Chinese 370

In A PRISONER'S DILEMMA: THE EU'S CHINA ARMS EMBARGO Richard A. Bitzinger reports on how Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder are leading an effort to overturn the European Union's 15-year-old ban on selling arms to China, even though the EU Code of Conduct on arms sales and normal national arms export policies and controls explicitly restricts arms sales to countries that might use these weapons for internal repression, for external aggression, or where human rights are being seriously violated. So why are they doing it? For the money, even though

...ending the arms embargo is unlikely to result in Beijing buying German submarines or French fighter jets. European defense firms cannot hope to compete with Russia's sweetheart pricing or technology-transfer arrangement. And the fact remains that Russian weapons are simply a better fit when it comes to the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA), based as it is on Soviet designs and technology. More likely, European arms producers would mainly provide the PLA with competing bids in order to extract better deals from Moscow...

So what does the EU possibly stand to gain from ending the arms embargo? In fact, Europe's large commercial enterprises stand a far better chance of benefiting than its defense sectors. Lifting the arms ban would basically amount to a political rehabilitation of China, in return for which Beijing could reward Europe by buying more passenger jets from Airbus, satellites from Astrium, or telecommunications systems from Ericsson or Nokia. China might also turn to Europe in the future for nuclear power plants or high-speed rail systems...

The fact of the matter is, however, momentum against the embargo is growing, and the EU is on course toward eventually overturning it, if not this year then probably sometime in 2005. The irony is that Europe's defense industry is unlikely to gain much from lifting the arms ban, while the transatlantic relationship will almost certainly suffer greatly. So long as Europe views weapons sales to China in strictly an economic sense, it will clash with Washington, which has to deal with the regional military and strategic repercussions of these sales.