Huawei

'What to Make of the Huawei Debate? 5G Network Security and Technology Dependency in Europe' by Tim Rühlig and Maja Björk (Swedish Institute of International Affairs 1/2020) comments

Europe is controversially discussing whether to ban the Chinese tech-giant Huawei from the roll-out of the new generation of mobile infrastructure, better known as 5G, not least due to conflicting pressures from the governments of the United States and the People’s Republic of China. 5G is a critical infrastructure and will penetrate European society and its economy to an unprecedented extent. Proponents of a ban argue that Huawei is closely allied with the authoritarian Chinese party-state, which could utilise Huawei equipment for espionage and sabotage. The argument is that banning Huawei is a matter of increasing network security in Europe. This paper explains that while scepticism is reasonable, and the security concerns are valid, a ban on Huawei is not an effective solution for generating network security. Other technological measures – first and foremost better encryption, and redundancies coupled with vendor diversity – would be more effective, although complete network security can never be achieved. Scepticism of China’s influence over Huawei is reasonable. However, the idea of banning Huawei stems, rather than from concerns over network security, from a geopolitical logic. In this context, a ban on Huawei would help decrease European technological dependency on China. The geopolitical fear is that China could leverage this dependency to extract political concessions from Europe in the future. We argue that Europe should indeed respond to this challenge but instead of striving for technological self-reliance, we discuss how the European Union could preserve access to strategic technology by means of diversification of the supply chain and underlying patents, coupled with “protectionism light”. We believe this could help respond to the emerging geopolitical rivalry over high-technology such as 5G while at the same time attempting to preserve free trade as far as possible. In short, our sceptical view on the idea of banning Huawei from the roll-out of 5G in Europe does not stem from a trust in China or Chinese tech companies, but rather from the perspective that it is not the most effective response to the future challenges of 5G networks and technology dependence.