Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger is widely attributed in the 1970s to have said “who do I call if I want to speak with Europe?” This now famous telephone number question has been repeated often to highlight the lack of a unified foreign policy across the European continent.
The implication of the telephone question is that there could be significant potential benefits for other foreign powers of having a single interlocutor in the EU with whom to speak. However, an increasingly common criticism in Europe of China is the opposite: Namely, that China favors a splintered EU so that it could “divide and rule” across the continent.
This is one reason the latest annual EU-China summit — a process which has been in place now for about a quarter of century — would be more important than most. There is an undeniable chill in relations that could see the two sides fail to even issue a joint statement following their summit yesterday and today.
The context is the attempts by European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen and other top EU officials, such as EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell, to enforce a common, bloc-wide stance regarding China. Yet despite these greater attempts at more unity, Brussels is struggling to find common ground on Beijing across its 27 member states.
Worse still, top EU officials have also become increasingly concerned in recent years about whether the nature of China’s external interventions in Europe represent a “divide and rule” strategy to undermine the continent’s collective interests. The context for this is that Europe is becoming an increasingly important foreign policy focal point for Beijing, which had generally enjoyed growing influence across much of the continent until the COVID-19 pandemic.
This ranges from eastern and central Europe, where China regularly holds “16+1” summits aimed at intensifying and expanding cooperation in the fields of investment, transport, finance, science, education and culture, as well as through key western European states such as Italy, which was the first and only G7 country to initially endorse the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Following the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Brussels has sought to bring the bloc together around a stronger policy toward China. Von der Leyen and Borrell have led on this, even though the European Commission president’s role does not include a formal foreign policy role.
Most recently, Von der Leyen and Borrell have made hard-hitting speeches. Take Von der Leyen’s example, where she said this month that “we must recognize that there is an explicit element of rivalry in our relationship. We must also recognize that China’s views on the global security architecture are not by default aligned with ours.”
The direction of EU policy on China is clearly moving in a more hawkish direction. Yet a central challenge for Von der Leyen and Borrell are the splits on Beijing within the bloc.
It is too simplistic to refer to an East-West dichotomy in the continent, in part because Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban favors strong ties with China. Nonetheless, there are clear differences between hawkish eastern European nations such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Lithuania versus western counterparts such as France, Spain and Germany, which conduct much more business with China.
Perceptions of a divided Europe have also been publicly highlighted by several Chinese officials, including EU Ambassador Fu Cong (傅聰), who has cast doubts about whether member states are behind the agenda of Borrell and Von der Leyen. Fu recently said that “Europe has not formulated a coherent policy toward China” and that it felt like “people quarrelling with each other.”
The positions of western European nations like Germany and France are particularly problematic for Brussels, given that both want to continue engaging extensively and economically with China. The longstanding and deep business ties that Berlin has with Beijing are widely documented, so it is no surprise that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is more equivocal than Von der Leyen and Borrell.
However, what has surprised many is the relatively soft stance that French President Emmanuel Macron has taken, including during a joint visit this year to Beijing with Von der Leyen. Remarkably, the French president took a business delegation of about 50 people — approximately four times larger than the group which accompanied Scholz on his separate trip last year.
Perhaps most surprising of all was that Macron moved significantly away from prior positions on Taiwan. Whereas Von der Leyen asserted on the trip that “stability in the Taiwan Strait is of paramount importance” and that the “threat of use of force to change the status quo is unacceptable,” Macron used the same occasion to describe Taiwan as a “crisis that is not ours” and that Europeans should stay out of and not be “America’s followers.”
Taken together, this highlights the challenging backdrop for this week’s bilateral summit. It is not just that — overall — EU relations are frozen, but that they could yet go from bad to worse next year.
Andrew Hammond is a London School of Economics IDEAS research institute associate.
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