EU Foreign Policy Towards China

The Institutional Politics of Cooperation

Project Context

EU foreign policy towards China has come a long way since the first EC-China Trade and Co-operation Agreement was signed in 1985. Political and bureaucratic cooperation mechanisms at various levels are now part of an institutional routine, encompassing a whole range of governance-related policy areas. These include highly technical issues such as trade standards and technology transfers to aspects of international security and climate change. Yet, amidst this impressive political and institutional evolution of EU-China relations, research on these processes has remained very limited. In particular, research on EU-China relations has developed in almost complete disconnect with the (significant) advances of EU foreign policy studies (EFP), particularly with regards to the institutional aspects of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Meanwhile, the academic debate on EU-China relations has become increasingly normative, discarding thorough analysis of the underlying bureaucratic and institutional mechanisms.

Analysts highlight that official discourses about a ‘strategic partnership’ notwithstanding, the EU and China disagree on most of the fundamental values of global governance: multilateral institutions, national sovereignty, use of force, and relations with rogue states. Stressing the fundamental divergence of national interests of key EU members vis-à-vis China, observers furthermore question the relevance, or even existence of, a common EU foreign policy towards China. Yet, these criticisms and the subsequent reluctance to study its processes can “often be attributed to an under-appreciation of institutional processes relative to other factors, such as material power” (Ginsberg and Smith). Indeed, there is an apparent lack of dispassionate and thorough analysis of the institutional processes at the heart of EU foreign policy towards China.

Project Objectives

The project aims to address this research gap by providing a theoretically informed and empirically rich analysis of the institutional politics of EU-China relations. For the 10-year period from the first EU-China summit in 1998 until present, this project traces the institutional processes of cooperation and EU foreign policy-making towards China in four key policy areas of global governance: non-proliferation, crisis management, climate change, and development policy. Each of these areas corresponds to a different institutional structure of the policy-making process due to different degrees of integration and institutionalization.

Conceptually, the project builds on institutionalist approaches within the field of EFP focusing on the internal and external effects of CFSP institutionalization. By disaggregating the different levels of EU foreign policy-making and analyzing the role and interactions of different institutional actors in the policy-making process, this approach contributes to opening the black box of EU-China cooperation mechanisms. Empirically, the study relies on the process of tracing through document analysis and in-depth qualitative interviews with the relevant bureaucratic and political actors. 

As such, the study aims to answer the following research questions: How has the institutional framework of EU foreign policy-making towards China evolved? Which actors and institutional dynamics have characterized its evolution both internally and externally? What institutional dynamics characterize policy-making in the selected policy areas? Which conclusions can be drawn from the different institutional structures of policy-making in the different policy areas?

Closing the knowledge gap on the political and institutional dimensions of EU-China relations will be a necessary first step towards a broader understanding of the effectiveness of current EU policies towards China.