a G3 (the United States, China and Europe) will not find meaningful support in China.
If the genuine opportunities for EU-Sino strategic cooperation are few, the genuine opportunities for a coordinated EU-US strategic partnership (and partnership between the United States and key European states) to help manage China’s rise are immense—a point that’s paradoxically better appreciated in Beijing than it is in Brussels or Washington.
Reddit
Digg
StumbleUpon
Delicious
Technorati
Yahoo
Google
Plurk
Rubadubadoobag
To summarise, ‘us whities should stick together’
@ bill: thank you for appreciating that point: that the presumption that the West should ‘manage China’s rise’ is both vain and patronising. Can you imagine how the West would feel if ‘third world’ countries sought to manage their rise (read: interfere in their affairs, contain them etc). As Ive said elsewhere, China looks like an aggressor because it is upsetting the status quo, but if you actually examine the status quo, it was reached through massive European aggression and is thoroughly unfair.
Bob
I think Europe should be united under a benovolent military dictatorship aligned with a similar gove’t in the U.S. In our own two societies, we should eliminate the criminals and lazy scum, then turn our joined attention toward China with the goal of destroying it’s internal structure and financial health.
Mladen
First thing Europe needs is tighter integration. With Lisbon Treaty there is legal framework and with financial crisis of whole countries will come motivation for action. Let’s face it, abandonment of Euro and falling apart of EU is not an option. At least not for any country which desires to remain relevant.
Such tightly united Europe can then be Good Cop versus Bad Cop – the USA. And USA must understand that as any good team, those two cops work as equal partners.
For time being, China deals with each problem as they show up. Considering last 200 years of their history, it is completely understanding. And at the moment, EU is not yet focused force, let alone potential enemy to China…
Magnus T.M.
>First thing Europe needs is tighter integration.
No we do not. We need two Europes. A financially disciplined free trade Europe as envisaged by Germany and a separate bureaucratic freeloading Europe as envisaged by France. The two visions are not compatible.
bill
Actually, I think China will “manage” it’s own rise, regardless of what the rest of the world wants, especially Europe. Europe is irrelevant other than being the force that may precipitate the final financial fall of the US.
China holds the US Budget in it’s hands. It is in a “catch 22″ situation that it is trying to get out of by using dollars to buy up minerals, oil, natural gas, land etc., all over the world. These are the materials we will need to rebuild our economy…and they will be under Chinese control.
China doesn’t want to dominate the world, just Asia and will slowly force the US out. Guam may one day be the closest our military will get to China.
Willby
“(and EU President Jose Manuel Barroso)”. Failure! If the writer knows this little about the EU, he really isn’t in the position to say what the biggest economy in the world should or should not do.
Magnus T.M.
The problem with dealing with Europe from a Chinese perspective is that the Europeans can’t agree on anything that China wants. Take for example the arms embargo on China. Despite most European countries having at various times promised to lift it, they have never been able to agree at the same time. Various member countries have constantly been subject to US pressure to backtrack on whatever promises they made. Another example is the Chinese participation in the Galileo project where under US pressure, the European partners essentially kicked China off it despite having paid for a piece of it.
There are simply too many flaws in his article that begs that question if Mr Lee has simply picked the quotes to fit his conclusions. John Lee’s knee jerk hostility to China diminishes the value of his analysis to the point of utter worthlessness.