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.