00:00A new report says Taiwan's ties with Europe have strengthened significantly over the last few years.
00:06The report from the Central European Institute of Asian Studies said,
00:10interactions between the EU and Taiwan increased five-fold between 2019 and 2024,
00:16and mutual visits have increased more than six-fold, which the report said have become more official and less secret.
00:22It also said Europe and Taiwan have signed more agreements in areas like economic ties and legal cooperation
00:27and soft security cooperation has also been expanding.
00:31The report comes after a number of high-profile visits to Europe by senior Taiwanese officials,
00:37including Vice President B. Kim Xiao and, as Taiwan's foreign minister has said,
00:41ties with Europe are entering a new phase.
00:46And to learn more about the report's findings,
00:48Kenneth Koronta sat down with Matej Shumachik,
00:51executive director of the Central European Institute of Asian Studies, one of the report's authors.
00:56Since the beginning of the 2020s, your report found that Europe-Taiwan ties have seen a sharp uptick.
01:03Can you talk about why this is and why did this uptick begin in the 2020s specifically?
01:08Yeah, so what we've seen was that EU-Taiwan relations have been developing very quickly
01:15on the backdrop of successive global crises that are pushing the relationship forward.
01:20Why 2020, the key reason there is that towards that period in 2019, essentially already,
01:28we've seen Europe waking up from the sort of naive views of China as a beneficial economic partner.
01:39This was very prominently seen, especially in Central and Eastern Europe,
01:43that was living in this dream of being a potential big benefactor of Chinese investment.
01:50But by that time, there was expectations fatigue setting in
01:53because none of those promises were really materializing.
01:57Majority of them ended up being just mere promises, right?
02:02Coupled with the deterioration of relations with China during the pandemic,
02:06as well as the huge support that Russia receives from China in the war of aggression against Ukraine.
02:14That all sort of feeds into why Europe started to have a much more realistic view of China,
02:24cognizant of risks and threats,
02:27and why it also started to turn towards building relations with alternative partners in the Indo-Pacific region,
02:34including with Taiwan.
02:37And then also your report specifically talked about this large uptick in visits
02:41between Europe and Taiwan,
02:45and also that they're becoming kind of more official and more in the spotlight.
02:49Can you talk a little bit about why this is and kind of what kind of interactions we're seeing most of?
02:54Yeah, so there's been a really very sharp uptake on the number of visits happening between Europe and Taiwan.
03:01What's crucial is that they are happening both ways.
03:05It's not just Taiwanese officials traveling to Europe.
03:09Europeans are also increasingly traveling to Taiwan.
03:12This shows that the relationship is maturing,
03:15that both sides have an interest in developing various forms of cooperation.
03:21The relationship has been really going from informality towards formality,
03:25as well as from being covered into happening very openly.
03:31To just illustrate what this means,
03:33members of the European Parliament,
03:35the body that was or still is very crucial in driving cooperation with Taiwan,
03:40were traveling to Taiwan for many years,
03:43but always in an unofficial capacity.
03:46The first actual official visit from an official parliamentary body,
03:52a committee tasked with investigating foreign information manipulation and interference,
03:57traveled to Taiwan for the first time ever only in 2021.
04:02Besides parliamentarians,
04:04we do see also growing engagements on various forms of executive levels,
04:11ranging from technical meetings of rank-and-file officials,
04:16but also more often,
04:19deputy ministers are willing to meet with Taiwanese counterparts.
04:23And you also talked about these kind of soft security cooperation,
04:27because there is this growing recognition
04:30that Europe and Taiwan have kind of interdependent security needs.
04:35I'm wondering,
04:35can you talk a little bit about what the soft security cooperation is
04:40and why it's important that it's rapidly expanding?
04:43Sure.
04:44I think we need to preface that by recognizing that
04:48hard security cooperation is still very difficult, right?
04:53We don't really see big arms sales from Europe to Taiwan,
04:59like we do, for example, from U.S. to Taiwan, right?
05:01But this taboo on security cooperation that has been long established
05:07is slowly eroding,
05:10thanks to a lot of meaningful cooperation happening
05:13in the area of soft security, as you've mentioned.
05:16So focusing on topics like supply chain resilience,
05:21targeting FIMI,
05:22so foreign information manipulation and interference,
05:26critical infrastructure protection,
05:28and issues like this, right?
05:31And this is sensitizing the Europeans to the idea
05:34that we can actually have some form of security cooperation with Taiwan
05:37that can maybe move on to the more harder topics.
05:44And it is also already starting to happen,
05:47although it is still masked as commercial cooperation,
05:52however, in something that we call defense-adjacent sectors.
05:57So a lot of new trade and investment is happening with Taiwan,
06:01for example, in the area of drones.
06:05Cooperation with Taiwan on semiconductors is going to be essential
06:08for Europe's remilitarization efforts,
06:12so that it can protect itself via the Russian threat.
06:15But also Taiwan is in a similar position
06:18where European firms are very active
06:21in helping Taiwan promote its own energy security,
06:26something that Taiwan has a grave problem with
06:28and that would be a major problem
06:31in the case of any sort of Taiwan's trade contingency.
06:34So,
06:39so,
06:43so
06:46you
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