Partnerships with equal benefits?

EU struggles to define strategic partnerships while summits highlighted problems with China.

Last month, the leaders of the EU’s 27 member states met in Brussels to discuss the EU’s strategic partnerships. In the course of  the following three weeks, the EU held summits with strategic partners South Africa and China,  as well as a wider EU-Asia summit that included India and Japan. These summits offered little  evidence that the EU is succeeding in giving more substance to its strategic partnerships. They did, however, provide insights into the challenges that the EU faces as it seeks to re-define its relations with the wider world now that the Lisbon treaty is in force. 

The term ‘strategic partner’ has no specific substance, nor is there a definition, although a number of countries have received the accolade – Brazil, Canada, China, India, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the United States and, occasionally, Turkey. Ahead of the summit that he had called for 16 September, Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, said that the EU had strategic partners but that it now needed a strategy to deal with them. That is a fair description of the current situation.

The conclusions adopted by the member states’ leaders in September described the strategic partnerships as “a useful instrument for pursuing European objectives and interests”.

“This will only work if they are two-way streets based on mutual interests and benefits and on the recognition that all actors have rights as well as duties,” the summit statement continued. The message was repeated, almost to the word, on 28 September, when Jacob Zuma, president of South Africa, attended a summit in Brussels.

This message is far less vague and general than it might appear at first. It could just be a glimpse of a new Union that tries to generate political capital from the money that it spends abroad.

That the EU may need to do this was demonstrated on 14 September, when a broad coalition, led by developing countries from around the world, rebuffed an EU attempt to gain speaking rights for its officials at the United Nations, thwarting plans by Van Rompuy to speak from the rostrum at the following week’s UN summit in New York. This humiliating defeat drove home some simple truths. First, not all countries share the EU’s excitement about the Lisbon treaty, and not all countries share the EU’s view that its internal set-up should have implications for European representation at the UN.

In addition, the EU’s largesse with development assistance has failed to translate into automatic political influence. Rather, such influence still needs to be built through careful, old-fashioned diplomacy of the kind that was neglected in the run-up to the UN vote. Reminding developing countries who is paying their bills may not be subtle and will be anathema to many development policymakers in the European Commission. Van Rompuy, by contrast, shows a politician’s appreciation for the hard facts that come with hard cash.

A lop-sided relationship

The summits with Asian countries on 4-6 October highlighted some of the problems that afflict the lop-sided relationship with a commercially successful and increasingly assertive China.

Calls by EU officials for China to devalue its currency, the yuan, fell on deaf ears. José Manuel Barroso, the president of the Commission, agreed to demands by Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, and cancelled a joint press conference. It was left to Karel De Gucht, the European commissioner for trade, to inject a dose of realism into the EU’s position on the yuan. Yes, it was overvalued, De Gucht said. But if it is going to be allowed to rise, it is not – according to De Gucht – because of European exhortations but because of inflationary pressures at home.

Not all is bleak in the EU’s relations with the booming countries of Asia, of course. The Union signed a free trade agreement with South Korea during the EU-Asia summit and hopes to conclude a – somewhat less ambitious – deal with India in time for a bilateral summit on 10 December, although much remains to be sorted out before then. But even on the commercial front, the main action appears to take place anywhere but in Brussels. Before and after attending the summit with the EU, Wen travelled to Greece, Italy and Turkey. At each stop, business deals worth billions of euros were signed or agreed.

In Turkey, Wen signed an agreement for the joint construction of 4,500 kilometres of railway. In Greece, Wen suggested that container traffic through Piraeus – operated on a 35-year lease by a Chinese company – would more than quadruple by 2015. (Greek ships already carry more than half of China’s exports of goods, he said.) And in Rome, he concluded agreements worth more than €2 billion.

There is plentry of substance to these commercial links. But they do not, at present, amount to a strategic partnership.