The European Council on Foreign Relations

China - Germany: A ‘new special relationship’

Date: 22nd May 2013  |  Author: Jonas Parello-Plesner,

Categories: China, Germany in Europe,

This weekend, the newly appointed Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang makes his first offical visit to the EU - he travels to Berlin to meet Angela Merkel. This is a meeting of the two economic powerhouses of the East and the West – and a continuation of the ‘special relationship’ between both countries.

Li has inherited a healthy relationship with Germany built on a “technology for markets swap”. China needs German machinery and technology for its next phase of growth; and Germany needs China’s market to absorb a growing part of its exports. Interestingly, Germany represents close to half of EU exports to China dwarfing France, UK and Italy. Last year we showed that China replaced Europe as as the most desired investment destination for German business. That is particularly striking when it comes to the German car industry: If China’s demand for German cars didn’t exist; car

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Video: the Scorecard’s assessment of foreign policy

Date: 31st January 2013  |  Author: Nicholas Walton,

Categories: China, Euro Crisis, Europe and the world, Middle East and North Africa, Germany in Europe, Scorecard, Wider Europe, Reinventing Europe, Security and Defence,

We've just published the third edition of ECFR's European Foreign Policy Scorecard. For those of you who prefer to consume your news in video form, have a watch of this:

What is the ECFR Scorecard?

Date: 25th January 2013  |  Author: Nicholas Walton,

Categories: China, Rule of law, democracy and human rights, Euro Crisis, Europe and the world, Middle East and North Africa, Germany in Europe, Scorecard, Wider Europe, Reinventing Europe, Security and Defence,

On 31st January we publish the ECFR Foreign Policy Scorecard 2013. Here's a short video that I've just put together to explain what the Scorecard project is, and why it should be of interest to everybody interested in European influence in the world...

Why was Angela Merkel in Athens last week?

Date: 16th October 2012  |  Author: Jürgen Matthes, Ulrike Guérot,

Categories: Germany in Europe, Reinventing Europe,

The EU has received the Nobel Peace Prize and could take a break from the current Eurozone crisis. But this week the hype is over and Europe will be back to normal: struggling to define its own future at the forthcoming European Council on October 18th.

On the agenda is an ambitious draft for a ‘genuine economic and monetary union’ prepared by the four presidents of the EU, Herman van Rompuy, José Manuel Barroso, Jean-Claude Juncker and Mario Draghi who, beyond fighting over who goes to Oslo, also need to find a way to create a European version of de facto fiscal federalism. This will not be easy to achieve and more money will need to be spend.

Angela Merkel’s surprising visit to Athens can be seen as a first step to convince the German public of the necessity to radically change the Eurozone. The visit was purely symbolic. Nothing was decided on the current Greek rescue program

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Germany’s past, China’s future?

Date: 3rd October 2012  |  Author: Hans Kundnani,

Categories: China, Germany in Europe,

In 2000 the American academic Aaron Friedberg wrote an influential essay called “Will Europe’s Past Be Asia’s Future?” in which he argued that great-power rivalry in Asia in the twenty-first century could resemble that in Europe in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Since then, there has been an ongoing debate among academics and analysts about the relevance to Asian security of the European history that culminated in World War I. In particular, some see a parallel between China now and Germany then: the rise of China today could be a threat to the US-led liberal international order just as the rise of Germany was a threat to the British-led liberal international order at the end of nineteenth century. “Modern China is the Germany of a century ago – a rising, expanding, have-not power seeking its place in the sun”, writes Charles Krauthammer.  

A more specific

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