FT:Global Insight: China sees EU as mere pawn

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Global Insight: China sees EU as mere pawn
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bece5f40-2f5a-11de-a8f6-00144feabdc0,s01=1.html

By Tony Barber in Brussels  Published: April 22 2009 17:40 | Last updated: April 22 2009 19:49

Viewed from Brussels, China’s importance to the world’s security and economic systems has never been greater. Viewed from Beijing, the European Union’s importance has rarely been smaller.

This imbalance will be on display in Prague on May 20, when EU and Chinese leaders get together for a summit. The meeting should have been held last December, but in an imperious gesture the Chinese cancelled it after Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, showed “disrespect” by arranging talks with the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader.

For the Europeans, it is something of a relief that the Chinese plan to show up in Prague. For the Chinese, it is something of an irrelevance that the summit is happening at all.

China once seemed to take the EU as an institution more seriously, largely because of its apparent potential as a counter-balance to US global hegemony.

But the world financial turmoil and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have dealt a staggering blow to the US image as an unchallenged colossus striding the world.

Moreover, the Europeans who enthusiastically embraced the notion of “balancing” the US – notably, France’s Jacques Chirac and Germany’s Gerhard Schröder – have left office and been replaced by more pro-US leaders. Meanwhile, the world economic crisis has catapulted China to even greater prominence in its own right.

Most importantly, the Chinese have figured out what Henry Kissinger, the 85-year-old US elder statesman, knew when he held office in the 1970s. Not only does the EU lack a single telephone number for foreign leaders to call when they want to speak to “Europe”, an awful lot of Europeans, including many in the political classes, do not want it to have one.

As the European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank puts it in a new report on EU-China relations: “China has learned to exploit the divisions among EU member-states.

“It treats its relationship with the EU as a game of chess, with 27 opponents crowding the other side of the table and squabbling about which piece to move.”

Much the same could be said, incidentally, of US and Russian attitudes to the EU. But in the final resort the US is Europe’s ally, whilst the Europeans are able to use the channel of Nato as well as the EU to conduct their relationship with Russia.

In China’s case, some policymakers in Brussels permitted themselves the hope, after an EU-China summit in Beijing in November 2007, that China would deal with the EU on a more equal footing. The summit had agreed to set up a “high-level mechanism” for the discussion of economic and trade issues, a structure designed to resemble the fairly successful framework used for cabinet-level US-Chinese negotiations.

Seventeen months later, European hopes of progress are disappearing. There have been disagreements over how often EU and Chinese officials should meet, and China has shown reluctance to bring its most senior policymakers to the table.

Why, indeed, should it? From the point of view of China, whose biggest trading partner is now the EU, the mammoth €169bn trade surplus that it notched up with the bloc last year suggests that there is no pressing need for change.

For the Europeans, however, matters stand differently. The EU often bleats that its economic policies were not responsible for the “global imbalances” that contributed to the world economic crisis. But its trade relationship with
China is about as unbalanced as one can imagine, and there is a lopsided quality to the political relationship, too.

The primary responsibility rests with France, Germany and the UK, the EU’s “Big Three”. Each cannot resist the temptation to cuddle up to Beijing in the hope it will be adopted as “China’s favourite European”.

This was painfully obvious during the spats with China over whether European leaders have the right to meet the Dalai Lama without Beijing screaming blue murder.

On every occasion when France, Germany and the UK had the opportunity to stick up for each other, they preferred to look the other way – “in effect, seeking to capitalise on each other’s misfortune”, as the think-tank report observes.

Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union, once said that “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them”.

These days, it is China selling the rope and a disunited Europe that is in danger of hanging.

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