POLICY WATCH:
Europe experienced a ‘fundamental change’ in its attitude toward Taiwan over the past four years, partly due to China, Reinhard Butikofer said

  • By Su Yung-yao,Chen Cheng-yu and Jonathan Chin / Staff reporters, with staff writer

Europe experienced a “fundamental change” in its attitude toward Taiwan in the past few years, former German European Parliament member Reinhard Butikofer said, adding that the EU should adopt a geopolitical framework to assess the global political landscape, especially regarding the bloc’s policy stance on the Taiwan Strait.

Butikofer, a former European Green Party cochairman, made the remarks during the European Values Summit in Prague on Wednesday and Thursday.

Many European political and business decisionmakers once viewed Taiwan as a dependent client that Europe had to help due to its democratic political system and because trade ties with Beijing were so limited, he said.

Photo: Reuters

Europe experienced a “fundamental change” in its attitude toward Taiwan in the past few years, with the shift attributable to China’s behavior, developments in Taiwan and the EU’s approach to geopolitics, he said.

China’s crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong was the catalyst in Europe’s realization that former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s (鄧小平) principle of “hiding your strength and biding your time” no longer guided the leadership in Beijing, he said.

Instead, China embraced an aggressive form of revisionism in its dealings with the world, as evidenced by its support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, without which Moscow might well have already lost the war, Butikofer said.

Taiwan’s vibrant democracy and significant contributions to the global community have also jolted the EU out of its habit of conceptualizing the nation almost entirely in the framework of cross-strait relations, he said.

Beijing’s weaponization of economics also drove the EU away from its previous paradigm of treating commerce and security as separate matters in favor of a more geopolitical approach to handling global affairs, Butikofer said.

Although former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) made significant inroads in improving Taiwan-EU ties, the relationship is not as developed as it should be, he said.

Europe should abandon its stance of dealing with Taiwan as an outlier, and instead accept the nation’s importance to geopolitics and regional security, Butikofer said.

Taiwan’s security is crucial to the security of the entire region and Europe itself, he added.