LONDON – In seeking to lift its arms embargo of China the European Union has picked on the worst kind of issue at the worst possible time. The roles of Europe – the good guy over Iraq – and the U.S. – the bad guy – have been reversed. And to what point? To earn a few more euros for the arms’ export industry which, although it earns a high marginal rate of return, employs relatively few people. (130,000 in the UK for example.) Is this worth passing up the opportunity of mending some fences with Washington? And there is no evidence that this change in policy is one that the European electorate- the one that with its protests fashioned its own common European foreign policy during the run up to the war with Iraq- is actually desirous of.
Over the decades, since President Richard Nixon engineered a grand rapprochement with Red China, U.S. policy has wavered all over the place. But during President Bill Clinton’s second term it finally settled into an admirable stability, one which the Bush administration has continued. Put simply, it is to be tough on human rights while engaging China politically and economically. So while the Clinton Administration supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and successfully persuaded Congress to give China permanent most-favored-nation trade status, it decided it would actively campaign to censure China in the annual meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission and continue with the post-Tiananmen Square arms embargo.
Europe in contrast seems still to be in a muddle. As Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, observed in his insightful book “East and West”, one sometimes has to pinch oneself to remember who needs whom most. European countries especially have a long history of rushing to Beijing to win some big order, either in competition with each other or with the U.S. and behaving as if their whole economic future depended on it. And this was at a time- the mid and late1990s- when China represented only 1.7% of all Western exports added together. And with his own study of British foreign policy towards China Patten showed that over time there was little relationship between the loudness or softness of London’s human rights’ voice and the success of Britain’s trading relationship with China. If, as Patten argued, Western governments could stand shoulder to shoulder and say once and mean it, “stop using economic and trade threats: you are in no position to do so, it is unacceptable behavior”, Beijing would get the message.
Europe has tended to do the opposite. In 1997 Denmark tabled a motion at the UN’s Human Rights Commission to condemn China’s record. The Chinese lobbyists went into overdrive. Denmark was told by Beijing that its criticism would be “a rock that smashed down on the Danish government’s head”. Several Danish contracts were cancelled and the European Union caved in and withdrew their backing from the resolution. A year later the European foreign ministers announced that “in view of the first encouraging results of the EU-Chinese human rights dialogue they would neither table nor co-sponsor the resolution in 1998”. The president of the EU’s foreign affairs council, British foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, cited the release of China’s most important dissident, Wei Jingsheng, as a fruit of the dialogue. But when I interviewed Wei Jingsheng shortly afterwards he denounced the European reasoning: “When Beijing’s relations with the West improve, conditions get worse for the dissidents inside China’s jails.”
Europe is now saying it will replace the arms embargo with a code of conduct. But if a formal embargo has been undermined- by France especially but also Britain- how will it be with a looser arrangement? How will dissidents fare?
Likewise, Europe seems strangely oblivious to Washington’s concerns over Taiwan. Washington worries that in a crisis state-of-the-art European weapons would be ranged against it by Beijing just as the Argentinean’s French-sold Exocet missiles frightened the pants off the British expeditionary forces whilst attempting to recapture the Falklands. Yet Taiwan rarely comes up on the radar screen of any European country’s concern, despite it being not only one of the modern world’s most outstanding economic success stories but has also transformed itself from being a totalitarian dictatorship into a bustling democratic free society. Why should China’s already threatening posture to Taiwan be strengthened at a time when Taiwan itself has chosen over the last few years to be very reticent about its own purchases of sophisticated arms? Taiwan needs from Europe a friendly arm round its shoulders not a slap across its face.
Britain’s chief arms’ salesman once told me that arms sales are “the thermometer not the disease”. No, they are the disease – and a quite irrational one.
