Charlemagne. The reds in the West

The European Union's courtship of China - and its implications for America

WHEN Hu Jintao, China's president, visited Paris a year ago, the French government celebrated by bathing the Eiffel Tower in red light and staging a dragon parade along the Champs-Elysees. Strangely, no such celebrations featured when George Bush visited Paris a few months later. France is not the only European country bending over backwards to please the Chinese. Last month Gerhard Schroder, the German chancellor, visited Beijing with 43 German businessmen. It was further confirmation that the European Union is hell-bent on wooing China, for a mixture of strategic and economic reasons.

The courtship is paying dividends. This week it emerged that the EU is now China's biggest trading partner: in 2004, trade between the two amounted to almost €160 billion ($210 billion), an increase of 35% over 2003. And within a few months the Europeans have made clear that they will take a step that will delight the Chinese and enrage the Americans, by lifting the arms embargo that has been in place ever since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

The looming transatlantic row over China is the more striking because in other respects European-American relations are improving. Mr Bush is due in Europe next month, on a trip explicitly intended to mend fences. Javier Solana, the EU's ebullient foreign-policy chief, visited Washington, DC, recently, and got on famously with all and sundry. Mr Solana says that he concluded that the Americans could “live with” the lifting of Europe's arms embargo on China.

The Americans retort that, if Mr Solana got that impression, he was simply not listening hard enough. On the contrary, at every stop of Mr Solana's extended traipse around Washington, from the Pentagon to Congress to the White House, his interlocutors stressed that any decision to lift the EU's arms embargo would go down very badly. Richard Lugar and Joe Biden, two senior senators who are in general well-disposed towards Europe, were particularly fierce.

American concerns are easy to understand. A few years ago, when Chinese threats to invade Taiwan became particularly vocal, the Americans sent an aircraft-carrier through the Taiwan Strait. Since then, China's arms build-up has only accelerated. The People's Republic now has hundreds of ballistic missiles pointing at Taiwan, to deter “splittist” tendencies. The possibility that American and Chinese forces might one day clash over Taiwan cannot be discounted. So the idea that America's NATO allies in Europe might actually aid the Chinese arms build-up seems abhorrent to Washington.

The European response to this is soothing. The lifting of the arms embargo, they insist, would be “symbolic” in nature. The only other countries on which the EU imposes an arms embargo are such pariah states as Myanmar and Zimbabwe. Putting such an important place as China in the same camp is insulting. The decision to get rid of this slur would not be motivated by any unseemly desire actually to sell the Chinese any weapons - of course not. To prove this, the EU will put in place a toughened “code of conduct”, which would stop any EU country from selling weapons that might upset the regional balance of power or threaten the interests of an ally.

The Americans are not convinced. What, they ask, will happen if the Europeans have a particularly lucrative contract dangled in front of them? Will it not be tempting to read the rules in the laxest way possible? Such concerns are particularly pointed since it will be left to individual EU countries to interpret the code of conduct. France, which is the country pushing hardest for the lifting of the embargo, is also one of the world's largest arms exporters. (Ironically, one of the liveliest recent corruption scandals in France concerns the sale of frigates to Taiwan in the 1990s, but then business is business.)

The Americans are especially concerned about technology exports to China. The Chinese can make their own guns and tanks, or import them from Russia. But they would love to get more high-technology and communications equipment that could improve battlefield management. America was able to stop Israel from selling China its sophisticated Phalcon air reconnaissance system. But Europe is an obvious place to shop. The EU is already the largest exporter of high technology to China, and China is investing €200m in the EU's Galileo project, a supposedly commercial satellite system meant to free Europe from its dependence on America's rival GPS system.

The China syndrome

Is it possible that more American pressure may dissuade the Europeans from lifting their embargo? Probably not. “That train”, says one senior EU official, “left the station and has been gathering steam for some time.” Even Britain and the Netherlands, which often share American concerns, are unlikely to block the decision; this week Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, said the embargo would go in the next six months. Britain too has an arms industry and commercial interests in China.

For the French, wider ideological issues come into play. Mr Chirac is the strongest proponent of replacing American hegemony with a “multipolar world”. On a visit to Beijing last October he declared that France and China shared “a common vision of the world - a multipolar world.” David Shambaugh, a Sinologist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, argues that China and the EU represent “an emerging axis”, based on the fact that “China and Europe share a convergence of views about the United States, its foreign policy and its global behaviour.”

That exaggerates the unanimity of opinion within Europe. But the EU is still poised to take a unanimous decision to lift its arms embargo. That would mark a significant milestone: a moment when Europe had to make a choice between the strategic interests of America and China - and chose China.

Commentary feature. The European Union's courtship of China - and its implications for America.