Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Focusing on inward foreign direct investment (FDI) screening, this book provides an in-depth analysis of how European states’ economic interactions with China have become a security issue.
Based on 100 interviews with scholars, journalists, policy makers, and politicians from across Europe, the book underscores the importance of the policy making process that led to the adoption of investment screening in European nations. It adopts the theory of securitization to analyse the passage of the status of Chinese FDI from economy to security. In doing so, it shows how the shifting view of Europeans is attributed to changes such as China’s growing economic presence, the persistence of non-market practices, the loss of competitiveness, and the use of economic statecraft.
This chapter tests the criticism by analysing the role that economic competitiveness – rather than national security – had in shaping part of Europe’s economic security discourse. The chapter also places the accent on the importance of personal preferences of influential actors, such as prime ministers and ministers, in shaping the national – but also regional – economic security debate and agenda. In the cases of the more protectionist countries the process of securitization was triggered by an existing propensity to protect national assets, by the EU-level debate, and by the decision of national stakeholders to address the issue domestically. Remarkably, Italy stands out as the only case in this book where the screening mechanism is repeatedly employed to prevent Chinese acquisitions before they reached the notification stage, and even retroactively unravelling existing deals.
This chapter traces the transformation of economic interactions between the EU and China, specifically Chinese investments, from being welcomed to becoming a security concern for the EU. It treats the EU as a single actor, capable of proposing and adopting legislation and making decisions as a unified entity. The analysis of the process that led to adoption of the EU framework for FDI screening firstly demonstrates how a divisive policy, such as a security approach to the economy, was embraced by most actors and member states and normalized. Secondly, it examines the interplay between security and economic aspects in the EU–China relationship. The chapter analyses the process that led to the perception of FDI and other economic interactions as security threats. The analysis focuses on three key elements: the role of Chinese investments, the influence of economic and security considerations, and the main actors involved in the process.
The focus of this book is on Europe, but economic security is a global debate. In Europe and in the world, it has been moving forward from screening FDI into areas that include supply chains, trade, data management, and economic coercion, to mention a few. Since 2017, countries such as Australia, China, Japan, South Korea, and the US have all implemented significant restrictions on economic openness based on security concerns. These changes have accelerated rapidly since the Covid-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2023. AÂ number of plurilateral frameworks and fora with a strong economic security agenda have emerged. Notably, the G7 has prioritized economic security and coordination. This chapter provides an overview of how other global actors approach economic security and compares them with the current state of affairs and debates in the EU and the UK.
This book shows that foreign direct investments from China have been at the forefront of tensions between economic opportunity and security risks due to their role in market access and asset acquisition. The book seeks to identify the actors and stakeholders in the EU, and their involvement in the process of securitization – the methods and mechanisms used to transform Chinese FDI from a purely economic matter into a security issue. If views emerge of Chinese FDI as a threat, then these views will induce the transformation of FDI from an economic to a security issue, and trigger a process that facilitates the securitization of other economic interactions. While this claim may sound commonsensical and unsurprising, it is rarely substantiated in wider empirical assessments of the elements that led to the connection between Chinese foreign investment and national security.
A diverse group of European states struggled to internalize the securitization process. These states include cases where the processes were only marginally prompted by the EU’s debate (the UK), and cases where it took longer for the process to start and to conclude (the Netherlands), but overall, they share two common traits: the longstanding attachment to an ideology of open markets and competition, and the absence of a strong legal predecessor to the new regulation for FDI screening. Nonetheless, a line of difference emerges in how the process develops. In the UK, for example, the economic security discourse demonstrates a strong inclination towards protecting narrow national security interests. The pivotal role of the Dutch company ASML has been shaping the stance in the Netherlands, pushing the debate on the country’s economic security to take competitiveness into consideration and touch upon issues such as adopting policies to safeguard technological edge.
Chapter 1 introduces and develops the academic debate around the process of securitization in the economic sector. This chapter shows that economy and security are increasingly interconnected and understanding the dynamics that inform the securitization of these economic interactions is a fundamental exercise to improve our comprehension of changing global dynamics. The theory of securitization of non-traditional security issues (NTS) provides an excellent explanatory tool to unpack how global actors are changing the way in which they look at economy. For example, the debates about the theory contribute to our understanding of how threats in the economic sector tend to be characterized by long-term implications rather than immediate repercussions and guided by a logic of risk rather than of an existential threat.
This chapter offers an analytical account of how China as an idea, an unrivalled economic power, and an imperial polity became integral in the collective European imagination of the world. It provides critical evaluation of the way in which the changing European identity and the production of rationalist subjectivity of Europe were manifestly informed by its forged and precarious knowledge of the imperial Other at the opposite end of Eurasia. It contends that such encounters had transformative effects on Europe’s historical, cultural, and social formation and the construction of European modernity. It also interrogates changing European views of China towards the end of the 18th century principally through the eyes of Lord Macartney, which can be taken as a historically contingent precursor to the coming clash of Chinese world ordering and European world ordering in the mid-19th century.
This chapter looks at how ancient Chinese moral and philosophical ideas and concepts are appropriated, creatively constructed, and reinterpreted by Chinese International Relations (IR) scholars as they put the study of history of ideas of Chinese world ordering in conversation with ongoing IR theorization. Three ideas examined are respectively the conception of power and moral leadership inquired by Yan Xuetong, the concept of Tianxia fundamental to a global political philosophy proposed by Zhao Tingyang, and the idea of Zhongyong central to the construction of a relational theory of world politics by Qin Yaqing. Performing this archaeology of knowledge of concerning contending ideas of historical Chinese world ordering, it is argued, is a bold and determined attempt to bring Chinese ideas and knowledge to challenge as well as enrich existing IR theories. It also serves to reclaim international thought in ancient China as foundational to a global history of international thought.
