China's new role in the making of
Europe By David Gosset
The redistribution of global power
modifies relations between great powers and
invites them to reconsider their diplomatic
priorities. While in the aftermath of World War II
the future of Europe was proactively shaped by the
United States, or more precisely, by a group of
American "Wise Men", China is now in a position to
have an unprecedented impact on the European
integration. As Beijing fully develops its immense
potential and becomes the world's biggest economy
in the coming decade, its capacity to influence
will certainly grow.
In this rapidly
changing context, the leaders of the European
Union and China should rethink the significance of
trans-Eurasian links and open a new chapter in the
relations between two of the world's most ancient
civilizations. Whether the degree as well as
the means of any Chinese
action in Europe is compatible with the internal
constraints of the world's largest developing
country - and congenial with traditional Chinese
principles of foreign policy - will have to be
seriously discussed by Beijing's policymakers.
In parallel, the realization and just
evaluation of China's new ability to influence
will occupy increasingly more space in European
public debates and stand as an issue of political
campaigns.
With a mutual trade in goods
and services which already reached 432 billion
euros (US$548.6 billion) in 2010, the European
Union and China form the second-largest economic
cooperation in the world. This level of economic
interdependence has been achieved in a very short
period of time despite a Great Wall of mistrust
separating two societies which have been evolving
largely independently for millennia. As the speed
of quantitative change exceeds the pace of
qualitative transformation, time will certainly be
needed to reduce the gap between trade and trust.
Obviously, it is the Chinese people's
belief in the Chinese renaissance which conditions
its success, and, similarly, the Europeans' faith
in the renewal of Europe will determine its
outcome. However, while self-confidence remains
the most powerful internal force, mutual
reassurance has the advantage to strengthen it,
and it is in that perspective that both sides
should not overlook what mutual trust can bring to
the two poles of civilization and, beyond, to the
world.
The Chinese renaissance should be
seen by Europe as a source of synergies. At the
operational level, it is time for the European
policymakers to build mechanisms to facilitate
Chinese investment within the European Union -
China will invest abroad more than $1 trillion by
2020 - to grant China Market Economy Status -
which will be, in any case, accorded to Beijing
under the World Trade Organization rules from
December 11 2016 - to lift an inopportune and
counterproductive arms embargo, to systematically
consult China on security issues - the Middle
East, nuclear proliferation - and to implement
ambitious Sino-European cooperation in third
countries - from Africa to Central Asia.
For decades, the West questioned the
Chinese political system and its capacity to bring
socio-economic progress to the Chinese people,
but, in a striking reversal, while the 2008
financial crisis exposed Western hubris, Chinese
analysts are now trying to assess the nature and
the significance of the Occupy Wall Street or the
Indignants protests. In 2011, Chinese media,
academia and think-tanks have been especially
expressing serious concerns about the viability of
the European project and the effectiveness of the
EU's leadership.
Mutual trust will develop
as Europe makes the effort to better understand
the specifics of China's governance and as China
appreciates the complexity of the interactions
between the European Union and its 27 members. The
history of the European construction has been a
series of collective decisions taken in the face
of crises, and, when immediately after World War
II Western Europe had to find the path toward
reconciliation and to cope with the Cold War's
challenges, it entered the first moment of its
political integration.
By an agreement on
two fundamental treaties - the Paris and Rome
treaties - which led to the creation of the
European Community, France, West Germany, Italy
and the Benelux began a political experiment
without any precedent: the peaceful integration of
independent and sovereign nation-states.
In this initial step of the European
integration where, Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman,
Konrad Adenauer, Paul-Henri Spaak or Alcide De
Gasperi, the founding fathers of Europe,
demonstrated remarkable vision and courage, the US
was the main external support of the European
renewal. At a time of devastation, despair and
emptiness, "Stunde null" - Zero hour - as
the Germans call it, the Marshall Plan contributed
to Europe's economic recovery and encouraged a
better coordination among European policies - the
Organization for European Economic Cooperation,
predecessor of the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) was created in
1948 to manage the Marshall Plan.
At the
birth of the European Community, the young
People's Republic of China was busy with its First
Five-Year Plan (1953-1957) and the Korean War
(1950-1953) illustrated the conflictual relations
between the West and Maoist China.
The
collapse of the Soviet Union marked the second
crisis which forced the redesign of modern Europe.
The 1992 Maastricht Treaty which established the
European Union and provided the legal framework
for the monetary union was Western Europe's answer
to the changes in Moscow and to the German
reunification.
French president Francois
Mitterrand conditioned his acceptation of one new
Germany to the German adoption of the euro. At
this crucial point of Europe's history the role
played by the German chancellor Helmut Kohl has
been decisive, and his capacity to put European
interest above what was perceived by a large
segment of the German population as their national
interest enough to deserve the extraordinary title
of Honorary Citizen of Europe - only bestowed
before by the European heads of state to Monnet.
If it undermined Soviet statesman Mikhail
Gorbachev's grand strategy of the "Common European
Home" which had, among others, Mitterrand's
blessing, Washington did not oppose the creation
of the European Union. However, long before the
existence of the euro, the Anglo-Saxon narrative
on the impossibility to implement this major
political decision was already very common, for
some could not even contemplate the idea of this
truly post-national enterprise, the transfer to a
supranational institution of one of the main
pillars of the modern state, its currency.
Since January 1 2002, the euro has been
adopted by 17 members of the EU, it is the second
largest reserve currency in the world as well as
the second most traded. Continental Europe has
shaped a global system in which genuine financial
multipolarity has become a reality.
At the
creation of the European Union, one decade after
Deng Xiaoping's "reform and opening-up" was forced
to handle the Tiananmen protests and their
consequences, the People's Republic of China was
not yet in a position to affect the course of
history in the far west of the Eurasian continent.
With the euro debt crisis, Europe is
arguably at its third main turning point since the
end of World War II. However, as it did previously
confronting the most serious challenges, the
continent will not de-Europeanize but, on the
contrary, deepen its union by operating more
transfer of sovereignty to its supranational
authorities in the field of budgetary and fiscal
policies. In that sense, for the European
federalists the euro crisis is an opportunity and
Brussels will subordinate the discussions on the
enlargement to the existential imperatives of a
more cohesive first circle of the European Union,
the euro zone.
At least two new elements
characterize the current stage of the European
construction, internally, the relative weight of
Germany - both an effect of the reunification and
of the positive impact of the euro on the German
economy - externally, the China factor. If the
Chinese leadership resolutely opts for a strategic
and targeted policy to support the present and
future role of the euro in the world, if it
encourages the Chinese companies to invest and to
create jobs within the EU - as a company like
Huawei is already doing - it will become a
significant contributor to the success of the
European project.
The Chinese defense of
the euro is also an instrument to consolidate
multipolarity and to pave the way to the
internationalization of the renminbi (yuan), in
other words, to enter a world where the US dollar
will have lost its absolute pre-eminence. In March
2010 on the occasion of a speech delivered at the
Shanghai's Lujiazui International Finance Research
Center on "The role of the EU and China in the
world's financial architecture of the 21st
century" the former president of the EU Commission
Romano Prodi made the following remarks: "When we
started with the idea of the euro, the top Chinese
leaders showed great interest, when I asked why
the creation of the euro was so important for
China while mentioning that the issue was not only
about economics but also about politics, the then
Chinese president Jiang Zemin said: "I want to
live in a multipolar world."
In this new
historical phase, the Sino-European relations are
not only mutually beneficial but they have become
mutually transformational. While an explicit and
tangible Chinese support to the European
integration would help Europe to defeat its fear
of the globalization, Europe's opening to the
Chinese renaissance would weaken Beijing's
Sino-centric reflexes. Sino-European dialogue and
solidarity can not completely eliminate
nationalism and populism from the public debates
but they can keep them at a relatively benign
level.
Germany's central position within
Europe and the new role of Beijing in European
affairs reinforce each other. In 2010 Berlin and
Beijing issued a joint communique on
"comprehensively promoting the strategic
partnership between China and Germany" officially
elevating their relations to a strategic level.
Already 5% of German exports go to the Chinese
market and while in 2010 the Sino-German trade
reached 130 billion euros (increasing by 35% from
a year earlier and representing 30% of the
EU-China total trade) it will be over 200 billion
euros within the next five years.
In an
euroskeptic posture, British Prime Minister David
Cameron has already expressed that the United
Kingdom will not back the efforts of EU countries
which aim to transfer more power to Brussels, and
consequently, while the euro zone will evolve
toward more integration, the distance between
London and the EU's inner circle will increase. In
these conditions, the "special relationship"
between the US and the UK which has been in the
past a limiting factor in the Sino-European
synergy will lose, to a certain extent, its
capacity to affect the relations between the EU
and China.
In the context of the Cold War,
the American assistance to Western Europe was also
an instrument to contain the Soviet Union and the
spread of what was perceived as an antagonistic
ideology, in the 21st century, the role of China
as a catalyst for European integration should not
be seen as a way to contain the US, but as a
long-term strategic action to create the
conditions for equilibrium in a multipolar and
globalized world system.
In that sense,
China's readiness to contribute to the
consolidation of the European construction could
be the most appropriate answer to the US
"return-to-Asia" whose intentions are not,
according to Washington, the containment of any
one but only a renewed engagement in a region of
the highest significance.
David
Gosset is director of the Academia Sinica
Europaea at China Europe International Business
School (CEIBS), Shanghai, Beijing & Accra, and
founder of the Euro-China Forum.
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