Strategic partnerships and China’s diplomacy in Europe: Insights from Italy
| Published date | 01 November 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481221127571 |
| Author | Filippo Boni |
| Date | 01 November 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2023, Vol. 25(4) 740 –757
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/13691481221127571
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Strategic partnerships and
China’s diplomacy in Europe:
Insights from Italy
Filippo Boni
Abstract
As discussions of a ‘new cold war’ between China and the West intensify, it has never been more
important to understand how China engages internationally. Crucially, as of 2022, China has
established 110 ‘strategic partnerships’, without stipulating any formal treaty of alliance, but we
know little about strategic partnerships and how China uses them, despite their centrality as a
foreign policy tool. Departing from the assumption of the state as a unitary and monolithic actor
in international affairs, this article proposes a new framework of strategic partnerships which
incorporates sub-state entities as well as an ideational component, highlighting the image-building
purpose that these partnerships serve. Empirically, the analysis focuses on the evolution of the Sino-
Italian strategic partnership, drawing on a critical discourse analysis of 1294 news articles published
as part of the agreement between the Chinese and Italian news agencies Xinhua and ANSA.
Keywords
alignment, Chinese foreign policy, media partnerships, Sino-Italian relations, spheres of influence,
strategic partnerships
Introduction
Discussions about a new Cold War have become increasingly frequent in recent years, as
a result of the intensifying competition between the United States and China. The poten-
tial re-emergence of two blocks, ‘one that looks to Washington and one that looks to
Beijing’ (Rachman, 2020) has gained traction in public discourses, so much so that during
his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2021, Chinese President Xi Jinping
himself warned against building ‘small circles or start a new Cold War’ (Xinhua, 2021).
Along similar lines, in the academic and policy debates, there has been a resurgence of the
concept of ‘spheres of influence’ (Allison, 2020; Insisa and Pugliese, 2020; Zala, 2020).
Defined by dynamics of control and exclusion (Jackson, 2020: 255; Kaufman, 1976: 11)
between a nation that has superior power and those deemed less powerful (Etzioni, 2020)
Department of Politics and International Studies, The Open University, UK
Corresponding author:
Filippo Boni, Lecturer in Politics & International Studies, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA, UK.
Email: Filippo.boni@open.ac.uk
1127571BPI0010.1177/13691481221127571The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsBoni
research-article2022
Original Article
Boni 741
in a determined geographical region (Keal, 1983: 15), spheres of influence have thereby
resurfaced as an attempt to interpret the current geopolitical dynamics, either in regional
or global settings.
However, since the end of the Cold War, the ways in which diplomacy occurs have
significantly evolved and transformed, which means that conventional approaches to
spheres of influence need recalibrating. In a multi-nodal and interdependent world, the
international alignments, which dominated the Cold War period and took the shape of
more rigid and static alliances that would then form geographically bounded ‘spheres of
influence’, have left space to more flexible arrangements (Strüver, 2017). It is against
such backdrop that since the mid-1990s, and more prominently in the early 2000s, there
has been the emergence of a new form of bilateral interactions, that of ‘strategic partner-
ships’ (SPs). As Thomas Wilkins (2012: 68) noted, ‘with its more informal and multidi-
mensional nature, the strategic partnership is therefore emblematic of the new,
Twenty-First Century alignment archetype’.
Existing scholarship has provided helpful definitions (Kay, 2000; Parameswaran, 2014;
Wilkins, 2008) and explanations regarding partnership onsets, choice of partners and
potential benefits (Strüver, 2017), as well as how SPs represent a new form of alignment
that differs from alliances, security communities and coalitions (Nadkarni, 2010; Wilkins,
2012). While some argue that SPs were initially used by the United States as a tool to
maintain their primacy in the immediate wake of the Cold War (Kay, 2000), others have
noted how SPs are instead a form of a new security practice signalling the emergence of
new forms of security governance (Envall and Hall, 2016), especially in the Asian context.
With 110 SPs established, including with 5 regional organisations, China is the country
that has used this tool more extensively in its conduct of foreign policy (Papageorgiou and
dos Santos Cardoso, 2021). Yet, little attention has been paid to how China deploys SPs in
its foreign policy beyond Asia. It is within this context that this article proposes to offer a
contribution to the understanding of SPs, their multi-level nature and the tools deployed
within this form of engagement in international relations.
To this end, this article’s original contribution is threefold: first, the discussion fore-
grounds the multiplicity of levels (national, provincial and local) and actors involved in
SPs, bringing into the analysis the role that sub-state entities (businesses, media, local
communities) play. The literature on SPs has been focused almost entirely on the state,
thereby neglecting the multi-level nature of these bilateral arrangements. In particular,
there is no discussion of the multi-level and omni-channel interactions that occur within
a SP. Rather than viewing engagement with the international as the sole preserve of the
state, there is a need to integrate other actors and scales of the state into our understanding
of SPs. More broadly, this also points towards a different approach to that outlined by
scholars deploying spheres of influence to understand contemporary international rela-
tions. The notion of a power bloc assumes a centrality of power which is unproblemati-
cally projected outwards. A different ontology, one advanced through a deeper analysis of
bilateral partnerships, would be a relational view of power which incorporates different
actors, scales and levels of influence that come into play within this form of engagement.
This is particularly important in the case of China, that is characterised by a decentralised
system – where a host of actors are able to experiment and adapt – coupled with oversight
from the top (Ang, 2016; Cabestan, 2021; Jones and Zeng, 2019).
Second, the article argues that it is key to incorporate an ideational component into the
framework of SPs, as it helps recalibrating existing understandings of their purpose. Rather
than seeing them exclusively as a form of loose bilateral security and economic
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