ABSTRACT
Obviously, there is not one single European perspective on China’s rise. How can a European Union (EU) of 27 member-states and societies – not to mention the whole European Continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains – not have developed a large array of views about the emergence of China? Reflecting a diversity of interests and mindsets, this diversity of opinions is challenging because nearly impossible to know of and present comprehensively in an article, or even in a book. Moreover, these perspectives constitute a set of moving targets that depend heavily upon another moving target: China’s changing discourse, policies, power and influence. As a consequence, I will be forced to be selective, if not biased, and limit this expose´ to the current decade. At a government level, the task may at first glance appear simpler since the
analysis can be based on official statements and policies. However, these sources are by nature very dry and rarely reveal a direct evidence of a perspective on China’s rise. For some time, the debate concentrated on whether China was rising or not. But since the early 2000s, China’s rise is a given, a fact that most EU governments tend to factor in without displaying any particular feeling, as if they could not do much about it. Moreover, it is well known, the EU is a strange twolayer institutional animal: while all member-states have agreed to draft and implement a common European Foreign and Security Policy (EFSP) at the Union level, they have also continued to control most of their own foreign relations, and for that reason have kept their own view about China’s rise. In other words, the EU-level perspective on China or any other country often reflects the smaller common denominator on which member-states can agree, while national perspectives and policies better underscore the genuine interests and concerns of the European governments. This is particularly the case of old and major EU member-states, as Germany, France and the United Kingdom (often called “the Big Three”) but also the Czech Republic, Italy, Poland, Spain or Sweden. Societies, in particular in democracies, forge their own view about the world.
The Europeans’ perspectives on China’s rise have been influenced by many actors, including interest groups, opinion leaders and the media. Since China has become
the EU’s second trade partner, the business community has good reasons to influence, in one way or another, the Europeans’ view of China. But this influence can go into opposite directions, depending whether the business lobby attempting to impact on policies is a supplier or a client of China, an investor or a recipient of Chinese investments. Opinion leaders can also be influenced by interests – and there are, in the EU, a
few examples of such pro-or anti-China lobbies – but also by ideas, and among these ideas, by the democratic principle orWeltanschauung. That is the case of many European scholars and media, who put a strong emphasis on human rights and all the problems stemming, in their view, from a lack of human rights protections and democracy in China (corruption, non-independent judiciary, repression of dissidents and minorities, extreme nationalism, growing social inequalities, environmental degradation, etc.). In other words, for these Europeans, the rise of China is not in itself an issue. The issue is the rise of an authoritarian China. They do not target China as such but the Chinese Communist Party-led government. Nevertheless, the EU’s societal perspectives on China’s rise are not restricted to
this political dimension. They also include many other and not necessarily independent variables, as the sustainability of China’s development strategy, the fundamental changes at play in the Chinese society, and the impact of China’s rise on the rest of the world. In such circumstances, what are the perspectives of the EU’s public opinions on
China’s rise? This is probably the most difficult question to answer. The mood of a public opinion on a particular country is sometimes more determined by circumstances, such as recent and ephemeral developments, than by deep and long-term trends. However, public opinions’ view is also influenced by interests and ideas, and constitute a factor that no governments or politician can totally ignore, including in the foreign policy realm. In this chapter, I will first review the major changes in the EU’s China policy
since the early 2000s. Then I will try to expose the diversity of European perspectives on China’s rise, looking successively at the major member-states, the EU Parliament, the so-called “pro-China lobby,” a few think tanks and human rights NGOs as well as the media and the public opinion.
