Competing Roles and Conceptual Differences as an Impediment to Bilateral Relations: The Case of the Strategic Partnership of the European Union and China

When EU-China partnership was launched in the 1990s, both parties held high expectations as to what the relationship would bring: the EU saw deeper relations with China as a way to manage global interdependence through norm transfer and policy convergence in multilateral and bilateral rule-bound frameworks; while China actively encouraged the presence of the EU as a global power as a way to break the US hegemony, reduce the tension surrounding its rise to great power status and achieve a multipolar international order. Recently, EU-China relations have grown increasingly contentious. Behind the growing tensions lie deep-rooted conceptual differences that are central to EU’s and China’s self-understandings and therefore their roles as global actors. This paper adopts a role theoretical perspective to explain the enduring paradoxical quality that marks the EU-China strategic partnership by deconstructing the deep-lying elements that make up their respective role conceptions and persistently thwarted role expectations.