Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its economic and/or diplomatic engagement with the People’s Republic of China
NC European Union CP OBOR Internal Net Benefit Shell
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- Link: Economic and diplomatic engagement improves relations—spills over into more cooperation
- Impact: OBOR solves many impacts including the global drug trade, terrorism, economic decline, and Asian war
1NC European Union CP OBOR Internal Net Benefit Shell
RSIS, March 2016 [S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies a professional graduate school of international affairs at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. RSIS’ mission is to develop a community of scholars and policy analysts at the forefront of security studies and international affairs, https://www.rsis.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/PR160307_China-One-Belt-One-Road.pdf] This Policy Report focuses on the overland routes that connect China to Europe via Central Asia and it aims to answer the question whether the European Union (EU) should engage China in the One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative. The expansion of the OBOR initiative is forcing China’s economic diplomacy to embrace a broader political and security engagement. While Russia and the United States are revising their roles in South and Central Asia, the EU has lost momentum. This Policy Report addresses the need for the EU to: • adopt a common voice to engage China’s OBOR initiative; • promote stakeholder participation; • coordinate crisis prevention; and • avoid focusing only on short-term economic gains to attract China’s outbound direct investments. The EU involvement with the OBOR initiative is a defining moment for Sino-European relations. In this respect, China has to: • communicate a detailed road map on the OBOR initiative; • allow local economic actors to access the bids for infrastructural projects; • increase the role of private Chinese SMEs; and • avoid relying on the OBOR initiative to export industrial overcapacity. In this regard, the utilisation of the EU social and environmental best practices by Beijing and a renewed EU stance towards a “flexible engagement” with China could be mutually beneficial for fostering regional stabilisation and structural reforms in South and Central Asia.
Balossi-Restelli, 2011 [Ludovica, professor at Cambridge University, An EU Innovative External Action?] This different historical experience also led the Europeans and the Chinese to adopt different trajectories of national-building. The need to prevent war and to expand their domestic markets motivated the European states to found the European community/Union where national sovereignty is transferred in part from member states to the community/union. The major European states have passed the stage of industrialization and entered into a post-industrial era. In the words of Robert Cooper, the European states are postmodern states which are characterized by “the breaking down of the distinction between domestic and foreign affairs and mutual interference in (traditional) domestic affairs and mutual surveillance” (Cooper 2002, 13). In contrast, China is still in the process of industrialization. Currently China is regarded as the “world’s factory”. In China’s external relations, sovereignty is stressed as a primary principle. It is difficult to imagine that China will agree with others on mutual interference in domestic affairs—this is in direct contradiction with China’s Five Principles of Peaceful coexistence. In the same vein, the distinction between domestic and foreign affairs is also to be maintained by Beijing in the coming decades. Composed of 27 member states, the EU is well recognized as a normative power. According to the Treaty of the European Union, the Union “if founded on the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and the fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law, principles that are common to the member states” (Treaty of the European Union, Art. 6). These principles, advocated by the EU, are not only applied to its member states, but also promoted widely to the other parts of the world. Since 2001, in the field of the EU’s external relations, political dialogue has been explicitly clarified by the Council to cover human rights and democratization. In addition, the EU has established human rights dialogues with about 40 countries. Among them, the EU established the first such human rights dialogue with China in 1995 (Devuyst and Men 2011). China is known for its pragmatism, which it has practiced since the reform policy was implement at the end of the 1970s. What Deng Xiaoping, the general designer of Chinese reform, said in the 1980s vividly summarises Beijing’s pragmatism: “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice”. The principle ambition behind China’s state building process is to achieve power and prosperity (Men 2007, 7-39(. In order to realise this goal, China has taken on board the successful experience from the Western world so as to reform its economic and social system, improves relations with its neighbours, and push aside value and ideological differences in order to develop close cooperation with major Western countries in regional and global affairs. The first cooperative agreement on trade relations was reached between the EU and China in 1978—three years after the European Economic Community and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) established diplomatic relations. The agreement on Trade and Economic Cooperation, agreed to in 1985, still serves as the legal basis for bilateral cooperation. In 2007, negotiations for a new agreement, The Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) were launched and as of yet there is still no clear idea of when the deal is likely to be concluded. Until now, economic and trade relations remain as a cornerstone of the EU-China partnership. In contrast, cooperation in the field of norms remains limited. Nevertheless, dialogue and programmes/projects are maintained and regularly developed between Brussels and Beijing in order to keep open different channels for bilateral communication on the matter.
Ntousas, March 2016 [Vassilis, FEPS International Relations Policy Advisor, http://www.feps-europe.eu/assets/6b12aa95-9d47-466f-a791-fa02a5d5c7d3/backtothefuture-feps-policybriefpdf.pdf] Take infrastructure for example. Many countries clearly lacking the resources today to set up their own competitive networks and to fund much required infrastructure projects will resort to OBOR and Chinese-led investment to help them improve their connectivity to major markets and resource supplies. Intent to use its large financial leverage in this way, China has expressed the willingness to fund these projects inter alia in order to improve its own market linkages and find additional outlets for its construction industry. By doing so, and so as to secure the safe and orderly conduct of its investment (and the commerce continuity that the business model behind such investment is based upon), Beijing will inevitably (try to) secure a higher level of support within each respective country. Therein lies the core of the argument about how OBOR could be politically beneficial to Beijing at the international level. Indeed, China is bound to gradually enlarge its footprint on the ground in large swathes of Eurasia as it uses its massive economic firepower to underpin the ambitious physical networks of OBOR. As the initiative unfolds, and as mentioned above, this will inevitably mean that Beijing will find itself increasingly involved in a wide variety of regional matters, ranging from political or social instability and regional disputes, to ‘non-traditional’ threats such as terrorism, sea-born crime and piracy, insurgencies and drug trade. In all of these matters, China’s involvement in OBOR will provide both an opening and an active interest in diffusing tensions and settling the situation, if it wants to preserve the status quo, in doing so, it will inevitably utilize the increasing leverage it will have in the region, as a consequence of its increasing leverage over the trading routes (and therefore the transit countries). whether intentionally or not, Beijing’s amassed economic clout will most likely translate into political clout, not least due to the fact that, though its involvement with OBOR, China will become an agenda-setter. According to many international commentators, this signifies that OBOR reveals a marked shift to Beijing’s hitherto low-profile international involvement. For these critics, the noticeable change that OBOR represents lies in what they see as China’s ambition to become a principal diplomatic force in the region in addition to the inevitable primary economic role it will want to secure for itself if the OBOR initiative succeeds; viewed as such, they also interpret OBOR, for example, as a strategic move by Beijing to counter the United States (US) pivot to Asia and/or the also US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership. For obvious reasons, China has routinely attempted to fend off any such allegations that it wishes to use OBOR for political purposes internationally in the classical ‘sphere of influence expansion’ sense. Indeed, Chinese officials have gone to great lengths to convey this message during their many visits in countries abroad, portraying OBOR as an initiative that is by no means a tool for any country to seek geopolitical advantages but one that is based on complementarity, joint consultations and mutual benefit. President Xi Jinping, for example, has stated that OBOR ‘should be jointly built through consultation to meet the interests of all, and efforts should be made to integrate the development strategies of the countries along the routes. It is not closed but open and inclusive; it is not a solo by China but a chorus of all countries along the routes.”19This also explains why Chinese leaders and party operatives have vehemently rejected the comparison that many observers have made that the OBOR is a Chinese scheme that resembles the U.S. Marshall Plan. Indeed, unlike the Marshall Plan, that is, the US-led and US-funded programme aimed at revitalising Western Europe after the end of the Second World War, which came hand in hand with strict conditions, Beijing has emphasised time and time again that there is not set of preconditions attached to OBOR. In this context, Beijing's insistence on the 'win-win', ‘no-strings-attached’ character of OBOR should not be seen as a simple slogan, but is rather embedded in the traditional Chinese ethos in its international modus operandi. For Beijing, the indivisibility of connectivity, stability, security, and development is an important component in explaining what is for them the real long-term added value of OBOR for the region: serving as a confidence-building exercise, OBOR and the greater connectivity it will bring with it can foster regional stability and development, which could in turn assist countries in transcending geopolitics and their geopolitical sources of antipathy. Put more simply, the intention here is for neighbouring countries to feel like stakeholders of the project, reap the benefits of what China has to offer through OBOR, and therefore gradually align their interest amongst them (and with Beijing) without feeling threatened by its increasing influence. Viewed in this context, the OBOR does not constitute an initiative targeted at converting economic influence into geostrategic might, but a gradual exercise in seed-planting of sorts, which if it succeeds, can strengthen the stability of the wider region. Regardless of the intentions of Beijing, the way(s) in which the confluence of all of the above factors will be perceived internationally relies heavily on how the OBOR initiative will be implemented. Indeed, as OBOR is expected to shape the country’s economic development strategy and international activities in the upcoming years, the ways in which the initiative will be implemented will ultimately decide the project’s ‘reputation’. For the moment, Beijing has shown that it almost exclusively focuses on the economic drivers of the initiative and that it places a great emphasis on the inclusiveness of the programme. Evidently, this can change over time, and in this sense, it is important to underline that the balance between the two will have to be continuously reassessed along the trajectory of OBOR’s development. Yet, in spite of whether OBOR intentionally or unintentionally manages to extend the pulling radius of China’s international gravitational field, the initiative itself can only be ostensibly regarded as a way to promote trade routes; the centrality of the initiative within China’s foreign and domestic policy announcements and discourse points elsewhere. Indeed, much like its added value in providing a framework of common reference and action in the domestic realm, OBOR can also act both as a springboard and a lynchpin for the intensification of China’s engagement internationally. As such, it can be seen as the policy embodiment of the intention for China to become a less dependent, more active strategic player in the international arena. Whether or not this exercise succeeds remains to be seen, but its potential consequences for China and world will be very significant nonetheless. Directory: wp-content -> uploads -> 2015 2015 -> Police Militarization 2015 -> 2015 ihbb championships: hs history Bowl Round 4 – Prelims First Quarter 2015 -> Wrtp/big step · 3841 W. Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee, wi 53208 2015 -> Rao bulletin 1 December 2015 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles 2015 -> Darton College 2015 -> Training Workshop on Planning and Implementation of Multi-Sectoral Development Programme (MsDP) in Bihar Date : 6th 2015 -> Rao bulletin 15 June 2015 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles 2015 -> Rao bulletin 1 September 2015 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles 2015 -> Rao bulletin 1 August 2015 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles 2015 -> Science, and transportation united states senate Download 2.62 Mb. Share with your friends:
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