Key takeaways
- The Chinese government is steadily gaining influence in the nations of the global South. Since 2013, this process has been taking place under the label of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
- Influence is gained through Chinese-led international institutions such as BRICS+ and regional cooperation forums such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Significantly, these institutions exclude the global North, effectively creating an alternative global governance system in opposition to the liberal international order (LIO).
- Influence-building takes place through regional mechanisms such as the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) and the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum (CASCF), and also via bilateral trade and investment deals.
- The EU (like the US) has been slow to take the BRI and Chinese alternative order-building seriously. Despite talk of a ‘Global Gateway’, Brussels has so far failed to construct a coherent and coordinated response.
- The EU needs to understand why China’s alternative order has more appeal in many parts of the global South. Reasons include the following: the absence of post-colonial baggage and dependency; Beijing’s insistence on non-interference in domestic politics; the relative ease of obtaining financial assistance and investment capital; and Chinese infrastructure construction know-how.
- The EU needs to find a way to build more influence across the global South as a counter to China. The basis of a renewed soft power campaign should be greater respect for the needs, interests, and identities of global South countries rather than depending on the uncertain appeal of ‘European values’ alone. The EU needs to show that it is capable of listening to its potential partners rather than just lecturing them about norms and values. A good start would be to increase diplomatic engagement via EU-led regional cooperation mechanisms promoting and facilitating Global Gateway investments.
China’s challenge to the West
Countries in the global North – defined as the United States of America and European nations, as well as other highly economically developed countries such as Canada and Japan – tend to assume that people worldwide, despite some minor cultural differences, share their belief system. For instance, it is taken for granted that most developing nations in the global South automatically buy into ‘Western’ norms and values – or that if they don’t, they must have been indoctrinated by an authoritarian propaganda machine. Most obviously, ‘Western values’ include European-style democracy and human rights, underwritten economically by the system of global free market capitalism.
Clearly, not everybody in the global North makes the assumption that developing countries will recognise the soft power appeal of the ‘Western model’, but many – including some policymakers – do. And, probably as an unacknowledged, perhaps unconscious legacy of the colonial era when Europe ran the world, they tend to do so without sufficient critical reflection upon the role of the global South in the international system. Europe’s colonial past – which involved virtually every country in Western Europe, including the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and even Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland – continues to colour the developing world’s relations with the EU. At the same time, as Belgian historian David Van Reybouck points out, the consequences of European imperialism – inequality and exploitation – are underemphasised in Europe itself. Chatham House scholar Hans Kundnani goes so far as to refer to the EU as a “vehicle for imperial amnesia.”