European Student Think Tank

The “Islanders” of the Falk­lands were called to a ref­er­en­dum on the 10th and 11th of March, cen­ter­ing on the archipelago’s con­tin­ued asso­ci­ation with the United King­dom. The vote yiel­ded unsur­pris­ing res­ults, given that ask­ing a crowd of Brits whether they think they ought to remain Brit­ish smacks some­what of an exer­cise in the absurd. This is how­ever rather irrel­ev­ant when this affair is regarded from the point of view of dip­lomacy rather than demo­cracy. A move which has played into a con­flict tak­ing place between China and Japan an ocean away .

There is no per­fect human being. We all have vir­tues and flaws. The same thing some­how applies to states, con­sid­er­ing that there is no abso­lutely self-efficient, developed and envir­on­ment­ally con­scious coun­try. Coun­tries cooper­ate with each other and build up “friend­ships” to cover their needs and max­im­ize their vari­ous interests. A “friend­ship” of com­ple­ment­ary interests is found between the EU and China with a view to end up their crises.

His­tor­ic­ally, China has strictly stuck to the non-interference prin­ciple. But, this sac­red prin­ciple as inter­preted in the Chinese for­eign policy may appear quite ambigu­ous. It has been dur­ing a long time pushed by the Chinese dip­lomacy to its lim­its but appears some­what flex­ible, depend­ing on what it is at stake.
Nowadays, this prin­ciple seems to be some­times over­worked. So much so the concept is los­ing its sub­stance. There­fore, let’s go back to the origins…

Con­trary to com­mon per­cep­tions, the so-called Euro-zone crisis is far from affect­ing only the sev­en­teen coun­tries of the single cur­rency. The effects of the crises can be felt even fur­ther, out­side Europe. African coun­tries that have barely recovered from the troubles of the 2008 fin­an­cial crisis, already real­ise that they may also be indir­ectly affected in, at least, two dif­fer­ent ways by the Euro-crisis.

December’s topic of the month invites your con­tri­bu­tions! “Chinese invest ments in Africa – how to com­pete with the dragon?” is what we ask this time. Sub­mit your con­crete topic proposal!