Some realism about ideological realism

Before turning to the analysis of specific ideological positions, it may be helpful to demonstrate the limits that certain existing traditions of social theory present for achieving the objectives of this book. This chapter makes two simple points: (i) many social theoretical arguments about the rule of law are best understood in terms of their social effects; and (ii) an awareness of this fact should make any interpreter of the Chinese rule of law discourse skeptical about attempts to interpret it – or the “rule of law,” for that matter – through a single social theoretical tradition. This chapter makes these points in conjunction with a discussion of ideological cynicism. As was suggested in the introductory chapter of this book, ideological cynicism is a salient feature of the Chinese rule of law discourse. The reason for this is easy to understand: a consistent, uncompromising ideological slant one way or another (but especially toward liberalism) may have serious adverse consequences for a scholar's career. As a consequence, there is a suspicion within Chinese legal academia that Chinese legal scholars do not make their true opinions about the rule of law known. There is also a conception, held by liberal and conservative-minded Chinese legal scholars alike, that the ideological doctrines of socialist countries (including the People's Republic of China) are particularly disingenuous. The neoconservative Professor Jiang Shigong, for instance, points out that in the course of the twentieth century many of the socialist countries “adopted constitutions more radical in their protection of human rights than Western countries to prove the superiority of socialism over capitalism.”

Introduction

This chapter continues the analysis of the conservative socialist ideological position and its relationship to liberal legal thought. The chapter's specific aim is to demonstrate that paradoxical and otherwise implausible statements about the rule of law may be both constitutive of and useful for an ideological project. As the starting point of this argument, this chapter seeks to reassess the perception that the Chinese leadership approaches law in an instrumentalist manner. By instrumentalism most students of China do not refer to the adjudicative theory according to which law is a means to an end. This kind of instrumentalism was, of course, central to the development of twentieth-century legal thought. “Law as a means to end” connoted the proposition that the empirical analysis of society should influence the legal ought. In China, the approach has been popularized by Zhu Suli's neoconservative legal thought, which seeks to justify a pragmatist approach to adjudication in China. In contrast to this adjudicative theory of instrumentalism, in foreign studies of Chinese law instrumentalism generally refers to those ideological conceptions that concern the relationships between the legal system and other parts of society rather than the form of legal thought within the legal system. In this sense, instrumentalism signifies an ideological conception that regards legal norms and processes not as the final arbiters of social choices, but as tools to implement decisions that emerge from other, supposedly more legitimate sources of normativity, such as the decision-making processes within the Communist Party.

“But nothing falls”?

Why should an outsider be interested in the Chinese debate on the rule of law? It may, of course, be enlightening in its own right to learn about the inter-elite ideological battles in one of the world's superpowers. More instrumentally, somebody looking to make a “false necessities” point about the rule of law may find useful argumentative strategies in the diversity of the Chinese rule of law discourse. Things are different in China, and hence the argument goes, no single rule of law model is better than any other rule of law model. The liberal (democratic) rule of law model, in particular, is only one possible rule of law model among many others. This argumentative strategy is not limited to the critique of liberalism and Western rule of law advocacy. It can also be a way for a scholar to condemn the outrages of Western colonialism and imperialism and express sympathies toward the (as such inscrutable) “Other.” Somebody else, looking to justify the advocacy of specific liberal legal institutions in China or elsewhere in the world, may draw the opposite conclusion from the Chinese rule of law discourse. From this perspective, the diversity of the Chinese rule of law discourse means that Chinese intellectuals have not been able to produce a legitimate, non-liberal rule of law model. Things are not that different in China, and hence the argument goes, nothing prevents international development agencies, nongovernmental organizations and Western governments from promoting liberal legal institutions in China. Also this argumentative strategy extends beyond the justification of specific legal reforms: it can also be a means for a scholar to condemn the outrages of Western colonialism and imperialism and to demonstrate sympathies toward the (eminently scrutable) “Other” as a member of common humanity.

Regional Threat Perceptions and Security Issues

The post-Cold War security landscape is increasingly characterized by regional security interactions (Buzan and Wæver 2003). Sub-system violent conflicts, often labeled “new wars” (Kaldor 1999) have become a core concern. While their novelty remains contested (e.g. Melander et al. 2009), such wars have become an integral part of security strategies. Thus, the 2003 European Security Strategy identified “regional conflicts” as a key threat (CEU 2003: 4). Asia, too, faces new security threats, including the effects of regional conflicts (Caballero-Anthony and Cook 2013). Both the EU and China show increasing concerns, for instance, about the instability and terrorist threats emanating from the Central Asian region (Lain 2014; CEU 2015: 6, 11).

To the EU, such regional conflicts are particularly relevant if they persist in the EU's own neighborhood. The wars in the context of the break-up of former Yugoslavia signified the failure and sparked the development of EU security policy (Juncos 2005; Kirchner 2006). In this context, the build-up of military capacities in the form of battlegroups and the construction of the European External Action Service (EEAS) as a diplomatic force on the EU level have received a lot of attention. Yet, at the same time, the EU is committed to the transformation of regional conflicts through civilian and political means and, in particular, through the promotion of regional integration. Meanwhile, the Asian context illustrates that regionalism is not equal to EU-style “institutional” integration. It may also take the form of “intergovernmental” regionalism, focused on states and “networked” regionalism, in which states and regional actors are connected in relatively decentralized yet interlocking webs and variable geometries (Yeo 2010).

Such comparisons of the EU's and China's regionalization policies are complicated by the fact that one is a regional organization and the other a “great power.” As a mature security community, the EU is committed to the transformation of its external security environment, using both power and values-based means to achieve normative ends. As an “authoritarian capitalist” “great power” (Gat 2007), China seeks to influence and shape its external security environment in ways that best benefit its nationalist ends. To China, regional conflicts are relevant if they have the potential to destabilize the regional security environment and adversely affect the region's (and hence China's) economic dynamism.

The principal security threat to many states and regions is no longer conventional military threats from other states, but civilian groupings engaged in identity politics, including terrorists (Kaldor 2012). Since the end of the 1980s, the growth and diversification of organized crime also became recognized as a substantial security threat (Albanese 2012). Common to both terrorism and organized crime is their increasingly transnational nature and potentially severe impact on economic and social stability. Therefore, the Chinese and EU responses and cooperation in these areas are of great significance. On the EU side, the fight against organized crime and terrorism has been a key driver of its general development as a security actor. On the Chinese side, the approach taken to address organized crime and terrorism reflects its dynamic domestic social and economic transformation, and also influences its global security role.

At first glance, however, there are few similarities between the Chinese and European perspectives on and experiences of terrorism. China faces various separatist movements that resort increasingly to terrorist attacks, while in Europe, serious ethnic-separatist terrorism, as exemplified by ETA, the Basque separatists, or the Irish Republican Army, has largely been on the decline. Instead, the EU has been mostly concerned with Islamist radicals and, to a lesser degree, political right- or left-wing extremists. Chinese attempts to associate domestic terrorists, mainly Uighurs, with global Islamist terrorism have not generally been recognized by Western countries. If one adds the long-standing differences between Europe and China over the status of Tibet and the principle of nonintervention, discussions of terrorism appear to be a potential spoiler of EU–Chinese relations rather than a basis for cooperation. However, the primary factor explaining most terrorist acts in both China and the EU is identity politics, which may provide some common ground for discussion. In addition, current events in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria highlight the threat from spiraling patterns of sectarian violence that transcend and destroy state boundaries, which provide for more shared interests in EU–Chinese security cooperation.

In the area of organized crime, China and the EU could be expected to share considerable interests, since their economies are deeply intertwined. Their ever-expanding trade relations have been shadowed by the growth and diversification of transnational illegal economic activities, which have built on a well-known historical tradition of organized crime in both Europe and Asia.

The EU and China are two of the largest and most highly interdependent traders in the world. In 2014, the EU became China's biggest trade partner and China the EU's second-biggest trading partner following the United States. Not only economically but also politically, the EU and China matter: China is among the world's “great powers,” but the EU's relevance as an international actor has also grown rapidly. Consequently, EU–China relations matter for global stability and prosperity, and the central aim of this book project was to explore the development of EU–China cooperation on security, both at the bilateral and multilateral level. To pursue this aim, a broad range of key themes in the field of EU–China security relations such as nuclear proliferation, international terrorist threats and cyber attacks were chosen, facilitated by two workshops, two conferences and a large number of working papers, accessible at the project website.

Throughout, the central objective was to bring together EU and Chinese views within a common research framework, involving threat perceptions, relevant policy responses, convergence levels and cooperation aspects. For the initial workshops, European and Chinese scholars prepared separate accounts of EU and Chinese perspectives on a range of security issues, which were published as online papers. During the second phase of the project, pairing scholars from Europe and Asia, authors collaborated on joint chapters in each of the ten substantive chapters. Earlier versions of the chapters were presented at further workshops and conferences benefiting from the comments of the community of scholars and researchers gathered for this project.

The book brings together almost thirty authors, including leading scholars on the subject. We are grateful for their cooperation in contributing to this book and to the project generally.

We have benefited from the individual advice and assistance of numerous colleagues, including Sven Biscop, Andrew Cottee, Duncan Freeman, Bruno Hellendorf, Jing Men, Shada Islam, Eoin Michael McNamara, Thomas Renard, Michael Reiterer, Gerhard Sabathil, Sabrina Schulz, Frans van der Putten, Peiran Wang, Wei Shen and Uwe Wissenbach.

We are indebted to the European Union's Life Long Education Programme, and the associated Jean Monnet Action Programme for generously funding our two-year research project. We are grateful to Alexandra Campos-Bray for her help and advice on administrative matters of the program.

The concept of “security” has been subject to frequent change and reinterpretation in both Chinese and EU contexts. This chapter will consider military security specifically, which – from a Chinese perspective – has remained largely unchanged despite the end of the Cold War. In fact, the collapse of communist regimes across central and eastern Europe in the summer of 1989, China's own Tiananmen incident in June 1989 and Western-led military interventions in Yugoslavia and the Third World in the 1990s reinforced paranoia about the potential intentions of Western states and whether they wished to encroach on China's sovereignty and territorial integrity. Instead of declining in importance, and in contrast to the preceding ten years of the Four Modernizations push under Deng Xiaoping, military security and the need to modernize China's military forces and technology became first-order concerns in Beijing (Friedberg 2000). Exponential increases in China's military budget took place throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. Tensions with the US and with China's neighbors were heightened in the Taiwan Straits over Chinese military exercises, the US Seventh Fleet responses in 1995, the crash of a US spy plane on Hainan Island in 2001, and by quarrels over potential European and Israeli arms sales to China in 2004–5 and 2007. More recently, China–US security disagreements have centered on the role of the United States as treaty ally with claimants contesting China's sovereignty over islands in the East and South China Seas, and the US’ “pivot” to Asia (Clinton 2011; Len 2012; Wong and Tay 2014).

From the perspective of most European capitals, the end of the Cold War concluded the bipolar, militaristic approach to security. The predominant pattern of conflict became intrastate, and was often fought with low technology and high civilian casualties. The lack of any obvious physical threat to the EU's members, alongside the economic crisis of 2008, served to put defense (and its related expenditure) low on the agendas of member states and, in security terms, emphasized the EU's ability to employ various predominantly soft tools in the security domain. The EU and the United Nations were among the international organizations most active in advocating a vision of world order organized along liberal lines and concerns about “soft security” issues rather than the “hard security” of military jets, tanks and troops (King and Murray 2001; Paris 2001).

Economic Security, the EU and China

Economic security relates to the strategic ability of states to maintain and develop their socioeconomic system of choice and their relative economic power position under conditions of anarchy. In today's globalized world, the economic dimension of security is gaining in importance. Increasingly, threats in this realm flow from the eroded policy autonomy of major states, which reflects the heightened interdependence in the real, financial and monetary sectors of the global economy. This erosion of autonomy is exacerbated by external uncertainty, the instability of an international system that is undergoing fundamental change. China's re-emergence and mounting influence – and that of other emerging countries for that matter – is not only affecting Western developed nations’ position in the global distribution of capabilities, it also constitutes a challenge of sorts to their very identity (Geeraerts 2011; Kupchan 2012). The successful economic growth of such an idiosyncratic power as China defies the present international order, which largely mirrors the Western worldview of liberal democracy and free markets (Foot 2009; Layne 2012). While, for more than half a century, the United States, in tandem with the EU, has watched over the provision of global public goods such as monetary stability and free trade, and has propagated the practice of good governance, human rights, international trade regulations, humanitarian intervention and state-building, recently the credibility of the United States and EU as political drivers of global governance has been put to the test (Kupchan 2012: Acharya 2014). As much as the United States, weighed by debt and deficits, is struggling to maintain its superpower status, the EU, faced with the eurozone debt crisis, is struggling for its very survival.

Meanwhile, China's growing economic clout has increased its political influence well beyond its borders and is turning it into a more confident player. Gradually, Beijing is also developing an alternative discourse of modernity and spelling out its own narratives of global governance (Schweller and Xiao Pu 2011; Pan 2012; Breslin 2013). Part of these narratives question the present global governance regime's ability to provide economic and monetary stability, as well as its authority in setting norms of good governance. As a rule, emerging powers tend to be suspicious of existing international regimes which tend to favor established powers.

EU–China cooperation in nuclear nonproliferation has become an important part of the two parties’ overall political and security relationship. The topic features regularly in the yearly EU–China Summit and the EU–China High-Level Strategic Dialogue between the EU High Representative for foreign affairs and security policy/vice-president of the European Commission (HR/VP) and China's state councilor. It is also a very important part of the recent EU–China 2020 Strategic Agenda for Cooperation (EEAS 2013), agreed by the two parties in November 2013. However, do the Europeans and the Chinese perceive nuclear security threats in the same way? How have they responded, both bilaterally and in the UN framework, to the question of nuclear nonproliferation? Is there convergence or divergence of views – and policies – on these issues?

In the first part of this chapter, the aim is to examine European and Chinese perceptions of nuclear security threats, discussing whether – and to what extent – Beijing and Brussels have succeeded in collaborating on nuclear nonproliferation issues, also taking into consideration their different international status as well as their relationship with the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia during the Cold War and post-Cold War era. Particular attention is given to China's evolution of thinking toward a more collaborative position on the nuclear nonproliferation regime, compared with the development of Europe's stance on the same subject in the post-Cold War era, following the adoption of the Treaty of Maastricht and the establishment of a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP).

The second part examines two practical examples of collaboration between Europe and China involving Iran and North Korea – arguably the world's major nuclear dossiers. This will involve a discussion as to why and how the EU and China have decided to actively collaborate on the Iranian nuclear dossier and why there has been little cooperation so far with regard to North Korea. Our investigation finds that Brussels and Beijing have converged on opposing Iranian nuclear militarization, due to the risks this would generate and the consequences that such a scenario would have for the region. Both have actively contributed to the negotiations leading to the agreement reached by the P5+1 – namely the group formed of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States) plus Germany and the European Union – on July 14, 2015.

The purpose of this chapter, and of the book as a whole, is to explore EU–China security relations, which have hitherto received scant attention in the writings on EU–China relations. This involves an empirical exercise of studying a number of security dimensions, through a number of heuristic orientations, structural interests and normative considerations. The purpose of these framing devices is to provide common elements of analysis to inform the following empirical chapters, rather than constitute a tight framework leading to systematic application.

EU–China security cooperation may appear tenuous and of little significance when seen next to the substantial amount of trade and other forms of economic cooperation between the two sides. Nevertheless, it is a topic of steadily rising importance, not only because economic and security concerns are becoming increasingly intertwined, but also as nontraditional security threats become more pronounced in international relations. Indeed, aside from economic interdependence, other factors affect the incidence of security cooperation between China and the EU. On the one hand, neither the EU nor China considers the other side as a potential enemy or a military threat – though the nondemocratic nature of the Chinese regime and its maritime territorial disputes continue to be viewed with suspicion by EU policymakers and public opinion (Casarini 2012: 4; Keohane et al. 2014). Instead, both China and the EU support a multipolar international order, and both adopt multilateralism as a key element of their foreign policy, albeit with differences in its practical application.

On the other hand, the EU and China have very different attitudes to key principles of inter-state relations such as state sovereignty, nonintervention and the territorial integrity of states. Furthermore, democratic aspirations and other normative concerns such as the rule of law or good governance matter for the EU in a way that they do not for China. More fundamentally, the fact that the EU is not a state carries with it limitations regarding the cohesion of its security policy, with security and defense policy remaining largely the prerogative of member states. The absence of a distinct EU military presence in Asia and the NATO membership of most EU countries diminish EU attractiveness as a genuine (independent) security actor in its dealings with China.

Climate change impacts on and is impacted by areas such as development, economy, security and energy. The concept of climate security encompasses a number of different phenomena and has increasingly been conceptualized in terms of fragility and resilience. Climate change can threaten people's survival and wellbeing (Barnett 2003: 7) and act as conflict multiplier (Adger and Puhin 2014). It can put pressure on economic, social and political systems as well as development processes. Failure to manage these pressures can increase the instability of states and societies. Climate security policy aims to strengthen the resilience of states and societies. This includes climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts, development and humanitarian aid programs as well as peace-building and conflict prevention (Mabey et al. 2011: 12–16; Rüttinger et al. 2015).

Climate security is closely interrelated with energy security. Burning fossil fuels to produce energy is the leading source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which cause climate change. In turn, climate change affects the security of energy supply (Umbach 2012). Climate change and energy security policies can contradict or reinforce each other. When measures to ensure energy security include a shift toward an increasing share of renewable sources, both policy areas are synergetic. When a move toward more domestic energy generation includes increasing use of fossil fuels, the increase of energy security is detrimental to climate policy goals.

Both the EU and China are large GHG emitters, which makes them major contributors to climate change. In 2013, China emitted 29 percent and the EU 11 percent of total global carbon dioxide emissions. The United States accounted for a 15 percent share (Oliver et al. 2014: 4). China and the EU also share a large degree of energy import dependence. In 2013, the EU imported 53.2 percent of its gross energy consumption (European Commission 2014a; Eurostat 2015) while China's import dependence also is above 50 percent.

Although both the EU and China are fully aware of the threats of climate change to human wellbeing and hold concerns of energy security, their perceptions of and responses to climate and energy security diverge. This fosters both cooperation and persisting divergences at global and bilateral levels.

The following section elaborates EU and Chinese perceptions of climate and energy security, followed by a discussion of the two players’ responses to perceived security concerns over the past two decades.