Power, Perception and Foreign Policymaking

US and EU Responses to the Rise of China

Scott Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351853323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the changing dynamics of power in the international arena since the end of the Cold War. Brown engages in analysis of how the United States and the European Union have responded to the so-called rise of China through an examination of how policymakers' perceptions of China have changed over time and influenced their policy choices. This study undertakes rigorous analysis of how these perceptions have evolved between 1989 and 20092016, offering a comparative perspective on the similarities and differences between the policy discourse and behaviour within these two Western powers.

Brown argues that 'China's rise' is a contested notion, with varied perceptions of how the implications of China's ascendancy have shaped policy preferences in ways that are inconsistent with concerns over the threat of an impending power-transition. Combining concepts and methods derived from IR and FPA, the book examines the linkages between great power politics and policymakers' competing interpretations of key international actors, and their influence upon foreign policies. The main objective of the study is to illuminate the different ways in which the US and the EU have responded to the rise of China through a close analysis of their decision-making processes and outcomes across a series of key encounters and events, including the transatlantic debate over the EU's proposal to lift its China arms embargo (2003-2005).

Undertaking qualitative analysis of the development of American and European policymakers' perceptions of China, this book will be of interest to graduates and scholars of post-Cold War international politics, Foreign Policy Analysis, policymaking, US-China relations and EU-China relations.

1
Introduction

Handling China’s rise

1.1 Focus of the book and research question

On September 27, 2008 – just days after my I began my doctoral studies, which would eventually form the basis of this book – taikonauts completed China’s first spacewalk, only the third nation to accomplish this feat behind the United States of America (US) and the Soviet Union/Russia. A few months prior, the world’s attention had been focussed on Beijing as it hosted the Olympic Games; up until then, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) generally sought to avoid close scrutiny of life inside the country. The spectacle of the opening ceremony and China’s dominance of the medal table seemed emblematic of its newfound confidence on the international stage. On the eve of the 59th anniversary of the PRC, Premier Wen Jiabao praised the contribution of these achievements towards “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” (cited by Xinhua, 2008).

The rise of China is frequently posited as one of the most important international developments since the end of the Cold War; the speed with which it has risen has prompted predictions that it will become the predominant power sometime this century. This has implications for the standing of the system’s current great powers – how they react will be crucial for the future of international relations. Great power behaviour is one of the main points of inquiry within International Relations (IR) scholarship; seeking to understand the factors which drive behaviour and especially the tendency for interstate conflict. Attempts to understand great power behaviour are reflected in the interest in and debate over the impact of China’s capabilities and intentions on the international system. This book offers a contribution which explores the impact of interpretations of ‘the rise of China’ upon the foreign policies of the US and the European Union (EU), challenging the dominant state-centric understandings of international affairs and offering an account that emphasises the importance of policy actors.

China’s rise is now an inescapable issue for policymakers, regardless of whether they regard it as hostile or benign. Attempting to understand how other international actors have responded – and should do in the future – has taken up much scholarly attention. Mainstream IR theories and the associated literature offer different perspectives on the principal motives driving state behaviour and responses. The genesis of these different perspectives is rooted in the theoretical development following World War II, when scholars focussed predominantly on the causes of war. The diversity of theoretical approaches which have emerged can be illuminating, but also makes it difficult to identify where to start in terms of testing the utility of particular ones in relation to developments in the international arena. Proponents of the dominant approaches, particularly realists, have favoured abstraction – that is, developing the capacity to refer to the international system as a whole, rather than discrete events within it. While such comprehensive approaches may be useful for claims to relevance and simplification of a vast, complex array of international relations, they necessitate further theoretical development if one wants to move from a level of abstraction to a specific issue or event.

The plurality of IR theoretical disciplines provides numerous perspectives from which China’s rise could be examined. However, this research focuses on one: power-transition theory (PTT). Whilst a wide range of theoretical frameworks could be adapted to examine how established powers respond to China’s rise, they are not specifically designed to do so and thus proponents could contest the application of the theory to particular developments, situations or relationships.¹ PTT is designed to examine precisely the development unfolding since the end of the Cold War: a rising power gaining in economic, political and military power in a way that could potentially alter the status quo arrangements of the international order as upheld by the established powers. PTT arguably emerged out of what Brian Schmidt (2002: 8) called the “elusive but persistent goal of mainstream IR in the United States to achieve the status of a ‘true’ science”.

China’s emergence (more accurately, re-emergence) as a great power arguably represents a continuation of the historical pattern of great powers rising and falling, as extensively researched by Paul Kennedy (1988) among others. Over the past half century, the PTT research agenda has advanced the argument that established powers will attempt to maintain their position for as long as possible by adapting their behaviour and offsetting gains made by the rising power. Transitions have often resulted in conflict – a trend which some observers argue is set to continue with the rise of China. PTT is the theory which we would expect to provide the clearest insights into how the established powers respond to the emergence of a potential challenger. Rather than assess which IR theory best explains these responses, this book concentrates on PTT because it is the one that should have the most purchase. Moreover, as the following chapter demonstrates, there is evidence to suggest that the ideas of PTT have influenced how some commentators understand China’s rise to a degree that is not true of other theories. For instance, Waltz’s (1979) defensive realism suggests that a bipolar system is inherently more stable than a unipolar system; such logic has not been invoked to argue for the positive implications of China’s rise. Keohane and Nye’s (2001) arguments on complex interdependence should decrease concerns over conflict yet while many have acknowledged the economic opportunity presented by China’s rise, there are persistent concerns that it may use hard power to get what it wants at some point in the future.

PTT has clear expectations for how established powers are anticipated to respond to the rise of a potential challenger (China) because it threatens the status quo arrangements which the dominant power (here, the US) and its allies (which include the EU) wish to preserve. When the challenger is rising rapidly, this creates uncertainty about the future and consequently generates instability amongst the powers. Authoritarian states such as China are presumed by PTT to be inherently dissatisfied with a status quo in which democratic states dominate and thus automatically will challenge this when they get the chance. These factors, in combination, increase the risk of conflict between the challenger and the established powers. Consequently, the rapid rise of an authoritarian state poses an existential threat to the system which the dominant powers benefit from and uphold.

Some academic literature and political commentary indicates that these ideas have infiltrated policy discourse over China’s rise. Debates amongst policymakers, political commentators, and analysts have generated opposing sets of ideas about China’s rise as either a ‘threat’ or an ‘opportunity’, and the former characterisation has given substance to the idea of an impending power-transition between China and the US. Invoking the logic and language of PTT, many commentators are drawn to the conclusion that China’s rise brings about the possibility – for some, the inevitability – of conflict. Under PTT logic, it appears that policymakers will progressively perceive China’s rise in terms of a ‘threat’, with alternative perspectives diminishing in salience as the external environment becomes increasingly incongruous with such conceptualisations.

By focussing on interactions between rising and established powers, PTT should be capable of providing insights into how the US has reacted to the rise of China, a potential challenger to its dominant status. There has indeed been a general drift towards threat rhetoric that reflects the logic of PTT within the US; despite its significant power advantage, some policymakers have expressed concerned that the gap is closing, which will allow China to act upon hostile intentions. However, the US has largely adhered to an approach of engagement with China, which is difficult to reconcile with PTT. By logical extension, other powers which derive benefits from the status quo (‘satisfied’ powers within PTT lexicon) such as the EU – arguably one of the US’ closest partners – should also be concerned by such developments. Yet the existing literature and empirical record suggests that policy discourse within and the behaviour of the EU does not reflect such concerns. This leaves open a question regarding how US and EU responses to key events in their relations with China match up with expectations that can be derived from PTT.

Looking at how policymakers have debated responses to China’s rise, it becomes clear that the way in which they actually perceive their external environment is not consistent with what we would expect if PTT were correct. This leads to the central question of the book: to what extent have different interpretations of the ‘rise of China’ influenced the foreign policies of the US and the EU towards China? I investigate the extent to which actors’ perceptions of their external environment – and their understanding of the implications thereof – drive their preferences for action, and assess whether this presents a more compelling account of foreign policy behaviour than accounts which privilege international-level factors and material capabilities. PTT implicitly assumes that perceptions are ‘fixed’ as states are the primary actors, with policymakers responding objectively to the changing international system. Consideration of US and EU responses to key events in relations with China is achieved through tracing how the policy discourse at these crucial moments evolved and what the arguments presented revealed about policymakers’ interpretations of China’s rise. This facilitates the analysis of the importance of perceptions in the determination of specific policies and US and EU responses to the rise of China more broadly.

The advantage of the approach developed here is that its applicability is not restricted to one polity; by using it to explain responses to discrete events and general trends across a period of twenty years for two very different international powers, I demonstrate the analytical model’s versatility as a tool for understanding the development of foreign policy. Beyond the project’s analytically innovative features, the empirical focus will also be of interest to those examining US- and EU-China relations and scholars of IR/Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) more broadly. Most in-depth analyses of and explanations for foreign policy behaviour tend to focus on a single set of bilateral relations. Examining two sets of bilateral relations has given this project a broader empirical scope without sacrificing analytical purchase; the utility of the model is demonstrated by its explanatory capacity in each instance. Secondly, while perceptions have been explored elsewhere in FPA literature (e.g. Fernández Sola and Smith, 2009), there is a lack of such studies in US- and EU-China relations; this book fills that gap.

1.2 Main findings and contribution

The central finding of the book is that the notion of ‘China’s rise’ has been interpreted in various ways by different actors over time; the lack of a single, objective meaning has led to contestations between preferences for how to respond to this shift in the international arena. This has been not been explored in the literature to date, with little critical reflection on the concept and its impact on policy preferences. The problem is that many policymakers and academics have been preoccupied with questioning whether China is rising or not, without considering what the notion of ‘China’s rise’ is taken to signify. These differing interpretations shape policymakers’ preferences for how to respond to China’s emergence. In this sense, the theoretical contribution of the book is to support the argument that ideas (subjective interpretations of China’s rise) matter in international relations. This is a common assertion in the constructivist FPA literature, but is approached from a novel angle in this research.

I argue that there are considerable variations in how policymakers have interpreted the significance of China’s rise, yet there has been little real discussion of what the term ‘China’s rise’ actually means within policy communities. Instead, the focus has been on its implications, resulting in contestation between divergent preferences for how to respond: essentially, proffering defensive or constructive actions. The evidence suggests that ‘China’s rise’ takes on different meanings for different actors at different points in time. For the most part, the US and EU’s responses to the rise of China have not been predicated on perceptions of an impending threat to their position in the status quo. Even looking at perceptions of China in the context of specific dimensions of international relations – military, economic, political, and normative – there is little evidence that ‘threat’ conceptualisations were the dominant view amongst policymakers. Instead, the economic and political opportunities presented by China’s rise have persisted and contributed to the development of the overarching strategies of engagement for both the US and the EU. The commonality between their responses is interesting and requires explanation given that both are very different international actors – the US is the classical model of the superpower state, whereas the EU is said to have a unique presence based on its civilian/normative values – with different policymaking subsystem structures. In the existing literature on US and EU responses to China’s rise, there is still work to be done in terms of developing explanations of their behaviour over time.

Further, although China’s power grew considerably over the timeframe of analysis, this has not elicited the sort of responses from the established powers we would expect to see if they operated under the logic of PTT. We also see that their respective policy discourses over China’s rise have varied considerably, with different perceptions evinced by policymakers which influence the forms their engagement strategies toward China have taken. Ultimately, the broad similarities between their strategies were down to interpretations of China’s rise as presenting economic and political opportunities prevailing within both the US and EU. Crucially, these were frequently held by the key policymakers within the main subsystems, therefore policies often reflected preferences predicated on these interpretations. This tendency has translated into the maintenance of strategies of engagement in response to China’s rise.

Labelling China’s rise as either a ‘threat’ or ‘opportunity’ obscures the reality that interpretations are multifaceted. I identify six overarching interpretations pertaining to different aspects of China’s rise (detailed in Chapter Two and summarised below in Table 1.1), covering the military, economic, normative, and political dimensions. These are then presented in pairs: first, China as either a military threat or non-threat. This relates to the level of threat presented to its neighbours, the US within the regional context or potentially – in the extreme arguments – globally. Second, China as an economic threat or an opportunity, in terms of whether its economic power will hurt the established powers, or benefit them through increased trade and raising China’s stake in the current international order.

Table 1.1 Interpretations of China’as rise

‘Negative’ interpretations	‘Positive’ interpretations
Military threat	Military non-threat
Economic threat	Economic opportunity
Normative threat	Political opportunity

Third, ‘normative threat’ versus ‘political opportunity’ are paired, as there has been no discussion of China as presenting a ‘normative opportunity’. Those attempting to counter perceptions of the Chinese regime as a threat to the norms and values of the international system tend to concentrate on political opportunities of drawing China into the established system, increasing its stake in the maintenance of the status quo and playing a more significant role internationally, commensurate with its growing size. In some respects, the threat interpretations are concerned with an ‘active’ China, whereas the opportunity interpretations convey a sense of passivity, wherein it is not so much China’s direct behaviour that generates these, but rather they are a by-product of its rise. The threat interpretations also spark a greater urgency about the immediate implications, as the threats were often seen as real in the present, rather than simply relating to what China might become.

Chapter Two lays the foundation for subsequent analysis by outlining the categories of interpretations found in the discourse of the US and the EU. The observations derived from these as analytical tools provide linkages between the theoretical framework and the empirical analysis of policy formulation. These underpinned the preferences of policymakers and contextualised the policy debates over specific events; in other words, the cases were not treated as isolated incidents by policymakers but as part of the broader relationship. The implications of specific events were derived from their broader interpretations of China’s rise, thus informing their preferences for how to react. Even so, there was little real explicit debate over what ‘China’s rise’ signified amongst policymakers in either polity, despite the apparent gaps between interpretations. Due to the lack of explicit recognition of this, the groundwork in Chapter Two provides a mechanism for identifying these gaps and the implications for the development of foreign pol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: handling China’s rise
• 2 Interpretations of the ‘rise’ of China
• 3 Debating the rise of China in US foreign policy
• 4 Debating the rise of China in European foreign policy
• 5 The transatlantic arms embargo debate: contesting the rise of China
• 6 China’s rise, continued: the US response under Obama and the EU response post-Lisbon
• 7 Conclusions
• References
• Index