How strategic is the EU-Asia relationship?

Angela Stanzel

EUROPEAN COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
01st April, 2015

How strategic is the EU-Asia relationship? That is a timely question in light of the recent controversy about EU member states joining the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and one that a group of think tankers and EU representatives tried to answer recently in a workshop ECFR co-hosted in Brussels, as part of its Global Strategy project, together with the Mercator Foundation and Egmont Institute.
The discussion focused mainly on how Europeans should deal with what South Korean President Park Geun-hye called the “Asian paradox”: Asians fear China because of its military power but are simultaneously attracted to it for economic and trade reasons. Although Europeans are well aware of the foreign policy tools they have – hard power tools such as sanctions and soft power tools such as development aid – they are unsure of how to apply them to China. Some of the participants therefore argued that Europeans needed a strategy to figure out how to deal and negotiate with China.
Other participants argued that there was no need for an Asia strategy – after all, there is also no European Latin America or Africa strategy. Instead, the alleged weakness of the EU is not so much the lack of a strategy but simply the lack of a tactical approach to China’s rise. In particular, Europeans needed to agree on what values they should pursue in Asia. In other words, the problem Europeans face in particular in dealing with China, but also with Asia in general, is not about China or Asia but rather about the limits of the Europeans themselves.

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