INTERNATIONAL
China and Europe together could break the mould of global politics
Summer 2006
Europe is politically more akin to China than America can ever be, says Geneva-based sinologist Lanxin Xiang. He describes here the steps the two partners should take to become the poles in a new system of international relations
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The spectre of a neo-Yellow Peril haunts Europe, and the battle cry “Beware of the Chinese!” can be heard almost everywhere. China is supposed to be scheming to split the transatlantic relationship through its cunning diplomacy over the arms embargo issue, and is also suspected of deliberately setting out to destroy Europe’s traditional industries. Most remarkably of all, China is seen to be seeking to dominate in regions like Africa where Europe has long had a leading role. All in all, China is viewed as the source of global energy panic, environmental apocalypse, Europe’s high unemployment rates and, of course, avian flu or whatever pandemic may next appear.
Are these fears of China justified? Suspicions that stem from trade and jobs are a familiar tale in the history of economic competition, but the European policy elite’s fear of a China plot aimed at weakening transatlantic ties is something new. The US administration and the EU Commission have now begun regular transatlantic dialogues on China, something that would have been unthinkable even two years ago.
Fortunately, despite the EU’s constitutional debacle, European politicians and the mainstream policy elite have not yet begun to use China as a scapegoat. They are less persuaded by the logic of the neo-Yellow Peril argument than those think tank analysts who remain nostalgic for their cold war research projects of yesteryear. But what few policy analysts have yet to see is the historic moment when Europe and China will come together once more, for the third time.
Because China and Europe lacked either a political or cultural sense of equality, the first two encounters were neither balanced nor mutually beneficial. Pioneered by the Jesuit missionaries, the first encounter during the 16th and 17th centuries was characteristic of a unilateral passion on the part of Europe, which received a major shock when it discovered the superb quality of Chinese products and began to eagerly absorb the ideas, values and technologies that constituted China’s “resource portfolios”. These intellectual properties directly inspired such monumental events in Europe as France’s Enlightenment and the discovery of the laisser-faire economic doctrine, as well as the creation in 1848 of the “Usong” republic of the Swiss Confederation.
The Chinese side however remained completely indifferent to Europe’s history and achievements, and considered Europe a quintessentially barbarian land. Later Eurocentric historians often dismiss, too, the crucial role of China during this first encounter in compelling the Europeans to define “Europe” in terms of the East’s better governing model and stronger psychological state of mind. Perhaps one should add that, the historic significance of this encounter is only matched by the EU’s identity crisis of today in the wake of its constitutional debacle.
The second encounter in the latter years of the 19th century was also a one-sided affair. Ironically, the British were perceived to have “opened up” a China that was in fact one of the original “globalisers”. The means used by Britain certainly swept away every value the Chinese had held for centuries, and that brutal Western shock no doubt helped shape the history of modern China after the Opium War. This time, it was Europe that compelled China to define itself in the context of Western dominance. Today, as China’s catch-up with Europe is becoming a real possibility, Europe and China once again find themselves in a position of fathoming one other and redefining their relations. This time it remains to be seen whether either or both sides are intellectually prepared to achieve a genuine understanding of the other.
The conditions for genuinely mutual understanding are more conducive than in the past. China, for its part, is ready. In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao made a very important remark when quoting Gu Hongming, a colourful 19th century Confucian scholar who was also educated in the west. Premier Wen declared that “in this world, perhaps only the French could best understand China and Chinese civilisation, because the French possess the same almost unique spiritual quality as the Chinese – subtlety.” Significantly, this statement can also be said to sum-up China’s attitude towards the European Union as a whole.
Looked at in terms of China’s foreign policy logic, Mr. Wen‘s “spiritual subtlety” seems to have three dimensions. First, China rejects the traditional eurocentric view of human history, and in this has found intellectual allies in Europe. The eurocentric view assumes the inherent superiority of Greco-Roman civilisation and sustains the myth that Europe’s achievements derived from its cultural originality, technical innovation and free human spirit. Europe is thus chosen to be the only “unbound Prometheus” in human history, so the rest of the world, including China, has perforce been backward, despotic and barbaric.
Second, China hopes to work with the EU in dismantling the last bastion of the power theory of international relations that is so deeply embedded in the current system. The EU is the first multinational political entity that has officially moved beyond the age-old logic of balance of power and hegemony. Its “spiritual subtlety” also helps the EU move beyond a “good and evil” view of the world. This fits very well with the Chinese call for the “democratisation of international relations” (Guoji Guanxi Mingzhuhua). Now that international rules and institutions are becoming crucial in China’s foreign policy decision-making, multipolarity and multilateralism have begun to unify the entire Eurasian continent and are a result of the intense institution-building activity in the region that has been inspired by the EU’s success.
Third, the idea that the China-EU relationship can only flourish at the expenses of transatlantic relations is perceived by Beijing to be a “cold war mentality” (Lengzhan Siwei) that is as absurd as the idea that China will remain at the receiving end of western-dictated globalisation. So far as China is concerned, the political and ideological west is disappearing, and harmony among civilisations has instead been placed on the global agenda.
Is Europe ready, intellectually and psychologically, to understand China? The Eurocentric view of history has long been challenged by the Europeans themselves. The French have been among the first to contest the eurocentric historical perspective, calling for an “archeological approach” and this perspective is undoubtedly closer to the Confucian view of cyclical and organic history than to the linear and mechanical one of the west.
It has also become politically incorrect in Europe to uphold racism, and this is one of Europe’s few original contributions. The context of today’s East-West debate is therefore different, so no one can easily hark back to Victorian notions of the white man’s supremacy. The old Yellow Peril sentiment has in any case never run very deep in Europe, and throughout the history of Christian Europe, China never became Europe’s “the other” in the same way as Islam. Even during the worst years of Sino-European alienation, the Chinese were seen as harmless and convertible “pagans”, but never as infidels. And now that the last European cultural invention – the artificial East-West cold war based on an ideological divide – has disappeared, the European intellectual world is ready to accommodate China even if the foreign policy community is not. Those who have lived comfortably off transatlantic relations for so long seem to find it hard to discard the notion of a political west.
But Europe, unlike the United States, has become a genuinely secular yet humane society, whose governing principles are closer to Chinese political philosophy than many Europeans may care to believe. China’s traditional governing principle has been the promotion of familial and social harmony, and justice. European democracy works better than discontented youth seems to believe, and Europe’s political participation levels are much higher than in the United States. European-style social democracy tends to produce more harmonious societies than can laisser-faire America. Europe is more culturally tolerant and its racial relations are by no means as bad as last Autumn’s French ethnic riots would suggest.
In sum, the EU has become a shining model for China. Europe and China seem to be on the way towards understanding each other for the first time, and at a level that can hardly be matched either by transatlantic ties or by Sino-US relations. What remains to be seen is whether each individual EU member state will support the idea of multipolarity in international relations. The EU and China have become the key poles of the new international system, so they simply need to recognise the reality of multipolarity rather than putting their trust in what remains of the old unipolar system.
The challenge to the EU-China relationship is twofold. On the one hand, both need to understand one another’s real intentions; the only war that Europe ever fought against China was the Boxer War of 1900. The political tensions of more recent times were simply cultural and diplomatic misreadings. On the other hand, the two sides must start defining their much-acclaimed yet largely empty “strategic partnership”. For any tie to be called strategic it must consist of a long view and a number of durable elements. And because each political issue that arises is linked to the lasting features of the relationship, it would be short-sighted to consider the arms embargo issue from the tactical rather than the strategic level of EU-China relations.