'Trading Partner, Competitor, Systemic Rival': The EU's China Strategy and the Diminishing Security Returns of Economic Interdependence

The present study critically examines the relationship between economic interdependence (EI) and non-militarised conflict against the current backdrop of worsening EU-China relations. It challenges the view that EI, measured through aggregate metrics (such as trade balance, GDP ratio, or symmetry), can reliably and linearly predict either non-militarised conflict or its absence in international politics. Instead, it suggests that EI is a multilevel phenomenon, whose capacity to render states vulnerable to each other is contingent on the specific nature of their economic intercourse. Comparing a heuristic built on traditional EI literature and aggregate metrics with one informed by more recent approaches to geoeconomics, global value chains, and the weaponisation of economic interdependence, the study shows the greater explanatory power of the latter. It identifies access to strategic goods and global value chain participation as the main drivers behind the deterioration of EU-China relations. In so doing, the study contextualises contemporary EU decision-making vis China, pioneers an analysis of EI between a unitary state actor (China) and a multi-state one (the EU), and suggests abandoning either or characterisations of EI in the study of non-militarised and military conflict alike.