Answer:
history is not a very good guide to the future, but it is the only guide we have got. Because of this, the only way to understand Sino-European relations in the twenty-first century is to look into their history; and when we do so, I suggest in this paper, we also see that we can only understand Sino-European relations if we also understand the relations between both parties and the United States.
2“The farther backward you can look,” Winston Churchill is supposed to have said, “the farther forward you are likely to see,”
Although these words are regularly attributed to Churchill, he… and the great forces driving Sino-European relations in fact only become visible when we look back a very long way indeed. In sections 2–4 of this paper, I do this, looking back first more than fifteen thousand years, to the end of the last Ice Age. In section 5, I suggest that this historical perspective not only goes far toward explaining Western Europe’s place in the American-dominated world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, but also reveals what Sino-European relations might be like in the increasingly post-American world of the mid and late twenty-first century.
