One Ocean, Many Currents: China’s Norm-Shaping Campaign at Sea and Europe’s Fragmented Response

Abstract

Europe’s maritime disputes and cooperation with China are usually analyzed one sea at a time. Simply put, the South China Sea is a question of security and law, the Gulf and Red Sea chokepoints are problems of energy and navigation, the Arctic is a matter of science and shipping, and the high seas are a matter of biodiversity. This issue brief argues that the four theaters are better read as a single Chinese campaign for authority over the rules of the ocean, that is, durable access to, and influence within, the institutions that write and operationalize maritime governance, combined with a refusal to be bound by the rules Beijing dislikes. The same pattern and interests recur across the BBNJ High Seas Treaty, the International Seabed Authority, the Antarctic Commission, the maritime chokepoints, and the Arctic. Where Beijing runs one campaign, Brussels runs four separate files, each featuring its own lead service and timeline. The asymmetry is sharpened by American withdrawal from ocean multilateralism, which is pushing the European Union (EU) into tense functional cooperation with China even as bilateral rivalry deepens. Surveying the evidence in each arena, the issue brief identifies where the thesis is most testable and argues that Europe’s central task is administrative: it must stop treating one campaign as four files, using a new reinforced European Ocean Pact as the vehicle. 

European discussions of EU–China maritime relations almost always proceed theater by theater. The South China Sea (SCS) is filed under security and international law, the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea under energy and freedom of navigation, the Arctic under science, environment and shipping governance, and the high seas under biodiversity and the law of the sea. Each file has its own lead service in Brussels, its own vocabulary, its own timeline, and, perhaps most importantly, its own budget. Granted, the Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries (DG MARE) is the lead body for policy and implementation, but there is no single authority for maritime affairs. Instead, a shared EU system manages these issues. The result is an analytical habit that treats Chinese behavior at sea as a set of discrete, theater-specific problems to be managed one at a time.

This issue brief argues that this habit obscures more than it resolves. A more accurate way to read China’s conduct across all four arenas is to see it as a single, coherent campaign with one objective: to acquire durable access to, and influence over, the institutions that write and operationalize the rules of the ocean, while declining to be bound by the rules it dislikes. The apparent paradox that frames most conference invitations, and definitely my own, is that the focus is on rivalry in the South China Sea, cooperation in the Arctic, security in the Strait of Hormuz, and so forth. This paradox dissolves once one stops asking what China wants in each sea and starts asking what China wants from ocean governance as an integrated system. The answer is the same everywhere; if one looks beyond regional and thematic divergences, the issue is China’s standing as a rule-shaper. The corollary for Europe is uncomfortable, or at least complicated. The cooperation European institutions welcome in the low-politics arenas trades in exactly the same currency—normative authority—as the rivalry they resist in the high-politics ones. The Union must accept that, in dealing with these problems, it has acquired a bedfellow it did not expect, namely China. It must therefore prepare to work multilaterally despite the apparent challenges, some of which this brief will address.

The most rigorous test of this thesis became apparent on January 17, 2026, when the High Seas Treaty entered into force. It is worth beginning there because the high seas are the one arena in which the rules are being written right now, in real time. The contest for authorship is therefore visible in its purest, and arguably in its most agitated, form.