Even in "Asian Century", Transatlantic Relationship Remains World's Most Important

28 May 2013

Rome:

The Asian Century isn’t written in the stars and there’s a long way to go for the Atlantic to lose its position at the centre of the global economy, said Michael Cox, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, at a meeting held last week at Rome’s Institute for International Affairs. Discussing the future of transatlantic relations in the Asia-centric world many believe is fast approaching, Prof. Cox warned against hasty predictions that Europe was doomed to retreat down the list of US priorities as Washington shifted its attention to Asia and the Pacific.  

The audience, consisting mainly of officials from Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, received an essentially two-part message. First, whatever its current difficulties, the transatlantic relationship was not only one of history’s great survivors; it was also exceptionally broad and deep. Second, it was nevertheless undeniable that Asia was more and more the main focus for the US public and policymakers, while Europe was losing ground.

He urged European policymakers not to roll over in the face of perceptions of a rising Asian juggernaut—and to be bold in reminding their US counterparts of the benefits of a close partnership with the EU.

The United States and Europe have never had an easy relationship, Prof. Cox reminded his audience. It’s complex but strong, as symbolized above all by NATO.  “Even at the height of the Cold War,” he said, “there was a crisis almost every year,” listing France’s withdrawal from NATO military command, the Vietnam War and Reagan’s deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles to Europe. But, as Cox pointed out, although the alliance’s breakup has been constantly prophesied since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has hung together even without the Soviet threat.

Economically the transatlantic relationship has never been closer. With about half of world economic output and a third of global trade, the United States and Europe make up far and away the world’s most important economies. Indeed, trade and investment ties between the two are so dense that, in Cox’s view, it’s “often difficult to say where the United States ends and the EU starts.” Figures bear him out: according to the European Commission, total US investment in the EU is three times that in Asia while intra-company transfers account for about a third of transatlantic trade.

For all that, American eyes are clearly refocusing towards Asia, now widely seen as more important to the United States’ future. According to Cox, a “huge intellectual and psychological turn” is taking place in the United States, one that’s profoundly “influencing views of how important Europe is.” Like the surveys that report a majority of Americans incorrectly believe China to have a bigger economy than the United States, this is a question of perception rather than reality: Asia needn’t actually be more important to US strategic and commercial interests than Europe for Washington to cold shoulder Brussels—it need only be perceived to be.

In fact, Cox poured cold water on the idea that the twenty-first century necessarily belongs to “Asia”, pointing to the continent’s slipperiness geographically and its political, cultural and economic diversity. “There’s no such thing as Asia,” he said: “There are countries in Asia, but no Asian collective.” For all the EU’s flaws, the stability and coherence of its institutions bear no comparison even to ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations), Asia’s best-organized regional body.

Prophecies about Asia’s forthcoming economic preponderance are often cloaked in a certainty they don’t deserve. Too much remains in play to take an “Asian Century” as fact, Cox believes. There’s a “great deal of exaggeration”, he said, emphasising the “very big futurological aspect” behind these forecasts about what the world would like in 2040 or 2050. The power such projections hold over policymakers and businessmen says more about the “huge impact Goldman Sachs [and other investment banks] have had on international relations” than it does about the future world order, which is profoundly unpredictable. His advice: “Don’t be fooled by projections”.

As a result of these powerful misperceptions, however, Europeans have “become convinced of their own decline.” They must shake themselves out of this and “start thinking for themselves”. Some Asian countries may continue to develop strongly. But whether the measure used is Gross Domestic Product, Foreign Direct Investment, Research and Development, biggest corporations or best universities, Cox reminded his audience that the countries of the North Atlantic are still way out in front.

However Asian the unfolding century might turn out to be, Washington will likely remain at the centre of global politics. “Everyone is talking about a new world order,” says Cox, “but the one thing that will not change is the centrality of the United States.” Relative to any would-be rival, the United States has and will continue to have “huge” advantages—economic, military and strategic in terms of the system of overseas bases and alliances it can call on. Chief among these is NATO, whose survival reflects the values Americans and Europeans share despite their differences—democracy, the rule of law and market economics.

In 2013, there can be little doubt that the transatlantic relationship is, in Cox’s words, “something steady and fundamental at the heart of the world order.” Whether or not it will remain so, however, is up to those charged with looking after it. For their part, European leaders must resolve the euro crisis, which, more than any other issue, has undermined the EU’s credibility in the United States. But they also need to reinvest in the North Atlantic. As this week’s Economist reminds them, finding the political courage to conclude an ambitious Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the United States is the best way they can do this. Given Europe’s current economic straits, such an agreement would certainly help it return to growth—whomever the century belongs to.

Qing Europe

27 May 2013

Rome

A few weeks ago, The Economist ran a cover story with the title, “Let’s party like it’s 1793: Xi Jinping, the Chinese dream and a return to greatness”. The cover depicted Xi Jinping, the newly installed Chinese President and Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, clad in a Qing mantle emblazoned with the symbols of modern Chinese power—skyscrapers, airliners, high-speed trains, motorways, fighter jets, warships. Even the country’s sole, recently acquired aircraft carrier made it on to the hem.

The image recalled the great Qianlong emperor who, in 1793, thought his country strong enough to spurn a British delegation that sought to open China to European trade. It was also designed to capture the national mood of renewed self-confidence Jinping, China’s latest “emperor”, has sought to project in calling his countrymen to realize an ambiguous “Chinese dream”. Only now in 2013 is China returning to the central position in the world economy it lost in the nineteenth century.  

China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing seized the Chinese throne in 1644. When Lord Macartney, the leader of the British delegation, arrived in Peking, they were at the height of their power, a treaty with Russia and a series of campaigns against the Central Asian tribes having extended China’s  frontier thousands of miles into the heart of Eurasia. With perhaps a third of global GDP, China’s economy was by far the world’s biggest. As ruler of such a vast empire, it’s no wonder Qianlong felt entitled to turn down the overtures of tiny, distant Britain.

But it was a fateful mistake. For what the British couldn’t get through diplomacy, they came back thirty years later to take by force, the Opium Wars handing Britain a leading hand in China for the rest of the century. In 1911, impoverished and politically discredited, the Qing were overthrown in a revolution that ushered in the half-century of turmoil that would leave government in the hands of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party. By 1960, China was wretchedly poor, left behind in a fast modernizing world.

Seen from Brussels, modern China’s growth rates are today an object of envy. But the country’s (in Chinese terms) recent past also contains salutary lessons for the European Union. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Europe is what China was at the start of the nineteenth—the world’s largest economy, as well as its biggest exporter and source of FDI. And, like the Qing Empire in 1793, today’s EU has never been bigger, enlargements in 1995, 2004 and 2007 having taken its borders far from its original Western European core. Croatia is set to join. Yet a distinctive, late Qing rot has already set in, symbolized above all in the euro crisis and the recession gripping much of the continent.

Today, the EU is China’s most important trading partner: China relies on the EU to sustain its modernization much as an industrializing Europe did on China during the nineteenth century. Of course, it’s hard to imagine Beijing taking advantage of the EU’s present atrophy the same way European governments once did China’s. But unless Europe returns to prosperity, the Qing’s plummet from the commanding heights of the world economy and their empire’s transformation into a plaything in the hands of newer, leaner and more dynamic powers foreshadows the declining global influence that awaits a Europe merely marking time. Alarmed by China’s return to greatness, Japan’s Shinzo Abe is presently engaged in trying to waken his country from its own late Qing slumber. Would Europe’s leaders were similarly roused.

Europe, Asia’s closer than you think

20 May 2013

Rome:

Much as in the rest of the world, there’s a firm belief in Europe that the centre of the global economy is shifting from the West to the East, the “rise of Asia” being as much an article of faith on the Continent as it is elsewhere.

Yet you don’t have to spend very long in Europe before you begin to notice that utterances of this credo are often followed here by the lament that “Asia is so far away”—much further than it’s thought to be from the United States or Australia, for example, citizens of which countries (or at least the latter one) are naturally assumed to have a knowledge of Asia out of reach of the average European.

There are doubtless many individuals that conform to this rule—and an equal number of exceptions that do not. But Europe’s remoteness from Asia is more perception than reality. When contrasted with the United States’ “natural” proximity to it, it’s a misunderstanding of geography.

From Washington D.C. to Beijing, the crow flies 11,144 km, crossing the International Date Line and making US policymakers not only half the world but very often also a whole day behind their Chinese counterparts. Yet from Brussels, a city on Europe’s western periphery, the distance is a mere 7,958km, meaning the centre of EU decision-making actually lies closer to the Chinese capital than Canberra, Australia, which, despite being some 9,010km from Beijing, is accepted as being in Asia—or at least that all-purpose version of it we call the “Asia-Pacific”.*

In other words, the “Far East”, as an excuse for European leaders not to think deeply about Asia, is a misreading of the maps. Of course, there are many things that justify such a “misreading”: shipping routes from Western Europe to China are significantly further than those from the United States’ west coast. Rotterdam to Shanghai is 10,525km, which is about the same as from New York (10,582km). But the same journey from San Francisco is a mere 5,398km (and from Honolulu only 4,572km).

But, equally, there are reasons to question such a mental construction of the world. First, by opening the so-called “Northern Sea Route” around Siberia, the melting of Arctic sea ice should significantly reduce shipping distances between East Asia and Europe. In any case, the global professional services trade (in which the EU is by far the world’s biggest exporter) hardly needs ships or water.

More important, the maps we are discussing were largely drawn in Europe. At least as far as modern South and Southeast Asia are concerned, today’s borders are the legacy of colonial enterprises directed from London, Paris and Amsterdam. Europe’s Asian empires are within living memory of a dwindling number of people in both east and west—and the young of both continents are often blissfully unaware of their existence. But the sixty years since their collapse is a blink of the eye in the world’s historical record.

In other words, there ought to be a fount of European knowledge about Asia that's far older, and better tested, than that which exists in either the United States or Australia, whose active engagement with Asia began relatively late. Indeed, London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) remains one of the foremost institutions of its kind in the world.

In view of this, the real impediment to expanding ties with Asia seems to be introversion and strategic myopia—the absence among European leaders of a vision of the Continent’s interests beyond its immediate neighbourhood. For a long time, the construction of the European Union has been European leaders’ overriding “strategic” objective, while NATO in Europe and global US leadership have relieved European states of the need to think deeply about their interests in the world beyond the Mediterranean, the North Sea and the Baltic—and what they need to do to secure them. This needs to change.

In the late nineteenth century, it was discovered that the North Eurasian plain was the same geologically all the way from Berlin to Beijing. Geographically, speaking Europe and Asia are not two separate continents, but the same one: Eurasia. What’s needed is for the Europe that’s still the world’s biggest economy and exporter (with merchandise exports more than twice China’s), and the Far East’s most important trading partner to rediscover that Asia with which it in fact shares a continent and a history.  

 

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* Even if we choose to measure the distance from the US Pacific coast, the distance from San Francisco to Beijing, 9,517km, is still further from Brussels, let alone a European capital further east, such as Vienna or Athens. Neither does it help to choose a “deeper” point in Asia than Beijing. From Brussels to Singapore the distance is 10,560km. From Washington, D.C., the distance is 15,545km and from San Francisco, 13,593km.

US Pivot to Asia leaves Europe fumbling. Answer could be bigger role for NATO

17 May 2013

Rome:

The US pivot to Asia has left Europe fumbling in the dark for a vision of its role in the world, a symposium Thursday May 16 at Rome’s Institute of International Relations was told. Instead of a coordinated EU strategy, there were “twenty-seven different views about what kind of global actor Europe should be,” Yale’s Prof. Emeritus Jolyon Howorth said. Such disarray was all the more serious given the relative decline of the United States and the rise of China, India, Brazil and other emerging powers—a major global power shift.

“With a single exception—the handover from the British Empire to the United States at some point in the early twentieth century—such transitions in history have always been violent,” Prof. Howorth said, endorsing Robert Kupchan’s (from the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations) vision of “no one’s world”. In this view, the current liberal, rules-based world order, rooted in national democracies and the rule of law, won’t survive the West’s decline. Instead, a handful of more or less equal powers will pursue their own interests with little agreement on, or regard for, the global common good. Without a dominant power or group of powers, the future will be one of conflict rather than consensus. As Howorth put it, it’s a vision of a “tense, semi-sort-of [sic] anarchy.”

A long-time supporter of Europe’s Common Defence and Security Policy (CDSP), Prof. Howorth believes European leaders are unready to deal with the changes that lie ahead. Although US foreign policy circles are alive with discussion about the future of the international system, on the other side of the Atlantic, silence reigns. “This debate is simply not happening in Europe,” he said.

The Arab Spring exemplified the EU’s lack of a “grand strategy”—and the means for pursuing one. Libya was just the neighbourhood humanitarian crisis Europe had been preparing for since the breakup of Yugoslavia twenty years ago. But it caught European leaders napping and showed how differently they perceived the Continent’s strategic interests. While Britain and France wrapped themselves in NATO’s banner to topple Ghaddafi, Germany’s traditional pacifism meant it stayed out. And US assistance was crucial, Washington leading “from behind” in name only. The lesson was clear: on strategy, Europe was divided and those countries that wanted to act remained dependent on US muscle.

Because of this, the shift of the United States’ strategic focus to Asia will affect Europe more than it realizes. According to Howorth, Washington is now saying to Europe: “If it’s a crisis in your backyard, it’s up to you to fix it.” Moreover, a new generation of American civilian and military leaders, with little memory of Cold-War solidary in the North Atlantic, is asking: “Why should the United States help Europe? How is the EU relevant to US strategic interests?”

Europe’s fundamental lack of strategic ambition is to blame. Despite years of hype, the CSDP effectively remains a dead letter. Europe lacks a power other than the United States that can galvanize the Continent strategically; and because European governments cling to defence and foreign policy as precious attributes of national sovereignty (“the last bastions of Westphalia”), the EU can’t develop a common strategic vision of its own. “If a grand strategy is defined as the calculated relationship between means and large ends,” Howorth said, “then the EU doesn’t talk about large ends.” There’s even disagreement about defence as a means—a fact reflected in twenty-seven different national white papers. (Last week, France published its latest.)

Despite the euro crisis, Europe’s isn’t a problem of money. Collectively, EU states spend an annual defence budget of around US$200bn—the same amount, astonishingly, as the US defence budget before 9/11. Whereas with that sum the United States, in Howorth’s words, “ran the world”, the EU can’t even run its own neighbourhood.

Yet all of Europe’s borders are areas of current or potential conflict: from the Arctic, whose energy resources global warming are opening up for commercial exploitation, to the Baltic, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova, where Russia remains as much a frustrated regional hegemon as it does across the Black Sea in Georgia and the Caucasus, and so on through the Middle East (Syria, Iran) and North Africa, where the Arab Spring has set in motion major political changes from Egypt to the Atlantic.

But with the CSDP moribund and its relationship to NATO “dysfunctional”, how should EU leaders go about protecting the Continent’s long-term security and prosperity? The more US eyes turn to the Pacific, the less they’ll be able to turn to Washington for an answer to that question.

To overcome Europe’s lack of strategic unity, Howorth thinks EU leaders should gradually merge the CSDP with NATO, an alliance still in search of a cause. Such “progressive fusion” would mean letting Europeans take more responsibility in NATO, not just “burden-sharing” but leadership—even over American soldiers. Rather than looking overseas for the alliance’s future (“NATO abroad”), NATO could remain focused on securing peace and democracy in Europe. And the better European leaders got at thinking, and acting, strategically, the easier the United States could quietly “tip-toe out the back door to Asia.”

This is controversial. Fearful of losing control of the alliance, Washington has traditionally resisted handing Europeans a greater say. According to Howorth, however, US policymakers are increasingly open to just such a scenario. The real question is: are Europeans ready for regional leadership—or despite frequent protestations to the contrary, do they secretly wish to free ride on Uncle Sam for ever?

On the other hand, if the US is “pivoting” to Asia, perhaps Europe should think of doing the same? I hope to write my next post on Europe and Asia.

 

 

‘INVISIBLE’ AZERBAIJAN KEEPS LOOKING WEST

15 May 2013

Rome:

Despite a historical sense of “invisibility” in global affairs, Azerbaijan was determined to keep “looking West” for its future, a colloquium on energy and security in the Caspian Sea, held Wednesday May 14 at Roma-Tre University, heard. Indeed, Azerbaijan’s ambassador to Italy, Mr Vaqif Sadiqov, said other countries were paying more and more attention to his own. Although the region’s oil had been exploited since the nineteenth century, only now was the greater Caspian Sea, which Mr Sadiqov called “one of the most dynamic parts of Eurasia”, coming into its own.

Certainly, Baku seems to be trying to raise its profile in Europe with educational partnerships of the kind that gave rise to Wednesday’s colloquium. With Russia’s troubled Chechnya and Dagestan provinces to the north and an often paranoid Iran to the south, speakers presented Azerbaijan as a precious partner for the West in a tense but strategically vital region—right on the Middle East’s doorstep.

“No country has done more to stabilize post-Soviet space in Eurasia,” Elnur Soltanov, Associate Professor at Azerbaijan’s Diplomatic Academy, said. Instead of selling out to an unnamed regional monopolist (read: Russia’s Gazprom), Baku had kept its oil and gas under independent national control, significantly increasing the US and Europe’s energy security, if only by diversifying world supply. And linked with resource-rich Central Asia (itself the subject of a new “Great Game” between Russia, China and the West), the Caspian could even offer an alternative to the Persian Gulf for world energy supplies.

Yet the usefulness to the West of this small state of 9 million Turkic-speaking, mainly Shia Muslims, wedged between the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea, is not obvious. At around 20bn cubic meters a year, Azerbaijan’s gas production is too small to offer Europe an alternative to Russia for its annual 500bn cubic metres of gas. An important contribution to some small countries’ supplies (such as Russia-dependent Czech Republic), it won’t be a “game-changer” until seabed pipelines allow Azeri gas to be supplemented with supplies from Turkmenistan’s enormous fields—the world’s fourth largest. But maritime borders disputes between Russia, Iran and Turkmenistan make that a dream rather than a reality for now.

Perhaps because of this, there’s a sense of unrequited love. Baku clearly expects more from the US and EU than it’s currently getting to help build the pipelines that would transport Azeri gas across Turkey to Europe or get Central Asian gas across the Caspian Sea.

But by far the most important issue it looks to the West for support for is the return of Nagorno-Karabakh, the 16-18% of Azeri territory occupied by neighbouring Armenia since the 1992-94 war following the breakup of the Soviet Union. Azerbaijan had “made big sacrifices” and “made itself vulnerable” to enhance other countries’ security, said Mr Soltanov. It hadn’t got enough from them in return.

Unfortunately for Azerbaijan, such pleas are likely to fall on deaf ears in Washington and Brussels. The influence of the Armenian diaspora in the US and Europe (especially in France), the need to keep Russia (Armenia’s unofficial protector) on board for the sake of more pressing threats to global security (Syria and Iran), and Baku’s own questionable human rights record (elections are due in October) mean Western help is unlikely to be forthcoming.

On the contrary, with memories of Moscow’s 2009 humbling of “upstart” Georgia still fresh, Western governments won’t want to burn their fingers again in a region whose full potential is likely to remain unfulfilled for some time. With prospects to the north and south even bleaker, however, “invisible” Azerbaijan will have no choice but to keep looking west until the West takes notice.

-         Matthew Dal Santo