SPEAKING
FREELY Transatlantic dream or joke in
Asia By Emanuele Scimia
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
In his farewell
address to Europe, outgoing Chinese Premier Wen
Jiabao left his mark. Speaking to the European top
brasses on September 20, in a closed-door summit
in Brussels, Wen once again called on the European
Union (EU) to lift its ban on arms sales to China.
The EU has been preventing its state members
from exporting weapons and
arms technology to Beijing since the aftermath of
the 1989 Tiananmen Square bloodbath, when then
Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping authorized
the crackdown on pro-democracy and anti-corruption
protesters.
The European Union's high
representative for foreign affairs, Catherine
Ashton, has always expressed her opposition to the
EU arms embargo, which she considers as a major
obstacle to the Brussels' bid to expand security
cooperation with China. Words which are part of a
pantomime, as the arms ban is in reality being
circumvented. Only in 2010, indeed, several EU
countries sold Beijing defense equipment worth
US$282 million, the EUobserver reported on
September 20.
While Baroness Ashton dreams
of developing EU-China strategic ties, the United
States and Japan are intent on sabotaging any
potential step in that direction. Washington and
Tokyo are pressing Brussels so that it keeps the
arms embargo on the Middle Kingdom going. In
addition, over the past months US President Barack
Obama's administration has been urging the EU to
join in a common effort towards the Asia-Pacific.
The US decision to increase its political,
economic and military posture has prompted a
debate about the possible Europe's comeback in
that region. Some European foreign affairs pundits
expressly advocate the launch of a transatlantic
partnership in the Pacific Rim.
In this
regard, Brussels and Washington released a joint
statement on July 12 - on the fringe of the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
Regional Forum (ARF) - calling for a more
stringent coordination in Asia on diplomatic,
security and trade matters.
Such a
prospect was recommended a month earlier in a
study by the European Institute for Security
Studies (EUISS). After interviewing about hundred
European and American foreign policy experts, the
EUISS reached a conclusion that the potential for
cooperation between the US and the EU in the
Asian-Pacific region should hinge on a sort of
division of labor, whereby Washington "could lead
on transparency on military build-up and mediation
in nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation",
while Brussels "could offer leadership in
promoting human rights and engaging regional
actors on global governance issues".
The
EU leadership is well aware that the global
balance of power is shifting to Asia and that, for
instance, European commercial interests could be
damaged by a permanent crisis between China and
Japan. Supporters of the "Look-East" policy in
Europe have criticized Brussels' silence on the
Sino-Japanese row over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islets,
much as its inability to maintain a minimum of
visibility in the region.
Visibility or no
visibility, the impression is that there is no
room for the European Union in Asia-Pacific, at
least at the moment. This is due to both the
current distribution of power there and the
divisive nature of European foreign action. EU
state members still pursue a go-alone strategy in
Asia, and Germany's drive toward China (as well as
countries like Vietnam) epitomizes that trend.
When German Chancellor Angela Merkel
visited China in August, she stressed that
"negotiations" and not "confrontation" should
settle trade disputes between EU countries and the
Chinese Red Dragon. However, Merkel's stance
diverges quite a lot from that of the EU
Commission and the United States, which are both
challenging Beijing's dumping and protectionist
policies. It is worth noting that earlier in
September the EU Commission opened an
investigation into alleged dumping of solar panels
by Chinese manufacturers, while the US government
filed a case at the World Trade Organization (WTO)
against China's auto and auto-parts subsidies.
With this backdrop, it is unclear how the
fractious European Union might have a say on the
inter-Korean nuclear standoff, the maritime
borders disputes in the East and South China Sea
or China-Taiwan's cross-Strait relations. The EU
has tried in vain to carve out a more prominent
role in Asia over the past years. In July 2011,
for example, EU representatives met with leaders
of an umbrella group of Burmese ethnic parties in
Thailand. Back then, the United Nationalities
Federation Council (UNFC) urged the EU to broker a
political solution to the long-standing conflict
between Myanmar's central government and Burmese
armed ethnic groups, but the mediation came to
nothing.
There are also worrying signals
that the EU common foreign policy is crumbling
even in its neighborhood, as the "Safarov Affair"
has recently demonstrated. Ramil Safarov is an
Azerbaijani soldier who was sentenced to life
imprisonment in 2006 by a Hungarian court for
killing in 2004 an Armenian colleague, Gurgen
Margaryan, during a North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) training program in Budapest.
The Hungarian government extradited
Safarov to Azerbaijan on August 31 and immediately
afterwards the Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev
pardoned him. The move drew a strong condemnation
from the EU, which a few days earlier had
earmarked US$25 million for reforming Baku's
justice and migration systems.
The Safarov
Affair has shown up the limits of the European
Neighborhood Policy when it comes to dealing with
oil-rich countries like Azerbaijan, whose
authoritarian regime is tolerated in Brussels for
its strategic importance as an alternative source
of energy to Russia - with its Neighborhood
Policy, the EU tries to extend political, economic
and security relations with neighboring countries
to the east and south.
At a time when many
European states are struggling to keep their
public accounts in check, it would appear that the
EU had better gain a leading regional dimension,
focussing primarily on Africa, the Middle East and
the Caucasus, rather than embarking on a
groundless Asian adventure.
Europe risks
miscalculation on the idea of exporting the
transatlantic scheme to the East Asia with the
purpose of revitalizing the original one along the
Atlantic Ocean. From this point of view, strategic
overstretching would be the first and foremost
danger.
If anything, there is a widespread
conviction across Europe that the EU's legitimate
ambitions to deepens its relationships with
fast-growing East Asian nations should be driven
by an effective common trade policy. European
countries hold vast economic interests in the
Asian-Pacific region and the resulting
interconnection could be a vector of EU-China
political engagement. And this whether or not
Brussels will openly start exporting arms to
Beijing.
Emanuele Scimia is a
journalist and geopolitical analyst based in
Rome.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click here
if you are interested in contributing.
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