Written by Meng Kit Tang.
Image credit: 鄭麗文/ Facebook.
At the Asia Society on June 8, Kuomintang (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun offered her party’s cross-strait process model in a single core sentence. Peace, she told the audience, is never achieved in one step but built gradually through pragmatic, incremental means. She referenced the European Union (EU) as an inspirational model for gradual evolution and institutional arrangements. No detailed institutional parallel followed. The reference served as framing and moved on.
This framing has carried significant political weight for years without being asked to justify itself. The EU analogy has circulated in KMT cross-strait discourse as historical warrant, accepted on authority rather than tested as an institutional argument. Yet the comparison becomes much less persuasive once one asks a straightforward question: what conditions allowed European integration to emerge in the first place?
Frédéric Krumbein’s careful scholarship (2021, 2024) uses European integration theory as an analytical lens for cross-strait dynamics. This essay asks something narrower.
Instead of asking whether European theories fit the Taiwan Strait, this essay asks what the KMT’s repeated reliance on the EU analogy reveals about the limits of its cross-strait approach once the analogy is tested against the historical record.
The Impasse That Produced the Analogy
Cheng’s EU invocation has a specific political origin. Direct cross-strait dialogue has been frozen for a decade. Beijing will engage only a Taiwanese government willing to acknowledge that both straits belong to one China, or 同屬一中 (Tóng shǔ yī zhōng), as a starting point, and Taiwan’s ruling party has produced no formula Beijing will accept.
Military pressure has intensified over the past decade while formal dialogue has stalled. Cheng does not claim that engagement is guaranteed to succeed. Rather, she argues that maintaining the status quo offers no credible route out of the current impasse.
Her Asia Society speech stated the logic plainly:
The two sides should begin by expanding people-to-people exchanges, progressively building mutual trust, and further promoting security dialogue and confidence-building mechanisms so that peace delivers tangible benefits for the people. (兩岸應從擴大兩人交流開始，逐步建立互信，進一步推動安全對話與安全互信機制，讓和平不只是口號，而是真正為人民帶來具體紅利。)
The sequence moves from contact to trust to institutions, with political resolution held at an unspecified later stage.
Yet Cheng’s account of her April meeting with Xi Jinping introduced an important precondition:
As long as the process is built on the one-China principle of the ROC Constitution and the foundation of the 1992 Consensus, there is solid room for cross-strait peace to develop. (只要建立在《中華民國憲法》的一中原則與九二共識的基礎上，兩岸和平就有穩固的發展空間。)
Whether Cheng’s diagnosis of the impasse is correct is not the question here. The impasse itself is real. The issue is whether the European precedent she invokes can sustain the political work being asked of it.
What the Analogy Is Actually Claiming
Three claims are embedded in Cheng’s invocation: peace takes time, gradualism can succeed, and people-to-people exchanges may generate the trust necessary for deeper institutional arrangements. The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) is presented as evidence that such sequencing has worked before.
Cheng is not proposing a European Union in East Asia. She is not calling for pooled sovereignty or Brussels-style institutions. The analogy is about process rather than structure: the claim is that gradual steps and the right sequence can produce peace.
Therefore, the European experience matters only insofar as it shows whether that sequence worked under conditions comparable to those across the Taiwan Strait.
What Made the ECSC Work
Robert Schuman’s May 1950 declaration rested on a calculation about industrial capacity rather than a wager on goodwill.
Pooling coal and steel production under a supranational High Authority would make war materially difficult by limiting the possibility of unilateral rearmament. The architects of integration did not wait for trust to emerge naturally among former enemies. They assumed trust would be scarce and designed institutions accordingly. Over time, those institutions helped produce habits of cooperation that gradually made trust possible.
Juridical equality formed another foundation of the project. The Treaty of Paris did not require any signatory to recognise another’s superior status before joining. France did not have to concede anything about Germany’s standing to participate. Political convergence was meant to emerge through the process itself, not serve as a condition for entering it.
The broader geopolitical setting mattered. France wanted to keep German recovery in check without stopping it. West Germany needed security and international acceptance. The United States wanted a stable Western Europe. Their goals were not identical, but they pointed in the same direction. Soviet pressure made compromise politically possible and non-cooperation increasingly costly.
Democratic governments subsequently ratified each stage of integration through established constitutional procedures.
Where the Analogy Breaks Down
European integration began because trust was lacking. Institutions were designed to manage that absence. Cheng’s sequence reverses the order, assuming that expanding social contact will generate the trust needed for institutions.
The precondition problem follows naturally. The ECSC required no prior acknowledgement of another state’s superior claim. Cheng’s framework asks Taiwan to accept tóng shǔ yī zhōng as the starting point while the destination remains undefined.
Cross-strait economic integration has nonetheless produced genuine interdependence. Taishang business networks and the bilateral agreements signed between 2008 and 2016, including ECFA, created constituencies invested in stability and continued exchange.
Krumbein identifies this neofunctionalist dynamic in the cross-strait case, and he is right to do so. This may be the strongest part of the European comparison. Functional cooperation can generate incentives for further cooperation. The difficulty lies in assuming that this dynamic alone can overcome the political obstacles that distinguish the Taiwan Strait from postwar Europe.
The external environment underscores those differences. US-China strategic competition does not produce a shared understanding of danger across the strait. Beijing interprets American involvement as a challenge to regional order. Taipei sees PLA pressure as a threat to its security and autonomy. The same external pressures push the parties in opposite political directions.
Unlike Soviet pressure, which encouraged France and Germany to treat integration as preferable to rivalry, US-China competition pushes Beijing and Taipei in opposite directions. In Taipei, coercive pressure makes concessions tied to tóng shǔ yī zhōng harder to defend domestically; in Beijing, the same pressures reinforce demands that such concessions remain indispensable.
Why the Analogy Persists
The alternatives help explain its durability. The Helsinki Process implies a degree of American co-architecture Beijing would reject. The Good Friday Agreement depends upon a third-party sovereign guarantor; an arrangement Beijing has consistently opposed.
German reunification suggests an endpoint many Taiwanese voters regard with suspicion even as Beijing finds it attractive. Oslo offers little reassurance after its own disappointments.
Seen in this light, the EU analogy survives not because it is uniquely persuasive but because competing frameworks carry even greater liabilities. It becomes the default vocabulary for engagement in the absence of a politically viable substitute.
The analogy also serves an important rhetorical purpose, especially at venues like the Asia Society. It frames Cheng’s approach as one of pragmatic engagement and peace-building, reassuring Western audiences that engagement does not necessarily mean capitulation. It also offers a way to discuss progress without insisting on an immediate solution.
That appeal is understandable. The impasse Cheng describes is real, and Taiwan’s political leaders must find alternatives to confrontation without assuming reconciliation or lasting stability.
Yet the analogy’s persistence should not shield it from scrutiny. European integration depended on conditions the Taiwan Strait lacks: institutions built to manage mistrust, constraints accepted by all sides, shared strategic incentives, and democratic approval at each stage. Europe may offer a language for gradual peace, but not a blueprint for achieving it.
Conclusion
The lesson is not that Taiwan should give up on incremental engagement. It is that such proposals should be judged by whether they fit Taiwan’s realities, not by whether they resemble Europe’s past. Taiwan needs a framework that has democratic legitimacy at home and reduces tensions across the strait.
European integration succeeded because its architects confronted differences directly through binding institutions instead of assuming goodwill would flow from contact alone. Taiwan’s cross-strait policy demands similar realism: clear sequencing that accounts for asymmetry, external pressures, and the lack of shared strategic incentives, supported by sustained domestic consensus that prevents engagement from becoming a path of unilateral concession.
Meng Kit Tang is a Singaporean freelance analyst and commentator who works as an aerospace engineer. He graduated from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), NTU, Singapore in 2025. He is also a regular contributor to Taiwan Insight.