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European Arms Embargo Against China

Angelique van Engelen - 12/18/2005

Efforts to propel growth of the lagging European defense industry are hardly paying off and now another obstacle been added. Lifting an EU arms embargo against China, planned for June 30, has been called into serious question since China indicated last week it is quite enamored with the idea of annexing Taiwan. In a real in-your-face move, China ratified a law condoning military intervention in Taiwan. Pressures from within the EU and the US are rising for Europe to abandon its plans.

Beijing's new law authorizing a military attack on Taiwan stunned everyone. The risk that China might be invading Taiwan who it had a legal claim to has been feared for a long time. The country's months old troop deployment along the Taiwan border also was an ill omen. Yet its open endorsement of intervention in the tiny neighboring country beat just about everything. "[this, and China's poor human rights record] created quite a difficult political environment" for lifting the embargo, said UK Foreign secretary Jack Straw, voicing the general opinion among EU policy makers who convened in a two day summit meeting.

Europe has long been divided over the ban and the rifts are deepening fast. France and Germany have been strongest in favor of lifting it, Britain had more problems with China's human rights situation.

In the US, the EU's proposed plans are being viewed as highly dangerous, increasing the potential risks US troops in Asia might come under. An EU-US trade war might emerge, said Condoleeza Rice, referring to Congressional plans to propose restrictions on transfers of high tech defense equipment to Europe. A plan to propose a U.N. resolution condemning China's human rights policy was rejected by US law makers last week. The EU sent a special mission to Washington to explain in depth its arms export rules and new proposed safeguards, yet Washington did not appear impressed.

If news reports are a good indicator of how speculation increases when tensions rise and risks are increasingly spelled out, then the worries even within Europe have grown quite intense. Last February, diplomats still said that linking increased arms sales to China with the planned lifting of the embargo would be an overreaction. This week, even EU diplomats are voicing concerns about the possibility that the EU's action might lead to destabilising international arrangements 'if Europe-manufactured weapons flood the Chinese market'.

It is apparently the high tech weaponry that's possibly going to be sold to China that people are worried about most. China has a huge army, but it's been without continuous access to high technology weapons for the past 15 years.

Some EU diplomats believe the proposed EU safeguards that they believed justified the planned lifting of the embargo and which indicate what can be sold are adequate and a step up from the vaguely worded embargo imposed in 1989. This embargo's vague wording has been referred to by US officials as a big worry, yet reports are circulating that even the US itself has sold arms to China in recent years.

China has reacted angrily to reports that the EU might delay its decision whether to lift the embargo. The China case will likely shape the EU's defense industry significantly.

Europeans are aiming to raise the standards of their defense industry to a competitive level with the US. The Chief Executive of the newly established European Defence Agency EDA, Nick Witney who has been in the job since July last year, indicated that more time is needed to reach unilateral agreement on a series of safeguards to prevent a that European weapons destabilize areas.

Over the next few months, it will become clear whether the EU is in the arms industry for the big bucks or whether it can muster up any unilateral plans that maintain a common defense industry for defense rather than income purposes only.

Currently, Europe's procurement programs are mostly formulated on a national basis and it's a large task to coordinate all 25 countries' weapons industries.

"Manufacturing and selling in a national market is no longer sustainable in a globalised world economy. The demand side needs to increasingly come together on a continental scale for the supply side to respond to that demand in a continental scale of market," said Witney recently in an interview.

Politicians in Europe tend to associate China with economic growth opportunities they they cannot afford to miss out on, but the combination politics, arms and economics might prove just a tad more complicated.

Even though embargos often are frail, there is so much of a notion still that an embargo ought to only be lifted only after the issue that caused it has been satisfactorily been addressed in a host country. Yet it is difficult to escape the notion that the poor Chinese human rights record hardly has been an issue in the EU plans to lift the ban.

China might for instance have been forced to lift more house arrests of dissidents and journalists if it would have felt the need to take the EU slightly serious. Yet recently, it did bow to US pressure to free a Islamic business woman.

What are the potential dangers an armed to the teeth China poses besides the obvious Taiwanese threat? For a while observers have been concerned about the direction China is heading for. On a scale with North and South Korea, Taiwan tensions might evolve in a similar, yet lesser pronounced threat.

Why would a country risk economic progress by invading a tiny little country down the road? China's a difficult read at the best of times but some experts are saying that the political impact of botching a deal on the embargo might exacerbate the situation. China might feel all the more emboldened to go ahead and attack Taiwan.

Apparently if anyone could have informed the Europeans of what they potentially might have been getting themselves into it would have been its US counterpart anyway because it has troops on the ground in Asia. Europe doesn't.