Europe in an Era of Growing Sino-American Competition

Coping with an Unstable Triangle

Sebastian Biba, Reinhard Wolf, Sebastian Biba, Reinhard Wolf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000364491
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book investigates how Europe should position itself in an era of growing Chinese-American rivalry.

The volume explores the contemporary relationship and ongoing dynamics between three of the most powerful players in today's international relations - the USA, China and Europe. It claims that the intensifying antagonism between Washington and Beijing requires a paradigm shift in European strategic thinking, and takes a trilateral perspective in analysing key issue areas, such as trade, technology, investment, climate change, the BRI, sub-national contacts, maritime security and nuclear non-proliferation. Using this analysis, the work seeks to offer original policy recommendations that respond to a number of dilemmas Europe can no longer avoid, including the trade-off between European interests and values in a harsher global environment, the question of whether Europe should align with one of the two superpowers, Europe's military dependence on a US pivoting to the Asia-Pacific, and possible trade-offs between global and regional governance efforts. The key finding is that Europe must follow a much more pragmatic and independent approach to its foreign and security affairs.

This book will be of much interest to students of EU policy, foreign policy, Chinese politics, US politics and IR in general.

1 Introduction

Sebastian Biba and Reinhard Wolf

Over the course of the past decade, the key conditions of Europe’s global strategy have been substantially eroded.¹ The rules-based international system had been increasingly under strain even before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic and the Trump presidency (Maull 2018). A major cause of Europe’s unravelling foreign policy has been the intensifying systemic, economic and military rivalry between the world’s foremost powers, China and the United States (US). This antagonism was first highlighted by the Obama administration’s “pivot/rebalance to Asia”, and has not only stymied the progressive reform of global governance but has also weakened regional and global orders. The world is regressing to a more realist state again, in which zero-sum competition for material advantage and the unilateral pursuit of national security will trump cooperation based on agreed norms, rules and procedures. Europe no longer faces a largely congenial multilateral environment but must adapt to trends that favour self-help at the expense of mutual advantage and reliable cooperation. However, it unfortunately lacks a strategic vision for such a new environment: as a prominent think tank concluded recently, “Europe possesses no robust collective foreign policy position concerning the geopolitical struggle between the United States and China over hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region” (Lippert et al. 2019, 29; also see Otero-Iglesias and Esteban 2020).

Apart from general trends towards suspicion and strife, escalating tensions between the world’s two dominant powers present Europe—both the European Union (EU) and individual European states—with profound challenges. What exactly are these challenges and what do they entail? What are the impacts of the intensifying US-China rivalry on Europe, particularly on its security, welfare and values? Worrying scenarios include relative gains considerations that further undermine effective global governance, escalating trade and technology “wars”, military escalation in the Asia-Pacific and the US disengaging from Europe to focus its limited resources on containing China. Against such a backdrop, what are Europe’s options for action and what then should it do? The list of urgent questions is long. Among other things, Europe must consider whether it can still largely rely on US support for European security, whether it should lean towards one of the two antagonists or steer a pragmatic course, whether it should try to defuse or contain Sino-American antagonism in the Asia-Pacific and beyond, whether it should adapt to a post-liberal world by clearly prioritizing interests over norms and whether it should continue to invest in the maintenance of a fragmenting global order or put more emphasis on promoting regional governance in Europe and its vicinity. Instead of addressing such questions just on a case-by-case basis or avoiding them altogether in the hope that others will solve its problems, Europe needs a thorough strategic debate about how it should position itself in this precarious geopolitical triangle.

This volume’s aim is to contribute to this long-overdue debate by investigating the challenges and potential responses to key issues which Europe needs to address. It does not stop at analysing past developments and future scenarios but also takes an explicit policy perspective by asking how Europe should prioritise competing interests, values and options. It brings together well-known experts from various European countries, united in the belief that thinking about European aims vis-à-vis the US and China is a matter of great urgency, particularly for the EU if it would remain an active player rather than passively adapt to decisions taken elsewhere; the world will not wait for Europe to “get its act together”. Some strategic decisions need to be made now, particularly on instruments (military and other) and institutions that cannot be created overnight. Internal problems such as illiberal trends in several European countries and finding adequate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic—regardless of how grave they may be—must not prevent Europe from looking beyond its borders and failing to prepare for external challenges.

As already indicated, these issues are similarly shared by all Europeans who consider themselves part of what has been the transatlantic community. When we speak of “Europe”, we generally refer to the EU as well as individual European countries within and outside of the EU. While we see the EU as the crucial European actor in standing up to the worsening US-China confrontation, we also believe that the European nation state remains relevant (especially after Brexit) and that these share many interests. Hence, the latter have to deal with the question of whether they want to coordinate these interests within the EU or outside of it (e.g., through coalitions of the willing such as the E3). The answer to this question may differ across issues. Consequently, the individual chapters in this volume may focus on different European actors.

All such actors are confronted with the dire reality that global politics has entered a far more antagonistic era, a new phase for which Europe is ill-prepared. This ominous downward trend is most obvious in the trajectory of US-China relations, which provides the rationale and overall context for this volume. As will become clear in the following section, the rivalry between Beijing and Washington has intensified across many issues. It is no longer limited to a number of isolated problems but has now assumed a structural quality and will hardly abate under the new US President Joe Biden. This confrontation is here to stay and may well get even rougher. It will set the stage for global politics for years to come. Unfortunately, Europeans also need to recognise that their own relations with both antagonists have also worsened, if less dramatically. America no longer is the reliable security partner it used to be, while China is now regarded as “a systemic rival” (EC 2019, 1). Both powers have begun to undermine EU cohesion and have applied tougher economic policies which jeopardise European prosperity. To provide the general background for our authors’ contributions, we must first map the growing conflicts within this triangle.

Growing US-China rivalry and its impact on Europe

Current US-China relations present themselves to the outside world as the expression of a complex strategic rivalry. Even though the two countries maintain a dense web of bilateral exchanges, the days are gone when pundits would talk about the prospects of Washington and Beijing forming a G-2 mechanism to jointly and cooperatively govern world affairs (Bergsten 2005, 2008; Brezezinski 2009; Zoellick and Lin 2009). Similarly, while the two nations remain economically intertwined, the notion of “Chimerica” (Ferguson 2008)—the long-held impression of a symbiotic economic relationship between the two—has already perished. Over recent years, concepts with such positive connotations have given way to the current widespread and gradually deepening ingrained conviction—by the two antagonists and beyond—that US-China relations are fraught with serious tensions that span a variety of dimensions and a great number of issues, with current trends pointing to a further deterioration of bilateral ties.

At the root of today’s growing strategic rivalry is China’s unprecedentedly rapid and comprehensive rise to the status of an “emerging potential superpower” (Brooks and Wohlforth 2016) with the potential to challenge US supremacy in the Asia-Pacific region and even globally. Hegemons being challenged by rising powers is a recurring theme in International Relations (IR), with potentially disastrous consequences. More recently, such scenarios have been labeled the “Thucydides’s Trap”, describing the “… severe structural stress caused when a rising power threatens to upend a ruling one” (Allison 2017, 29). Allison (2017) identified 16 of those cases over the last 500 years, 12 of which have resulted in open war between the antagonists.

In IR theory, this phenomenon is best captured by the so-called power transition theory, which sets out to explain and predict the occurrence or absence of war between the hegemonic power and one of its challengers (Organski and Kugler 1981). In doing so, the theory has two drivers: the first is power parity as the necessary condition for a power transition; the second is the degree of (dis)satisfaction of the rising state with its status in the existing regional and global orders. This latter functions as the sufficient condition determining the war-proneness of a power transition. This leads to the underlying issue of present-day US-China relations: a severe and increasingly intensifying status competition between the two countries (Biba 2016; Rudolf 2020).

Generally speaking, status refers to an actor’s specific rank within a social hierarchy. It has intrinsic value for a state because the higher its status, the more privileges it can enjoy. As a result, states tend to seek a high status. However, not every state can have this high status, because then none would (Larson et al. 2014). The situation of US-China relations is that US status, both globally and regionally in the Asia-Pacific, remains relatively higher than China’s. Additionally, the US is intent on defending and bolstering this status because what is at stake is nothing less than global leadership and regional preeminence, coupled with enormous political and economic gains. Meanwhile, China is not satisfied with its current ranking and privileges, and hence seeks a higher status—allegedly one on par with the US globally and even outstripping the US in the Asia-Pacific region (Biba 2016).

US-China rivalry for status is aggravated by a number of concomitant circumstances. The first is that both nations are highly status conscious. Americans widely share the belief that their country has a distinctive mission to transform the world and that this mission gives their country a superiority over others (Mead 2002; Nau 2002). At the same time, an increasingly bipartisan consensus, comprising a majority in US business and society, has emerged which sees China as a serious threat to this US self-perception (Zhao 2019). For example, the December 2017 US National Security Strategy overtly labelled China a “revisionist” power that would aim at shaping “a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests” and would seek to “displace the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific region”. The Chinese, meanwhile, have traditionally considered themselves the centre of the civilised world and currently understand their country’s renewed rise to great power status after its “century of humiliation” as natural and regaining something lost (Yan 2001). The US is perceived to stand in China’s way and as denying China’s rightful place in the international system. A “sentiment of insecurity and sense of being threatened” by the US have increased in China ever since former US President Barack Obama unveiled his “pivot/rebalance to Asia” strategy in November 2011 (Wang and Yin 2014).

Related to this is a second aspect: agency. While the US-China status competition is principally rooted in the anarchical structure of the international system, it has recently been intensified by factors of agency. That is to say, while this rivalry has preceded former US President Donald Trump and will stay under new US President Joe Biden, Trump’s “status-driven foreign policy” (Wolf 2017) further accentuated the problem. His “fixation with personal prestige” and his “desire to look like a ‘winner’ ” necessitated him making America the undisputed “number one” again (ibid., 99–100). Chinese President Xi Jinping certainly cultivates a very different approach to leadership than Trump; however, his sensibility to status concerns is arguably little different. It remains to be seen in how far Biden will adopt a different tone.

The third concomitant is that of ideological differences. From the US point of view, it has not been beneficial to its perception of China’s rise that the latter is neither a liberal democracy nor a market economy (Friedberg 2011). China’s recent “handling” of the Uighurs in Xinjiang, as well as of protest in Hong Kong, has underlined the US’ standpoint and nourished widespread American frustration about China’s failure to democratise any time soon. There have also been growing US concerns about China establishing, and possibly exporting to the world, a new development model that is capable of merging autocratic rule with sustained economic growth. Conversely, the Chinese Communist Party has long feared US “missionary zeal” to democratise the world and hence has cautioned Washington against both overt and covert endeavors to subvert and transform the Chinese political system.

Consequently, US-China relations have been characterised by increasing mutual distrust about the other’s intentions (Lieberthal and Wang 2012). This state of affairs might escalate existing security dilemmas between Washington and Beijing. This is particularly so because both the US and China seem to be relatively insensible to the actual existence of such dilemmas, with each side claiming purely defensive intentions and not realizing that their respective actions could also be perceived otherwise—as offensive tactics (Rudolf 2020). In addition, the current state of affairs has already led a number of distinguished observers to conclude that we are now entering a new cold war era (Leonard 2018; Kaplan 2019).

As previously mentioned, the ongoing and worsening US-China conflict—including status competition, security dilemmas and even cold war mentality— plays out on different levels and comprises a number of crucial issues. Regionally, it is all about supremacy and spheres of influence in the Asia-Pacific (Mearsheimer 2010). While the US retains its post-World War II claim to leadership in the region, a rising China is less and less willing to accept this claim that, historically, was its own. Due to the status concerns illustrated above, as well as significant economic interests, neither side is likely to back down, while the possibility of a peaceful condominium has also been questioned (Friedberg 2011; Mearsheimer 2010; Wolf 2012). Importantly, it is also in this regional context that military confrontation between the two powers is most likely and cannot be ruled out. The two cases that stand out in this regard—the South China Sea and Taiwan’s status—have both become more intense over recent years. In the South China Sea, China’s rapid and large-scale building of artificial islands and its subsequent stationing of military equipment on these have provoked repeated US “Freedom of Navigation Operations” through these contested waters. Physical military encounters between both sides have become more frequent in recent years and could well produce some inadvertent clash that might then spiral out of control. Regarding Taiwan, former President Trump exemplified the increasing US lack of sensitivity to Beijing’s “One China policy” when he caused a major diplomatic stir in December 2016 over a phone call with Taiwanese President Tsai Ying-wen. Additional international security problems in the region, such as the North Korea nuclear issue or the Sino-Japanese conflict over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, could also entail a US-China military face-off.

Globally, the likelihood of military confrontation has receded; however, the number of controversial issues is increasing, as do their interconnectedness and complexity. Even areas where there was still cooperative interaction between Washington and Beijing under the Obama administration—such as over climate change mitigation and nuclear non-proliferation—have faded since Trump assumed office. The most significant complex of problems in 2020 is what could be termed the “economy-finance-technology triangle”, which is most evident in escalating diplomatic confrontation between the two countries in recent years and plays out not only bilaterally but also in multilateral organisations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO).

In light of his protectionist “America First” approach, former President Trump has brought a great amount of zero-sum thinking to the field of broader US-China economic relations, which is unlikely to go away under the new Biden administration. Already during his election campaign in 2016, Trump called China a “currency manipulator” (Forbes 2016) and repeatedly lamented America’s huge trade deficit vis-à-vis China, infamously proclaiming, “[w]e can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing” (CNN Politics 2016). Since the beginning of 2018, the US has drawn China into a protracted trade war which particularly features US special tariffs on a large number of Chinese export products. Superficially, this conflict is about reducing China’s bilateral trade surplus and about recreating jobs for American workers. More profoun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors/author bios
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Europe’s agency in the international system
• Part II Geostrategic issues and Europe’s security
• Part III Geo-economic issues and Europe’s welfare
• Part IV Concluding remarks
• Index