Rising China, declining Europe: a tale of hubris | Charlemagne's notebook | Economist.com
EUROPEANS are used to being looked down on by superpowers: after all, we had half a century of practice at being a buffer zone between America and the Soviet Union.
Disdain is now being taken to a new level, however, by a growing band of Chinese thinkers and officials, who make clear their impatience with talk of the European Union being a model for the Middle Kingdom.
Chinese intellectual curiosity in the EU seemed to peak a few years ago, when in Beijing and Shanghai think tanks grew moderately excited about the idea that Europe was about to adopt a constitution and equip itself with a permanent president and foreign minister. Such European swagger fed into China’s (only natural) desire to see a more multipolar world develop, to replace the post Berlin Wall era of American hegemony.
Then came 2005, and French and Dutch referendums that rejected the draft EU constitution, tipping the union into four years of institutional squabbling that has still not ended. In the meantime, the forces of globalisation, accelerated by the global economic crisis, left the relative decline of Europe as a trading power even more cruelly exposed.
The EU is also exceedingly bad at dealing with Beijing. The 27 member countries undercut and compete among each other for commercial advantage, while the central EU bureaucracy has allowed itself to be bogged down by process (there are scores of EU-China structural dialogues now).
Now, a common Chinese view of Europe amounts to:
- Europe is in decline but has not come to terms with it.
- Yet Europe still wants to impose its values on China.
- There are structural problems in dealing with the EU because of the difficulty in distinguishing EU from member-nation interests.
- We have conflicting interests in Africa.
I have much sympathy for Chinese complaints about the structural difficulties of dealing with the EU. I also have nothing but admiration for the hard work, ambition and astonishing tenacity of the Chinese people, as they study, work and dream their way to lives their parents and grandparents could never have known.
But, and it is a big but, I have real problems with the idea that because Europe is in relative decline, we have no right to promote our values.
Values are not proved right or wrong by the wealth or growth of the economies behind them. Today’s Chinese arguments amount to a boast that their model of 21st century autocracy is being proved objectively superior by China’s economic and strategic rise.
Many people would argue that China is rising (at least in part) despite its autocratic model, which ignores such important drivers of success as meritocracy, transparency, and the promotion of creative and innovative thinking. I would argue that an alternative history of the past 30 years of Chinese Communism might be this: if you abandon some of the most economically destructive policies ever devised and stop kicking the Chinese economy, it will stand up and be rather big.
We in Europe are far from saintly, and we certainly have a lot of structural problems that need to be addressed. But here is a question: what if we in Europe are worth listening precisely because we made so many mistakes in our glory days? Mistakes that echo many of today’s Chinese policies.
We in Europe have tried mercantilism, militarism, statism, corporatism and inculcating our youths with angry nationalism. We know all about the model of state-driven investment (as do the Japanese, another declining power the Chinese like to disdain). And we know its wisdom is far from proven in the long run, thanks to problems of misallocated resources, weaknesses in the banking system, pollution and the like.
We in Europe thought it was a good idea to scramble after African resources, first by grabbing them then in the post-colonial period by extending vast loans to murderous kleptocracies. And we were right when, far too late in the day, we decided to do less of that, and try to promote good governance in Africa.
Plenty of European countries also used to be dictatorships, which jailed dissidents and systematically suppressed bad news. And so Europeans remember the low quality of government and administration that you get when you lack democratic checks and balances. We know to be deeply sceptical when non-democratic regimes say they are self-policing.
In short, throughout the bloody centuries of European rule and misrule over large chunks of the world, we tried a lot of things that were both wicked, and ultimately self-defeating. Now, and perhaps only because we are in the twilight of our power, Europeans believe we have learned some bitter lessons about values.
