Unlikely Partners?

China, the European Union and the Forging of a Strategic Partnership

Anna Michalski, Zhongqi Pan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9789811031403
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811031410
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides an in-depth analysis of the relations between China and the EU, tracing the development of this complex, yet intriguing, relationship between two substantially different actors. To uncover a deeper understanding of this unlikely partnership, the authors analyze the partnership through the prism of contending norms and worldviews. The China-EU strategic partnership has evolved through fits and starts but despite continuous trade disputes and severe diplomatic misunderstandings, the EU and China pledge to uphold, even deepen, the partnership. Policy experts and scholars will learn how such contending bilateral relationships can be managed and establish a better understanding of deep-seated conceptual differences between these two entities.  

© The Author(s) 2017

A. Michalski, Z. ZhongqiUnlikely Partners?Governing China in the 21st Centuryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3141-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Unlikely Partners? The EU-China Strategic Partnership in a Changing World Order

Anna Michalski¹ and Zhongqi Pan²

(1)

Department of Government, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

(2)

School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

End Abstract

This book explores the strategic partnership between the European Union (EU) and China. The partnership was set up in the early 2000s and is today one of the most significant between global powers. Despite the extent and durability of their engagement, the EU-China strategic partnership often takes the backseat in comparison to the attention accorded to the relations between the United States (US) and China, or China’s deepening relations with Russia. Nevertheless, the EU-China strategic partnership is an important component in the reconfiguration of the world order triggered by the rise of new powers. The significance of the EU-China strategic partnership lies not only in connecting two global actors but also in the management of the antagonistic quality of the partnership between such different actors. Despite the deep-seated conceptual differences that reign between the EU and China, their engagement in the strategic partnership has gradually been strengthened. Throughout the past 20 years, both the EU and China have professed their willingness to deepen and broaden the scope of cooperation, and this is in a period of time when a number of internal and external factors suggest that instead they drift apart. From this perspective, the EU-China strategic partnership is conceptually and normatively interesting and merits further investigation.

For both the EU and China, the strategic partnership constitutes an important dimension in their respective foreign policies carrying a number of functions related to identity, status, and position in the international system. For the EU and its member states, bilateral relations with China are without doubt of major significance in order to pursue their economic, strategic, and political interests. Moreover, the strategic partnership with China confirms the EU’s status as an actor in the international system, and the deep normative divisions between the two only further underline the centrality for the EU as a normative power to maintain close relations with China. For China, the strategic partnership with the EU fulfills a number of strategic goals linked to its rise to global status, of which the most important is to push the reconfiguration of the international system toward multipolarity in order to ensure that the rise of China pans out without major disruption.

In most accounts of EU-China relations, the economic dimension is held up as the most important dimension. Indeed, the EU is China’s biggest trading partner, while China is the EU’s second largest trade partner after the US. In 2014, the EU-China trade in goods amounted to €467 billion, while the trade in services reached €54 billion¹. However, the EU-China strategic partnership includes a number of other dimensions, such as social, economic, and environmental sustainability, human rights, education, innovation, urbanization, and Research and Development (R&D), which have broadened the interaction among European and Chinese civil servants and experts. The partnership also sustains the EU’s and China’s international cooperation on global issues, such as the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, antipiracy, climate change, and the UN Millennium Development Goals, further enhancing their diplomatic cooperation within as well as outside the confines of the partnership.

Nevertheless, the EU and China make up a quite unlikely couple. Their bilateral relationship has at times been severely strained, and its fruitfulness has been questioned as tangible breakthroughs have been difficult to realize. At the heart of their sometimes acrimonious relationship lie deep-seated conceptual differences concerning norms, visions of power, modes of international engagement, and the organization of the emerging world order. The extent to which these deep-seated differences can be bridged, or at least contained, is decisive not only for the continued engagement in the strategic partnership but also for the international system, as the new world order will be premised on accommodating actors with significantly different normative outlooks. In that sense, it is positive that neither the EU nor China has allowed bilateral disputes and occasional diplomatic flare-ups to scupper the strategic partnership. On the contrary, since 2014, the EU and China have regularly acknowledged the positive aspects of their bilateral relationship both rhetorically and in action to the effect that new areas of cooperation have been added and the structures of engagement have been strengthened. Improved diplomatic relations, however, cannot mask the fact that despite attempts since 2007 to replace the expired Trade and Cooperation Agreement of 1985, the EU and China have thus far been unable to forge a new contractual basis for their partnership, although negotiations on a bilateral investment agreement are making slow but steady progress. As suggested by previous experiences, EU-China relations continue to tread a delicate balance between mutual recriminations and constructive engagement, with the deepening of the partnership being dependent on both sides showing willingness to address outstanding problems and meet the concerns of the other. In this book, therefore, we pay particular attention to analyzing the conceptual difference between the EU and China as we believe that the way in which these evolve is important for strategic partnerships as a new form of international engagement, as well as for the development of the EU and China, respectively, as international actors.

The Bilateral Dimension of Cooperation

China’s emergence as a global actor in the last 30 years has primarily been driven by a neck-breaking economic growth, which has resulted on the one hand in an unprecedented improvement in social conditions by lifting some 500 million people out of poverty since 1978, while on the other has engendered substantial income differentials, sustained urbanization, and extensive environmental degradation.² Despite adverse domestic consequences, it is undoubtedly on the back of the record levels of economic growth that China has been able to engage internationally. Apart from its permanent seat on the UN Security Council, which it inherited from the republican regime of Chiang Kai-shek in 1971, China’s early international engagement was primarily economic. However, the economic diplomatic engagement was slow at first as despite being a founding member of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the People’s Republic of China (PRC) could not fully benefit from its membership in these organizations before the right of representation was transferred from Taipei to Beijing in 1980.³ In 1986, China applied for membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and became a member in 2001, further confirming its integration into the international economic system. Since the early 2000s, China has manifested itself as a comprehensive global player, engaging in an increasingly broad range of issues. Today, its influence on international politics stretches over almost all issue areas and regions in the world.

The EU cannot boast the same meteoric rise as China, and there is still much debate on whether the EU should be regarded as a global power in the first place.⁴ Notwithstanding that debate, the EU has global presence and pursues the aim of coordinating the EU member states’ foreign policy into a concerted stance on specific issues, although sometimes more successfully than others. As an international actor, the EU has upheld a self-image as a normative power—one that seeks to promote the norms and values on the international scene that are central to its identity and role as international actor. However, the strength of the EU’s identity as a normative power is dependent on its internal cohesiveness and the success of its economic and social model. On these accounts, the international status of the EU has suffered setbacks in the last decennium due to the onset of multiple crises, chiefly the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone, the refugee crisis, and the British referendum on its continued membership with the EU. In addition, the manifest lack of internal cohesiveness and consensus among the EU member states has at several occasions hampered its ability to act as a global power. Indeed, the EU member states’ propensity to seek bilateral agreements with China and China’s ability to make use of the EU’s internal dissension are regularly brought forward as the primary explanation for the EU’s lack of strategic edge. Despite the vagaries of coordinating national foreign policy, the EU has been quite successful in forging partnerships with a number of individual countries or groups of countries around the world, of which the strategic partnership with China was, and perhaps still is, the most ambitious one with a global power. For these reasons, and others explained below, it is important to study the EU-China partnership. This is so not only in order to understand why the bilateral partnership between the EU and China has waxed and waned in the last 20 years but also to comprehend on a deeper level the factors that drive or impede further bilateral engagement, which will, ultimately, shape the future prospects of this unlikely strategic partnership.

The Global Context

The timing of this book is significant. After more than 20 years of undisputed existence, the liberal world order is now being challenged by the shifting balance of power among major international players and by the dynamic development of global agendas. The emergence of the EU-China strategic partnership is inscribed in this wider transformation. This changing context is marked by a reconfiguration of the international system shifting from the dominance of the liberal post–Cold War order characterized by unipolarity and American hegemony to a more fluid environment in which different norms compete. In this more fluid context, states and international organizations are seeking new forms of engagement to complement multilateral structures and global governance. The rise of China has quickened the pace of the fundamental change taking place in the international system, which alongside other trends plays into the molding of a new world order. Among these, we find the West’s military overstretch and the loss of the moral high ground in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Russia’s increasing aggressiveness under Vladimir Putin, the consequences of the financial and economic crisis, the increasing importance of the Pacific as the focal point for trade and economic and political cooperation, and the severe instability in the southern and eastern Mediterranean, which constitute but a few, albeit important, pieces in this complex puzzle.

The implications of this transformation are only slowly becoming clearer as the central features of the evolving international system emerge. One such feature is the higher degree of diversity in terms of culture, political systems, and level of social and economic development as a result of the growing number of states with global importance. These states will now have to be accommodated, implying that the acceptance of the principles and norms of the liberal order cannot be taken for granted any longer. China’s place in the new world order as one of the two great powers is crucial, and to that effect, its relations with the US are under constant scrutiny by academics and practitioners. However, relations between the US and China continue to be marred by antagonism and competition, which prevent the two from establishing a functioning strategic partnership despite several attempts to this effect. Relations between China and the EU are seldom ascribed the same significance as those between the US and China. One reason is that the engagement between the EU and China is less contentious because of the absence of fundamental strategic disputes between them. However, for this reason, the conceptual differences between them have hitherto been handled in a (mostly) non-aggressive manner, which makes the EU-China strategic partnership important as a part of the wider picture of the reshaping of the world order.

This book is based on a premise that the emergence of strategic partnerships, and indeed the surge in their numbers in the last decade, is an important piece of the puzzle to understand the social dynamic among states and other actors in the evolving international system. This new system will for a foreseeable period be based on an uneasy combination of multipolarity and multilateralism. This, in turn, will prompt states to forge working relationships with both friendly and antagonistic states and other actors. The overarching aim to enter into bilateral partnerships is to increase the predictability of interstate relations and so to enhance the stability of the international system. At the same time, strategic partnerships may also become a means to gather support for a particular worldview by offering a setting in which norms can be diffused and a partner may be socialized into particular norms and worldviews. This dual purpose of strategic partnerships is particularly evident in the case of the EU and China whose partnership is of particular interest as it is forged between two considerably different actors as concerns their worldviews and normative standpoints. By analyzing the conceptual differences between the EU and China in regard to their perceptions of norms and worldviews, we are able to explicate the nature of the socialization dynamic and the extent to which socialization in strategic partnership is possible. The social interaction which emerges in the EU-China strategic partnership goes well beyond traditional diplomatic relations in the international system. Here, the conceptual differences play an important role, not only because they matter for the bilateral dynamic between the EU and China but also because the handling of such conceptual differences ultimately set boundaries for what is possible to achieve within strategic partnerships between unlike actors.

The Purpose and Motivation Behind Looking into the EU-China Strategic Partnership

The motivation for writing a book of this type is twofold. On the one hand, it concerns the wish to know more about the function of strategic partnerships on three different levels: the international, the bilateral, and the individual. More precisely, we seek to find out what strategic partnerships means for the development of the international system and the evolution of the social structures among states and international organizations therein; what they signify for bilateral engagements between specific actors; and, finally, why and for what purpose individual actors enter into strategic partnerships, in particular, those between actors who do not share worldviews and normative standpoints. On the other hand, we share an empirical and conceptual fascination with the bilateral relationship between the EU and China—two actors which in many respects are each other’s antipodes. Linked to this interest of ours is the ambition to explain how and why the EU-China strategic partnership has evolved despite often discounted as being of little or no consequence. It soon became obvious to us that in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of the social dynamic of the bilateral engagement between the EU and China, we had to look at the conceptual differences which define their respective perspectives on norms and worldviews. Precisely because a focus on conceptual differences enables us to discover a deeper understanding of the dynamic interplay in strategic partnership, we are also better placed to assess strategic partnerships’ wider significance for the social interaction among states in the international system. However, oftentimes conceptual differences do not receive the attention they merit in analyses that seek to clarify why and how the EU and China manage to uphold, even deepen, their strategic partnership, in spite of obvious differences in normative outlook. In this respect, we believe that the explanatory power of conceptual differences is undervalued because of their intangible and elusive character, often considered as too deep seated and intractable for an assessment of the evolution of the strategic partnership. In this book, we argue that conceptual differences can and should be brought into an examination of the EU-China strategic partnership because they enable a deeper analysis which brings forward important points of understanding that otherwise would have been left untouched. This approach also pertains to the function of strategic partnerships as arenas for competitive role-playing in which actors seek to obtain the recognition for their position and status in the international system.

We have chosen to focus on contending views and perceptions in regard to sovereignty, internal and external norms, global governance, constellations of power, and notions of foreign policy. The reason for choosing these concepts is that they encapsulate the differences in the outlooks and behavior of the EU and China as international actors and, therefore, their understanding of strategic partnerships as a means of international actorness and as arenas to play out international roles and self-perceptions as global powers. Other scholars might have chosen to focus on the economic relations between China and the EU, or on identifying each actor’s (national) interests to assess the underlying reasons for the development (or lack thereof) of the EU-China strategic partnership. We wanted, however, to go beyond material factors to analyze the perceptions of the EU and China of themselves, each other and the international system. By basing our analysis on ideational factors such as norms, identities, and roles, the approach of this book lies close to struct...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Unlikely Partners? The EU-China Strategic Partnership in a Changing World Order
• 2. Strategic Partnerships: A New Form of International Engagement
• 3. The Development of EU-China Relations
• 4. Europe, China, and the Diffusion of Norms
• 5. China, Europe, and Normative Preferences on Sovereignty and Human Rights
• 6. European and Chinese Perspectives on the International System
• 7. Relations Between the European Union and China in a Future Perspective
• Correction to: Unlikely Partners?
• Back Matter