Lecture
LUCIR book talk: Awakening to China’s Rise: Europe amid US-China Strategic Competition
- Date
- Tuesday 25 April 2023
- Time
- Location
-
Wijnhaven
Turfmarkt 99
2511 DP The Hague - Room
- room 3.48
Hugo Meijer, CNRS Research Director at Sciences Po and Founding Director of the European Initiative for Security Studies will present the finding of his newly published book: Awakening to China's Rise. European Foreign and Security Policies toward the People’s Republic of China.
This book provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of how Europe’s major powers have responded to the re-emergence of China as a great power in world politics since the end of the Cold War. To do so, it puts forward a unique cross-regional comparison of how the major European powers (France, Germany and the United Kingdom) have confronted Chinese assertiveness both in the Asia-Pacific and in Europe.
Firstly, it analyses their response to China’s increasingly muscular regional posture in the Asia-Pacific through the development of diplomatic and security initiatives with partners in the region. Secondly, it delineates how they have confronted China's inroads into Europe, looking at the measures that they have taken to tackle Chinese investments in, and supply of, technologies in strategic sectors such as critical national infrastructures, dual-use technologies, and in the digital domain, including Huawei's 5G networks.
It shows how China’s growing assertiveness after 2009 has caused the three major European powers to gradually awaken to China's rise. In the 2010s, heightened threat perceptions of China, coupled with increasingly competitive bilateral economic relations with the PRC, have gradually and cumulatively caused the hardening of their policy goals which, in turn, translated into the formulation of new policy instruments to confront such a challenge. To substantiate this argument, the book relies on a large body of previously undisclosed primary sources, including: 223 interviews conducted with senior officials in Europe (Berlin, Brussels, London, Paris), in the United States (Washington DC), and in Asia (Beijing, Shanghai, New Delhi, Seoul); declassified archival documents from France, the UK and Germany; leaked US diplomatic cables; and new data on European naval deployments.
About the speaker
Hugo Meijer is CNRS Research Fellow at Sciences Po, Center for International Studies (CERI, Paris) and the Founding Director of The European Initiative for Security Studies (EISS), the largest network of Security Studies scholars in Europe. He is also Senior Fellow at the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy (CSDS), in Brussels, and Honorary Researcher at the Centre for War and Diplomacy, Lancaster University.
Nicolas Blarel, Associate Professor of International Relations and Director of Studies at the Institute of Political Science, will moderate the discussion and serve as a discussant.
This event is open to the public; all are welcome.