The correlation between migration and security is still prominent more than a decade after the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001. While significant political authorities such as those in China and the EU have approached these issues from different perspectives, for European countries, having a strong and credible external border is crucial for the integration project. EU external migration practice has thus focused on keeping migrants out. This remains a defining feature of the EU's cooperation with neighboring countries (through the European Neighbourhood Policy) and key transit/source countries (through EU mobility partnerships) (Lavenex 2006). In China, internal movement has been of utmost concern as it involves some 236 million people (approximately 31.8 percent of the EU's total population) (CNBS 2013). Internal migration regulation in China has been viewed through the security lens because it is a question of social stability relating to urban–rural relations and the reduction of economic disparity that has characterized the period of economic reforms since 1978. By contrast, China's external migration control has been approached from the development angle as part of its shifting economic priorities and efforts at integrating the country into the global economy. Unlike the EU, China does not rely on external partners for migration regulation, and this has significant implications for future EU–China security cooperation on migration. In this chapter, EU and Chinese policies concerning migration, security and development are compared and contrasted to reveal their divergent approaches. EU migration strategies are shown to derive largely from a framework of border security, while Chinese migration policies have developed out of economic necessities. By outlining these differences, we ask: is it misplaced to focus on security when considering potential migration policy cooperation between the EU and China? The conclusion proposes ways forward.

China and EU Migration Cooperation: Divergence

As a key country of origin for most of the world's migrants, China has remained in the spotlight as the top partner for cooperation in the field of migration. This is especially the case when it comes to issues emanating from the security dimension of migration such as human smuggling and trafficking. In terms of multilateral engagement and global cooperation in the field of migration, however, China has limited participation.

The ambition in producing this volume was to examine the nature and extent of relations between the European Union and China beyond the scope of trade and investment. While there is no doubt that this relationship continues to be dominated by economic concerns, the preceding chapters have demonstrated the multifaceted character of the cooperation between the two powers and the value in probing deeper into the various security dimensions of this relationship.

Seeking to identify a security perspective in the context of a predominantly economic partnership is not a contradiction. Indeed, these two aspects of EU–China relations can be seen as two sides of the same coin: precisely because the EU and China are such significant trading partners, both also have an inherent interest in various kinds of cooperation that can help to underpin their mutual security (Gartzke 2007). Or, to put it differently, the fact that Europe and China perceive each other as trading partners – and not as adversaries – also makes it easier to consider cooperation across a range of security domains.

From such a starting point, EU–China security cooperation is not a utopian concept or a normative agenda, but an empirical question – a question that requires the kind of detailed analysis across a range of relevant areas that the contributions to this volume have provided. Building on these foundations, the purpose of this concluding chapter is threefold. First, to bring together the individual analyses and aggregate them, as much as possible, into a comprehensive picture. Second, the wider context influencing EU–China security relations will be brought into focus, including issues such as the potential for differences among EU member states and the role of third countries as impacting on this relationship in the context of global security. Finally, based on the preceding analysis and discussion, the chapter will provide an overall assessment of the current state and future prospects of EU–China security relations.

Security Cooperation between the EU and China – Toward Convergence?

The contributions to this volume have systematically analyzed EU–China security relations across a range of traditional and nontraditional dimensions of security. The guiding questions, as established in our introductory chapter, concerned the degree to which one can observe convergence between the two sides with respect to both the perceptions of threats facing the polity/society as well as the domestic policy response in addressing such threats.

Security Threats Emanating from a Global Cyberspace

Compared to the increasing relevance of global cyberspace to the societal, commercial and military sectors in both the European Union and China, cybersecurity is the blind spot in the overall EU–China relationship. It was only in 2013 that the EU and China formally expressed a common general interest in cyberspace (EEAS 2013). At the same time, both actors, with differences in content, scope and timing, have developed their own approaches to cybersecurity and the respective threats they perceive in global cyberspace.

Cybersecurity policy has been on the radar of the EU for many years. It established the European Network and Information Security Agency in 2004 in order to facilitate a movement toward shared knowledge and improved “best” practice among EU member states. There was also a clear security (sub)dimension connected to the evolution of the EU's “information society” agenda. The issue was moved up the EU's political agenda in 2007, with NATO, the EU and other actors forced to radically rethink their approach following distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Estonia's public and private infrastructure. Thus the EU's threat perception and vulnerability in relation to cybersecurity is connected to Europe's economic transformation, as well as the social and political consequences of cybercrime, attacks on information systems and protecting cyberspace in order to ensure its effective operation in military and civilian dimensions. Cyberspace, if not secured, from an EU perspective, threatens the very existence and evolution of all Europeans across social, economic and political realms.

The EU's policy has since developed and been underpinned by the need to achieve the objectives it has set for itself in its document on the digital agenda for Europe (European Commission 2010), and equally as significant, the driving force of such an agenda, the Europe 2020 strategy (EEAS 2013). In addition, it has recognized that, as a security issue, the protection of cyberspace is borderless, and it has highlighted these issues in its policy documents and internal security strategies, including a set of principles and guidelines for internet resilience and stability (European Commission 2011) and a cybersecurity strategy (European Commission 2013). Furthermore, it has recognized the importance of working in partnership with global partners to address the civilian and military aspects of cybersecurity challenges.

The protection of civilians against natural and man-made disasters has increasingly become a governmental responsibility. Urbanization, industrialization and globalization have highlighted vulnerabilities to “natural disasters, industrial or transportation accidents, terror attacks, critical infrastructure failures, or a ‘near miss’ of one of these” (ANVIL n.d.). Befittingly, civil protection has become a salient security issue for the European Union as well as China. Yet, as will be argued below, this increased prominence has only led to a partial convergence in policy responses. Notable differences remain in the understanding of the nature of (the) security threats, the allocation of responsibilities and the general approach to civil protection.

In the EU, civil protection is progressively a transnational policy area, whereas in China it is largely still developing as a national policy area. At the same time, civil protection is a policy area where some convergence can be observed. China has developed a broader nontraditional understanding of civil protection and the role of the military has become less pronounced. China's capabilities in civil protection have also strengthened so it is better able and more willing to respond to external and transboundary crises. Agreement on the need to respond to specific crises – and mutual interest in effective responses – creates space for collaboration, which so far has been limited to mainly technical matters. Arguably, civil protection is an area where there are clear opportunities to build trust and to broaden the scope of collaboration.

Civil protection is commonly referred to as civil security, civil (air) defense and crisis management. These related concepts reveal subtle differences in the understanding of the nature of (in)security addressed in civil protection. The Chinese distinction between renfang (civil air defense) and minfang (civil defense) shows the origins of civil protection against air raids as well as a more recent broader understanding of civil protection. In Europe, civil protection developed under the shadow of the Cold War, but it has evolved strongly from the predominantly traditional security domain (for example, nuclear attacks) to the largely nontraditional one (for example, natural disasters such as earthquakes and flooding, but also industrial accidents). The EU has combined responsibilities for civil protection and humanitarian aid in one Directorate-General of the EU Commission (the Directorate-General for Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid, DG ECHO), illustrating a broad nontraditional interpretation.

Over the past four decades, the European Union (formerly the European Community) and China have maintained an ever-increasing set of bilateral relations of varying degrees of cooperation and conflict (Chen and Armstrong 2010). For the last two decades, as both partners emerged as global security providers, their respective policy agendas have begun to touch upon issues of human security. The concept of human security, hailed alike by pundits and policymakers since the mid-1990s (Gaspers 2005; Fukuda-Parr and Messineo 2012), has thus informed national, bilateral and multilateral policymaking both in the EU and China (Bedeski 2007; Solana 2014; Breslin 2015).

Human security challenges are rooted in two global interrelated processes. First, the crises arising from the steady erosion of modern statehood and responsible government in many parts of the world, which in turn create a diverse set of dangers, risks and threats to human well-being. Following the Cold War, these challenges have multiplied as transnational actors, such as terrorist groups, and transnational occurrences, such as infectious diseases, spread (unevenly) across the globe, probing political authority on all levels: local, national, regional and global (Bajpai 2003; Kaldor 2007). Second, human security is a normative and dynamic concept that arises from the conferral of obligations by normative entrepreneurs on governments to provide (additional) protection and expanded freedoms (Burgess et al. 2007; Gaspers 2009). While Behringer (2005) has argued that “middle powers” were instrumental in pushing the concept, and others have highlighted the impact of various UN agencies (Newman 2014), an intense academic debate ensued as to how far the concept had been “captured” by national governments to pursue their traditional security agenda, thereby sidelining several nontraditional security concerns, such as global health, gender equality and cultural security (Chandler 2008; Owen 2008; Krause 2014).

In the early twenty-first century, considerable differences in content and emphasis of the three key pillars thus remain: freedom from want, freedom from fear and freedom to take action on one's own behalf (UNCHS 2003). To cooperate, however, does not require a formal normative consensus or converging interests between two powers. What is essential, as the example of the emerging norm of “responsibility to protect” attests, is the compatibility of foreign policy behavior by the EU, China, the United States and a few others, which allows for policy coordination in the UN and various other international fora.