EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas’ pointless jabs at China during the SCO summit in Tianjin and events in Beijing to mark victory over Japan betray wilful ignorance and diplomatic incompetence
Though terribly sexist, it’s not for nothing that many Chinese on the mainland have taken to calling Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign affairs chief and her boss, Ursula von der Leyen, “silly white sweeties”.
Oftentimes, you just don’t know whether to laugh or cry over Kallas’ out-of-the-left-field pronouncements, and whether she is being serious or just wants to pick a fight with her favourite targets, Russia and China.
She has lately taken issue with claims by both countries during the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin and the commemoration in Beijing of imperial Japan’s defeat in the second world war that they were the victors.
It’s hard to know why that’s controversial for her.
“This is the battle of narratives for the Global South and all the rest of the world,” she told reporters when asked about the two events. “Russia was addressing China like we fought the second world war, we won the second world war and we defeated Nazism, and I was like, ok, that is something new [my italics]. If you know history, it raises a lot of question marks in your head. I can tell you that people don’t read and remember history that much. You can see they buy these narratives.”
So, like I guess like it’s ok to talk like a teenager for someone holding one of the most important diplomatic jobs in the world.
Do you think Britons bother to mention the Russians and Chinese much during VE Day; or when the Americans remember D-Day and Normandy?
There was the small matter of the Eastern Front, which bogged down Nazi Germany and sealed Hitler’s fate as three-quarters of German military losses were sustained there.
And, as historian Rana Mitter writes in China’s War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival, “it was not unique for any society to stress those parts of the wartime narrative that helped to build its own national self-esteem … Many Western histories of the war concentrated on the Western European front, downplaying the crucial contribution of Russia.”
Kallas has rightly complained that many people just don’t read history, perhaps including herself, and have no idea about China’s contribution either.
Let me quote Mitter some more: “For decades, our understanding of that global conflict has failed to give a proper account of the role of China. If China was considered at all, it was as a minor player, a bit-part actor.
“By holding down large numbers of Japanese troops on the mainland, China was an important part of the overall Allied strategy.”
Between 14 million and 20 million Chinese died in this war of resistance. Unlike France, China did not fold on contact with an invading army, “proving wrong”, as Mitter wrote, “the [Western] journalists and diplomats who predicted, over and over again, that China could not possibly survive … For over four years, until Pearl Harbour, China fought the Japanese practically alone. During this time a poor and underdeveloped country held down some 800,000 troops
from one of the most highly militarised and technologically advanced societies in the world. For another four years after that, the success of the Allies in fighting two fronts at once, in Europe and Asia, was posited in significant part on making sure that China stayed in the war.”
Britain had its “finest hour”, according to Winston Churchill, by standing alone in Europe against Hitler, until the US joined the war. China stood against imperial Japan even longer and made far greater sacrifices with its people.
In fact, contemporary Chinese communist leaders have been far-minded in their assessment of China’s contribution.
One last time, from Mitter’s book: “China has taken a place on the global stage, and seeks to convince the world that it is a ‘responsible great power’. One way in which it has sought to prove its case is to remind people of a time past, but not long past, when China stood alongside the other progressive powers against fascism: the second world war.”
Of course, Kallas’ monumental gaffe may nevertheless be taken as a storm in a teacup. But it’s at least big enough for the Chinese foreign ministry to issue a rebuttal. It speaks to the larger problem of EU leadership with its ideology-driven foreign policy, incompetent diplomacy and dysfunctional statecraft that has been prolonging the Ukraine conflict.
Under Kallas and von der Leyen, the EU has refused all compromises and negotiations with Russia other than an impossible total victory, and any country or political leader seen as advocating a diplomatic solution or even just continuing trade with Russia, is dismissed as “Putin sympathisers”.
They now threaten secondary sanctions against India and China, even though practically the whole world outside the West has continued business as usual with Moscow. But demonising and threatening Beijing won’t work, especially when the EU is now the weaker party, and when the Chinese have been advocating a diplomatic solution over Ukraine from day one.
Quite simply, most EU leaders see Russia as evil and so anyone who has dealings with them, instead of joining their good and just struggle, is evil too. That’s why they can’t accept that Russia is seen by most outsiders as Europe’s problem but not the world’s.
This black-and-white mindset is not only counterproductive but dangerous. But it exposes a reprehensible double standard too, as the EU treats Israel with kid gloves despite the latter’s rampant aggression across the Middle East, and especially its ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Thanks to people such as Kallas and von der Leyen, so far as the rest of the world is concerned, the West has been doubly discredited, in Ukraine and Palestine.
