EU unlikely to lift China arms embargo soon
By Axel Berkofsky

BRUSSELS - Is the European Union going to get rid of its weapons embargo imposed on China after Beijing decided to use the People's Liberation Army against the people, violently crushing peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square on June 3-4, 1989? The anniversary is just around the corner.

A noncommittal "maybe, but not just yet", was the message from this week's meeting of the European Union (EU) Council's foreign ministers in Luxembourg. After the weapons embargo issue failed to make it onto the agenda of the last EU Council meeting in late March, the EU foreign ministers, the EU's High Representative for the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) Javier Solana and other high-ranking EU Commission officials decided to discuss the issue over a "working lunch" this week, an indication the sensitive issue is receiving a lower level of official focus, or at least out of the media spotlight.

The EU, however, is considering modifying its nonbinding weapons sale code of conduct for China. It opposes sales to end users who abuse human rights or who use arms to suppress dissent or undertake international aggression. The code, however, does not carry the force of law and is open to the interpretation of member states; it only requires states to inform each other about arms export licenses they intend to issue to China. Some observers had said that if the arms embargo were to be lifted, the code of conduct would still prohibit sales to China, but that does not appear to be the case, since EU states retain discretion.

China has been urging the EU to scrap the embargo - imposed because of the Tiananmen human rights abuses - ever since German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder promised Beijing last December that getting rid of the ban was "only a matter of time". EU foreign ministers, however, did little more than delegate the controversial issue to a lower level at their embassies in Brussels.

When visiting China last December, the German chancellor not only promised to do his very best to get the EU embargo lifted soon, but also agreed to have an entire German plutonium factory dismantled and delivered to China in 2004. While the German business delegation traveling with the chancellor at the time was delighted with the Schroeder initiative to boost German-Chinese business ties, the public and the political opposition on the home front was less than enthusiastic.

Only some time ago, Germany decided to dismantle its nuclear power plants before 2010. Shipping second-hand plutonium factories to China and elsewhere is certainly not acceptable, claimed the critics. Earlier this week and under intense domestic pressure, the German government announced it would indefinitely postpone the factory's disassembly and shipment to China,

Luxembourg lunch: China arms on the menu
Back to the Luxembourg lunch: "The Council requested," the official summary of the lunch time discussions reads, "the Permanent Representatives Committee [Committee of EU member states' ambassadors] and the Political and Security Committee [ambassadors plus military officials from EU member states] to take the issue forward."

On Saturday, 10 new countries will officially join the EU: Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. That means further delays, so lifting the embargo won't get any easier for China, says Frank Umbach, security analyst and resident fellow at the Berlin-based German Council on Foreign Relations.

"If finding a consensus amongst 15 EU members to deal with the embargo is already difficult, getting 25 EU countries to agree on such a controversial issue might become next to impossible," he told Asia Times Online.

Already one week before the EU Council meeting in Luxembourg, Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen told his Chinese counterpart that attempts to exert intense pressure on the EU to lift the ban against weapons sales to China are unlikely to pay off in the near future.?

"I have given to my Chinese colleague this presidency's frank assessment that we don't believe - as things stand - that a decision is likely during our presidency," Cowen said when meeting Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing at the Asia-Europe ministerial meeting in Straffan, Ireland, on April 20. Li dismissed the bad news nonchalantly, indicating that Beijing is prepared to wait. "All good things take time. It is all up to our European friends," he said, knowing that France and Germany share Beijing's perception that the embargo is "outdated" and "has served its time".

China's state-controlled media was optimistic, announcing weeks before the EU Council meeting in Luxembourg that the EU "will very likely" make a decision to lift the embargo. French state-of-art Mirage jets and stealthy German submarines could be on the way to China before too long, China's official People's Daily cheered earlier in April.

Wishful thinking, at least for the time being, and Ireland, currently holding the rotating EU presidency, is unlikely to lose much, if any, sleep over a decision to lift the embargo. Instead, Dublin would prefer to leave the issue up to the incoming Dutch presidency beginning in July, says John Quigley, Brussels representative of the Dublin-based Institute for European Affairs. "Ireland has enough on its plate both with the EU's enlargement and the stalled talks on a European constitution to worry about Franco-German ambitions to lift the embargo," he told Asia Times Online.

Dutch support arms embargo, cite human rights
The Netherlands, for its part, is still opposed to lifting the embargo and has a standing parliamentary resolution that keeps the embargo in place until China comes up with clear and specific evidence that its human rights record has improved "significantly".

"Human rights, however, are unfortunately not on top of China's EU agenda," an EU Council source tells Asia Times Online.

Already in 1996, Brussels and Beijing established a human rights dialogue, progress in which ranges from "absent" to "very limited", as some EU diplomats complain, very much off the record.

Despite the EU Council's decision to put the weapons embargo on the back burner until further notice, a majority of EU foreign ministers present in Luxembourg seemed in favor of lifting the embargo, provided the EU's Code of [arms sales] Conduct, has, in EU lingo, "sufficient safeguards".

In the meantime, the EU Council will charge one of its own working groups with reviewing and possibly modifying the current Code of Conduct to "keep the criticism and controversy in check", an EU Council official said. The inner-Council's so-called Working Party on Conventional Arms (COARM) is expected to address United States concerns that the "right" interpretation of the Code of Conduct will enable France and other EU members to export weapons and weapons technology to China if the embargo is lifted.

The EU Code of Conduct, updated in 1998, obliges all EU member states to inform each other about arms export licenses they issue to China and sets out clear criteria for granting those licenses. Although not legally binding, the code stipulates that EU weapons licenses cannot be issued if the recipient country violates human rights or international law, uses the weapons for internal repression or international aggression.

While EU Council officials hope that COARM will convince alarmed US policy-makers that the code is more than a flexible gentlemen's agreement, others believe that the US is likely to alert and opposed to modifying the code for some time and wants to add the issue of dual-use technology exports to the EU-US agenda.

Dual-use technology the 'real' export issue
Dual-use technology exports provide China with technology and hardware, capable of being used for military or civilian applications, and that is indeed the "real issue", Umbach claims. "The current Code of Conduct," he maintains, "is completely insufficient to prevent EU member states from exporting militarily sensitive dual-use technology to China and elsewhere."

China is already the EU's second largest trading partner with bilateral trade accounting for roughly US$150 billion in 2003. Franco-Chinese bilateral trade amounts to an annual $13 billion and European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), a Franco-German arms manufacturer, is keen to get a big slice of the pie. EADS is reported already to have shown vivid interest in selling weapons and weapons technology to China, including radar and possibly air-to-air missiles.

Roger Cliff and Evan S Medeiros, political scientists at the Washington-based RAND Corporation, fear European high-tech weapons exports to China could resume quickly, once the EU jettisons the embargo.

"European technology transfers before 1989 played a key role in enabling China to develop modern surface-to-air and air-to-air missile systems," they write in the International Herald Tribune. Lifting the EU embargo, they claim, would further boost the modernization of China military which is "largely aimed at preparing for a potential conflict with Taiwan".

Updating China's missile program by introducing and deploying precision-guided missiles is part of these efforts, and the EU's Galileo radio satellite navigation system might just be what China is waiting for, says Steve Tsang, reader in politics at St Anthony's College, Oxford University.

At the sixth EU-China summit in Beijing last October, China signed up to jointly develop Galileo with the EU, but China is mainly interested in the military use of the system, Tsang writes in the Far Eastern Economic Review.

China wants Galileo alternative to US GPS
"China's keen interest in the EU's Galileo radio satellite project is mainly driven by the prospect of acquiring an alternative to the American-operated Global Positioning System (GPS) for its version of the US Joint Direct Attack Munitions [JDAM]," said Tsang. The US' JDAM is a GPS-guided "smart bomb" that can be produced inexpensively and, unlike conventional missiles, is able to evade missile defense systems.

Indeed, the EU and US could become rivals over the Chinese arms market, says David Shambaugh, director of the China policy program in the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington. Lifting the EU arms embargo, Shambaugh warns in the Financial Times, might put pressure on the US administration to lift its own restrictions, opening up the lucrative Chinese market to the US weapons manufacturers.

"No doubt the American defense industry would like to make sales if permitted, and if EU companies begin to do so, then the domestic pressure may grow to relax the US sanctions to permit competition," he writes.

Alarmism aside, lifting the embargo would probably be more "symbolic than of substance", an EU Council official cautions. "As the EU wants China to become a 'strategic partner'," the official said, "China's ambitions to get off the list of countries subject to EU weapons embargoes is understandable."

Apart from China, the EU imposed weapons embargoes on Sudan, Zimbabwe and Myanmar.

Beijing's policy makers have long insisted that the embargo is a "relict of the Cold War", standing in the way of Brussels' goal to establish a "strategic partnership" with Beijing, envisioned in the EU's recently published security strategy paper, titled "A Secure Europe in a Better World", carrying Javier Solana's signature. Although the paper calls for a "strategic partnership" with China in the context of the EU's CFSP, it provides no details on the how and what of EU-China security cooperation.

While many analysts believe that the envisioned security partnership is very unlikely to go beyond the paper tiger stage any time soon, France for its part didn't wait for Brussels bureaucrats to walk the talk.

Without consulting EU member states, Paris decided to stage naval military exercises with China only a few days before Taiwan's presidential elections on March 20. The joint military drills took place off Qingdao, about 800 miles from Taiwan's northernmost point, and led to strong criticism from Taiwan's president Chen Shui-bian, who accused France of "willing to be used" by China.

Washington, of course, believes that France has a hidden agenda when pushing to lift the EU weapons embargo. Paris, the US government claims, is engaged in backdoor geopolitics seeking to secure Chinese support for its opposition against US unilateralism. Beijing and Paris announcing their support for the concept of a "multipolar world" confirmed this suspicion to a US administration that has made France-bashing a way of life, ever since Paris opposed the US invasion of Iraq.

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao will visit Brussels in May and more Chinese inquiries on the weapons embargo are in the offing, EU observers say.

Additional Chinese patience, however, might be required, given that EU leaders are, at least for the time being, unlikely to help China threaten Taiwan, which it calls a breakaway province, with European weaponry. Principles over business in Brussels, until further notice.

Dr Axel Berkofsky is a research fellow and policy analyst at the Brussels-based European Institute for Asian Studies (EIAS) where he is dealing with EU-Asia/EU-Japan Relations. He also teaches EU-Asia relations/East Asian and Japanese security at European universities and think tanks.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)