Europe’s Disgraceful Betrayal

According to top EU officials, the new Comprehensive Agreement on Investment between Europe and China is a wonderful panacea of important measures that includes greater market access to European companies in China and pledges to implement the Paris climate agreement.

And, they say, “China has committed to effectively implement [International Labor Organization] Conventions it has ratified, and to work towards the ratification of the ILO fundamental Conventions, including on forced labour.”

No one believes that for a second.

European officials have rushed to cement the trade deal before the end of 2020, and before Joe Biden takes office. In the process, they’ve deliberately overlooked the Chinese Communist Party’s disdain for human rights and its widespread atrocities, including forced-labor practices, in Xinjiang. Although it once seemed that opposition to the deal spurred by concerns for China’s Uyghur minority might have scuttled the negotiations, the two sides completed their talks and signed the agreement earlier today.

Now it awaits approval by the European Parliament, which could vote the proposal down — and a number of the body’s members have already spoken out against the arrangement. Reinhard Butikofer, the Green Party member who runs the Parliament’s China delegation, tore into it on Twitter. The “language on ILO and forced labor is not worth the ink,” he wrote. In another tweet he compared the deal to putting lipstick on a pig. More than a few of his colleagues are expected to express their agreement with him.

In the interim, whether or not this investment agreement wins approval, it speaks volumes about how some European officials view the new reality of democratic competition with China and reckoning with Beijing’s human-rights abuses. Gérard Araud, a former French ambassador to the United States and the U.N., wrote on Twitter that although he is indignant about the Chinese government’s treatment of the Uyghurs, refusing to sign the agreement would not have had any impact, and it would’ve been a “feel good” policy.

But refusing to conclude negotiations over the agreement would have accomplished one simple thing: denying the Chinese Communist Party-state legitimacy and the greater leverage that comes with these sorts of negotiations and deeper ties. Europe recently acknowledged that China is a “systemic rival” and that curtailing Chinese investment in certain vital European industries is a security concern. This year saw the beginning of a U.S.-EU strategic dialogue to coordinate on China-related issues. The president of the European Council even took to the U.N. General Assembly in September to declare Europe’s allegiance to the U.S. side in the competition with China.

But this was no match for the desire to cater to business interests across the continent, particularly in Germany.

For the past four years, headlines declared that Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron are the new leaders of the free world — the United States, this narrative claimed, had abdicated its responsibility to defend liberal democracy and the Western alliance. There’s certainly no disputing that Donald Trump’s fusillades against NATO, collective defense, and America’s allies strained transatlantic relations (even if they resulted in larger allied contributions to NATO) — but the destructive potential of this agreement dwarfs any of the concrete damage that the president might have inflicted upon the alliance.

Officials on both sides of the aisle are right to be furious about this agreement. It sells out a people targeted for eradication and sets transatlantic cooperation on China back several steps when it’s needed most.

Or, as Matthew Pottinger, the National-Security Council official who has worked on crafting the administration’s China policy, put it:

Some European officials and commentators liked to claim that the Trump Administration was an impediment to even deeper transatlantic cooperation. Now it is plain to all that this isn’t about President Trump. It’s about key European officials. Look in the mirror.

They posed as defenders of multilateralism, human rights, and Western liberalism. It was a very clever negotiating position.