Does Taiwan need diplomatic allies?
ROC Central News Agency
02/02/2022 01:44 PM
By Joseph Yeh, CNA staff reporter
On Dec. 10, 2021, Nicaragua severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan. It was the eighth country lost to China under President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and the second time Nicaragua had dumped Taiwan under a Daniel Ortega presidency.
A combination of being financially outmuscled by and the economic allure of the biggest market has whittled Taipei's list of diplomatic allies down to 14.
Although by now a somewhat routine matter, Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) was seemingly caught off-guard.
MOFA declined to hold a press conference following Nicaragua's announcement "due to the absence of senior diplomats responsible for the matter."
This was followed by a thwarted attempt to donate the now-dissolved embassy's assets to a local church group. In a final humiliation, Ortega's government seized the former embassy building in Managua and declared it would be handed to the incoming envoy from Beijing.
Despite provoking some soul searching, the ignominious exit also raised a different question: Does Taiwan even need diplomatic allies?
Public opinion appears to be shifting toward the negative.
"I don't even know where Nicaragua is," Cheng Hui-ying, an elementary school teacher in Taipei, told CNA.
As many as 60 percent of those polled by the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation (TPOF) in late December said they don't care about the country's dwindling number of allies.
Only 32 percent said they were worried about the issue.
In a similar survey conducted by TPOF when the Solomon Islands cut ties with Taiwan in September 2019, 40 percent of respondents said they were worried about the setback.
Liao Yu-hung, a bank employee from Taoyuan in his 40s, said he doesn't care about cutting ties with allies as it had no impact on Taiwan's economy.
According to international law specialist and pro-Taiwan independent activist Raymond Sung (宋承恩), such rising apathy towards the loss of diplomatic allies can be attributed to the Taiwanese public's overall indifference toward global affairs.
This unperturbed response is also present in political circles.
Current Legislative Speaker You Si-kun (游錫堃) famously said in 2016, in response to Taipei losing Sao Tome and Principe to Beijing, that "even if Taiwan ended up with no diplomatic allies in its present form as the Republic of China, it could gain allies as an independent Taiwan."
However, former Foreign Minister Chen Chien-jen (程建人), for one, said a sovereign state needs official recognition by other countries to maintain its statehood.
"If no other countries officially recognize Taiwan, we will become further isolated in the international arena and the legitimacy and the very existence of the country will become questionable," Chen said.
One diplomatic source told CNA that if Taiwan lost all of its allies, it would mean that no countries officially recognized the existence of the Republic of China, the official name of Taiwan, making it even easier for China to pressure other countries into recognizing Taiwan as part of the People's Republic of China.
Sung, however, disagrees, saying that statehood does not require diplomatic recognition from other countries.
Sung also said it is true that diplomatic allies can raise proposals for Taiwan's participation in the U.N. system, but the results, as have shown over the past decades, are far from successful.
Losing allies is becoming less devastating than it used to be, particularly as major powers like European Union, the United States, Japan, and major world powers have voiced their support for the country and deepened unofficial cooperation, according to Sung.
It may even be that the future of Taiwan's diplomatic relations is out of the country's hands. Joseph Wu (吳釗燮), Taiwan's foreign minister, made the argument that the loss of Nicaragua was less about the deterioration of a bilateral relationship and driven more by a wider ideological battle between the U.S. and China.
As Ortega is facing a series of sanctions from U.S. and other democracies, he had decided to ally himself with the authoritarian camp of China and Russia and end ties with Taiwan, which is close to Washington, Wu said.
Another reason the current government is putting less attention on keeping ties with diplomatic allies is the cost to the taxpayer, and Wu has publicly stated it is not a priority for his ministry to forge official relations with more countries.
Such reasoning is driven by the fact that Taiwan is gaining ground in its unofficial relations with world powers and European countries.
Late last year, Wu had publicly visited Slovakia and Czech Republic, two countries with which Taiwan has no official diplomatic relations.
It is extremely rare for a Taiwan foreign minister to have a public schedule in countries that have no official ties with Taiwan, given the fact that they would usually face strong pressure from China to prevent such a trip from going ahead.
In November, the Taiwanese Representative Office in Lithuania opened at the Baltic state's capital city, making the office in Europe the first to bear the name "Taiwanese" in Europe.
Vilnius approved the office name despite strong protests from China, which viewed the move as encouraging formal independence for Taiwan.
As Wu pointed out during a Legislative session on Dec. 23 last year, while it is important to maintain diplomatic relations, his ministry now believes it is equally important to deepen unofficial ties with like-minded countries.
The view is also shared by many international affairs scholars.
Bonnie Glazer, director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, pointed out that China's continued aggression toward Taiwan was having a negative impact.
"The Chinese campaign to pry countries away from Taiwan was starting to backfire because it was making other nations, such as U.S. allies Japan and Australia, more supportive of efforts to boost Taipei's security. Taiwan's isolation isn't in the interests of the EU, Japan, Australia, and many other countries, so they may take steps to strengthen their ties with Taiwan."
Jessica Drun, a Taiwan expert at the Atlantic Council, said Taiwan will likely be unruffled by the loss of another diplomatic ally. "I personally believe that Taiwan's unofficial relationships are more critical than its official ones."
Enditem/ASG
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
