So we come to the next presentation of Bill Hayden.
Well, I think I don't have to introduce Bill Hayden.
And you know each other very well.
Bill Hayden worked more than 20 years for BBC and is now, if I'm correctly informed, for Chatham House.
And he wrote this wonderful book about the South China Sea.
And I'm personally very impressed about his historical research, who takes away all the ideological covers, which blocked our view to the history of China, and the region of Southeast Asia.
Okay, without further ado, Bill Hayden's if Roy's yours, and now, I think we can hear something about the European role, a topic we discussed before in this region.
Okay, Bill Hayden, please. Great. Thank you very much, Gerhard and thanks to everybody.
I'm going to talk quite specifically about Britain.
I'll let you go.
And I guess that last Q&A discussion was a bit of a bridge to where we're going.
So I thought I'd start here, since this has become, I suppose the biggest symbol of Britain's renewed interest in Asia, the aircraft carrier and the strike group that went to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean and the Pacific as far as Japan and Guam last year.
It was kind of a very political statement of intent.
So that's kind of one view, I guess, of Britain's new role, but the Global Times had a different image.
A leaky, grounded ship rust bucket, imagining itself to be a great power through the projection of naval force.
Or is this a more realistic depiction.
This is currently the British naval presence in the Indo-Pacific.
There are two ships of this size, two offshore patrol vessels. This is HMS Spey, and there's HMS Tamar as well.
But this is taking part in an exercise with the Philippines quite recently.
While it's easy to dismiss this, it does seem probably quite a sensible policy for a middle power like the UK, with a legacy of connections in Asia.
Three Commonwealth countries in Southeast Asia, Malaysia and Singapore, we have defence ties with and Brunei, we've even got a garrison there.
Having a couple of small warships in what's called persistently present there allows the UK to build up relations with local militaries and also to develop a cada of crews who are familiar with operating in Asia.
But since Covid and economic recession and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there's going to be obvious questions about whether the UK will be able to sustain a presence like this.
I think it won't be too much of a problem to sustain a small commitment. But we're unlikely to see another big expedition for a while, not least because Britain's second aircraft carrier has broken and is currently undergoing repairs in Scotland.
And so therefore we've only got one. And I guess that's going to be staying in Europe for the time being.
It's thinking kind of more widely and to be on the sort of naval issues.
We've had a publication of this document, the Integrated Review. Unlike Germany, France, Netherlands or the EU as a whole, the UK hasn't published a specific Indo-Pacific strategy document.
Instead, it included two pages out of 100 in its overall Integrated Review in March last year.
And there were two elements here, I think, the adoption of the formulation of Indo-Pacific and the choice of the words TILT to describe a reorientation in British policy.
So the UK was a relatively late adopter, I think, of the term Indo-Pacific and the geopolitical formulation behind it. I think really it was encouraged to do so by Japan from around 2015 onwards.
And then by the US, after the Trump administration took power, I think the G7 was an important venue for developing this new consensus.
The Indo-Pacific as a term became part of an FCO planning memorandum in March 2018.
And then in September 2020, by which time it had been called the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, appointed a new Director General, Indo-Pacific, as opposed to its previous Asia-Pacific, and then developed an internal Indo-Pacific framework.
So it kind of built up slowly within government, I think. And then in 2020, the Foreign Secretary started to talk about a TILT towards the region.
And TILT, I think, is rather a gentle word in English, but it clearly indicates an orientation towards something, and therefore an orientation away from something else.
And that unspoken but obvious something in the integrated view is the European Union. The EU is barely mentioned in the document.
Although at one point it says, we will work with the EU where our interests coincide, which seems a rather thin attempt to include the EU, particularly compared to its enthusiastic references to NATO and to individual European countries.
So that's the clear context of the integrated review and the Indo-Pacific TILT. So it emerged down to the UK's decision to leave the EU and the need to have a new outlook on the country's role in the world.
But having said that, I would argue that Brexit wasn't the only factor.
And being a good Marxist, I'll begin with the economic base. So the UK has been suffering from stagnating economic productivity ever since the 2008 financial crisis, or even well before Brexit, maybe part of the explanation for Brexit in fact.
And various governments have attempted to address the problem. And the Cameron government, the Conservative Cameron government in 2010, in particular, sought to reach out to China for investment and trade and infrastructure development.
And the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Finance Minister George Osborne, was a key figure in this process.
He was particularly interested in attracting Chinese investment to the north of England, what became known as his northern powerhouse strategy.
In effect, he wanted to use the Chinese Communist Party to destroy the electoral base of the British Labour Party. A very clever move.
And this came to its fruition in 2015 with the declaration of the golden era of UK-China relations during Xi Jinping's state visit to the UK.
The two men went and had a pint of beer in a pub. And the government signed a slew of agreements, including one encouraging China to build two nuclear power stations in southern England.
One of which would be 10 miles behind me, and the other would be 30 miles in that direction over there. On the coast of the North Sea, on the way to Germany, you'd have been pleased to know.
But that triggered all kinds of concerns, both domestically and in the US and elsewhere. So when Cameron resigned after the Brexit referendum and the new Prime Minister Theresa May took power, she ordered a complete review of the deal, along with other arrangements with China.
And then when Trump took power in early 2017, the pressure to reduce ties with China became even stronger and became particularly focused on the question of Huawei's involvement in our national communications infrastructure.
In 2019, the contradictions of Brexit in the Conservative Party became too intense and Theresa May was forced from office, leading to the rise of Boris Johnson, the British Rajapaksa in July 2019.
At the same time, wider concerns about China were growing, particularly after the crackdown in Hong Kong, and British officials started to talk about a new realism in relations with China.
And Conservative MPs in particular started to talk about China as a hostile challenge to the interests of the UK. And in April 2020, a new group among the Conservatives, mainly the China Research Group, was formed in April 2020.
That's become very influential in Parliament and government in promoting a more hawkish line towards China.
But obviously, the situation in Hong Kong and also Xinjiang and elsewhere created concerns, and in November 2020, the UK declared that China was in breach of the Treaty over Hong Kong. So that was the last straw.
So the Golden Era was over five years after it had been declared. But it wasn't just Brexit or China, I think, behind the tilt. I think it would have probably happened anyway.
The growing strategic pull of the Indo-Pacific was already underway, but of course some kind of reorientation in British policy. I think we appointed a trade envoy, our first trade envoy to the Asia Pacific, I think, in 2018.
But clearly Brexit and the changes in China forced the pace of change.
So we need to think about the Indo-Pacific tilt in this overall context. But I think it also might be helpful to think about it in contrast to China's Belt and Road Initiative, particularly the way the BRI is described in Jinghan Zeng's book.
I don't know if you know its slogan, Politics. And Zeng talks about the BRI not so much as a calculated strategic move, but more as a means of focusing attention and exhorting to action.
And he argues that the process of filling the idea with meaning occurred after the term had been coined and only incrementally. I think that's also a useful way to think about the British Indo-Pacific tilt.
So according to Zeng, the BRI performs useful functions for Xi Jinping himself to enable him to walk out of the shadow of his predecessors and place his personal stamp on the country for China to assert a new, larger regional role.
And he also notes how the concept was hijacked by domestic actors for their own interests and produced a number of competing interpretations and ended up as an all-encompassing slogan.
And many of those things I think have happened to the integrated review and the Indo-Pacific tilt.
It became a means of projecting a post-Brexit vision for Britain's future role under Comrade Boris Johnson, a vision that became known as Global Britain.
And Johnson clearly expected to be around for long enough periods to become its figurehead, but in the end the Boris era was even shorter than the Golden Era.
So Johnson wanted Global Britain to distinguish a British post-Brexit role more clearly from its predecessors and him from his predecessors.
But that said, the integrated review wasn't a vanity project, it was clearly an attempt to deal with a new world circumstance in the 2020s with resurgent challenges.
Its lead author was Professor John Bew, author of a book on realpolitik, which he casts as a necessary antidote to the perceived excessive idealism in Anglo-American foreign policy of the post-Cold War era.
And you can see his influence, I think, strongly written through the integrated review document.
So the IR sets out an approach for what it calls Global Britain based on four principles, on openness, on a robust position on security, a renewed commitment to what the UK calls being a force for good.
And it says an increased determination to seek multilateral solutions.
So in other words, we want to portray ourselves as like the EU but without the protectionism.
The UK wants to defend prosperity and stability through the existing rules-based international system, and that's led to a new vision for the UK's interests, a much closer alignment of security and prosperity.
And while there are some nods towards cooperation, there's also a strong element of competition with the EU, with plenty of references to Britain aiming to be the leading European partner in the Indo-Pacific and such like.
And unlike France, which has French Caledonia and French Polynesia with a combined population of half a million, the UK's only territorial presence in the Pacific is Pitcairn with a population of 67.
But the British government says there are 1.7 million British citizens resident in the Indo-Pacific, assuming that's a very broad definition of people with dual nationality and things like that.
Apparently this is more than France's one and a half million. But of course there are many other Commonwealth states in the region, there are 26 Commonwealth states with coasts around the Indo-Pacific.
And I think there's a degree of jealousy in Britain about the way that France has been able to translate its diplomatic and military engagement into commercial sales, for example by selling Rafale jets to India or submarines to Malaysia.
And of course submarines has to lead us to the question of AUKUS, which was obviously announced just over a year ago in a three way press conference.
There's been a lot of talk about AUKUS. I'm somebody that tries to stop people using the word alliance when they talk about AUKUS. AUKUS is not an alliance.
It's basically a defence technology agreement. Some of the reaction to it I think was somewhat hysterical.
But if you want to talk about alliances, these are alliances, ANZUS and the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance, and there are already existing agreements between the Five Eyes countries to do with naval cooperation and obviously intelligence sharing and all the rest of it.
So I don't think AUKUS really added anything much to those, except for developing a particular type of platform, which may take 20 years to arrive.
And since I'm talking about this, I'm going to slay a canard, which was that the AUKUS announcement was timed to undermine the EU's Indo-Pacific strategy announcement.
And the detail of that was that the EU's announcement was supposed to happen on the 14th of September of last year, or even possibly the day before, but it was delayed so that Ursula von der Leyen could deliver her State of the Union address on the 14th of September.
Obviously the Indo-Pacific strategy should have come before the AUKUS agreement was announced, but it was delayed by the EU itself. So it wasn't a kind of Anglo-Saxon attempt to divert attention from the EU's thing.
It was just one of those cock-ups that happened in international relations from time to time.
And I think a little bit about how AUKUS was received in the region, and most countries, spokespeople from foreign ministries and things, gave it a relatively warm welcome for the region, I suppose, with the exception of Indonesia, which said it was deeply concerned by the prospects of a continuing arms race.
Other countries seem to think it was, you know, tolerable or bearable. And I think that's probably to do with the fact that UK, Australia and US have generally positive relations with most of these countries and could understand.
But this was about them trying to get back in the game of regional competition. And that wasn't necessarily a bad thing, so long as there was consultation and people played by the rules.
The other element, of course, is the CPTPP. That's been a big part of it. You remember the woman in the front, Liz Truss, Britain's shortest reigning Prime Minister ever. Almost forgotten now.
But her big thing, of course, as Minister for International Trade, was to get Britain's negotiations with CPTPP up and running, which has been relatively successful.
You know, negotiations are underway and may even be concluded before too long.
And CPTPP was interesting for quite a few reasons, but not least because it shaped the way that Britain did the Brexit deal, that one of the conditions for Britain's Brexit negotiations was that it ought to be able to allow us to join the CPTPP.
So that was the kind of hurdle that was placed in the Brexit negotiations to kind of give Britain the flexibility, the freedom, if you like, to go ahead and join CPTPP.
Now there are plenty of signs of imperial nostalgia perhaps in CPTPP, an idea of returning to older trading patterns with Asia. And that was clearly part of the Brexit agenda too, but it became rapidly clear that plenty of countries such as India weren't that interested in such an arrangement,
or if they were, they wanted concessions in other areas such as lifting visa restrictions first, which were quite difficult for British conservative politicians.
So it emerged that delivering individual trade deals with different countries would take a very long time. So it was therefore much easier or possibly would be more efficient for Britain to join a bloc like the CPTPP.
And the idea that the UK and the US were going to tie up a quick trade deal was also quickly killed. So CPTPP became a bit of a totem for British conservatives as a means of showing how the UK could rejoin the world in a post Brexit scenario.
But really the question of course is how much can it replace the EU and the answer is not very much. So our total trade with the CPTPP 11, which obviously includes Japan, is only a quarter of pre-COVID trade with the EU.
So it has a very symbolic role, I think, in British politics, but it's not going to be a driver, I think, of economic growth so much. A more important factor is geopolitics.
By joining CPTPP, the UK saw itself as anchoring itself in a global trading system and giving ourselves a new higher status that we might have as a country on its own.
It proves that the UK is serious about multilateral organisations, that it cares about the international system, and it wants a strong relationship with Japan, Australia and other partners in Southeast Asia.
And I heard this phrase, you know, it shows that we're serious about joining Team Indo-Pacific, embedding our economic future in a strategically important region.
One other point which was raised by Lord Mandelson, former British Labour Party politician, European Commissioner, was that joining CPTPP could be a route to a trade deal with the US if ever the US joined CPTPP.
It might be a dim prospect at the moment, but who knows how things might change, but also opens the way to other agreements with other countries such as the UK's Digital Trade Agreement with Singapore.
The third plank, so after the military and the economic, is the diplomatic agenda, and I was surprised how quickly the UK obtained dialogue partner status with ASEAN.
At the end of the past, you know, for 40 years before that the UK had shared dialogue partner status as part of its membership of the EU.
And then it was able to successfully persuade ASEAN that by upgrading us to independent dialogue partners that we were, it was really a sort of maintenance of the status quo.
And obviously through that dialogue partner status it gives us access to different parts of the regional agenda as well, the ARF system, and all the rest of it.
So, the UK is applied to be an observer to two of the ASEAN Defence Ministers plus expert working groups. For example, so it's another way of kind of keeping us at the table with a relatively small commitment I think of diplomatic effort.
So one of the questions I think is really how much of this is going to endure under the new government. I think under Liz Truss we would have seen a much clearer alignment with a US agenda, a more hawkish agenda.
Truss talked a lot about her network of liberty idea, sort of like-minded, liberal democratic states working together to push back against China.
And she was clearly a sort of favourite of the China research group approach to China, a much more hawkish and upfront approach.
But I think we're going to see a change in that under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. There is a review of the integrated review underway at the moment, and although we haven't been told what's going to be in that review, it seems that there was a discussion I think under Truss that China would have been nominated a specific threat in the same category as Russia.
But that seems now to have stopped. I don't think that's going to happen.
There was an attempt for Rishi Sunak to meet Xi Jinping at the G20 summit, which didn't happen. We're not being told why.
But I think we see a de-escalation of a lot of the rhetoric really, the hawkish rhetoric towards China.
In the last few weeks, we're sort of seeing references to working with China and the necessity of dealing with China on climate change and things like that.
So in some ways, we might be moving a bit closer back to the EU formulation of China as partner, competitor, rival, a kind of multifaceted view of China, which I think was sort of being edged out under the Johnson and Truss governments, where it was much more clearly just going to rival and even potentially threat towards the end.
So we might see, I think, a move back to maybe the more, if you like, the traditional conservative view, the Osborne Cameron view.
And Sunak's background himself is in finance and banking and the city of London and the financial industry is very keen to start making money from China, plus the fact that we're entering a recession here in the UK, rampant inflation, all the rest of it.
The conservative party's polling numbers are terrible, and it's looking to basically get some economic wins so that it stands a chance in an election which has to be called in the next two years or so.
Interesting that today the government released its latest important export figures, and China is the UK's fourth largest trading partner in all four quarters of the most recent year or so.
So, so emphasizing, I think, that our relationship, our economic relationship with China. So I think expect to see a kind of more balanced approach which strangely I think, or interestingly might put us closer to the kind of an EU approach potentially,
or at least trying to straddle a kind of European and an American position when it comes to dealing with China, but bear in mind of course that in the G20 we heard a more conciliatory set of phrases coming from Joe Biden as well.
But there is something actually shifting here, I think, in the way that the UK and the G7 countries may be larger, starting to talk about China at the least.
We shall see, and I think also some of the language of the Labour Party, which at the moment is stands to win the next election, is quite similar.
That said, the UK is still building up, rebuilding its navy, we have an announcement yesterday I think earlier in this week that we're going to build another eight, or we're going to build a total of eight frigates, which will increase our naval heft,
so actually replacing 13, so we can argue this in two different ways. And they're being built in Scotland and that's important for jobs in Scotland and trying to take some of the wind out of the Scottish separatist movement by showing them the benefits of being part of the United Kingdom.
And which brings us back to the economy, of course.
I mean, to sum up really, I think we've got, you know, there's an economic issue to resolve, which will obviously affect the affordability of British overseas presence.
And I think there's going to be a need to kind of, you know, rebalance the actual components of the Indo-Pacific tilt, and I think we might see a kind of, you know, attempts to reach out to China diplomatically and economically.
And maybe, you know, maintain a kind of reassuring presence when it comes to Southeast Asian and other countries in the region, but I don't see us going quite as enthusiastically up against China as we might have done under a trust government.
So shall I leave it there?
Thank you very much for this excellent view of what is behind the slogan politics here, and it led us to the problems of the domestic policy in Great Britain.
So, it was very interesting.
First of all, any questions from the audience?
No interest in written politics?
So, my question would be, does Indo-Pacific or Asia,
does this policy play any significant role in the election campaign or in the domestic debate in Great Britain?
At which rate is this topic in the public opinion or the public discussions in Great Britain?
I think, not really.
I think it becomes an issue when people talk about the benefits or otherwise of Brexit, which is still a live political issue.
And so it becomes a token, you know, when somebody says, look, it's enabled us to, you know, go and join CPTPP, and so that's great and then it becomes, well, has CPTPP delivered us anything?
Yes, but it will do in the future. And so it becomes, and so therefore, it becomes a way of talking about our engagement with the EU more than it becomes a way of talking about our engagement with the Indo-Pacific.
I think anybody would object to building up trade with Asian countries.
So, there's a debate about how realistic that is.
I think opinion towards China has shifted considerably after Hong Kong protests.
Obviously, the Xinjiang issue is quite well covered here.
I don't know if you saw recently there was a confrontation outside the consulate of China in Manchester, which had protesters being attacked.
So China isn't doing itself any favors. So the kind of the general perception of China as a bad actor, I suppose, is embedded in the system.
I don't think anybody you meet in the street could tell you why Britain would need to get involved in a battle over Taiwan, for example.
And so I think it would be very hard to justify an involvement in any kind of Taiwan scenario, unless I think it was portrayed as part of a Chinese plan to make the world a worse place somehow.
Yeah, I don't think there's that much detailed understanding.
And I think we're saying it's not as if the Indo-Pacific tilt has been accompanied by a sudden leap in people wanting to learn Asian languages or study Southeast Asian studies or whatever it is.
There's still a kind of, you know, I think it's accompanied a more inward looking Britain rather than an outward looking one, which is, you know, undermines the whole point of it.
The whole point of leaving the EU for people that supported it was to kind of make, you know, global Britain to make it a global asset, but it doesn't seem to have delivered.
Okay, there's a question, Felix.
Yeah, thank you so much, Bill, for your really, really interesting presentation.
I was wondering on the UK-China relations, that's kind of where you ended your presentation in a way.
And when I take also what you just said on China, basically, being perceived by and large in the public sphere, but also if I got you right amongst the kind of foreign and security policy community as a bad actor, essentially.
How does this fit in with obviously very, very strong, even growing economic ties, or at least in terms of trade?
If I take also the announcements by Johnson and Truss at least, I mean, Rishi Sunak is probably too early to tell.
Seriously, we need to diversify away from China.
And it's a very similar picture here in Germany, right?
I mean, there's this always talk about diversification.
We've never invested so much in China than in the last half year.
Like, if the data is correct, which I believe it is, then so there's a political narrative that says compartmentalization is not really going to work.
China is inherently a bad actor, and we have to somewhat have some sort of wider strategy of dealing with it.
And then there's reality on the ground where effectively, because also have a hard time probably reigning in economic actors, compartmentalization is practiced on the ground.
Where do you see this trajectory of this in the future?
Because if we look at the U.S. and recent legislation also passed by the Biden administration, it's a very different trend.
So do you think the U.S. is going to be the not necessarily the role model for how the U.K. will pursue its China and in the Pacific strategy in the next couple of years,
but will be some sort of inspiration?
Or is this also seen as critically as it is seen on the continent, where it's often seen as like very kind of domestically motivated protectionism and so on and so forth?
Thank you.
I think it's going to be a long and wobbly answer, I'm afraid, Felix.
So I mean, right now, there's a there's been an issue about whether a Chinese company can take over a small manufacturer of semiconductors in South Wales, new ports, fabrication and new laws were introduced in order to scrutinize foreign investment in the U.K.
in order to examine things, exactly things like this.
And that, too, has become a symbol about whether we are going to allow China to take over our strategic assets and then a very involved debate about whether this company actually has advanced capabilities and all this kind of stuff.
Anyway, the government has come down on the side of blocking the investment and stopping the Chinese takeover.
And that's quite a significant moment because it had become very, very politicized.
And yet at the same time, you know, almost the same day, I think we had Rishi Sunak saying, you know, we've got to trade with China, we've got to kind of deal with it all the rest of it.
And so it's like the government sort of system, the bureaucracy has kind of reoriented itself over the last, you know, seven years to take a more hawkish position on things like Huawei and takeovers and all the rest of it.
Just in time for the political leadership, I think, to start taking things possibly back in the opposite direction. So, you know, you've got, you know, a lot of the bureaucracy and the official done is in a more hawkish place now.
And I didn't really mention the impact of COVID and I think that's probably something that affected Germany as well that the suddenly when COVID arrived and China started, you know, diverting supplies of protective equipment internally, and we all ended up, you know, without those supplies.
That was a kind of quite a big trigger for a lot of people here, as well as Hong Kong.
I mean, it's worth, I'd like to see actually where, you know, so China is our fourth largest trading partner, but to break that down, how much of that is to do with financial exports, you know, as opposed to real exports, you know, Germany does real exports.
Yeah, we just do financial products. And also we have 120,000 Chinese students studying at British universities, you know, bringing in, you know, millions and millions.
So it's that kind of, you know, it's that vulnerability. But it is quite interesting, I think, that despite everything that has gone on in UK-China relations, the UK has not been treated in the same way as Australia, for example.
We haven't been punished and isolated on all the rest of it, despite kicking out Huawei, despite signing up to the sort of American agenda in lots of ways.
And so, you know, is it just that China only wants to kind of pick on one country at a time and doesn't want to kind of have a broad range of fights? Or is it that they still hold out hope, you know, for us becoming, you know, good actors at some point in the future?
I think we will probably end up, well, I think under trust, we would have, you know, joined the American agenda much more wholeheartedly.
I think we're kind of going back to that, you know, riding two horses at the same time agenda, I think possibly a bit sooner.
And I think, you know, that will, you know, there's a, you know, for a long time, there's been an attempt to try and draw up a whole of government China policy in the government and the civil service.
And it never comes in, you know, because the Treasury and, you know, the finance side and the economic side are pushing in one direction and the security people are pushing in a different direction.
And that hasn't been ever resolved. So there's been this discussion about where is the China paper because apparently something has been circulating in Whitehall, but nobody knows where it is.
And it doesn't look like it's ever ever going to see the light of day.
So, I think we're, you know, I think we're possibly at another inflection point, you know, right now. And I think there's going to be quite a tussle inside the government, which is a way inside Parliament between the sort of hardline China research group types who are kind of quite ideological,
and maybe the sort of the one that those conservative MPs who are more focused on how to win the election in two years time, what can we do to turn around the economy, can we improve China relations as a step towards that.
So, in some ways, the kind of the things that tour the Conservative Party apart over Brexit might take on a new form in the next two years with China as the kind of dividing factor.
Okay. Thank you so much Bill for this wonderful presentation and for your answers.
And now we will have a break for 15 minutes, and we will back in 15 minutes at three o'clock central European time. Okay.
There was also a question in the Q&A, by the way, for you, Bill.
It's about freedom of navigation and Taiwan.
Yeah, I mean, one ship from the carrier strike group HMS Richmond sailed through the Taiwan Strait last last year.
And, yeah, I think actually that's, that's the one thing that the UK does worry about in terms of rules based order and China in the Indo Pacific I mean they are particularly hot on freedom of navigation and those rules.
So I think that's been a big, big factor in, you know, them building up their naval cooperation. That's a short answer but but yes.
Okay. So, we will back in 15 minutes.
Okay. Thank you so much.