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EU dealing with conflict in Europe with rival China on the mind

EU dealing with conflict in Europe with rival China on the mind

Source:Pei-Yin Hsieh

The war in Ukraine is changing Europe as the EU moves from a monetary union to a military one in a bid to play a leading role in shaping a new global order. “Economic dependency”, a double-edged sword, turns into a geopolitical weapon. CommonWealth journalists reported on the ground in Brussels.

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EU dealing with conflict in Europe with rival China on the mind

By Shu-ren Koo, Silva Shih, Constance Chang, Linden Chen
From CommonWealth Magazine (vol. 746 )

On the last leg of our journey, at the hub of the NATO military alliance between Europe and the United States in the Belgian capital of Brussels, we witnessed the changes in the thinking of the European Union (EU).

“Europe must learn to speak the language of power,” said European Commission High Representative Joseph Borrell in announcing A Strategic Compass for Security and Defense at a press conference after the EU Summit in Brussels in late March.

Awakening: Europe needs military integration

The Strategic Compass is the first joint defense policy in the history of the European Union (EU). It also symbolizes a major shift of the 27-nation body from an economic community to a major geopolitical player.

The Strategic Compass, slated to be implemented by 2025, covers four main topics: a 5,000-strong rapid reaction force, defense budget increases, regular joint military exercises, and a mutual obligation among the member states to defend each other against an aggressor. 

People are aware that the EU is not just building up its military capability because of the war between Russian and Ukraine, and the ensuing refugee crisis. The Strategic Compass comes at a time when the EU, Russia, the United States, and China strive to take the lead in building a new world order.

“The entire world is moving from a unipolar to a multipolar order, the United States, China, Europe, Russia, as well as India and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are pressuring each other. They all want to be part of this process of securing positions in the new world order,” says Tu, president and CEO of Synnex Technology International Corporation, the world’s second largest ITC and semiconductor distributor.

Ukraine is a test case, telling the world that an armed conflict could begin if amid this process the safety and survival of one player is neglected.

Gradually, starting with the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president to Great Britain leaving the EU, the U.S.-China trade war, and all along to the coronavirus pandemic, a new world order has emerged in which great powers struggle for supremacy.

(Source: Pei-Yin Hsieh)

“This is a wakeup call for Europe,” is the tenor of what officials and scholars have been telling us in interviews and conversations in Poland, Germany, and Belgium, which is home to EU institutions and NATO headquarters.

“The most important change, I think, is a change of mindset,” notes Professor Sven Biscop, director of the Institute for International Relations in Brussels, a think-tank associated with the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The most important change is that the EU has finally taken the first step toward a defense union as part of its objective to achieve strategic autonomy.

Su Hung-dah, dean of the College of Social Sciences at National Taiwan University, who specializes in EU integration, points out that military integration has long been a touchy issue in the EU, and therefore failed to make headway. However, with the war between Russia and Ukraine unfolding, countries that had misgivings about a stronger military role of the EU such as Germany have come to support an independent European defense force.

French President Emmanuel Macron has been the strongest advocate of a more autonomous European defense. And a series of recent events, starting with Trump’s threat to leave NATO, his failure to consult with European allies on pandemic prevention, and the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, to the Australian decision to switch a 56 billion Euro submarine order with France to the United States, have only strengthened Macron’s conviction that the EU must pursue more independent diplomatic and defense strategies.

A Macron victory in the second round of the French presidential election in late April would be a shot in the arm for European strategic autonomy and a defense and military union.

Yet Biscop cautions that the Strategic Compass lacks implementation details. There is no consensus within the EU such as what coordination with NATO should look like, or how the joint EU force would be composed and operated.

As Europe’s main security guarantor, the United States is also quite happy that the EU is ready to shoulder a greater share of defense responsibilities.

During a visit to Poland in late March, U.S. President Joe Biden not only toured a Ukrainian refugee camp and delivered a speech but also inspected U.S. troops stationed in Poland to underline the resolve of the United States and Europe to jointly defend NATO allies against Russia.

“After the war in Ukraine began, the United States and Europe united because of the common threat posed by Russia,” said Marcin Jerzewski, an analyst with the Taipei Office of the Prague-based European Values Center for Security Policy. Due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the relationship between the U.S. and Europe, which had gone cold during the Trump era, has been rekindled.

Under NATO rules, the member countries are obliged to spend more than 2% of their GDP on national defense. However, only ten of the 30 members, including the United States, are meeting that target. Most NATO members maintain only small military forces, whereas the U.S. has 66,000 troops – more than the total number of soldiers of 19 NATO members combined – stationed in Europe.

On the other hand, Washington is forced to devote more military resources to the Indo-Pacific region to contain China. Therefore, Washington wants Europe to shoulder greater responsibility for its own defense.

"The Americans still play a leading role (in NATO). But you still feel their main priority is Asia, is China. This (war) is more of a distraction for them,” explains Biscop.

Ashley Townshend, director of Foreign Policy and Defence at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, believes that “To safeguard the United States’ credibility and strategic position in the Indo-Pacific, the Biden team must continue to act with restraint over Ukraine.” This restraint serves to win the trust of its Asian friends and demonstrates that Washington does not pay less attention to the Indo-Pacific region because of the war in Ukraine.

Challenge: The China factor

While reporting in Europe revolved around the war in Ukraine, the “China factor” crept into conversations virtually throughout our trip.

The EU updated its approach toward China in 2019. While China had previously been regarded as a strategic partner, the EU now defined it as a “systemic rival”.

At the EU-China virtual summit in early April, the two sides found virtually no common ground on the war in Ukraine. “If there is anything certain from the summit, systemic rivalry is the new reality,” said Janka Oertel, director of the Asia Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations, of the qualitative change in the bilateral relationship.

The shift in Europe-China relations poses a formidable challenge for the EU because it has much stronger economic links with China than with Russia.

A look at the trade figures of the U.S., Europe, China, and Russia shows that the EU, the U.S., and China are each other’s largest or second-largest trade partners. In contrast, their bilateral trade with Russia centers on energy resources.

Companies around the globe were already hard hit when the U.S.-China trade war disrupted supply chains. The Russia-Ukraine war has triggered a European energy crisis, causing commodity prices to go through the roof.

China is the EU’s second-largest trade partner and export market. Car manufacturers are particularly dependent on the Chinese market, and the same goes for the jobs of European workers. Should China cause a military conflict in the Indo-Pacific region, the economic repercussions could cause an unemployment wave in Europe.

*Risk: Stability tool turns into weapon

“I think everybody was surprised, also in Europe, with the strong sanctions package,” Biscop said, "because this is really hurting our own economy as well.” This reflects the fact that economic strength is being used as a tool for advancing strategic interests.

The Russia-Ukraine war constitutes the first time that economic sanctions on such a scale have been implemented. For Moscow, the EU’s dependence on Russian oil and gas imports provides the strongest backup in this geopolitical competition. It means that “mutual economic dependence”, which once served as a world peace stabilizer, has now become a weapon in the competition for supremacy in the new world order.

Ray Dalio, founder of the world’s largest hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, said on Twitter in April, “I believe that the Russia-Ukraine war is just the first battle in a long war for control of the world order.”

He believes that the outcome of this battle will tell us how powerful the sides are, whether the American-led sanctions are effective, and how other nations will position themselves on global issues in the future.


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Translated by  Susanne Ganz
Uploaded by Ian Huang

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