3. The Silk Road Economic Belt: an opportunity for European Union–China cooperation? KEY FINDINGS The Silk Road Economic Belt: • touches on a number of European Union(EU) foreign and security priorities, including global governance, state-societal resilience and cooperation among regional orders; • is largely in line with the EU’s interests in Central and South Asia, although the implications for the EU’s normative and value-based agenda remain in question; • has, at this stage, limited prospects as a platform for EU–China hard security cooperation, but it does offer greater cooperation potential in relation to human security, in particular as an accelerant to global achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs). The EU: • should strategically utilize opportunities to engage China, and other relevant actors, and calibrate the Belt to contribute towards a‘rules-based global order’ in line with its own interests and values; • should consider forging closer strategic relationships with key stakeholders such as China, India and Russia in the interest of a more stable Eurasia, with the Belt as one possible impetus for this; • should think and plan more strategically about its own vision for a more secure Eurasia, and develop a more coherent stance on Eurasian integration visions such as the Belt; • will need to allocate greater institutional and human capital to continuously study and monitor the Belt and its political, economic and security implications. This section builds on sections 1 and 2 and assesses to what extent the Belt’s objectives and drivers are compatible with the EU’s own foreign and security interests in Eurasia. It looks at how the EU relates to the BRI as a whole at a number of levels both internally and globally, as well as how China’s engagement through the Belt in Central Asia and South Asia will affect the EU’s security interests in those regions in particular. The section concludes with a series of policy recommendations to the EU that are based on the findings of the report and focus on EU–China avenues of cooperation from a security perspective. 3.1. Compatibility with European Union security interests The EU’s 2016 Global Strategy states that the EU will‘pursue a coherent approach to China’s connectivity drives westwards’. 220 From a trade and investment perspective, the EU and many of its cash-strapped member states have welcomed the influx of Chinese investment. In September 2015, the European Commission signed a MOU on an EU–China Connectivity Platform, to‘enhance synergies’ between the BRI and the EU’s own Investment Plan for Europe(the‘Juncker Plan’). The platform is designed to pursue joint investment opportunities along the Silk Road. Prospective projects have so far been identified in the territories of the EU and China itself, although joint investment in third countries could eventually take place under this framework. EU member states have also engaged with China bilaterally on BRI-related investment, particularly many Central and Eastern Europe(CEE) countries through the 16+1 dialogue format established in 2012. Although Chinese analysts and officials posit that the 16+1 dialogue platform with CEE countries supports the European integration 220 European Union,‘Shared vision, common action: a stronger Europe’, June 2016.