Roberto Peruzzi - 05/03/2012

     Relations between the People’s Republic and the European Union began amid widespread forecasts by western observers that China would go through the same process as the former USSR and fall apart. An embargo on supplying munitions in 1989, and scepticism about China’s economic prospects were the chief manifestations – though France and Great Britain at once broke the EU embargo (France as early as 1989), while Germany simultaneously set about building up a solid relationship with the Chinese People’s Republic. Although a code of behaviour on the embargo was introduced in 1998, it would continue to be a formality and not a reality: its recommendations could be so loosely interpreted, exceptions were built into it, nor was it binding on individual countries. Nonetheless it was one of the factors that dogged relations with the People’s Republic.
     The second phase of relations stemmed from 1995 when the European Commission presented its first policy document: all expectation that the regime would collapse was abandoned, replaced by the generic target of improving the quality of relations. A series of strategy documents from the Commission (1998, 2001, 2003, 2006) marked the success of this tighter bond and its great strategic value. From a bid for more extensive economic relations, there now transpired the possibility of a “strategic partnership”, to use the terminology employed. The weakness of Europe’s initiative was that no trace of any such “qualitative” upturn would be seen in member countries’ foreign policy debates or in the European Parliament.
     The nuances may have been clear to Europeans, but less so to the non-European observer. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Chinese diplomacy was in search of a counterpoise to US unilateralism and took the Commission statements as a serious compendium of European intent. From their traditional preference for bilateral relations with individual countries, they accordingly swung over to enhanced political relations with the community institutions. Publication of the document China’s EU Policy Paper in 2003 encapsulated this new course and the store China now set by relations with the EU. Significantly, it was the first strategy document published by the Chinese government on relations with anybody outside the USA.
     Few Europeans seem to have grasped the importance of China’s diplomatic step, but it did not escape the American diplomats and analysts, who began to look askance at what EU documents called a “strategic relationship” designed to “contain unilateral-style initiatives” in the international system – a strategic “marriage”, as one authoritative American analyst called it in 2007. The crowning point in this game of “Chinese” mirrors came in 2006 when Italian premier Prodi visited China. Prodi’s European standing misled the Chinese government into thinking his readiness to discuss the embargo issue and Europe’s failure to accord China the status of a market economy spoke of some commitment on the part of the EU to reappraise the Chinese viewpoint. From that time until 2008 China became increasingly disillusioned with the real scope for EU relations.
     They detected a worsening view of the PRC among European public opinion (all the research at the time pointed to this, though without any convincing explanation) and greater rigidity about negotiations. 2008 stands as the nadir of relations that had been in the making for a decade. Cooperation over the biggest Sino-European project, Galileo, came to an end; the European Parliament condemned repression in Tibet; there was a threat to boycott the Olympics. Commission President Barroso’s duplicity over these issues added exasperation to Chinese diplomatic disappointment. In September the escalating US finance crisis radically altered the international context: although the PRC buried the hatchet of previous months and renewed formally friendly relations with the European institutions (which still continue today), in actual fact Chinese diplomacy reverted to its traditional preference for bilateral relations with Great Britain, France and Germany.
     A privileged relationship with this last came to outweigh the rest: it was reciprocated and in no great time the PRC became Germany’s prime commercial partner. As crisis deepened in 2010, the political and economic clout of the EU dwindled within international finance, leading many Chinese analysts to write off the European project as a failure. Seeing the emergence of German hegemony in the EU confirmed the Chinese government in its preference for strong relations with Berlin, and dispelled any lingering illusions that enhancing relations with Brussels might pay off.

Roberto Peruzzi
(Università di Bologna)