In looking at the role of the European Union in the Taiwan issue I start with some rather basic and familiar premises.
The first of these is that the manner in which the dispute between China and Taiwan is ultimately resolved – that is, whether it is done cooperatively or coercively – and even the precise way in which a stalemate may be carried forward into the future, will be decisive in shaping China as a power and in determining the form of China’s participation in international strategic affairs. If one tends to believe that China’s posture towards Taiwan – involving non-negotiable demands and the threat of force – is indicative of an essential disruptiveness and assertiveness inherent to Chinese strategic behaviour and its long-term designs, pointing over time to a more coercive and demanding Chinese attitude towards the outside world, then the dispute carries considerable predictive significance.
If one takes the less stark view, namely that China’s obsession with Taiwan and all that this has given rise to – a military build-up and shrillness in its dealings with countries that presume to comment or act on Taiwanese affairs – are the exception that proves the rule of a more benign and cooperative China, then one still has to concede that this exception could under some circumstances infect all of China’s diplomacy very much for the worse.
And if one takes the middle view, as I suspect most analysts would, that China’s trajectory as a power is still undecided, then the dispute with Taiwan stands out as possibly the single most important factor that will swing things either way. Indeed, there are many scenarios which can be developed about the cross-Strait dispute. A cooperative resolution of the dispute leading to reunification or political accommodation of some description might, in time, contribute to the ebbing of uncouth nationalist impulses as the significant force in Chinese politics they are today. But they might just as well create a nationalist euphoria, and lead to the projection by China of an assertive self-confidence that would be badly received in Asia and elsewhere. A conflict to settle the issue, in all likelihood involving the United States, on the other hand, would certainly produce an enormous strategic and economic convulsion in which Asian countries would be asked to choose sides – and some European countries would be invited to participate militarily.
The second basic premise, then, is that the current and potential effects of the dispute between China and Taiwan are inescapable. The European Union cannot be isolated from or significantly insulated against them. It inevitably follows that the European Union must have not only a clear policy towards but also a strong role in the cross-Strait dispute. It must, as a matter of practical self-interest, try to encourage certain outcomes and to discourage others. As well as interests, matters of credibility are at stake here: a European Union that seems aloof from, or even oblivious to, a dispute of this magnitude will struggle to be taken seriously as an aspiring actor in global security affairs. Currently, the EU falls down here.
The EU’s stated policy towards the cross-Strait dispute is simple and transparent enough. It entails adherence to the ‘One China’ policy and, with that, full diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China. No member of the EU recognises Taiwan or is remotely in prospect of contemplating that possibility. Within these self-imposed constraints, however, economic ties with Taiwan are sought and encouraged by the EU, and private dialogues are conducted, episodically, with reasonably senior Taiwanese diplomats and military officials – sometimes in the teeth of public objections by China. The EU ‘insists’ – and that is an unusually robust expression in the lexicon of the EU’s dialogues with China – on a peaceful resolution of the cross-Strait dispute, and it stresses that any settlement that is reached following a dialogue between the two ought fully to take into account the wishes of the people of Taiwan.
As far as it goes, there is nothing particularly objectionable or unusual in this: it is an approach adopted by many countries around the world in their attempts to resolve calculations and instincts – some moving in opposite directions – about hard geopolitical realities, economic interests and political affinities in dealing with China and Taiwan. But the problem is that this really is as far as the European Union’s policy appears to go.
Official documents on foreign policy priorities and major bilateral relationships cannot always be completely comprehensive, and they cannot, and in some senses perhaps should not, capture fully all of the intricate calculations and debates that produce public statements. Even allowing for this, however, it is hard for anyone – and certainly not anyone in Beijing or Taipei – who picks up a major policy paper produced by European Union in recent years to conclude that the Taiwan issue has been a matter of serious concern to the EU or an important point of discussion in its otherwise impressively extensive and involved dialogue with China. The European Security Strategy paper published at the end of 2003, which was admirably outward-looking, clear-headed and straight-talking for an EU document, only mentions China twice in its fourteen pages: once in a fleeting reference to China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation, and again on the last page, where China is blandly, and without elaboration, identified as a ‘strategic partner’ of Europe. There is no mention of the dispute with Taiwan and its potential ramifications.
In the paper produced earlier in 2003, entitled ‘A maturing partnership – shared interest and challenges in EU-China relations’, the EU’s call for cross-Strait dialogue and a peaceful resolution of the dispute, its view that greater economic ties will help blunt political antagonisms, and the EU’s own interest in whatever non-political ties with Taiwan its adherence to a ‘One China’ policy will permit – all of these are rehearsed in just six lines of a rather dense 32-page document.
A reliance on written public statements does not, of course, allow for the possibility of a private, behind-the-scenes dialogue between China and the EU on the question of Taiwan. No doubt mention is made of it. And, on sensitive issues like this, there may be a definite advantage in preferring quiet communication over public hectoring. But if this is so, then the European Union has traditionally tended to speak not so much sotto voce as in a barely audible whisper. From Taipei’s perspective, of course, the silence has been deafening.
Why has the European Union’s policy taken this form, when so much is at stake? There isn’t, it seems to me, a single cause or a coherent strategy behind it. ‘Functional’ reasons have often been advanced: here, it is said that policy priorities are inevitably shaped by perceptions, and that perceptions, in a circular sort of way, are determined by the form of engagement one has with China. The European Union’s engagement of China has been primarily economic and so China is seen through an economic lens. This tendency, it is argued, has been reinforced by the lack on the part of EU members, and certainly by the institutions of EU, of material interests and strategic assets in China’s vicinity of the kind possessed by the US, leading to a lower sensitivity to potential security threats emanating from China. Allied to this, the European Union has only recently begun to conceive of itself as a major actor in international security and to put into place, including in the Constitutional Treaty, political mechanisms and bureaucratic instruments and military capabilities to help realise this ambition.
There is something to all this. But it is not entirely satisfactory as an explanation of the EU approach, or non-approach, to the Taiwan question. Deeper economic engagement of China, and of Taiwan itself for that matter, can just as well lead to a clearer understanding of the dispute between them, rather than to an ever-narrowing myopia. The European Union has member states that pride themselves on their global perspectives and contacts, rather than on their parochialism, and many have a long history of engagement with Asia in particular. The EU has two permanent members of the UN Security Council, with a third knocking on the door.
Clearly, then, political issues as much as ‘functional’ determinants have also to be looked at. Perhaps the most significant of these is the tendency of the European Union to acquiesce too much to Beijing’s view that a proper adherence to the ‘One China’ policy involves instant disqualification from meaningful comment on or intervention in the cross-Strait dispute, and that formal diplomatic recognition of China by the EU is in some way diminished or qualified by contact with Taiwan. Then there has been the inclination to see the China-Taiwan dispute as a matter that comes under the purview of the United States. There are various reasons for this: US strategic and military pre-eminence in Asia is seen as a fact of life, and makes Washington the natural arbiter; and some would with justification argue that the US has in any case not been particularly welcoming of European engagement in Asia in the past, except in times of crisis or when support of US policy objectives was needed. Be that as it may, it has to be admitted that definite advantages, not least in smoothing economic relations with China, have also been perceived in Europe in allowing the US to bare the diplomatic costs and military burdens of involvement in a seemingly intractable dispute. In this sense, Europe has been a knowing ‘free-rider’.
If one adds all of these things together – and the list is not exhaustive – one ends up with a bit of a muddle: some degree of self-interested political calculation by the EU arguing against intervention in the cross-Strait dispute; some sense that the scope for effective intervention is constricted by a lack of means; wide variations in the degree to which EU member states and domestic constituencies have been seized of the issues involved; and the absence of a common and rounded strategic assessment at the EU level that is reflected in policy. It is tempting to say that the EU’s posture on China and Taiwan is too detached and unfocused to do any good, but sufficiently so to do harm.
The diplomatic trauma over the proposed repeal of the EU arms embargo has been exceptionally revealing. What did it reveal? It showed that the analytical and policy vacuum concerning China and Taiwan in the EU was large enough to allow two countries (France and Germany) with strong views but narrow, national interest-driven perspectives to step in, set the agenda for the EU as a whole and imply to China that a major policy decision would be taken without first bothering with much prior, intramural consultation within the EU. It showed that once discussion did get under way, there was no consensus whatever on the issues at hand; nor, moreover, on what the issues were. European debates about the wisdom of lifting the embargo were dominated by questions surrounding human rights, and the implications for the bilateral relationships of member states with China as against the potential impact on transatlantic relations. Until a reasonably late stage, and probably not that much before China itself made it an issue by passing an anti-secession law in which China proclaimed its right to use force against the island, Taiwan did not feature in its own right as a central focal point of European discussions.
Some significant damage has been done by this process: the Taiwanese, for their part, have been led to conclude that at best there is ignorance of and at worst indifference to their concerns in Europe; China has probably with some relief concluded the same, and feels that it is only external pressure form Washington that has stayed Europe’s hand, rather than a spontaneous re-evaluation of policy or increased interest in Taiwan.
But the European position is not completely irrecoverable, and if nothing else the experience of the last year has been instructive. What might a more constructive European Union approach involve? Much of it boils down to matters of clarity and volume. As a starting point, the European Union would have to indicate that it was not prepared to participate in the fiction that the cross-Strait dispute is an entirely internal Chinese affair, and that outside interest and intervention in it is illegitimate. It should set out clearly that it regards the dispute as a matter affecting not only East Asian interests but the material security of the EU. It should avoid giving Beijing the impression that Europe is willing to soft-pedal on the issue in return for better commercial relations with China. It ought more loudly and forcefully to express its opposition to any use of military force by China in the settling of the dispute, and underline the point that Beijing should make no assumptions either way about the stance the EU would adopt in such an event. The cross-Strait dispute should explicitly be made the focus a bilateral security and military dialogue, or at least formally included in broader such discussions. Indeed, this might in addition to the tightening of export controls be made a condition of the lifting of the arms embargo. The EU should more actively encourage cross-Strait dialogue, rather than talk about its desirability in abstract terms, even perhaps to the extent of floating the idea that it might make a more effective mediator than the United States.
In its dialogue with Taiwan, the European Union should signal that it wants to expand contacts with this democracy, and that the pace and scope of these will be determined by the EU and not by Beijing. It should offer clear reassurances that Taiwan’s interests will not intentionally, or by default, be sacrificed in the pursuit of better relations with China. It should also, however, make clear to Taipei that there is no such thing as automatic and inevitable European support for Taiwan, and that unilateral provocative action will be looked on frostily. It is an approach, in other words, that resembles in part the policy of ‘strategic clarity’ that the Bush administration has been developing.
The EU should organise its diplomacy on this issue in consultation with the United States. And a more constructive European approach would be one in which American policy positions and statements would be publicly reinforced when and where the European Union thought this was valid and necessary. Too often in the past this has not been the case. But, in order to have credibility, not just with China and Taiwan, but within the EU itself, it would be important for European Union policy not to resemble something that might have been faxed-in from Washington. The effectiveness of a stronger European role in the cross-Strait dispute would flow precisely from the fact that the EU’s interventions were seen to be selective and based on independently derived assessments. That, in turn, means that the EU will have to plough resources into developing analytical capabilities to inform policy, and to put into place a structure for consultation through which a more rounded assessment of China and Taiwan would be developed internally.
On the whole, however, I arrive at a fairly pessimistic prognosis. It’s not hard to. It is true that we now have, by default, an official transatlantic dialogue on China, and that awareness inside the EU – both within and among member states – about the cross-Strait dispute is increasing. Even so, the hurdles to a more significant and effective role are immense. And some of them of are of the EU’s own recent making: China cannot really be expected to take seriously admonitions about the unhelpful effects of its defence build-up on cross-strait political dynamics from an EU that is proposing to take a politically and presentationally important step of repealing the arms embargo while leaving in place a quite permissive export control regime; Taiwan might for the same reason be entitled to doubt the extent to which Europe will uphold its interests or could credibly pose as a mediator. American confidence in a constructive European role will not develop easily, and it seems likely to be much more discouraging than before. The instinct to avoid antagonising China seems fairly well engrained in the EU’s psychology. And in a context of scarce resources and abundant distractions, I see more deferral and drift.
