Description
US-China relations represent the most consequential bilateral relationship of our time. Yet, this relationship has developed into a state of serious ‘strategic competition’. What is more, when bilateral ties between such heavyweights become increasingly strained and confrontational, third parties, too, are immediately affected. However, such ripple effects should not be seen as a one-way street. Third parties, even if they are lesser powers, can have agency as well, and therefore they may likewise have influence on the US-China great-power rivalry.
This rationale is certainly accurate for the EU, which itself has the potential to act as a great power internationally. Nonetheless, recent literature on EU-US-China triangular relations has mostly focused on analyzing the effects of the US-China strategic competition on the EU. This paper turns this predominant logic on its head and instead looks into how the EU impacts upon US-China relations. In so doing, the paper loosely employs a constructivist lens to investigate how the EU (and individual member states) perceive the US-China great-power rivalry, how the identities of the US and China are feeding these perceptions, and how these perceptions then shape European efforts to influence the changing contours of the relations between the US and China.
