This dimension of Europe’s foreign and security policy has so far been largely neglected in the International Relations (IR) and Security Studies literature. A voluminous body of scholarship has investigated when and how the US rebalanced its security policy toward the Asia-Pacific as well as the reordering of Washington’s alliances and security partnerships in the region to confront the PRC. The response by Asia-Pacific countries to China’s expanding regional clout and ambitions, and their alignment behaviour, have similarly been the subject of a burgeoning literature. By contrast, the question of how Europe’s major powers have sought to confront the security implications of China’s rise—both in Europe and in the Asia-Pacific—remains largely under-explored in the International Relations (IR) literature.
Overall, the existing scholarship on EU-China relations tends to be piecemeal and fragmentary and to lack robust empirics. Crucially, no study has yet undertaken a cross-regional comparison of how Europe’s major powers have responded to the security challenges posed by China’s re-emergence in world politics—looking at both Europe and the Asia-Pacific.
In light of the shortcomings of the existing literature, the intellectual contribution of this project is twofold.
First, by investigating a strategically crucial yet neglected dimension of the foreign and security policy of Europe’s major powers, this project fills an important gap in the scholarly literature on both European and Asia-Pacific security dynamics. To do so, it relies on a large body of previously undisclosed primary written and oral sources, including elite interviews, declassified archival documents, leaked diplomatic cables, new data on European naval deployments and a wide-ranging overview of parliamentary hearings, testimonies, public speeches and government reports. Based on wide-ranging primary sources, this book delivers the first systematic cross-national and cross-sectoral empirical analysis and comparison of how the major European powers have responded to the perceived national security challenge posed by the rise of China in world politics.
Second, given the absence of a common European strategy toward the PRC, this project also aims to enrich the policy debates on how to bolster cooperation between the EU, its member states, and the US (and transatlantic relations more generally) in developing a common strategy towards China. Arguably, how the US and Europe wrestle with the re-emergence of China in world politics will be a, if not the, defining issue for transatlantic relations in the years to come. Against the background of the intensifying US-China competition, of growing doubts over the robustness of US commitments to Europe and, more broadly, of the shifting centre of strategic gravity of world politics from the Euro-Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific, the findings of this project can thus contribute to fostering a debate among policymakers, academics and the larger public in Europe—and on the two sides of the Atlantic—on the security ramifications of China’s rise for transatlantic relations and on how to forge a common policy response.
