Friday 10 March 2017

Geopolitics over Oceans, TPP


Wolfgang Pape

Geopolitics over Oceans:
Only plurilateral containment 
or omnilateral opening?

While here in the West trade people are focusing their attention on the TTIP negotiations, they are barely aware that, apart from this contentious bilateral Transatlantic Partnership currently set on its difficult course of discussion, there is an already existing plurilateral Transpacific Partnership (TPP) at a much more advanced stage of ratification out there in the East.
What both Partnerships have in common as a major motive for the USA leading them is the ostentatious exclusion of China. As far as the TTIP is concerned, this exclusion prima facie is purely based on geography. Evidently not the case with the TPP, the naïve observer might well ask why the second -- or perhaps already the largest -- economy in the world is not being included as another appropriate Pacific neighbour in such a plurilateral pact. With Communist Vietnam vetted as suitable, market ideology can hardly have served as a valid pretext for the rejection of China. The actual answer sounds too simple: TPP is driven by the USA[1] and Washington does not want the Chinese to play a negotiating role, at least not from the very beginning, i.e. not upstream in the basic shaping of its rules and standards. After the negotiators ‘paraphed’ the TPP text, there were indeed hints that China might one day join the club.  But it can only come in, once the TPP’s basic rules have been established in the Western way[2] with the acquis so set in stone that even the biggest trader would hardly be able to change anything afterwards. With the USA still the dominant power in the setting of the rules from IPR to ISDS[3], over the Atlantic as well as over the Pacific, China would be left with a very limited margin in which to set out its own standards.
In geopolitics such containment strategies have revealing historic precedents. Already before the height of the Cold War between the USA and the Soviet Union, the Anglo-Saxons used containment strategies against China in the negotiation of the Treaty of San Francisco in 1952, which covered Japan’s withdrawal after WWII. China's exclusion from those talks led to the purposely unclear situation in the China Seas and to the increasingly tension-filled but control-leaking ‘American Lake’[4] of our days, ranging from the Spratly Islands in the South to the Dokdo/Takeshima in the North.
One might go even further back in time, as Henry Kissinger does in his bestseller, and point out that China did not participate either in the making of the basic rules of the existing international order grown on the all-Western Westphalian structure of nation-states,[5] originating in the 17th century and evolving into the multilateral system of our day. In East Asia, unlike in Europe, people in more maritime communities had a much weaker attachment to anything like a state with clear boundaries[6] or to ethnic groupings and dogmatic books of religion. There, coastal traders created pragmatic networks eventually reaching all the way to Arabia and Rome, also via the Silk Road. It has taken Europe centuries of destructive wars over national borders mainly drawn by mighty militaries to learn at least plurilaterally the lessons for mutually beneficial trading networks and flows of communication unhindered by borders -- as finally achieved in Schengen, in spite of a multilateral yet unfettered focus on the nation-state.
East Asia (as well as Africa and South America!) through the imposition of western-made ‘inter-national law’ often saw straight-line borders artificially inflicted by colonisers separating and mixing peoples irrespective of their native, natural and cultural belonging. This strategy also led to thousands of islands being left 'at sea', which later gave cause not only to post-colonial conflicts from the Falklands in the South-Atlantic to the Kurils in the North-Pacific but also in the China Seas. Such conflicts do not (yet) flare up in the East only because the ‘Asian Paradox’, with its still fast-flowing trade, maintains priority over deeply frozen politics and exaggerated territorial disputes stemming from those imported Western concepts of the narrowly nation-minded multilateralists such as borders and sovereignty.
However, the Chinese of the 21st century – much more pro-actively emerging on the world scene and potentially the largest economy again -- expect to be centrally[7] involved in further 'international’ rule-making, even to the point of revising some of the rules that prevail.[8] Otherwise, Chinese initiatives spanning the globe with BRICS[9] and SCO[10] and more recent AIIB[11] as well as OBOR[12] clearly demonstrate that the country’s call can draw others – not only nations -- into its suite in an omnilateral way that rather lets the USA look lonesome and excluded now. It must have been a shocking eye-opener for Washington to see even main allies of its ‘Five-Eyes’ of old like the UK and Australia rush without any hush to join the new AIIB. Francis Fukuyama, who along with other Americans is fearful of China exporting its model, already admits that the US has relatively little to offer to developing countries and it should have become a founding member of the AIIB.[13] To a certain degree, Obama has sought to work with China, while at the same time forging relationships with other states that can shape and constrain (but not militarily contain) it.[14] The American’s attempted arch of containment around China hence would reach from Europe via India and ASEAN all the way to South Korea and Japan. But the Americans seem to be already pushed into such a defensive position by China’s deft diplomacy that Hillary Clinton has recalled the Cold War and called TTIP an ‘economic NATO’. However, it is questionable whether she really could count any longer on solidarity equivalent to NATO’s Article 5 in the trans-ocean partnerships, in view of China’s further emerging mild market might[15] and hard political power poss


[1] The USTR even calls it “Made in America” as headlined in big letters on its website
[2] NB: The original TPP text was ‘paraphed’ by negotiators in English, Spanish and French only, not in any Asian language. The 12 countries involved in the Trans-Pacific Partnership are arranging to hold an official signing ceremony in New Zealand on 4 February 2016; they include Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States of America and Vietnam.
[3] The insistence of the USA on the ISDS reminds us of the Senate’s refusal to ratify the League of Nations in the 1920s i.a. on grounds of President Wilson having neglected the American ’arbitration tradition’ in his negotiations with the Europeans; cf. Mark Mazower, “Governing the World“, London, 2012, p.138-139. Interestingly, it is now the EU insisting on ISDS-courts in their FTA with Japan.
[4] See Wolfgang Pape, “Is the ‘American lake’ drying up in the China Sea?”, CEPS, Bruxelles, 31.7.2014 https://www.ceps.eu/publications/%E2%80%98american-lake%E2%80%99-drying-china-sea accessed 12.1.2016
[5] Cf. Henry Kissinger, “World Order“, London, 2014, p. 225
[6] See Bill Hayton, “The South China Sea“, Yale University Press, 2014, p.8
[7] NB China is still the Middle Kingdom in its own and Japanese name, i.e.中国
[8] Kissinger, p. 225
[9] BRICS brings together Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa
[10] The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation comprises China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan
[11] The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has a list of 57 prospective founding members that have signed its basic agreement to commit funds, including major EU member states. The United Nations has addressed the launch of AIIB as having potential for "scaling up financing for sustainable development" for the concern of global economic governance.
[12] OBOR refers to the China’s action plan for its new Silk Road under the slogan “One Belt, One Road”. It potentially covers an area with 55 percent of world GNP, 70 percent of global population and 75 percent of known energy reserves (see François Godement, "One Belt, One Road: China’s Great Leap Outward", China Analysis, European Council on Foreign Relations, June 2015, http://www.ecfr.eu/page/-/China_analysis_belt_road.pdf accessed on 11.1.2016
[13] See Francis Fukuyama, “Exporting the Chinese Model“, New Europe, Issue 1146, January 2016, p.107
[15] China’s richest man is buying up a major stake in Hollywood, the very heart of America’s remaining ’soft power’, in order to build the world’s biggest studios in China; see The Guardian, “Hollywood studio Legendary bought for $3.5 bn in largest Chinese acquisition”, 12.1.2016, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/12/hollywood-studio-legendary-bought-for-35-bn-in-largest-chinese-acquistion accessed 15.1.2016

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