The EU, China and the world. Too soft a touch

Lifting its arms ban on China will do the EU no credit

FOR European governments, which pride themselves on the civilising effect of their “soft power”, these are heady days. The European Union has been helping to broker a deal to win the protesters on the streets of Kiev the freer and fairer election that all Ukrainians were robbed of last month. Next week, despite misgivings, the EU will give Turkey, another large and strategically important neighbour, a date to open talks on eventual membership and thus, it is hoped, every reason for its mildly Islamist government to stay the democratic course.

Bringing stability to its own backyard is no longer the limit of Europe's ambition. This week brought a summit with China, the EU's newest “strategic partner” and a recipient of increasing amounts of European investment and trade. Next week officials from Britain, France, Germany and the EU will start their diplomatic arm-wrestling with Iran over ways to put a permanent end to that country's dangerous nuclear dabbling. And Europe's diplomats are not the only ones seeing action. From Sierra Leone to Afghanistan, from Bosnia to Iraq, Europe's soldiers are giving its diplomacy a harder military edge in increasingly far-flung places. Yet for all the economic and political clout at its disposal around the world, Europe can also be shamefully feeble about where to apply it.

The Europeans should at least be admirably tough on human rights, you might think. Earlier this year European ministers agreed a set of conditions for Myanmar's nasty regime to be seated for the first time, as the Association of South-East Asian Nations wished, at October's biennial ASEM (Asia-Europe) meeting. Yet Myanmar rudely cocked a snook, the Europeans went to the summit anyway and the final declaration was disgracefully silent on the junta's continued ruthless suppression of democracy.

Yet it is over China that the Europeans have got themselves into the biggest tangle. It has long pressed the EU to lift its 15-year-old arms embargo, imposed after the 1989 killings of democracy campaigners in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and elsewhere. France, keen as anyone to compete for a larger share of the lucrative China market, has long lobbied hard for the ban to go on the grounds that it is outdated, anachronistic (lumping China with miscreant regimes like Myanmar, Sudan and Zimbabwe) and not the way aspiring strategic partners should be treating each other. Now France has got its way. At their summit on December 8th, the EU gave China the “positive signal” it had been looking for. The ban is expected to go soon, though the exact date remains to be decided.

Yet lifting the ban sends out entirely the wrong signal. China's human-rights record is still poor. Many of those jailed in 1989 are still there. Earlier this year Chinese officials were hinting, in conciliatory fashion, that at least decrees governing arbitrary detention could be abolished, opening the way for China to ratify the UN's Convenant on Civil and Political Rights - as the EU has pressed it to do. But the Communist Party decided it still needed this tool of repression. And with France and then others pressing so hard for the arms ban to go, what need was there for human-rights concessions anyway?

The ban covers defence technology and weapons, and lifting it would be a strategic error, not just a political mistake. Behind China's military modernisation is a determination to recover Taiwan, which it regards as a renegade province, by force if need be. Turning push to shove would pit China against America, which is pledged to help Taiwan if it is attacked. Shortsightedly, some Europeans don't think Taiwan is much of their concern. Yet if America, which has lobbied strenuously for the arms ban to stay, were ever to find itself facing off against a China equipped in part by its European allies, the transatlantic alliance could be that war's first casualty.

Not good enough

Those Europeans who fought to keep the ban in place are now mounting a rearguard action to strengthen the EU's broader code of conduct on arms sales. Licences are meant to be denied where equipment might be used to abuse human rights, commit aggression, upset a regional balance or harm the interests of friends and allies. But the EU code is not binding. Governments interpret it differently, especially where technologies have civilian as well as military uses - just the sort of communications and radar technologies that China's armed forces need. And it is unlikely to reassure Congress, which may put up new barriers to transatlantic defence co-operation for fear that China will be a knock-on beneficiary.

All of which leaves China sitting pretty: it is giving nothing in return for the lifting of the arms ban, and can expect the continuing row to exacerbate tensions between Europe and America. The Europeans, meanwhile, are left looking like a bunch of naughty schoolchildren, squabbling over whether to lift the embargo quickly and get the bad news over before America's president, George Bush, visits Europe in February, or wait till his back is turned. None of this is calculated to convince others, such as Iran with its nuclear ambitions, or Russia over Ukraine, that Europe can defend its own interests, let alone take a position of principle and stick to it.

Editorial says 'Lifting its arms ban on China will do the EU no credit'.