The politics of potential: The relations of the People's Republic of China and the European Community and its member-states France and Great Britain, 1969-1979.

摘要

This dissertation examines a decade of interaction between the People's Republic of China and the European Community, two regional centers which share a geopolitical reality that Soviet deployments serve to emphasize. With independent nuclear capabilities, formidable conventional power and economic complementarity that combine to suggest the "politics of potential," contempory Sino-West European relations are too compelling to dismiss on the failed aspirations of the 1970's. In view of the credibility that a McKinderesque view of Soviet hegemony still holds for scholar-practitioners such as Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the politics of the Eurasian triangle is a major American security concern.;The 1970's witnessed a loosening of the international system that prompted much academic speculation about the transition from "blurred bipolarity" to "emerging multipolarity," with particular reference to the enlarged Community and the re-emergence of China. By proposing parallel programs for European Security and Cooperation and Asian Collective Security, the Kremlin gave notice that it would reject multipolarity in favor of a Soviet-dominated transcontinental status quo. Rejecting any accommodation to Soviet power, the Chinese instead entered the European debate. Articulating a counter-mobilization campaign around the Theory of the Three Worlds, which placed Europe at the center of superpower confrontation, Beijing became a strong advocate of West European integration against the Soviet peace program dedicated to the institutionalization of pan-European integration.;Sino-West European relations stalled, however, over the incompatability of their regional strategies, mutual suspicion and fear of provoking a Soviet reaction. They settled into a distant parallelism, characterized by detachment and more closely attuned to the Chinese concept of a united front than to the western balance of power strategy. Nonetheless, their limited interaction confounded the Soviet strategy of selective detente and bilateralism.;This dissertation is a historical analysis drawing on the limited secondary sources on Sino-West European relations, the extensive literature on the Sino-Soviet dispute and Soviet-West European relations, and a broad range of primary sources, including interviews in Beijing, Brussels, Paris and London.;This thesis contributes to the growing scholarship on regionalism and globalism, generally explored from the vantage of intra-alliance relations.