Ebook: One Belt, One Road, One Story?: Towards an EU-China Strategic Narrative

This edited collection offers the first sustained exploration of the scope for a shared narrative to emerge between the EU and China. Forging a shared strategic narrative is hard. But if not achieved, then the EU and China will move towards different and competing horizons, find they understand breaking events through different lenses, and find the identification of common interests more and more difficult. This book is informed conceptually by a focus on power and communication on the one hand, and by the understanding that EU-China relations do not exist in a vacuum on the other. How the EU views China depends on China’s response to the USA’s Asia pivot, to China’s relations with African states, and indeed China’s own relationship with Russia. In this context, how can European and Chinese leaders turn One Road One Belt into a win-win situation when their relations to others will complicate matters and, in fact, other states may even seek to actively disrupt that EU-China relation?