Twenty-twenty was the year that saw Xi Jinping’s geopolitical illegality and domestic abuse. However, the year ended with a free offer from the European Union to Beijing in the form of a unilateral, opaque and misleading investment agreement. Europeans betrayed their American ally, not to mention their own values.
Seven years in progress, but suspended by the pandemic, the agreement was hastily concluded by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen. They insist that the agreement simultaneously defends “our interests” while “promotes our core values”, as von de Leyen said.
But the draft confirms what anyone familiar with China’s behavior in the past decade should already know: namely, that Brussels sacrificed European values to promote economic interests – marginally.
Yes, the deal will open up new service industries to European investors, hamper technology transfers and add some transparency to state-owned companies and other forms of market manipulation. The EU is hailing these modest concessions from China’s capitalist state apparatus as major victories, but most of them were already underway – and could have been achieved without betraying human rights if Europeans included the United States as a third partner.
As it stands, the deal is bound to disappoint on its own terms, leaving European newcomers to China’s economy complaining about an uneven playing field in the industries this deal opens up for investments, such as electric vehicles, consumer finance and private hospitals. . Although China’s giants are allowed to raise capital and quickly litigate to return home, European companies will remain largely hostage to a fraudulent game, in which Chinese state control is placed directly in the balance.
And for what? The EU is essentially prepared to expose its routine human rights sermons as cheap talk in exchange for higher margins for automakers, consumer goods manufacturers and other German multinationals. In the meantime, the agreement does little to stem the mass slavery of the communist regime of its Muslim minorities. At best, it will end the continued efforts of China’s human rights defenders and hawks in the European Parliament to free the continent’s supply chains from Uighur forced labor. In the worst case, it will incorporate some new European companies into the same bloodstained value chains.
The official text calls for China to comply with a number of provisions of the International Labor Organization that it has already ratified, although it does not provide any enforcement mechanism to monitor behavior there. China is both a founding signatory to the ILO and the world capital of modern slavery. Thus, the fact that Europeans can get Beijing to ratify additional ILO provisions can only prove meaningless.
The deal comes at a time when the Chinese Trump government is about to leave. President-elect Joe Biden and his foreign policy circle, while historically tolerant of Beijing, have indicated that they prefer a joint, transatlantic approach to China. But Europeans couldn’t wait to see what the new regime in Washington could mean.
The promoters of the agreement say that the EU should not be held responsible for not associating with an ally whose own policy towards China has not been stable among governments. They also argue that engaging in the China-US rivalry is not in Europe’s long-term interest. But European duplicity is, or should be, obvious to the Biden team, despite the Democrats’ typical solicitude for European goodwill.
In the post-COVID world, China’s market manipulation and domestic abuse is unlikely to decrease and may even get worse. Against this background, the EU’s race to strike a deal says something – somewhat sinister – about European “strategic autonomy” in relation to the United States, the buzzword initially released by French President Emmanuel Macron and now flying through Brussels.
Yes, the deal will only go into effect for another year, but two weeks is all the time Biden has to figure out how to react – an unenviable position for the leader of the free world. Biden can take a page from his predecessor. President Trump’s skeptical instincts about China and his distrust of Europeans seem justified: Xi is as bad as he insisted, and Angela Merkel’s Eurocracy was exposed as a sales bubble.
The democratic West needs a single spine. Hopefully, Biden has it.
Jorge González-Gallarza is an associate researcher at Fundación Civismo.
Twitter: @JorgeGGallarza