E3G

Europe in the World: Summer Briefing

By Chris Littlecott

3. Achieving Energy Security and Climate Security: Europe must choose to develop a truly common response to energy and climate security threats instead of retreating down the self-defeating path of energy nationalism. Europe must take a global lead in order to secure its future energy and climate security.

Europe cannot prosper in an unstable climate. Nor can it succeed without reliable and affordable access to energy services.  This makes the transition to a global low carbon economy among the most important of Europe’s strategic interests. Failure to achieve either goal will result in rising political tensions, economic disruption and conflict as competition for increasingly scarce resources dominates global relationships. Europe will not fare well in such a world of competing powers, and neither will the values which bind us together.

Europe has led the world in developing a coherent response to these twin challenges, but it has failed to match the scale and urgency of the problem, and still does not see them as essential issues of European security and prosperity. Short term national interests are still dominating energy policy and preventing effective coordinated action, despite the fact that no one European country can achieve energy and climate security unilaterally. Energy and climate change policies are still dealt with separately, though both aim to influence investment in the same energy systems.  For the European response to meet the scale of the challenge, energy and climate security must become part of the core of the new European project in the way that food security and the single market have defined the past.

4. Investing in a successful China: Europe must choose the path of common proactive engagement with China based on mutual interests and strong European values, instead of a fractious competition for contracts. Europe must defend its core economic and security interests by investing in China’s development as a stable, soft power.

Too often China is presented as a threat to European prosperity, while conversely competition for short term national commercial advantage drives European countries’ relationships with China. This masks the truth that Europe and China are increasingly economically interdependent, and China’s success is critical to managing Europe’s aging population. The economic dynamism of China could drive up European incomes and give far higher returns on European pensions than investments in developed countries. But this is not inevitable, because China’s current pattern of growth is creating social and environmental stresses which threatens its stability.

Europe’s energy and climate security also depend on the choices China is making. China is often accused of driving up prices and financing undemocratic regimes through its increasing presence in the global scramble for oil and other primary resources, but this analysis fails to acknowledge the fact that China’s economy is heavily export driven and we are the final consumers of its goods. China fears exclusion from resources by the powerful “West”, reinforcing advocates of hardline attitudes on sovereignty and non-interference within the Chinese leadership. The reality is that Europe needs China to keep growing, which inevitably means that China will increase its global energy footprint. The challenge for both Europe and China is how China will secure its energy supply, and what pattern of energy use it builds into its expanding infrastructure. 

China’s success in managing these domestic and external stresses will determine whether it chooses a hard power route or a soft power route for the next stage of its emergence. At the moment it is keeping both options open. Europe needs a soft power China which helps expand and maintain an international rules-based system and which accepts international norms. That means a China that is successful and stable; above all a China that is achieving a transition to much more efficient use of resources, thereby accelerating that transition for everyone else.