ABSTRACT
In the context of the increasing global influence of China, this chapter analyses the conditions under which differentiation strengthens or weakens the EU’s potential resilience to Chinese influence not only in the EU, but also in EU’s associated states. The chapter first identifies how the EU’s institutional vulnerabilities can be instrumentalised by China to increase centrifugal forces and the risks of fragmentation, as well as to erode democracy, with a particular focus on a form of Chinese regionalism that unfolds without proper democratic controls. The second part of the chapter analyses the EU’s institutional responses in three policy areas displaying variation in the levels of differentiation and reflecting the diversity of the scope of influence of China in the EU: commercial policy (foreign direct investments), pre-accession policy (pre-accession assistance), and higher education (academic freedom). It is argued that the EU’s resilience increases with external differentiation, and that resilience increases in the absence of internal differentiation, as will be shown in the case of foreign direct investment (FDI). EU resilience increases when the condition of legal stringency (the formal and substantive ambition of a legal instrument) is met. The extreme case of academic freedom shows that a minimal level of integration is required to ensure EU’s resilience.
