Description
This paper outlines the emergence of Taiwan as a foreign policy ‘issue’ in British parliamentary foreign policy debates in the first 25 years after Taiwan’s democratisation. The Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ and in particular defensive co-operation, is quintessential to the UK's foreign policy, with Britain also a permanent member of the UN Security Council, yet there exists scarce literature on Taiwan's role in British foreign policy and how Britain might respond to escalating tensions in the Taiwan Strait. This paper therefore excavates the discursive trajectory of Taiwan in British foreign policy debates, providing a timely equivalent to the developed scholarship afforded to US foreign policy debates on the role of Taiwan. A focus on discursive construction recognises Taiwan's unique plight, as an essentially “philosophical” (Brown & Wu, 2019, p. xxii) phenomena in global politics, a battlefield of semantics where dominant discourses serve to contest and constrain what Taiwan is, or isn’t, perceived to ‘be’. This paper’s discourse analysis seeks to rescue Taiwan's integral specificity and how dominant discourses serve to delimit Taiwan’s international space. The initial findings of this project outline the extent to which Taiwan was principally conceived of as a primarily economic phenomena in foreign policy debates in the late 1990s and early 2000s, yet where amidst the development of Taiwan’s maturing democracy and the crushing of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, Taiwan emerged as a central feature of growing concern amongst MPs about China. As such this paper recognises that whilst Taiwan has ‘emerged’ in British foreign policy discourse it has yet to become an established British foreign policy ‘tradition’ (Bevir, 2009) deemed as intrinsic to British foreign policy objectives. Therefore, this project seeks to address a fundamental knowledge gap in understanding how Taiwan is considered, contextualised and addressed in British foreign policy.
