Europe's
great mistake
would be to end the
arms embargo of China
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
February 9, 2005
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.
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Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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