The EU’s Human Rights Promotion in China and Myanmar: Trading Rights for Might? EU Diplomacy Paper No. 5, October 2014
This paper aims to answer two questions: generally, to what extent the human rights promotion of the European Union (EU) in third countries is consistent, and more specifically, why the EU’s approach towards human rights promotion in China and Myanmar differs despite similar breaches of human rights. It compares the EU’s approach to the two countries over two time periods in the late 1980s and 1990s in the context of the EU’s evolving human rights promotion. Based on the two case studies, this paper finds that the EU’s human rights promotion in third countries varies significantly. Whereas one would expect the EU’s approach to become increasingly assertive throughout the 1990s, this has only been the case with Myanmar. China’s economic and political importance to the EU appears to have counterweighed the general rise in European attention to third countries’ human rights records. In other words, this paper finds that commercial interests take precedence over human rights concerns in case of important trading partners.
Burma and ASEAN: A Marriage of Inconvenience
AbstractThough Burma joined ASEAN with high hopes in 1997, the union has been a mutually disappointing one. Burma has not enjoyed the influx of FDI and general economic windfall it expected from joining, and ASEAN has been repeatedly embarrassed by SPDC human rights abuses. Yet there have also been benefits: the junta was inspired to release Aung San Suu Kyi (at least for a while) and to set forth the 7-step “roadmap” to constitutional government, while ASEAN became a more comprehensive regional organization and has augmented its diplomatic toolkit to deal with intransigently dissident members. How this uneasy relationship fares amid the 2010 elections remains to be seen.
The Internet and the Changing Beijing-Taipei Relations: Toward Unification or Fragmentation?
Information and its technologies facilitate the exercise of what has been called “soft power,” a concept that differentiates information from the conventional dimensions of “hard power,” which is mainly associated with military force and economic influence. Soft power, according to Nye, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense of the United States, means that “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons.”1